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PAST EVENTS 2013-14

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October 11 and 12, 9 am to 5 pm
York University
Founders College, Senior Commons Room

 

Conference:

New Directions in US Studies: Re-imagining the 1950s and 1960s

Co-sponsored by the Centre for the Study of the United States, University of Toronto

 

This conference brings together some of the most exciting recent scholarship on the US in the 1950s and 1960s.  The seven panels present thoughtful, cutting-edge research from the fields of history, political science, sociology, and literature, as well as from art, music, and film. A highlight of the conference is the keynote address by Professor Paul Buhle from Brown University. His talk, entitled "Culture as Politics: How Vernacular Arts Opened up US Studies...and why it needed opening so badly," discusses the rise of graphic novels and other non-traditional literature, fiction and non-fiction. Buhle, an activist since his teen years, established a new left journal in the 1960s and a journal on popular culture in the 1970s. He has edited or written more than 40 books, including a three volume study of Jews and popular culture, an authorized biography of C.L.R. James, as well as graphic histories of the IWW, SDS, and Emma Goldman. 

The conference helps launch York University’s new US Studies Program and showcases, along with the contributions of other distinguished scholars, York’s excellence in “American” studies.

For additional information , please go to the website at:
http://www.yorku.ca/uhistory/USConference/index

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Friday, October 18, 2:00-4:00 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs

 

Lisa Parks

Life in the Age of Drones

Co-sponsored by the Cinema Studies Institute, Innis College, University of Toronto

 

Since 2004, the CIA has conducted a secret drone war in the FATA region of Pakistan, a difficult to access rural region on the border of Afghanistan that is inhabited by Pashtun tribes, controlled by the Taliban, used by Al Qaeda operatives, and occupied by the Pakistani military. The CIA has shrouded this ongoing drone war in secrecy, waged war without declaring it as such, killed hundreds of Pakistani civilians, and violated international law in the process. This set of circumstances, yet another “US state of exception,” demands new ways of thinking about the power of images and networks, and imagining how transnational opposition to such state actions can be catalyzed and organized. Parks’ presentation begins with a contextual discussion of the US drone war in Pakistan, highlighting its endorsements from mainstream media, logistical challenges, legal controversies, and casualty counts. She then moves to a discussion of several examples of “drone media”–including drone attack scene photos, declassified aerial assault videos, and drone protest media that have circulated on the Internet. Drawing on the work of Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Tiziana Terranova, Derek Gregory, and others, she argues that these media: 1) draw attention to a vertical field of biopower—a ground to air domain of life, labour, histories, technologies, and mediation—that is increasingly integrated within the flows of network culture; 2) expose the logics of speculation and uncertainty that underpin drone warfare; and 3) make legible a new class of the disenfranchised which I refer to as “the targeted”— people who are the intentional or incidental victims of aerial violence.

 

Lisa Parks is Professor and former Department Chair of Film and Media Studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara, where she is currently the Director of the Center for Information Technology and Society. Parks has conducted research on uses of media and information technologies in various transnational contexts. Her work is highly interdisciplinary and engages with fields such as geography, communication, international relations, and art. Parks is the author of Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Duke UP, 2005), and Coverage: Aero-Orbital Media After 911 (forthcoming Routledge 2014), and is working on a third book entitled Mixed Signals: Media Infrastructures and Cultural Geographies. She is co-editor of: Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries and Cultures (Rutgers UP, 2012), Planet TV (NYU, 2003), Undead TV (Duke UP, 2007), and, Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (U of Illinois, forthcoming). Parks has held visiting appointments at Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin, McGill University, University of Southern California, and the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently a PI on two major research grants in the fields of ICT4D and Internet Freedom.

Wednesday, October 30, 12:00-2:00 pm
Room 200, Larkin Building
15 Devonshire Place

 

 

Peter J. Loewen

Empathy and Political Preferences

Organized by the Centre for Ethics, and co-sponsored by the Centre for the Study of the United States, University of Toronto

This talk is part of the Ethics at Noon lecture series.

 

Peter J. Loewen is the Director of the Centre for the Study of the United States, and Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto at Mississauga. His research focusses on political behaviour broadly conceived, but especially in the Anglo-American democracies. His work has been published in such journals as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Electoral Studies, Political Psychology, and the Canadian Journal of Political Science. Peter received his PhD from the Université de Montréal, and completed post-doctoral fellowships at the University of British Columbia, and the University of California, San Diego. Loewen's research is funded by SSHRC, the European Research Council, and by a Government of Ontario Early Researcher Award. Loewen has undertaken extensive public-facing work. He writes a regular column for the Ottawa Citizen, and has in the past contributed to The Globe and Mail, and the Toronto Star. He has engaged in past electoral engagement work with Vote Compass in partnership with the Wall Street Journal, CBC, and Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Loewen also engages in ongoing consulting work with various electoral management bodies.

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Friday, November 8, 9:30-11:00 am
Jackman Humanities Building
Room 718, 170 St. George Street

 

Jacqueline Goldsby

Faculty and Graduate Student Seminar

Co-sponsored by the Department of English, University of Toronto

 

 

Jacqueline Goldsby is Professor of English and African American Studies at Yale University. She is the author of  the prizewinning A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2006). From 2005-10, Goldsby directed the widely-acclaimed archival recovery project, "Mapping the Stacks: A Guide to Black Chicago's Hidden Archives," to support research for her next book, Birth of the Cool: African American Literary Culture of the 1940s and 1950s.

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Friday, November 8, 1:00-3:00 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs

 

 

Jacqueline Goldsby

The Art of Being Difficult:The Turn to Abstraction in African American Poetry and Painting During the 1940s and 1950s

Co-sponsored by the Department of English, University of Toronto

 

Jacqueline Goldsby is Professor of English and African American Studies at Yale University. She is the author of  the prizewinning A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2006). From 2005-10, Goldsby directed the widely-acclaimed archival recovery project, "Mapping the Stacks: A Guide to Black Chicago's Hidden Archives," to support research for her next book, Birth of the Cool: African American Literary Culture of the 1940s and 1950s.

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Thursday, November 14, 4:00-6:00 pm
Vivian and David Campbell Conference Facility
Munk School of Global Affairs
1 Devonshire Place

 

Sandra Harding

Objectivity and Diversity:Tensions for Feminist Postcolonial Research

Co-sponsored by the iSchool, Faculty of Information, University of Toronto

 

For over four decades, feminists from the Global North and South have examined the tensions and contradictions in doing research that attempts to improve the conditions of women from the Global South. This has occurred in work critically focusing on, for example, colonialism and postcolonialism, modernization theory and its development projects, and international relations. This presentation will reflect on some of the major sites of such tensions and contradictions.

 

Sandra Harding is a philosopher who teaches in Education, Gender Studies, and Philosophy at the University of California Los Angeles. Harding taught for two decades at the University of Delaware before moving to UCLA in 1996. She directed the UCLA Center for the Study of Women from 1996-2000, and co-edited the journal Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society from 2000 to 2005. She is the author or editor of fifteen books on issues in epistemology, philosophy of science, and feminist and postcolonial theory. Her most recent books are Sciences From Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities (Duke 2008), and The Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader (Duke 2011.). Objectivity and Diversity: Feminist, Postcolonial, and Science Studies Issues will be published next year by University of Chicago Press.

