Humanities News, Features, and Other Updates

Category: News

STC Student Part of EPA Award-Winning Team

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On April 11-13, a team of nine Michigan Tech students participated in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Sustainable Design Expo as a part of the P3 program for People, Prosperity and Planet in Washington DC. The team won the AIChE Youth Council on Sustainable Science and Technology P3 Award. This award was given to one of 40 teams by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers’ Institute for Sustainability and SustainUS, a nonprofit organization of young people advancing sustainable development and youth empowerment in the United States. The award recognizes the team that has the most interdisciplinary and community engaged project that will have a significant impact on reducing resource use locally, regionally, nationally or globally and that can benefit youth.

The team also earned an Honorable Mention P3 Award from the EPA.

The team includes the following students and was mentored by Jay Meldrum (director of the Keweenaw Research Center) and Richelle Winkler (assistant professor in social sciences):

  • Edward Louie, MS environmental and energy policy
  • David Anna, BS mechanical engineering
  • Krista Blumberg, BS chemical engineering 
  • Andrew Garrod, BS mechanical engineering
  • Melissa Michaelson, BS anthropology
  • Dana Savage, BS chemical engineering
  • Nicolette Slagle, MS environmental engineering sciences
  • Theresa Tran, BS science and technical communication
  • Kayla Warsko, BS chemical engineering

(This article originally appeared in Tech Today. Writer: Allison Mills)

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Peace Corps Information Session

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There will be a Peace Corps Information Session March 24 by Kari Henquinet, director. Michigan Tech PCMI Program Peace Corps volunteers are making a difference all over the world in education, health and the environment. Stop by this information session to learn more about the benefits of service and how you can live, work and learn overseas. The info session is Tuesday, March 24, at 5 p.m. in MUB Alumni Lounge B. For more information, contact Brett Heimann at 312-353-8680 or bheimann@peacecorps.gov.
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Gareth Williams to Speak on Violence in Contemporary Mexico

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williams_colloqThe Humanities Department’s Rhetoric, Theory and Culture 2014-15 Colloquium Series is pleased to welcome Gareth Williams, Professor of Spanish and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Michigan. Professor Williams’ talk is entitled “2666, or The Novel of Force.” It will take place on Friday, April 3rd, at 5 pm, in Forestry G002 (refreshments will be available). All are welcome!

Here is the abstract for Professor Williams’ talk:

Upon the Nazi invasion of France in 1940, Simone Weil penned one of her most renowned essays dealing with the relation between force and the foundation of the city, titled “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force”.  Roberto Bolaño’s 2004 novel 2666 is a fictionalized attempt to approach the murder of hundreds of working class women in and around the city of Santa Teresa (Ciudad Juárez) in the deserts of northern Mexico from the 1990s to the present.  The novel also offers a sustained reflection on the double originality of the political, that is, the constitutive relation between reason and force.  At the heart of the novel’s aesthetic is the questioning of the relation between war as the register and experience of the everyday and the contemporary grasped as (im)possible metaphorization, which in turn raises the question of what is possible in literature, in life, in the face of death.

Professor Williams is the author of The Other Side of the Popular: Neoliberalism and Subalternity in Latin America (2002), The Mexican Exception: Sovereignty, Police, and Democracy (2011), and numerous articles examining the relation between cultural history, literature, and political philosophy. He is one of today’s key thinkers about Latin American politics and culture.

For more information, please contact Marcelino Viero-Ramos.

Photo credit: Shaul Schwarz for The New York Times

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Van Kooy Appointed Huntington Library Mayers Fellow

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Dana VanKooy
Dana VanKooy

Dana Van Kooy, Assistant Professor of Transnational Literature, has received an appointment as a Huntington Library Mayers Fellow along with a grant to support her archival research this summer. The Huntington Library is one of the largest and most complete research libraries in the United States. The Huntington is known for its extraordinary collection of rare books and manuscripts in the fields of British and American history and literature.

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Kasson Fiss In Print

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Laura Kasson-Fiss
Laura Kasson-Fiss

Laura Kasson Fiss (HU) published a paper entitled “Pushing at the Boundaries of the Book: Humor, Mediation, and Distance in Carroll, Thackeray, and Stevenson” in The Lion and the Unicorn.

Pushing at the Boundaries of the Book:
Humor, Mediation, and Distance in Carroll, Thackeray, and Stevenson

Alice pushes at the boundary of the book as she travels through the looking glass. John Tenniel’s twin illustrations of her journey in the first edition of Through the Looking Glass (1872) occur on either side of a single page (see Figs. 1 and 2). The mirrored orientation of the two images means that each pair of objects is printed back-to-back. Only Alice travels in one side and out the other, her head piercing the page. Her extended right hand presses on the surface of the looking glass, which ripples before giving way. That ripple on the surface of the page suggests that the page, like the looking glass, is a semipermeable membrane that the right reader can enter. Indeed, on the other side of the looking glass, Alice meets creatures out of storybooks, such as Humpty Dumpty and the Tweedles, whose stories she recalls. As readers follow Alice’s immersion, they too must place a hand upon the page—but the page turns precisely because they encounter solid resistance.

Alice’s journey through the page literalizes the metaphor of reading as immersive that has characterized descriptions of Victorian reading starting in the period itself. Yet calling attention to the mechanism of immersive reading paradoxically breaks the illusion. Nicholas Dames addresses this issue in the works of W. M. Thackeray and others by arguing that Victorians conceived of attentive reading not as a steady state but as cycling between intense involvement and contemplative reverie (82–83). This intriguing theory takes on additional ramifications when considered in relation to Victorian children’s literature, especially humorous material such as Carroll’s Alice books. The conceit of the child reader enables an additional level of play. Naturally, the cautionary notes sounded by Jacqueline Rose and James Kincaid about the problematic roles of child muses also apply to implied child readers, but so does Marah Gubar’s response that authors, aware of their own totalizing authority, created space for collaboration (Artful Dodgers, passim), in this case with and among child and adult readers. In addition to Carroll, two authors of humorous children’s texts who made their reputations by writing for adults, William Makepeace Thackeray and Robert Louis Stevenson, use humor and depictions of reading to represent both the immersive Wonderland of fiction and the material, mediated pleasures of getting there.

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