Research Lectures and Conferences

Spring, 2009

Pembroke Seminar Research Lecture

Hugh Raffles

"Squish That Bug!" Crush Freaks in an Unforgiving World

5:00 pm-7:00 pm
Pembroke Hall, Multipurpose Room, #305
172 Meeting Street

Public reception will follow

Hugh Raffles is Associate Professor and Chair of Anthropology at The New School for Social Research in New York. He is the author of In Amazonia: A Natural History (Princeton, 2002), which won the AmericanAnthropologicalAssociation's Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing. Most recently, his work has been published in Granta, Cabinet Magazine, and Public Culture. His essay "Cricket Fighting" is included in this year's Best American Essays. His new book, a study of encounters between insects and people in a wide variety of times and places, will be published next fall

November 11, 2008

Pembroke Seminar Research Lecture

Cancelled

Sam Easterson
Creative Producer
Royal Ontario Museum

"Using Animal Borne Imaging Systems to Create an Aesthetic of Empathy"

5:00 pm, Room 120, List Art Center, 64 College St.

Public reception will follow.

Easterson is a video artist and museum professional who is currently
the Creative Producer at the Royal Ontario Museum. His work has been
exhibited at The Whitney Museum and seen on the Sundance Channel,
Animal Planet, CNN, and the Late Show with David Letterman.

SAM EASTERSON has been making video art for over 10 years. Included
among the art museums that have exhibited his work are the Whitney
Museum of American Art, "Biennial Exhibition"; the Walker Art Center;
the International Center of Photography and the New Museum of
Contemporary Art. Easterson has also presented his work on the Sundance
Channel, Animal Planet, CNN, and on the Late Show with David Letterman.
His work has been reviewed in numerous publications including the New
York Times, Newsweek Magazine, Audubon Magazine and the New Yorker.

In addition to working as a video artist, Sam Easterson has also worked
as museum professional in the US, Canada and New Zealand. He has held
permanent positions at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Natural
History Museum of Los Angeles and at Te Tapa Tongarewa National Museum
of New Zealand. He currently works as a Creative Producer at the Royal
Ontario Museum, where he is developing over 100 videos for the ROM's
new permanent Schad Gallery of Biodiversity: Life in Crisis.

Easterson is a graduate of The Cooper Union for the Advancement of
Science and Art in New York and also earned a Master of Science in
Landscape Architecture from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
He has received grants from the Peter S. Reed Foundation, the Yellow
Fox Foundation, the Durfee Foundation and the Creative Capital
Foundation, among numerous others. In addition, Easterson is also a
recipient of the prestigious Louis Comfort Tiffany Prize.

Contact Donna_Goodnow@Brown.edu or call 401-863-2643 if you have any questions.

October 25, 2008

Gender Studies – Rethinking the Past, Imagining the Future:
A Conference in Honor of Louise Lamphere

This conference honored anthropologist Louise Lamphere and her major gift to Brown University in support of Gender Studies teaching and research in cross-cultural and transnational perspectives. The history of this gift is fascinating because Lamphere, now a distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico, was a pioneer in early feminist scholarship and a junior faculty member in the Brown Anthropology Department in the 1970s. After being denied tenure, Lamphere became the lead plantiff in a class action suit against the University for sex discrimination. The suit was settled by a consent decree in 1977 that mandated goals and timetables for the hiring and tenuring of women faculty. Over the years, the conditions of the consent decree resulted in many more women scholars joining the Brown faculty. This story of gender studies scholarship and activism comes full circle with Lamphere's ground breaking gift to support visiting junior faculty appointments at Brown. The celebratory conference served as an opportunity to rethink the history of feminist scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s, to examine changing research paradigms in the present, and to hear about new lines of research by younger scholars and the promise of cross-generational collaborations.