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Friday, November 15, 10:00 - 11:45 am
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs

Friday, November 15, 2:00-4:00 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs

 

Mathew Coleman

Retreat from social reproduction? Racial profiling and non-federal immigration enforcement in the U.S. South

Co-sponsored by the Department of Geography, University of Toronto

 

Mathew Coleman (Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles, 2005) is Associate Professor of Geography at Ohio State University. Coleman is a political geographer who works in the areas of critical geopolitics, law and geography, political economy, and particularly immigration law and policy. His research focuses on immigration enforcement in the U.S., and on the detention and deportation of mostly U.S.-bound undocumented labourers from the Western hemisphere. His current research, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, explores local-federal immigration policing partnerships in the U.S. South which allow sheriffs, among others, to enforce immigration violations for federal immigration authorities. Coleman teaches graduate seminars as well as undergraduate courses on political geography, economic geography, and geopolitics.

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Wednesday, November 20, 2013, 4-6 pm
Munk School of Global Affairs, room 208N

 

 

Jacob Hogan

Who is in Charge of this Mission?: The U.S. Ambassador, CIA Chief of Station, Embassy Intrigue, and Washington

Organized by the CSUS Graduate Student Workshop, University of Toronto

 

 

The September 12, 2012, murder of U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens in Benghazi should be a catalyst for increased focus on the organizational rules and hierarchies connecting the American Mission abroad and in Washington. Hogan’s paper argues that the CIA Chief of Station, rather than the U.S. Ambassador, represents the most powerful individual in any U.S. Embassy or Consulate system. This transformation occurred in three distinct periods, all associated with the rise of the intelligence establishment, beginning with the creation of the Office of Naval Intelligence in 1882. Next, the formation of the Office of Strategic Services in World War II presented an unprecedented challenge to the State Department’s unrivaled relationship with the White House. Finally, the CIA’s creation in 1947 elevated the Director of Central Intelligence over the Secretary of State in bureaucratic importance; a new paradigm that crystallized under Allen and John Foster Dulles during the Eisenhower administration. He will place emphasis on how presidents from Truman to Nixon have personally involved themselves in determining whether the CIA or Foggy Bottom possesses the supreme authority in the U.S. Embassy structure. Hogan’s paper will mainly draw from primary documentation found in the Foreign Relations of the U.S. series.

 

Having completed his B.A. and M.A. at the University of Ottawa, Jacob is a third year PhD candidate in History at the University of Toronto, and member of the Department’s graduate journal, Past Tense. Under the working title of Beyond Beijing, Bretton Woods, and New Bancor Order: The IMF, U.S., China, and the Genesis of Global Governance, 1965-1974, his dissertation will explore the rise of a supranational currency and Chinese power, alongside the economic decline of the U.S. during the Vietnam War era. Jacob is currently researching at the Munk School for his supervisor, Ronald Pruessen, focusing on the Obama administration’s policies toward the Near East and Arab Spring. Through this work concentrated on contemporary U.S. policies vis-à-vis Libya and FRUS research for his dissertation, he has become more interested in the historical organization of the U.S. Embassy.

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Friday, November 22, 6:00-9:00 pm
Vivian and David Campbell Conference Facility
Munk School of Global Affairs
1 Devonshire Place

 

 

Book Launch:
Sterilized by the State: Eugenics, Race and the Population Scare in 20th Century North America
Randall Hansen and Desmond King
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013

Organized by the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, and co-sponsored by the Centre for the Study of the United States, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto.

 

Sterilized by the State is the first comprehensive analysis of eugenics in North America focused on the second half of the twentieth century. Based on new research, Randall Hansen and Desmond King show why eugenic sterilization policies persisted after the 1940s in the United States and Canada. Through extensive archival research, King and Hansen show how both superintendents at homes for the “feebleminded” and pro-sterilization advocates repositioned themselves after 1945 to avoid the taint of Nazi eugenics. Drawing on interviews with victims of sterilization and primary documents, this book traces the post-1940s development of eugenic policy and shows that both eugenic arguments and committed eugenicists informed population, welfare, and birth control policy in postwar America. Simply put, the anti-population growth movement, and the Great Society programs, and the early choice movements were shot through with eugenicists and eugenic arguments.

Speakers:
Randall Hansen, Director, CERES
Desmond King, Nuffield College
Melissa Williams, Dept. of Political Science, University of Toronto
Ian Dowbiggin, University of Prince Edward Island

 

The book launch will be followed by a reception.

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Monday, November 25, 2013, 6:00-7:30 pm
Munk School of Global Affairs
Room 208N, 1 Devonshire Place

 

 

U.S. Thanksgiving Social

Organized by the CSUS American Studies Students Society, University of Toronto

 

 

 

The CSUS American Studies Students Society has organized a Social to celebrate U.S. Thanksgiving this week. Attendance is by invitation only for American Studies Majors, Minors, and faculty members. To RSVP, please email: uoft.amstudies@gmail.com.

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The Jackman Humanities Institute Program for the Arts, the Cinema Studies Institute, Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, & Social Justice Education (OISE), and New College present:

 

Cinematic Translations: The Work of John Akomfrah

A University of Toronto tri-campus 3-day event, focusing on Artist-in-Residence John Akomfrah

 

 

Featuring:

 

STUDENT SALON with John Akomfrah and Opening Keynote Speaker Manthia Diawara
(New York University)
Screening of The Last Angel of History, with discussion following keynote
Nov. 27, Innis Town Hall, 2 Sussex Ave., 6:00-8:00 PM
Student reception 5:00-6:00 Innis Café

 

JOHN AKOMFRAH IN CONVERSATION with Cameron Bailey (Artistic Director of TIFF) and Manthia Diawara (NYU) following screening of Seven Songs For Malcolm X

Nov. 28, UTSC, MW 160, 6:00-8:00 PM)

SYMPOSIUM: Cinematic Translations: The Work of John Akomfrah               

Nov. 29, 1:00-6:30 PM
1:00-3:30 pm: Vivian and David Campbell Conference Facility, Munk School of Global Affairs, 1 Devonshire Place

1:00-2:10 pm:

Chair: Ritu Birla (University of Toronto)
Panellists: Rinaldo Walcott, (OISE, University of Toronto), Kass Banning (University of Toronto)
Respondent: Malini Guha (Carleton University)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  
2:20-3:30 pm
Chair: Marieme Lo (University of Toronto)
Panellists: Aboubakar Sanogo (Carleton University), Pablo Idahosa (York University)
Respondent: Ato Quayson (University of Toronto)

CLOSING KEYNOTE CONVERSATION with John Akomfrah and Kobena Mercer (Yale University),
on The Stuart Hall Project
4:00-6:30 pm: Innis Town Hall, 2 Sussex Ave.

 

Co-sponsors: African Studies, Caribbean Studies, Centre for South Asian Studies at the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs, Centre for the Study of the United States, Munk School of Global Affairs, Centre for Comparative Literature, Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, Department of Historical and Cultural Studies (UTSC), Department of English (UTSC), Department of Arts, Culture and Media (UTSC), Department of Art, Department of English, Department of Visual Studies, Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, Women and Gender Studies Institute.

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Friday, November 29, 4:00-6:00 pm
Room 108N, Munk School of Global Affairs

 

Michael Brown

The Birth of the (Gay) Clinic

Organized by the Department of Geography, and co-sponsored by the Centre for the Study of the United States, the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, and the Comparative Program on Health and Society, University of Toronto.

