Institute for Research in the Humanities, UW-Madison (IRH)

The IRH is pleased to co-sponsor this exciting event.

Dear friends of ILS - please see the shared flyer for details about the 75th anniversary event! Please note, too, that if you're unable to join us that day in Madison, we will have options for hybrid participation as well!

A great opportunity for UW Graduate Students!

Humanities Grant Writing Camp (HGWC) - Wisconsin Scholarship Hub (WiSH) Hosted by the Institute for Research in the Humanities and facilitated by the UW–Madison Writing Center, the 4-day camp (May 20-23, 2024, 9:00 am–3:30 pm) provides participants with a structured introduction to the nuts-and-bolts of writing funding proposals to support a wide range of humanities...

We are excited to welcome Thomas Leek as a UW System Fellow in 2024-2025.

🗣 ! A nice honor for German associate professor Dr. Thomas Leek. The University of Wisconsin-Madison Institute for Research in the Humanities, UW-Madison (IRH) awards fewer than 45 fellowships to internal and external applicants each year.

📣 IRH is looking for a Project Assistant for 2024-2025 📣

The IRH is excited to announce the call for a new Project Assistant for 2024-2025. This is a 50% project assistantship, twenty hours per week, for twelve months beginning September 1, 2024. The Institute seeks a dissertator-status graduate student in the humanities for an annual appointment, September-August, 2024-2025, renewable. This position offers salary, tuition remission, SGH health insurance, and other benefits. Some availability in August 2024 for hourly paid training is required. For more information about the position and how to apply see the the full call for applicants:

irh.wisc.edu

📢📢 The due date for IRH External Fellowships is fast approaching. For full Calls for Applications and for links to apply see the IRH Fellowship page: https://lnkd.in/gqxa4GrN.

Solmsen Fellowship (4 available) for scholars working in the humanities on European history, literature, philosophy, politics, religion, art and culture in the classical, medieval, and/or early modern periods before 1700. Projects on the relationship of pre-1700 Europe to other parts of the world are also welcome. Due Oct. 26th

Kingdon Fellowship (2 available) for scholars working in the humanities in the historical, literary, artistic, and/or philosophical studies of Christian and/or Jewish religious traditions and their role in society. Projects may focus on any period from antiquity to the present, on any part of the world, and in any field(s) in the humanities. Due Oct. 26th

Ciplijauskaité Fellowship (1 available) scholar with a Ph.D. (at any stage of career), working in Spanish literary and cultural studies of the Iberian Peninsula. We are especially interested in scholars working on peninsular Spanish poetry. The Ciplijauskaité Fellowship does not typically support editions, anthologies, or translations. Due Oct. 26th

Ullrich Langer (Interim Director of the IRH, 2017-2018; Senior Fellow, 2000-2005) will discuss his new book, Lyric Humanity from Virgil to Flaubert (Cambridge University Press, March 2023) on Tuesday, May 2 at 4:45pm in the University Club room 212. Event sponsored by the Center for Early Modern Studies. https://irh.wisc.edu/event/book-launch-with-professor-ullrich-langer/

📢SHRF Deadline Extended!📢

The deadline for the 2023 Summer Humanities Research Fellowship (SHRF) competition was just extended to Friday, April 21, 2023, 5:00 pm CST.

Funded by the College of Letters & Science and the Office of Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education (OVCRGE), the SHRF program and workshop support tenured humanities faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in pursuing their “next big project.”

Over the course of the summer, these fellowships and accompanying workshop will allow a small cohort of scholars to make progress in the early stages of new book projects or articles. The workshop seeks to inspire participants to think programmatically about their research as well as how effectively to pursue external funding to support their scholarship and advance their careers. Award also includes $1,000 in flexible research funds and the opportunity to organize a workshop related to the fellow’s forthcoming publication.

Encountering the Nonhuman in French Literature and Thought, a symposium
April 25 @ 4:30 pm - 6:00 pm

“The Nonhuman Future”
Lucas Hollister (Dartmouth College)

Hollister is Associate Professor of French and Italian Languages and Literatures at Dartmouth College, with areas of expertise in 20th/21st-century French literature, the novel, popular culture, genre fiction and film, cultural and critical theory, and ecocriticism. He is the author of Beyond Return: Genre and Cultural Politics in Contemporary French Fiction (Liverpool UP, 2019) and co-editor of “Frontiers of Ecocriticism,” a double issue of Contemporary French and Francophone Studies (volume 25.1-2, January and March 2021). His articles have been published in MLN, PMLA, and French Cultural Studies. Hollister has written extensively on Antoine Volodine and was a speaker on the Volodine roundtable at the 2022 French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium. His current research focuses primarily on ecocriticism and genre fiction in France and the United States.



