Check out our online literary calendars for events in the St. Louis area.

Please send entries for the regular Literary Calendar to the Center by the 10th of each month. Email to litcalartsci.wustl.edu or call (314) 935-5576.

Return to the Top

The African & African American Studies Program, American Culture Studies, The Center for the Humanities, The Center for Joint Projects in the Humanities and Social Sciences, The Center on Urban Research and Policy Present:

Storms, Politics, and the Destruction of the American Gulf Coast: A Washington University Faculty Roundtable on What Hurricane Katrina Wrought

Wednesday, September 14, 4 to 6 pm.
McMillan Café (Room 115), Old McMillan Hall, WU Hilltop Campus.

Featured Panelists:
John Baugh, Ph.D., Margaret Bush Wilson Professor and director of the African and African American Program in Arts & Sciences (moderator)

Christopher Bracey, Ph.D., associate professor of law, School of Law

Leslie Brown, Ph.D., assistant professor of history and in African and African American studies in Arts & Sciences

Robert Francis Dymek, Ph.D., professor of earth & planetary sciences, Earth Sciences and Arts & Sciences

Wayne Fields, Ph.D., Lynn Cooper Harvey Distinguished Professor in English and director of American culture studies in Arts & Sciences

T. R. Kidder, Ph.D., professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences

Donald Nichols, Ph.D., assistant professor of economics in Arts & Sciences

James Herbert Williams, Ph.D., E. Desmond Lee Professor for Racial and Ethnic Diversity, George Warren Brown School of Social Work

Carol Camp Yeakey, Ph.D., professor of education in Arts & Sciences

Audio from the roundtable discussion is now available.

Return to the Top

The Center for the Humanities and The Performing Arts Department Present:

Understanding Dance as the Language We Embody

Thursday, September 22, 2005, at 4:00 pm
Ann W. Olin Women’s Building Formal Lounge

The Center for the Humanities continues its 2005-2006 Translation Series with a panel discussion featuring Alonzo King, Ron Himes, Cecil Slaughter, and Gerald Early (moderator). The panel will discuss cross cultural translation of ideas via non-verbal expression in dance.

	Alonzo King is a choreographer and artistic director of the San Francisco Dance Center, and a writer and lecturer on the art of dance.		Ron Himes is the Henry E. Hampton, Jr. Artist-in-Residence and founder of the St. Louis Black Repertory Company.
Cecil Slaughter is artist-in-residence and director of Washington University Dance Theatre.		Gerald Early is the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters in the Department of English in Arts & Sciences and director of the Center for the Humanities.

Photos from the event:

Several WU dance students gather before the discussion.	Moderator, Dr. Gerald Early, introduces the other panel members.	Audience members ask the panel members questions about dance.

Return to the Top

Presented by The Visiting East Asian Professionals Program, The Center for the Humanities, & The Center for International and Area Studies:

Wang Ning, one of China’s leading and most intriguing humanist scholars in literary and cultural studies, will visit Washington University on Monday and Tuesday, October 10 and 11. He will speak at a free brown bag lunch open to faculty and students on Monday, October 10 at noon. Please RSVP at 314-935-5576, since seating is very limited. He will speak again on Tuesday, October 11 at 12-2 P.M. to National Narratives Study Group.

All events will take place in Old McMillan Café (Room 115), Old McMillan Hall, on the WU Hilltop campus.

Dr. Wang is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Tsinghua University. Apart from his numerous publications in Chinese, his English essays on comparative literature and cultural studies frequently appear in New Literary History, Critical Inquiry, European Review, Comparative Literature Studies, etc. He is currently Distinguished Visiting Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Wang’s presentation on October 10th will deal exclusively with cultural studies, including elite culture and its products—literature and performing arts—as well as studies of film, TV, and other channels of popular culture in contemporary China. His talk will particularly emphasize the currently prevailing model of cultural studies introduced from the West into China in the early 1990s. Wang will address the following issues: how cultural studies was introduced into the Chinese context, how it is integrated with domestic elite culture studies and comparative literature studies, how it is institutionalized in the Chinese context, and how it is developing into an equal intellectual partner in dialogue with the Western scholarship in the age of globalization. Wang maintains that cultural studies and literary studies have a lot in common, especially in the Chinese context, so that these two branches of learning need not oppose each other. Rather, a sort of complementary dialogue could be realized between the two fields.

Please call 935-5576 for more information.

Dr. Early introduces Dr. Wang Ning, the featured guest of the Brown Bag Lunch discussion.	Audience members enjoy a delicious Chinese buffet.	The roundtable format provides opportunity for questions and group discussion during the lunch.

Return to the Top

The Center for the Humanities presents:

The fourth annual faculty book celebration "Celebrating Our Books, Recognizing Our Authors."

December 7, 2005, at 4 p.m., in the Ann W. Olin Women's Building Formal Lounge. Free and Open to the Public. Bring a colleague. Bring a friend.

The Washington University Campus Store will display the author’s books, all of which will be available for purchase. Authors will be available after the colloquium to sign their works. Please call (314) 935-5576 or email cenhumartsci.wustl.edu for more information. Seating is limited. RSVP is strongly encouraged.

Our display beginning in March, International Women’s month, looks at the representation of women and power through toys and comic books.

In the pre-feminist era, powerful women were not a noticeable feature of American society. However, they existed in fictionalized form as comic-book heroines. Wonder Woman, Catwoman and their super-sisters fought for truth, justice and the American way alongside, and often better than their male equivalents, without sacrificing glamour. In many ways, they were just guys with breasts and bikinis; fantasy wish-fulfillment's for male readers who got a kick out of images of scantily-clad, strong women – so long as they weren't real.

Post-feminism, some things changed but not others. The comic book super-heroines looked much the same, but the old style glamour girls were joined by a new breed, including Lara Croft and Martha Washington, who were less concerned with maintaining a veneer of femininity than with realistic action in formerly male contexts.

Barbie, the all-American all-purpose female, soon got in on the act, taking on identities of the old super-heroines. Sometimes she was cast as a female version of the men: Super-Woman, Batwoman.

In the real world, role models of powerful women now proliferated, and Barbie dolls took on professional personas to encourage young girls that their dreams of power and agency could one day be reality. Dolls of real personalities serve a similar function. Figures of pornographic actresses, however, are ambiguous: are they in control of their own sexual power, or, like the early comic heroines they so resemble, are they just projections of male fantasies?

The 60s and 70s saw the appearance of “Wimmin’s” comics, a feminist alternative to the traditionally male-dominated comic industry, where women used the medium to voice a demand for power equal to men’s.