 

Michael Brown is a Professor of Geography at the University of Washington. Most of his research explores issues related to governmentality and gay men's health. His current research involves a collaboration with Larry Knopp, and is centred on the relationship between the gay and lesbian community and health promotion agencies in the pre-AIDS era. He is author of two books: Closet Space: Geographies of Metaphor from the Body to the Globe, and Replacing Citizenship: AIDS Activism and Radical Democracy. He is also co-editor of the book Seattle Geographies, and has written numerous journal articles. Brown is active in volunteer work, and teaches courses on urban, political, social, and cultural geography.

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Monday, December 2, 4:00-6:00 pm
Department of History Conference Room
Sidney Smith Hall 2098
100 St. George Street

 

 

Peter L. Hahn

An Oasis or a Mirage?: The U.S. Vision for the Arab-Israeli Peace Process since the Cold War

Co-sponsored by the Canada Centre for Global Security Studies, and the Centre for the Study of the United States, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto.

 

Peter L. Hahn is the Chair of the Department of History at Ohio State University. As a research scholar, Professor Hahn specializes in U.S. foreign relations in the Middle East since 1940. His publications include: Missions Accomplished?: The United States and Iraq since World War I (Oxford University Press, 2011); Historical Dictionary of U.S.-Middle East Relations (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007); Crisis and Crossfire: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 (Potomac Books, 2005); Caught in the Middle East: U.S. Policy Toward the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1945-1961 (University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Empire and Revolution: The United States and the Third World Since 1945 (co-edited with Mary Ann Heiss, Ohio State University Press, 2001); and, The United States, Great Britain, and Egypt, 1945-1956: Strategy and Diplomacy in the Early Cold War (University of North Carolina Press, 1991). Since 2002, Hahn has served as Executive Director of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, a professional society of some 1,600 members in four dozen countries.

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Friday, December 6, 2:00-4:00 pm
Room 108N, Munk School of Global Affairs

 

 

Robin Kelsey

Stare Down: Confronting the Camera in mid-1960s America

Co-sponsored by the Department of Art, University of Toronto

 

 

In mid-1960s America, the camera—whether recording for film, television, or still photography—came to be regarded as an aggressive machine at odds with the integrity of personal character, creative passion, sound judgment, and civic process. Time and again, American institutions imagined the cold stare of the camera as hostile to the fragile beauty of human ideals. A series of unsettling national encounters with mechanical reproduction, beginning in 1954 with the televised Army-McCarthy hearings, and extending through the coverage of the Kennedy-Nixon presidential debates and the media frenzy over the assassination of John F. Kennedy, led to a surge in concern in the mid 1960s regarding the effects of cameras on human subjects. In an effort to describe and understand this pervasive burst of anxiety, Kelsey will discuss the confrontation between camera and human subject in three instances drawn from radically different contexts: Andy Warhol's so-called screen tests, made between 1964 and 1966 of various celebrities and pseudo-celebrities; Estes vs. Texas, a 1965 Supreme Court case that restricted the use of cameras in courtrooms; and the media events surrounding the alleged paranormal powers of Ted Serios, whose claims to impress images psychokinetically onto film by staring into Polaroid cameras brought him onto television and into the national press in the mid-1960s.

 

Robin Kelsey is Shirley Carter Burden Professor of Photography, and Chair of the History of Art and Architecture Department at Harvard University. He holds a PhD in art history from Harvard, and a JD from Yale Law School, and has practiced law in California. A specialist in the histories of photography, landscape, and American art, Professor Kelsey has received various awards for his scholarship and teaching, including the Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize for his work on the nineteenth-century survey photography of Timothy O’Sullivan. He is working on two books, one on photography and chance, and the other on photography in America during the Cold War era.

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Philip Mirowski

The Neoliberal Gameplan for Big Crises, like Global Warming and Economic Collapse

Co-sponsored by the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, and the Department of Geography, University of Toronto

 

This talk outlines the generic Neoliberal political response to crises, first abstractly, then in the cases of global warming and the economic crisis. For Neoliberals, humans can never be trusted to know whether the economy or biosphere is in crisis or not, because both Nature and Society are dauntingly complex and evolving. The Neoliberal solution enlists the strong State to allow The Market to find its own way to the ultimate solution. The role of the strong Neoliberal State is threefold: to becalm and mollify the restive public who are provoked to constrain or neutralize The Market in response to problems; to reiterate and deploy the Neoliberal panacea such that the way to address any (falsely) perceived market failures is to introduce more markets; and finally, to facilitate The Market in discovering its own eventual transformations of Nature and Society which will transcend any economic or biosphere crisis.

 

Philip Mirowski is the Carl E. Koch Professor of Economics and Policy Studies, and the History and Philosophy of Science, University of Notre Dame. He is author of: Machine Dreams (2002), The Effortless Economy of Science? (2004), More Heat than Light (1989), Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste(2013), and ScienceMart: Privatizing American Science (2011). He is editor of Agreement on Demand (2006), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: the Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (2009), and Building Chicago Economics (2011), among other works. Outside of ongoing research on the history and analysis of the commercialization of science, he is also working on a computational complexity approach to the crisis, and a new book on the history of the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economics, sometimes called the Nobel. He was awarded the Ludwig Fleck Prize from 4S in 2006, and has been visiting professor at Yale, Oxford, NYU, Duke, Paris, the University of Technology-Sydney, and the University of Amsterdam.

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Wednesday, January 15, 2014, 2:00-4:00 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs

 

Cindy D. Kam

Disgust and Public Opinion

Co-sponsored by the Department of Political Science, University of Toronto

 

Cindy D. Kam is Associate Chair, Director of Graduate Studies and Professor of Political Science and Psychology at Vanderbilt University.  She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 2003. Her research focuses on political psychology, public opinion, political participation, and political methodology. In 2011, she was awarded the Emerging Scholar Award from the Elections, Voting Behavior, and Public Opinion Section of the American Political Science Association and the Erik H. Erikson Award from the International Society of Political Psychology. Kam is coauthor of Us Against Them: Ethnocentric Foundations of American Opinion and Modeling and Interpreting Interactive Hypotheses in Regression Analysis, and she has published articles in outlets such as the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Behavior, and Critical Review.

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Thursday, January 16, 12 noon-1:30 pm
Room 3130, Sidney Smith Hall
100 St. George St., 3rd floor

 

Cindy D. Kam

Faculty and Graduate Student Workshop

Co-sponsored by the Department of Political Science, University of Toronto

 

This event is only open to Graduate Students and Faculty members.

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Friday, January 17, 12:00-2:00 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs

 

James N. Druckman

Democratic Competition and Citizens’ Preferences: An Uneasy Tension

Co-sponsored by the Department of Political Science, University of Toronto

 

This talk will explore how competition in democratic governments can create challenges to what many consider to be "quality opinions.” Thus, there may be a fundamental tension between two democratic requisites: competition and preference formation/responsiveness.

 

James N. Druckman is the Payson S. Wild Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. He has published over 75 articles, been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012. He currently is the co-PI on "Time Sharing Experiments in the Social Sciences."

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Hoang Vu Nguyen

Disaster, Settlement, and Belonging: Wavering Diaspora in Vietnamese New Orleans

Organized by the CSUS Graduate Student Workshop.

