21st Century Studies Newsletter, October 2002 (Fall)

I have spent the last year on sabbatical, not exploring strange new archives and boldly going where no historian has gone before, but trying to fi nish up several writing and organizational projects and not agree to too many new ones.I succeeded relatively well in the fi rst aim, but failed completely in the second.The sense of calm that comes from not having teaching responsibilities or committee meetings must be readily apprehensible, for others know that this is an excellent time to offer interesting possibilities.The opportunity to serve as the director of the Center for a year was one of these.I have been fortunate to have served as the director of two other interdisciplinary units at UWM-the Center for Women's Studies and the Comparative Study of Religion program-and found the cross-campus contacts and friendships that developed professionally enriching and personally rewarding.Thus although I had looked forward to coming back from sabbatical as a "regular" faculty member with no administrative duties for the fi rst time in twenty years, the chance to work on programming for this year's theme, and with this year's group of fellows, was too tempting.This year's theme, "Autonomy, Gender, and Performance, " generated a diverse group of fellowship applications, with the fellows chosen coming from fi ve different departments in the College of Letters and Science, two from the Peck School of the Arts, and a UW-System fellow from UW-Stevens Point.Their projects will take the form of creative work that appears in space as well as between two covers, and will explore ways in which issues of autonomy and agency are infl ected by gender and other axes of difference, ways in which cultural and social forms enable and limit human autonomy and freedom, and ways in which the gendered body is theorized simultaneously as a site of control and of possibility.Center events for this year will be similarly diverse, with speakers from many fi elds, including anthropology, English, Hispanic studies, history, theatre and fi lm studies, philosophy, and musicology.The Center will sponsor two performances during the spring semester, both of which interrogate gendered cultural icons and have generated a wide array of co-sponsors from across campus.The year will end with the major conference, "In Terms of Gender: Interdisciplinary and Cross-Cultural Perspectives, " to which we have invited scholars from a number of countries and disciplines and for which we are again working with multiple on-and off-campus partners, including Joan Scott from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and Mary Louise Roberts from UW-Madison.I have just returned from the Early Modern Workshop in Jewish History, an annual workshop that this year focused on the family, gender, and social structures.As many of the speakers there noted, one of the key changes in Jewish life during the early modern period was the formation of self-governing Jewish communities, particularly in eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire.These communities have traditionally been celebrated as sites of autonomy and agents of modernity (or at least "early" modernity), but our discussion of the gendered nature of the communities' institutions and their intervention in family life problematized and complicated this trajectory.As we explore the impact of gender in this second year of the Center's two-year thematic focus on autonomy, I look forward to similar reconceptualizations in many fi elds of scholarly analysis and creative production.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.