May 1-2, 2008

2008 Pembroke Center Roundtable

“Self Among Others: The Social Fabric of Subjectivity”

Participants
James Hopkins –Philosophy, King’s College London
Lynne Layton –Psychiatry and Women’s Studies, Harvard
Ona Nierenberg –Apres-Coup Psychoanalytic Association, Bellevue Hospital Center
Charles Shepherdson –English, SUNY-Albany
Robert D. Stolorow –Psychiatry, UCLA
Lyndsey Stonebridge –Literature and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia

The New York Times recently reported that psychology textbooks describe psychoanalysis as "dessicated and dead." Nevertheless, psychoanalytic theory continues to inform vigorously both large strands of clinical practice and the theoretical work of academic literary and cultural studies. Clinicians and academic scholars both find in psychoanalytic theory support for the fundamental claim that selfhood
or subjectivity is not an innate given, but an on-going process essentially determined-and therefore potentially disrupted, corrupted, or otherwise troubled-by the relational and more broadly social context. This surface agreement notwithstanding, the theoretical paradigms from psychoanalysis on which clinicians and academic scholars rely remain quite different, thus leading them to offer very different interpretations of this fundamental claim and to draw very different implications from it. For instance, academic scholars tend to take their bearings from Freud and Lacan, whereas clinicians prefer to draw on various forms of "relational" psychoanalysis, initiated by British object-relations theory.

The roundtable will examine and discuss explicitly the contrasts and convergences between these theoretical paradigms, as they bear on the general question of the relation between the psychic and the social (particularly, between subjectivity and intersubjectivity), looking for example at what is invited and what is foreclosed in each discourse. Specific issues that might be addressed in this context include the role of Freudian notions of narcissism and melancholia in the formation of identity; the contrast between Freudian identification and relational (provision/deficit) models of subject formation; the formation and incitement of desire by relational or social configurations; conceptions of otherness and corresponding conceptions of intersubjectivity; theories of the formation, development, or constitution of subjectivity. The roundtable will bring together clinicians accomplished in psychoanalytic theory and academic theorists whose research has been informed by psychoanalytic ideas.

April 30, 2008

Hannah Arendt Lecture Series

Lyndsey Jane Stonebridge
Professor of Literature and Critical Theory
University of East Anglia

"Judging in a Lawless World: Hannah Arendt and the Eichmann Trial"

5:00 pm, Crystal Room, Alumnae Hall

Public reception will follow

Lyndsey Stonebridge’s research is on the inter-relations between literature, psychoanalysis and history. Her most recent publications, The Writing of Anxiety and Fiction after Modernism (edited with Marina MacKay), are concerned with the legacies of wartime in mid twentieth-century culture. She is currently working on a new book on writing about war crime trials (Law Writing: Fiction after Nuremberg). Lyndsey Stonebridge is also the one of the co-organisers of W.G. Sebald: In Memoriam, an Interdisciplinary Conference, to be held at University of East Anglia, September 5-7, 2008.

April 3, 2008

Pembroke Seminar Research Videoconference

John Forrester
Department of History and Philosophy of Science
University of Cambridge

"Women and the Reception of Psychoanalysis in Cambridge in the Early Twentieth Century"

CIT Room 269
115 Waterman Street

John Forrester is Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of numerous books and articles on psychoanalysis, including Truth Games: Lies, Money, and Psychoanalysis; Dispatches from the Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and Its Passions; and The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan and Derrida.

March 7, 2008

Gender and the Politics of "Traditional" Muslim Practices

9:00 am - 6:30 pm
Crystal Room, Alumnae Hall

In cases where Muslim women and girls are seen as needing to be rescued and advocacy seems imperative—as with honor crimes, female circumcision, early marriage—structural analyses of issues apart from gender can fall away, thus producing little new knowledge and reinforcing stereotypes of Muslim backwardness versus Western modernity. The participants in this conference will look at alternative ways to view so-called “traditional” Muslim practices. They will look at instances where everything from local politics to transnational economics might contribute to a given practice, and where the political, the socio-economic, or the cultural might be the most important factors to consider.

Click here for additional information and a list of conference participants

December 4, 2007

Pembroke Seminar Research Lecture

Judith Guss Teicholz

"A Strange Convergence: Postmodern
Theory, Infant Research, & Psychoanalysis"

5:30 pm, Crystal Room, Alumnae Hall

Public reception will follow

Judith Teicholz is a Supervising Analyst and Faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis (MIP), and on the adjunct faculty of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. She is the author of Kohut, Loewald, and the Postmoderns (1999) and co-editor of Trauma, Repetition, and Affect Regulation (1998)

October 9, 2007

Pembroke Seminar Research Lecture

Arnold H. Modell

"Identity and the Selection of Value"

5:00 pm, Crystal Room, Alumnae Hall

Public reception will follow

Arnold Modell is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He is the author of "The Private Self" (Harvard University Press), and "Imagination and the Meaningful Brain" (MIT Press)