 

Vietnamese Americans in New Orleans (approximately 7,000 people) have been praised as a successful case of resilience among other local ethnic minorities after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. By revisiting Hurricane Katrina, Nguyen’s research shows a need to reconsider the exaggerated claims for the success of the Vietnamese. In contrast to other scholars who argued for the close-knit nature of a diasporic community (Cohen 1997; Safran 1991), he points out the fluid identity of Vietnamese immigrants that played a role in struggling for recognition. Instead of taking the Vietnamese as a homogenous minority group, his research illustrates a divergence among Vietnamese generations on local incidents upon their return to New Orleans. Five years after Katrina, the explosion of Deepwater Horizon drilling rig of British Petroleum (BP) in the Gulf of Mexico has hit the local economy once again. By drawing attention to race, poverty, and religion, his research has examined a negotiation process in which Vietnamese Americans wavered between a diaspora and an ethnic group. The thesis not only contributes to the current debate on the fluidity of diaspora (Clifford 1994; Dorais 2010), but it also reveals a product of white institutional power in the BP compensation agenda.

 

Hoang Vu Nguyen received a Master’s Degree in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in 2007. For his Master’s thesis, he investigated the impact of the urbanization process on residents in Hanoi, Vietnam.  Hoang works at the Department of Southeast Asian Studies at the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology (VME), specializing in Indonesia and East Timor. He has conducted several field trips to Indonesia, Brunei, and Laos to study and collect cultural artifacts for the Opening Exhibition of the Southeast Asian Building of the VME. He is now interested in studying overseas Vietnamese and their relations with the homeland, for which he is pursuing a PhD program in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto.

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Friday, February 7, 4-6 pm
George Ignatieff Theatre
Trinity College
15 Devonshire Place

 

J. Jack Halberstam

The Wild: Notes on Anarchy

Organized by the Centre for the Study of the United States, Munk School of Global Affairs. Co-sponsored by the Women & Gender Studies Institute, University of Toronto; and, the Department of English & Writing Studies, Western University.

 

Jack Halberstam is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity Gender Studies and Comparative Literature at USC. Halberstam works in the areas of popular, visual, and queer culture with an emphasis on subcultures. Halberstam’s first book, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995), was a study of popular gothic cultures of the 19th and 20th centuries and it stretched from Frankenstein to contemporary horror film. Her 1998 book, Female Masculinity (1998), made a ground breaking argument about non-male masculinity and tracked the impact of female masculinity upon hegemonic genders. Halberstam’s last book, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (2005), described and theorized queer reconfigurations of time and space in relation to subcultural scenes and the emergence of transgender visibility. This book devotes several chapters to the topic of visual representation of gender ambiguity. Halberstam was also the co-author with Del LaGrace Volcano of a photo/essay book, The Drag King Book (1999), and with Ira Livingston of an anthology, Posthuman Bodies (1995). Halberstam regularly speaks on queer culture, gender studies and popular culture and publishes blogs at bullybloggers.com. Halberstam published a book in 2011 titled The Queer Art of Failure (Duke University Press), and Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012). Halberstam is currently working on a project about queer anarchy tentatively titled: The Wild.

 

There will be publications for sale after the lecture.

 

Please Note:

Prof. Halberstam will also be giving a research seminar at the Women & Gender Studies Institute, on Wednesday, February 5, 3-5 pm, in the Jackman Humanities building, Room 100A. For additional information and to register for this seminar, please contact Prof. Sarah Trimble at: s.trimble@utoronto.ca.

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Wednesday, February 26, 2014, 4-6 pm
Munk School of Global Affairs, room 208N

 

Justin Morris

Robots in Cowboy Hats: Hollywood Sound Serials, and the Hinterland Audience

Organized by the CSUS Graduate Student Workshop.

 

 

Though a great deal has been written on the status of the silent film serial as a highly popular form that helped to establish formative economic relationships between cinema and the newspaper industry, in relation to the growth of widespread fan cultures, the “golden age” of the Hollywood sound serial (encompassing a period of roughly 1935 to the late 1950s, and the advent of television) has largely mirrored the academic discussion of other “lower” film forms, such as the Hollywood B-film. Guy Barefoot indicates that film historians have only “made occasional references to […] later film serials,” quoting Ben Singer as reductively asserting that the serials survived “as a low-budget ‘B’ product with limited distribution, and an appeal primarily to hyperactive children.” Though statements such as Singer’s move to suggest that sound serials were merely poorly produced cinematic hiccups that played without fanfare to small audiences, it is the status of this unique film form among the hinterland audience which establishes its importance to economic, exhibition, and movie-going histories. Drawing upon exhibitor reports found primarily within the “What The Picture Did For Me” section of the Motion Picture Herald, this paper will seek to trace the serial’s progression from mass to niche markets, from a vastly populated “adult” audience, to a hinterland audience frequently addressed (by Hollywood and local exhibitors alike) as juvenile. Ultimately, Morris’ paper strives to establish the Hollywood sound serial as a significant—rather than diminutive—phenomena, of Great Depression-era exhibition and movie-going practice.

 

Justin J. Morris is a first year PhD student at the University of Toronto’s Cinema Studies Institute. Justin completed his Bachelor’s degree in History and Film Studies at the University of Alberta in 2011, and his Master’s degree in Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto in 2012. His research interests include the depiction of Canada in Hollywood cinema, the phenomena of 1930s singing cowboys, and the nature of seriality in cinema. He is currently co-authoring a documentary on experimental artist Harry Smith and the Anthology of American Folk Music, to be broadcast on University of Victoria radio in the coming year.

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Friday, February 28, 12-2 pm
Sidney Smith Hall, Room 3130
100 St. George Street

 

Dan Nexon

Undermining the Hegemon? The Politics of Public-Goods Substitution and ‘Soft Balancing'

Co-sponsored by the Department of Political Science, and the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto.

 

This lecture is part of the "FIRST! Friday IR Seminar and Tea!" series. A light lunch will be served.

 

Dan Nexon is Associate Professor, Dept. of Political Science, Georgetown University. He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010, he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. Prof. Nexon specializes in the comparative-historical analysis of international politics, international-relations theory, and international security. His current research focuses on statecraft and instruments of power politics, particularly in the context of unequal inter-state relations. His work covers issues in international-relations theory, American foreign policy, power politics, the politics of religious contention, and the relationship between popular culture and world politics. He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010. His articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, Dialogue IO, European Journal of International Relations, International Studies Perspectives, International Studies Review, International Studies Quarterly, Review of International Studies, and several other publications.

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Thursday, March 6, 2:00-4:00 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs

 

Matthew Levendusky

The Effect of “False” Polarization: Are Perceptions of Political Polarization
Self-Fulfilling Prophecies?

Co-sponsored by the Department of Political Science, University of Toronto

 

The past decade has witnessed an explosion of interest in the partisan polarization of the American electorate. Yet little research so far has considered the causes and consequences of perceptions of polarization. Does perceived polarization cause actual attitudinal polarization? Across multiple studies, we show that media coverage of polarization leads citizens to exaggerate the degree of polarization in the mass public, a phenomenon known as false polarization. We also find that false polarization causes voters to moderate their own issue positions but increases dislike of the opposing party. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for understanding polarization in the mass public and the potential consequences of polarized media coverage.

 

Matthew Levendusky is currently Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, in the Department of Political Science, at the University of Pennsylvania. He was previously an assistant professor of Political Science at Penn (2007-2013), and a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for the Study of American Politics at Yale University (2006-2007). He obtained his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2006, and his BA (with highest honors) from The Pennsylvania State University in 2001. He is the author of The Partisan Sort (Univeristy of Chicago Press, 2009), and How Partisan Media Polarize America (University of Chicago Press, 2013). His work has also appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly, and a variety of other outlets in political science. His research focuses on understanding how institutions and elites influence the political behaviour of ordinary citizens, including studies of mass polarization, the effects of partisan media, and various other topics.

