STAR Events 2009-2010
SPECULATIVE LUNCH: "Mestizaje, Créolité and Hybridity"
7th May, 1pm-2pm. INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDIES IN THE HUMANITIES
This event aims to bring together scholars who are or might be interested in revisiting and revising theoretical concepts such as "mestizaje", "créolité" and "hybridity" in a globalised and transatlantic world. These concepts, which connect the fields of Postcolonial Studies, Critical Race Theory, (U.S.) Third World feminism and Gender Studies, among others, spring from specific cultural, historical, linguistic and racial contexts, but are also closely related to transnational and transatlantic dynamics. They inform a whole range of research that refers to the "ethnic", the "postmodern" and the "anthropological" in the 21st Century.This speculative lunch will give scholars the opportunity of discussing the importance of these theoretical concepts from an interdisciplinary perspective. Therefore, it will be open to scholars from any discipline at the University of Edinburgh.
The speculative lunch will take place on FRIDAY 7TH MAY, from 1-2, and will be held at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh. The lunch is free for those attending, but spaces are limited so booking is strongly recommended. Please do so
asap in order to secure your place. If you would like to join us this time, please send an email to iash@ed.ac.uk.
Alternatively, you could contact either Dr. Mackintosh (F.J.Mackintosh@ed.ac.uk) or Dr. Aishih Wehbe-Herrera (Aisheh.Wehbe@ed.ac.uk) should you have any further questions or comments.
"Darwin and Lincoln on Race and Society". A joint RSE/IASH One-day Conference
13 November 2009
The Royal Society of Edinburgh, 22-26 George Street
Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born on the same day in the same year: 12 February 1809. The 200th anniversary celebrations on both sides of the Atlantic remind us that the American President and the British zoologist jointly helped to shape the modern world. Questioning established hierachies of nature, race and class, their legacy of civil and scientific liberalism still holds radical potential today. The day conference will explore connections and conflicts between Darwin's and Lincoln's work including the origins of their thinking in Enlightenment discussions of human nature and society, the nature of their original contribution and its reverberations in contemporary culture and politics.
Speakers:
Professor Catherine Clinton (Queen's University Belfast)
Dr Jon Hodge (University of Leeds)
Professor James A. Moore (The Open University)
Conference fee: £27 (with lunch); £15 (without lunch)
For full programme and registration details see the RSE website
http://www.royalsoced.org.uk/events/index.htm#darwin_lincoln
The Conference will be followed at 5.30 pm by a public lecture by Marek Kohn (author and columnist): "Believing in Change: Darwin, Lincoln, Obama".
Marek Kohn writes books and articles about a range of interconnected themes, including ideas about human nature and human difference, evolutionary thinking and its impact on society, national identity, and trust. His books include: A Reason for Everything: Natural Selection and the English Imagination; As We Know It: Coming to Terms with an Evolved Mind; and The Race Gallery: The Return of Racial Science. He writes for the Independent, the Guardian and the New Statesman. He is also a fellow in the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics at the University of Brighton.
The lecture, at the RSE, is FREE but ticketed.
To book a ticket contact the RSE Events Department: Tel: 0131 240 2780,
Fax: 0131 240 5024, Email: http://mce_host/events@ royalsoced.org.ukor register online at: www.royalsoced.org.uk/events
11 December 2009
Transatlantic Literary Studies Lecture to launch the Transatlantic Literary Studies series
St. Cecilia's Hall, Edinburgh
Professor David Simpson (English, University of California at Davis)
Translating America in the Early Nineteenth Century
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STAR Events 2008-2009
Monday 24 November 2008, 4-6 p.m.
Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities
Hope Park Square, Edinburgh
The Institute of Geography and the STAR Project together welcome
Gustavo San Roman (University of St. Andrews) and Iain Stewart (Independent Scholar)
for a discussion concerning Scottish-Uruguayan connections.