“The pull of the earth… Revisiting Michel Serres’ natural contract”
Stéphanie Posthumus (McGill University)

Posthumus is Professor of Comparative Literature at McGill University. Her work develops an ecocritical approach to the many diverse forms of the non-human in contemporary literature and philosophy. She is the author of French Écocritique: Reading Contemporary French Theory and Fiction Ecologically (U of Toronto P, 2017) and co-editor of the essay collections French Thinking about Animals (Michigan State UP, 2015) and French Ecocriticism: From the Early Modern Period to the Twenty-First Century (Peter Lang, 2017). At the intersection of several contemporary critical streams, Posthumus’s research focuses on representations of the non-human, or more-than-human, in contemporary French literature as well as across European literatures and cultures. She is co-principal researcher for L’Imaginaire Botanique, a digital humanities project researching the circulation of plants in contemporary literature written in French (for more information, see https://imaginairebotanique.uqam.ca/). Her article, “Retours du végétal dans Herbes et golems (2012) de Manuela Draeger (Antoine Volodine) et Ruines-de-Rome (2002) de Pierre Senges” (L’Esprit Créateur, vol. 60.4, 2020) explores the question of the non-human in Volodine’s works.



“Animacy and Edibility: When Food Speaks Up”
Gina Stamm (University of Alabama)

Stamm is Assistant Professor of French at the University of Alabama. Her research focuses on 20th– and 21st-century French and Caribbean literature, specifically questions of embodiment and the environment; environmental humanities; ecocriticism; and psychoanalysis. Her publications position her as an influential voice in ecocriticism, especially ecofeminism and plant studies. Publications include “Inventing a Vegetal Post-Exotic in the Work of Antoine Volodine” in Ecozon@:European Journal of Literature, Culture, and Environment (vol. 10.2, 2019), “Animal Végétal: Plants and Transhumanism in Contemporary French Literature” in French Forum (vol. 46.1, Spring 2021), and “Cannibal Plants: Tropiques and Martinican Aesthetics” in Women in French Studies (vol. 27, 2019). She is currently translating Volodine’s novel Songes de Mevlido, under consideration with University of Nebraska Press. She, too, was a speaker on the Volodine roundtable at the 2022 French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium.

Adam Stern (IRH Resident Fellow, 2022-2023) will be giving a lecture for the UW-Madison Center for the Humanities "Friday Lunch" series. His lecture, titled "Zionislandology" will take place on March 3rd, 2023 at 12:00pm-1:00pm.

Please note: A catered lunch will be provided at this Friday Lunch event. Seats are limited and available on a first-come basis. To register, please send an email to [email protected] with your name, title, or affiliation.

Beginning with Hannah Arendt’s well-known distinction between medieval, religious Jew-hatred and modern, secular antisemitism, this talk reconsiders contemporary debates concerning the periodization of race, religion, and settler colonialism. The discussion follows Arendt’s terms into more recent historiographical writing by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (Jewish history), Geraldine Heng (race in the Middle Ages), and Patrick Wolfe (colonization). It concludes by speculating on how this constellation of figures and texts can contribute to a theological-political genealogy of Zionism as a form of island-thinking.

If you happened to miss Dr. Agata Fijalkowski's wonderful talk on law and visual culture this past Thursday you can still listen to it on the CREECA Podcast at this link:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/law-and-visual-culture-in-three-vignettes-agata/id1286768316?i=1000586648743
Agata Fijalkowski is Reader, Leeds Law School, Leeds Beckett University and currently is an Honorary Fellow at the IRH.

‎CREECA Lecture Series Podcast: Law and Visual Culture in Three Vignettes - Agata Fijalkowski on Apple Podcasts ‎Show CREECA Lecture Series Podcast, Ep Law and Visual Culture in Three Vignettes - Agata Fijalkowski - Nov 17, 2022

Check out this exciting event organized by Medieval Studies Program at UW-Madison on Friday Nov. 11th! Sara Ritchey will give a public lecture titled "From Archive to Repertoire in Late Medieval Women's Caregiving Communities."

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 11: Professor Sara Ritchey (History, University of Tennessee-Knoxville)
2:30 pm, Hagen Room (Elvehjem 150): Workshop for graduate students and faculty. Please contact Sarah Friedman ([email protected]) to participate.
5 pm, Elvejhem L150: Public lecture. “From Archive to Repertoire in Late Medieval Women’s Caregiving Communities.”

Drawing on a range of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century French and Latin sources, including saints’ lives, charters, psalters, devotional miscellanies, drama, and poetry, this talk will survey the performance of healthcare that religious women (primarily beguines and Cistercians) provided in hospitals, leprosaria, infirmaries, and bedsides. It speculates on how textual knowledge in these communities was augmented through oral elaboration and suggests ways that medievalists can recuperate submerged healthcare knowledge and practices from manuscript vestiges.

Co-sponsored by the Anonymous Fund and the Department of History.