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Friday, March 7, 10:00-11:30 am
Room 1040, Jackman Humanities Building
170 St. George Street

 

Leigh E. Schmidt

Faculty and Graduate Student Workshop

Co-sponsored by the Centre for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto

 

Leigh E. Schmidt is the Edward C. Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. He joined the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics in 2011. From 2009 to 2011, he was the Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America at Harvard University, and, from 1995 to 2009, he taught at Princeton University where he was the Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion and served as chair of the Department of Religion. He has held research fellowships at Stanford and Princeton and also through the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Schmidt earned his undergraduate degree in history and religious studies from the University of California, Riverside, in 1983 and his PhD in religion from Princeton in 1987. Prof. Schmidt is the author of numerous books, including: Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 2000), which won the American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in Historical Studies and the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association; Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (HarperOne, 2005), which appeared in an updated edition from the University of California Press in 2012; Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays (Princeton University Press, 1995); and, Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern Period (Princeton, 1989), which received the Brewer Prize from the American Society of Church History. In addition, Schmidt has served as co-editor with Sally Promey of American Religious Liberalism (Indiana University Press, 2012), co-editor with Laurie Maffly-Kipp and Mark Valeri of Practicing Protestants: Histories of the Christian Life in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), and co-author with Edwin Scott Gaustad of The Religious History of America (HarperOne, 2002). Schmidt’s latest book is Heaven’s Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman (Basic Books, 2010). His next book project is on how atheism and non-belief have fared historically in American public life.

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Friday, March 7, 2:00-4:00 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs

 

Leigh Schmidt

Public Atheism: An American History

Co-sponsored by the Centre for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto

 

Leigh E. Schmidt is the Edward C. Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. He joined the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics in 2011. From 2009 to 2011, he was the Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America at Harvard University, and, from 1995 to 2009, he taught at Princeton University where he was the Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion and served as chair of the Department of Religion. He has held research fellowships at Stanford and Princeton and also through the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Schmidt earned his undergraduate degree in history and religious studies from the University of California, Riverside, in 1983 and his PhD in religion from Princeton in 1987.

 

Leigh Schmidt is the author of numerous books, including: Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 2000), which won the American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in Historical Studies and the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association; Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (HarperOne, 2005), which appeared in an updated edition from the University of California Press in 2012; Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays (Princeton University Press, 1995); and, Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern Period (Princeton, 1989), which received the Brewer Prize from the American Society of Church History. In addition, Schmidt has served as co-editor with Sally Promey of American Religious Liberalism (Indiana University Press, 2012), co-editor with Laurie Maffly-Kipp and Mark Valeri of Practicing Protestants: Histories of the Christian Life in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), and co-author with Edwin Scott Gaustad of The Religious History of America (HarperOne, 2002). Schmidt’s latest book is Heaven’s Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman (Basic Books, 2010). His next book project is on how atheism and non-belief have fared historically in American public life.

 

Registration is required for this event. To register, please go to:http://munkschool.utoronto.ca/events/

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Friday, March 7, 4:00-6:00 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs

 

Vivek Bald

Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America

Co-sponsored by the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs, and the Cinema Studies Institute, Innis College, University of Toronto.

 

Drawing from his recently published book, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Harvard University Press, 2013), Bald will explore the histories of two little-known groups of South Asian Muslim migrants who came the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The first was a group of small traders of embroidered silks who came to sell their goods on New Jersey's beach boardwalks in the 1880s and then built a peddler network, rooted in New Orleans, that stretched throughout the U.S. South, the Caribbean and Central America. The second group were workers on British steamships, who began jumping ship in New York, Baltimore and Philadelphia during WWI to escape indenture-like conditions and access factory and restaurant jobs onshore. Bald will trace out these early histories, exploring the ways South Asian migrants navigated both British colonial power and U.S. racialization, segregation, and immigration restrictions - and the ways African American and Puerto Rican communities provided these men with shelter and possibility at the height of the Asian Exclusion era.

 

Vivek Bald is a writer, scholar, and documentary filmmaker whose work focuses on histories of the South Asian diaspora. He is the author of Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Harvard University Press, 2013) and a co-editor of the collection The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power (New York University Press, 2013). His films include Taxi-vala/Auto-biography (1994), Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music (2003), and In Search of Bengali Harlem (in production). He is Associate Professor in Comparative Media Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a member of MIT's recently formed Open Documentary Lab.

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Tuesday March 11, 2014, 3:30-5:00 pm
OISE Room 2211
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
University of Toronto, 252 Bloor Street West

 

Andrew Hayes

A Simple Test of Moderated Mediation

Co-sponsored by the Department of Political Science and the Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, and the Department of Psychology, Ryerson University.

 

Methods for testing a hypothesis about "moderated mediation" that have become widely used in the behavioural science literature are piecemeal approaches that do not formally test whether the indirect effect in a mediation model is moderated. In this talk, Andrew Hayes introduces a formal test of moderated mediation based on a hypothesis test or interval estimate of the parameters of a function linking the indirect effect to values of a moderator. Real-data examples are provided for different forms of moderated mediation, and the implementation of the method is illustrated using software such as the PROCESS procedure for SPSS and SAS as well Mplus.

 

Andrew Hayes is a Professor of Quantitative Psychology at The Ohio State University. His research focuses on linear models, with an emphasis on resampling methods of inference. And he has emerged as a leading contributor to the recent literature on statistical approaches to assessing mediation and moderation. Specific areas of investigation and writing include statistical approaches to assessing mediation and moderation. His methodological work is published in Psychological Methods, Multivariate Behavioral Research, Behavior Research Methods, Psychological Science, British Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Psychology, Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, and the Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation. His 2013, Introduction to Mediation, Moderation, and Conditional Process Analysis: A Regression-based Approach has become an instant best-seller at Guilford Press. Further information about Professor Hayes and his work is available at: http://www.afhayes.com/.

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Tuesday, March 11, 5:00-7:00 pm
Jackman Humanities Building
Room 100, 170 St. George Street

 

Joshua Dubler

Bad Men, Poor Men, and the Ethnography of Religion and Prison

Co-sponsored by the Centre for the Study of Religion, and Diaspora and Transnational Studies, University of Toronto.

 

Bad Men, Poor Men, and the Ethnography of Religion and Prison is a genealogical investigation of certain facets of contemporary common sense. Drawing on his recent book, Down in the Chapel (FSG, 2013), which is an ethnographic study of the chapel at Pennsylvania's Graterford Prison, Dubler explores how dominant attitudes toward prisoners play off of dominant discourses about religion to produce two ideal types--"the bad man of religion" and the "poor man of religion." With special attention paid to Graterford's Muslim communities, Dubler shows how these two types inform both religious life at Graterford and the popular attitudes that sustain mass incarceration. 

 

Joshua Dubler is Assistant Professor of Religion, at the University of Rochester. He received his PhD in Religion from Princeton University. His research and teaching focus on American religion and theory of religion. Along with Andrea Sun-Mee Jones, he is the author of <i>Bang! Thud: World Spirit</i>, from a Texas School Book Depository. Dubler has taught courses at Princeton University, Haverford College, Andover Newton Theological School, and in Villanova University's program at Graterford Prison. He is currently teaching a course on the modern concept of "guilt.