'Don Heriberto, A Tale of Two Identities: Sir Herbert Gibson, Scotsman and Argentine'
In this presentation, Iain Stewart, author of the forthcoming biography Don Heriberto, Knight of the Argentine, describes the life of Sir Herbert Gibson, a Scotsman who rose to prominence in Argentina during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sir Herbert was particularly active in forging ever-closer ties between Britain and Argentina, his opinions being valued by influential figures in both nations, including several Argentinean presidents and the Prince of Wales. After highlighting significant episodes of Sir Herbert's career, Stewart will close by making some remarks on his connections with Uruguay, after which Gustave San Roman will offer a more general commentary on points of contact between the country and Scotland. A discussion of the links between Scotland and the two River Plate neighbours will help to conclude the event.
Monday 16 June 2008, 4 p.m.
Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Hope Park Square
Presenting: Professor Desmond Bell's film 'Hard Road to Klondike' (1999)
Professor Desmond Bell (IASH Fellow)
Film Studies, The Queens University Belfast
Rotha Mor and Saoil, Micí Mac Giobhanin's autobiographical story is a classic tale of the experience of the Irish emigrant in Scotland and the US at the end of the 19th century. Desmond Bell's film employs a rich mix of still and moving image archive, both factual and fictive, to retell Mici's story and to muse on the nature of storytelling and how this was inflected by early cinema. The film is narrated by Stephen Rea and features the music of Kevin Volans. Hard Road to Klondike was selected for the 42nd Venice Film Festival. It was screened by RTÉ and TG4 and won the Irish Film and Television prize for best Irish documentary in 2000.
Thursday, 27 March 2008
Transatlantic Ideas of the American Founding
A one-day conference held at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh
This event was organised by Paul Kerry (Brigham Young University) and Matthew Holland (Brigham Young University), in association with STAR and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities.
The organisers are most grateful to the Constitutional Sources Project, The Association for the Study of Free Institutions, Brigham Young University, The STAR Project, and The University of Edinburgh for their generous support of this Conference.
Monday 29 January 2007
Dr Robert Savage, IASH Research Fellow
'A stranger among us': Edward Roth, America and the Origins of Irish Television
Abstract:
Ireland's national television service emerged in 1962 as a hybrid commercial public service in an attempt to merge the traditional Rethian philosophy with the free market dynamic represented by British and American commercial networks. The first director-general, Edward Roth, was an American who had extensive experience in commercial television in the United States. Importantly, he also had wide-ranging experience in working abroad and prior to coming to Ireland had been hired to organize television stations in Peru and Mexico. The importation of Roth and his American ideas to Ireland highlights the bias of this compromise with commerce. Roth was hired with the approval of Sean Lemass, on the advice of a search committee headed by an icon of British television, Eamonn Andrews. Andrews, perhaps the best-known Irishman in the United Kingdom, hosted one of the most popular television shows of his generation, What's My Line? He was also a successful businessman and entrepreneur who owned studios in Dublin and London. Like Lemass, Andrews was a modernizer who had little patience with those who believed television could 'save' Irish culture. Although the Lemass Government gestured towards accepting the need to uplift and educate the nation, in reality generating income to sustain the service was the priority.
Roth was an Irish-American Catholic, hired because of his technical and managerial expertise, and because of his ethnic and religious background. He arrived in Ireland in 1961 as a dynamic technocrat, fully equipped to oversee the physical establishment of a national television station but unaware of the complexities of Irish culture and politics. His term was a turbulent one as the American-made westerns and crime dramas he purchased proved tremendously popular with Irish audiences but also highly controversial. Many critics of the new station were horrified with what they perceived as a relentless diet of American programs and demanded that indigenous cultural and educational programmes be developed and broadcast. Debates about programming and the need to embrace and transmit authentic Irish material were an important part of the cultural discourse in these formative years of Irish television. This seminar will address the challenges that Roth confronted as Director-General in the early 1960s.
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