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Thursday, March 13, 4:00-6:00 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs

 

Brenna Wynn Greer

Making Image Matter: Reconsidering Civil Rights Work in the Post World War II United States

Co-sponsored by the Toronto Photography Seminar.

 

What happens when we consider how non-activists contributed to the civil rights struggle? The lecture dramatizes this question by examining the image-making activities of two black entrepreneurs—publisher John H. Johnson and public relations guru Moss H. Kendrix. Through their commercial image-making and image-management ventures in the post-World War II decade, these black capitalists produced mainstream media representations of black people and black life essential to African Americans’ campaigns for racial equality and national belonging. Appreciation of their “civil rights work,” however, requires recognizing civil rights activity that was not necessarily grassroots or progressive, or explicitly political, which is crucial to understanding the course and efficacy of mid-twentieth century black civil rights politics.

 

Brenna Wynn Greer is a historian of race, gender, and culture in the twentieth-century United States who works at the intersections of African American, business, and visual culture history. She is currently at work on a manuscript entitled “Image Rights: Black Representation Politics and Civil Rights Work in the Postwar United States,” which explores the relationship between African Americans civil rights politics and their acts of making media representations and black life from the New Deal era through the early Cold War years. As an assistant professor in history at Wellesley College, she teaches U.S. history courses in topics of consumerism, visual culture, fashion, and social movements.

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Tuesday, March 18, 2:00-4:00 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs

 

Jason Brennan

The Meaning of Markets: Against Semiotic Objections to Markets in Everything

Co-sponsored by the Department of Political Science, University of Toronto

 

Many people are convinced that there are certain goods that–while it is permissible to have and give away these goods–should not be for sale. Inhis forthcoming book, Markets without Limits, Brennan argues there are no inherent limits to markets. Anything that you can give away you may sell, and anything you may take for free you may buy. In this talk, he focuses on “semiotic” objections to market, which hold that buying and selling certain things shows disrespect or contempt for people, places, or objects that deserve reverence. He argues all such semiotic objections fail. In fact, there is no essential meaning to market transactions. Whenever a market generates good outcomes but is seen as disrespectful, rather than this giving us reason to stop the market, it gives us reason to change our view of what counts as expressing disrespect.

 

Jason Brennan (Ph.D., 2007, University of Arizona) is Assistant Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at Georgetown University, where he teaches courses in ethics, political economy, moral psychology, entrepreneurship, and public policy. He was formerly Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Research, at Brown University. He is the author of Why Not Capitalism? (Routledge Press, 2014), Compulsory Voting: For and Against, with Lisa Hill (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Libertarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2012), The Ethics of Voting (Princeton University Press, 2011), and, with David Schmidtz, A Brief History of Liberty (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). He is currently writing Markets without Limits for Routledge Press, and Against Politics for Princeton University Press.

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Friday, March 21, 2:00-4:00 pm
Room 108N, Munk School of Global Affairs

 

Leandra Zarnow

Bringing Protest Politics to Capitol Hill: Rethinking the 1970s Through the Career of Outsider Politician New York Representative Bella Abzug

 

 

Three decades before Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sarah Palin entered U.S. politics, New York Representative Bella Abzug imagined a day when “a woman schlemiel” could “get as quickly promoted as a male schlemiel.” A trailblazing politician for more than her feminist program, Congresswoman Abzug has been largely forgotten beyond the aforementioned sound bite featured during campaign season. Elected to represent Manhattan’s Nineteenth District in 1970, Abzug entered Congress as a Left Democrat who promised to “bring Congress back to the people.” Seen as “sister Bella” to some and “the conservative’s devil” to others, Abzug became America’s most recognizable political celebrity during her three short terms in Washington. Considering Abzug’s estimable challenge of Rush Limbaugh-esque Barry Farber in 1970, and her devastating loss to Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the 1976 Democratic Senate primary, as well as the space in between, tells us much about America’s changing political culture as the nation—and the Democratic Party—moved right. Most revealing is how much Abzug accomplished as a “maverick” politician who sought to bring the tenor and demands of 1960s social movements to Capitol Hill. Significantly, Abzug helped lead a period of policy experimentation in the areas of gender and racial civil rights, government ethics and privacy rights, urban renewal and environmentalism, which effectively made the U.S. political system more open, responsive, and accountable to a broader range of Americans. Historians have focused too narrowly on the malaise of the 1970s and the decline of the liberal state, discounting this key policy moment.

 

Leandra Zarnow is a Research Associate with the Centre for the Study of the United States during the 2013-2014 academic year. Zarnow comes to the Centre from Stanford University, where she was an American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellow during 2011-2013. She received her PhD from University of California, Santa Barbara. Leandra is primarily interested in United States women's and gender history, U.S. political, legal, and cultural development, and transnational rights movements.  She is currently completing her first book, Bella Abzug and the Promise and Peril of the American Left, to be published by Harvard University Press. Her articles have appeared in journals including Law and Social Inquiry, Reviews in American History, Feminist Formations, and the Journal of Policy History.

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Wednesday, March 26, 4-6 pm
Munk School of Global Affairs, room 208N

 

 

Mathieu Vallières

‘...that’s malarkey, but it’s very important malarkey’: Unpacking the Nixon-Kissinger worldview and emotional community during the Vietnam War Moment, 1969-1973

Organized by the CSUS Graduate Student Workshop.

 

 

Vallières’ dissertation investigates how President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, and their French counterparts Presidents Charles de Gaulle and Georges Pompidou, responded to the defeat of American power in Vietnam, and the corresponding existential realization of American limits in the world. To this end, the Paris Peace Negotiations—which intended to bring the war to a close but also prompted, at once, great power competition, collision, and collusion—becomes an ideal setting for a comparative analysis of the respective, but overlapping “imperial imaginaries” of the United States and France. The paper focuses on how Nixon and Kissinger imagined—or failed to imagine—a revision of America's role within the international order during this period of transition and transformation—or what I call the “Vietnam War Moment.” More specifically, it aims to show that because the period was fraught with challenges unfamiliar to America's global empire, Nixon and Kissinger viewed this moment—and therefore responded to it—by relying on a set of familiar ideas made up of notions of exceptionalism, conservatism, and Cold War orthodoxies. What is more, as they grieved what seemed to be the end of the American empire (at least in Southeast Asia), they created an emotional community that privileged denial, bargaining, depression, and most importantly, applauded anger, but rarely, if ever, acceptance. Typically understood by historians as realists par excellence outside the narrative of empire (thanks in part to their own voluminous writings), the unpacking of Nixon and Kissinger’s imperial worldviews, and of their emotional community reveals that they should not only be reintegrated into the trajectory that intertwines U.S. foreign relations and imperialism, but also distanced from their purported unadulterated, rational policy-making.

 

Mathieu Vallières is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. His current research is entitled The Paris Peace Negotiations 'Beyond Vietnam': Franco-American relations during America’s withdrawal from Vietnam, 1969-1973. It aims to set the American withdrawal from Vietnam within its layered historical, international, and imperial contexts while also accounting for its highly emotional character. Vallières completed his M.A. in History from the University of Toronto in 2008, and his B.A. (History) from the University of Ottawa in 2007.

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Thursday, March 27, 2:00-4:00 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs

 

Cheryl Boudreau

Wanting What is Fair: How Party Cues and Information about Income Inequality Affect Public Support for Taxes

Co-sponsored by the Department of Political Science, University of Toronto

 

 

Income inequality has risen dramatically in the United States, and the federal government and states have tried to use tax policy to reduce it. What types of information affect public support for redistributive tax policies? We address this question by conducting survey experiments where citizens express opinions about tax policies under consideration in a real-world context. We manipulate whether they receive party cues, information about rising income inequality, both, or neither type of information. We find that when citizens are given information about rising income inequality, they connect it to their views on specific tax policies. We also find that inequality information can induce Republican citizens to support a tax increase that their party opposes. These results challenge the prominent view of citizens as too ignorant to connect information about inequality to specific taxes. They also suggest that efforts to inform the electorate about inequality can influence tax policy opinions.

 

Cheryl Boudreau is Associate Professor in the Political Science department at the University of California, Davis. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in 2007. Boudreau's research examines whether and when different types of political information help uninformed voters to make political decisions that improve their welfare. This information may come from trusted endorsers, encouraging citizens to vote for a particular candidate or initiative, or from politicians competing in a debate. Citizens may also rely on the statements their peers make during discussions, the opinions of the masses (as reflected in public opinion polls), or the detailed policy information contained in voter guides. Using laboratory and survey experiments, as well as observational studies, Boudreau's research sheds light on when these different types of information help uninformed voters to behave as though they are more informed.

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Monday, March 31, 2:00-4:00 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs

 

Inderjeet Parmar

Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power

Co-sponsored by the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology; and, the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto.

 

 

This lecture examines the complex interrelations, shared mindsets, and collaborative efforts of influential public and private organizations in the building of American hegemony over the past century. Focusing on the involvement of the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations in U.S. foreign affairs, Prof. Parmar traces the transformation of America from an “isolationist” nation into the world’s only superpower, all in the name of benevolent stewardship. Based on archival research over a period of fifteen years,he tries to show how a combination of American academics, think tanks, and policy makers institutionalized elitism, which then bled into the machinery of U.S. foreign policy, and became regarded as the essence of modernity. America, planning to replace Britain in the role of global hegemon, created the necessary political, ideological, military, and institutional capacity to do so. Far from being scientifically objective and politically-neutral, the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations played fundamental roles in transforming America’s role in world affairs, advancing U.S. interests at the expense of other nations. The lecture incorporates a number of case studies of American philanthropy, including in Nigeria, Chile, and Indonesia.

 

Inderjeet Parmar is Professor of International Politics at City University London, UK, Chair of the AHRC Obama Research Network, and Past President of the British International Studies Association. Between 1991-2012, he was at the University of Manchester. He is the author of several books and articles, including Think Tanks and Power in Foreign Policy: A Comparative Study of the Role and Influence of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1939–1945; and his latest, Foundations of the American Century (Columbia UP, 2012). He is currently a Visiting Research Scholar at Princeon University, writing a monograph, Race and Empire in Anglo-American Wars from Korea to the War on Terror.

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Tuesday, April 22, 2-4 pm
Munk School of Global Affairs, room 208N

 

Claire Bond Potter

Andrea Dworkin’s Queer Friendships: Anti-pornography Feminism and the Problem of Sexual Reputation

Co-sponsored by the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, and the JHI Working Group: Gender and Global Scholarship, University of Toronto.

 

Andrea Dworkin’s many critics have characterized her as, at best, an opponent of erotic freedom and, at worst, of giving feminist cover to the conservative culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s. This criticism has caused her to be misrepresented, both as an intellectual and as a lesbian. As part of Claire Potter's work on late twentieth century radical feminism in the United States, she reanimates Dworkin’s history by understanding her through networks of friendship that offer alternative readings of this extraordinary intellectual as a proponent of the ethical, loving intimacy that would be possible outside the violence that adhered to gender.

 

Claire Bond Potter has been Professor of History at The New School for Public Engagement, New York, since 2012. Prior to that, she worked at Wesleyan University. She received her Ph.D. in History from New York University. Potter is currently writing a political history of anti-pornography campaigns, Beyond Pornography: Feminism, the Reagan Revolution and the Politics of Gender. She is the author of War on Crime: Bandits, G-Men and the Politics of Mass Culture (Rutgers University Press, 1998), and an editor, with Renee Romano, of Doing Recent History: On Privacy, Copyright, Video Games, Institutional Review Boards, Activist Scholarship, and History That Talks Back (University of Georgia Press, 2012). Since 2007, she has blogged at Tenured Radical, which moved to The Chronicle of Higher Education in July 2011. With Renee Romano of Oberlin College, she edits a series, Since 1970: Histories of Contemporary America (University of Georgia Press). Potter serves on the editorial board of the Journal of the History of Sexuality, and is a co-director of OutHistory.org.

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Wednesday, April 23, 4-6 pm
Munk School of Global Affairs, room 208N

 

Caleb Wellum

Ecology and the Politics of the Future in the 1970s

Organized by the CSUS Graduate Student Workshop, University of Toronto

 

 

The 1973 OPEC Oil Embargo against the United States triggered long lines at American gas stations, and signaled the end of cheap oil in the American and global economies. High crude oil prices riled American consumers and fuelled conspiracy theories, while exacerbating stagflation and the painful economic recessions of the 1970s. The potential for a more scarce energy future also ignited a heated debate about the nature and future of America’s energy system, and the potential for its disintegration. Economists and pundits feared the erosion of America’s domestic economy and political power abroad. This paper examines discourses of the energy future that used the language of ecology to predict socioeconomic catastrophe unless America abandoned the ideal of economic growth in favour of the massive social reorganization needed to support a steady state economy. Such ecological discourse relied on a politically and affectively potent politics of anticipation that demanded action now to save the future. By the end of the decade, however, neoliberal imaginaries of the energy future began to emerge that also adopted this anticipatory stance, but posited the unregulated free market as a panacea for America’s energy and economic woes. Exploring these conflicting discourses allows for a deeper understanding of the anticipatory and affective dimensions of neoliberalism, which is often reduced to a set of economic principles that cannot explain its political power on their own.

 

Caleb Wellum is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. His dissertation is entitled “Energizing the Right: Economy, Ecology, and Culture in the 1970s American Energy Crisis.” His research focuses on cultural history and the politics of anticipatory discourses. In particular, his work links the history of neoliberalism to debates about energy, ecology, and economy that surrounded the energy crises of the 1970s. This work is supported in part by a CSUS Graduate Research Grant and the Gerald Ford Presidential Library. Wellum has presented at NiCHE workshops, and the American Studies Association conference. Before coming to Toronto, he earned his BA (Hon.) and MA from McMaster University in Hamilton.

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Friday, May 23, 10:30 am to 3:00 pm
Hart House, East Common Room

 

Margaret Randall

Radical Texts & Political Acts: Forty Years of Reading Margaret Randall

A Panel, Poetry Reading, and Film

Co-sponsored by the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, and the JHI Working Group: Gender and Global Scholarship, University of Toronto.

 

 

This event is part of "History on the Edge," the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women.

 

Margaret Randall is a feminist poet, writer, photographer, and social activist. Her classic work of oral history, Cuban Women Now, was published in Toronto by Women’s Press in 1974. Since then she has published over a dozen other works of oral history, 35 books of poetry, and scores of edited anthologies, translations, and articles. Margaret lived among New York’s abstract expressionists in the 1950s and early ’60s, participated in the Mexican student movement of 1968, shared important years of the Cuban revolution (1969-1980), the first four years of Nicaragua’s Sandinista project (1980-1984), and visited North Vietnam during the last months of the U.S. war in that country. She has written about some of these experiences in her recent autobiography To Change the World: My Years in Cuba (Rutgers UP, 2009).

 

For more information on this event: <click here>. For information on the Berks conference, please visit the website at: http://berks2014.com/2013/10/04/registration/.

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Friday, June 13th, 11:00 am to 12:30 pm
Room 208N North House
Munk School of Global Affairs, 1 Devonshire Place

 

CHRISTOPHER SANDS

North American Economic Integration

Co-sponsored by the Consulate General of the United States - Toronto

 

Christopher Sands is a Senior Fellow at Hudson Institute, in Washington, D.C. where he directs the Initiative on North American Competitiveness and concentrates on regional economic integration and policy coordination. Dr. Sands is also a professorial lecturer at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, and the G. Robert Ross Distinguished Professor of Canada-U.S. Business and Economic Relations at Western Washington University. He has taught at the American University School of Public Affairs, and has lectured at the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. Department of State and for the US Department of Homeland Security. In 1999-2000, Dr. Sands was a Fulbright Scholar and visiting fellow at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa. He has written extensively on policy conflict and coordination related to manufacturing, the automotive industry, energy, labour markets, regulation and border security.

 

Dr. Sands holds a B.A. in political science from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Canadian studies and international economics from the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University. He is a member of the American Political Science Association, the International Studies Association, and the Association for Canadian Studies in the United States. Dr. Sands currently serves as treasurer and a member of the executive committee for the Canadian Politics Section of the American Political Science Association, and is a member of the research advisory board of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Ottawa, and the advisory board of the Canada-United States Law Institute jointly established by the law schools of Case Western Reserve University and the University of Western Ontario.

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PAST EVENTS 2012-13

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THURSDAY, JANUARY 26
DOORS AT 6:30 PM, EVENT STARTS AT 7:00PM
ISABEL BADER THEATRE
93 CHARLES ST WEST

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* Please Note: This event has been relocated from Room 208N. *

Tuesday, January 31, 10 am-12 noon
Vivian and David Campbell Conference Facility
Munk School of Global Affairs

 

Roundtable:

Trans Studies: State of the Field

Co-sponsored by the History Department, York University; Women and Gender Studies Institute, and Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, University of Toronto

Chair:
Elspeth Brown, Director, American Studies Program and Centre for the Study of the United States, University of Toronto

Speakers:
Susan Stryker, Director of the Institute for LGBT Studies, and Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, University of Arizona.
Sheila Cavanagh, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, and Coordinator of the School of Women’s Studies and the Sexuality Studies Program, York University

Nick Matte, Adjunct Faculty, Ph.D. Candidate, Dept. of History, and Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, University of Toronto.
Bobby Noble, Associate Professor, cross-appointed to the Departments of English and Sexuality Studies, York University.

 

 

To register for this event, please go to: http://www.munk.utoronto.ca/EventDetails.aspx?eventid=11586

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Tuesday, January 31, 4-6 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs

SUSAN STRYKER

Cross-Dressing for Empire: Embodying White Masculinity Through Performance in San Francisco’s Bohemian Club, 1870s-1920s

Co-sponsored by the History Department, York University; Women and Gender Studies Institute, and Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, University of Toronto

 

Susan Stryker is Director of the Institute for LGBT Studies, and Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, at the University of Arizona. She earned her Ph.D. in United States History at U.C. Berkeley in 1992, held a post-doctoral fellowship in Sexuality Studies at Stanford University, and has been a visiting faculty member at Harvard University, U.C.-Santa Cruz, Simon Fraser University, and Macquarie University. She has written widely on queer and transgender topics, and co-edited the Lambda Literary Award-winning anthology The Transgender Studies Reader. Her Emmy Award-winning film Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria, documents an episode of transgender collective resistance to police oppression in 1966. She is currently researching cross-dressing theatricals in San Francisco’s all-male Bohemian Club, and working on a new film about 1950s transsexual celebrity Christine Jorgensen, and continuing to promote the development of transgender studies.

 

To register for this event, please go to: http://webapp.mcis.utoronto.ca/Events.aspx

 

To view an interview with Susan Stryker in Xtra!: <click here>.

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February 1, 5:00 to 7:00 pm
University College, University of Toronto
15 King’s College Circle, Room 140

 

Panel:

Beyond the Border

Co-sponsored by University College Canadian Studies program, and the Centre for the Study of the United States at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto.

 

A group of leading University of Toronto experts in Canada-US relations will provide insight into the proposed border agreement between the two nations at Beyond the Border, a panel event taking place at University College on February 1 at 5:00 p.m.The new deal on bilateral trade and security has been called the most important of its kind since the North American Free Trade Agreement. Others describe the Shared Vision for Perimeter Security and Economic Competitiveness Action Plan, announced by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and US President Barack Obama on December 7, 2011, as “incremental and hypothetical.”Debating the implications of the deal for border relations, economic integration, and security are:
Stephen Clarkson, Professor of Political Economy, and author (with Matto Mildenberger), Dependent America? How Canada and Mexico Construct US Power;
Emily Gilbert, Professor of Geography, Director of Canadian Studies, and author, Borders and Security in North America;
John Kirton, Professor of Political Science and Director, G8 Research Group;
Audrey Macklin, Professor, Faculty of Law, and author, The State of Law’s Borders and the Law of States’ Borders; and
Kent Roach, Professor, Faculty of Law, and author, September 11: Consequences for Canada.
Elspeth Brown, Professor of History and Director, Centre for the Study of the United States, will moderate the discussion, which is open to the public.

 

For further information, please visit www.uc.utoronto.ca/beyondtheborder  or contact:Yvonne Palkowski
Communications Officer, University College, yvonne.palkowski@utoronto.ca   | (416) 978-3160.

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Wednesday, February 1, 2-4 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs

 

RONALD NUMBERS

Creationism Goes Global

Co-sponsored by the Department of Religion, University of Toronto

 

Ron Numbers is an eminent scholar of the history of science, medicine, and religion in the United States. He is the author of numerous books, including Darwinisim Comes to America (Harvard, 1998); The Creationists (California 1992, and more recently, Harvard); Almost Persuaded: American Physicians and Compulsory Health Insurance, 1912-1920 (Hopkins 1978); as well as over ten edited volumes. Prof. Numbers has won numerous awards, including fellowship in the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a John Simon Guggenheim felllowship. He wase President of the History of Science Society (200-2001) and the American Society of Church History (1999-2000). He will be in residence at CSUS in February-March, 2012.

 

To register for this event, please go to: http://webapp.mcis.utoronto.ca/Events.aspx

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** THIS EVENT HAS BEEN RELOCATED **

Friday, February 10, 2-4 pm
Vivian and David Campbell Conference Facility
Munk School of Global Affairs

 

JEFFREY DVORKIN

US and Canadian Public Broadcasting: Different Origins; Similar Threats

Co-sponsored by the Journalism Program, University of Toronto Scarborough

 

 

Jeffrey Dvorkin is a Lecturer and Director of the Journalism Program at the University of Toronto Scarborough Campus. He was Managing Editor and Chief Journalist at CBC Radio, and VP of News and Information at NPR in Washington, DC. He was NPR's first news ombudsman, a position he held for more than six years. Dvorkin is also the Executive Director of the international Organization of News Ombudsmen.

 

To register for this event, please go to: http://webapp.mcis.utoronto.ca/Events.aspx