Calendar

Apr
9
Tue
Salima Ikram: Darlings, Delicacies and Donations: Ancient Egyptian Animal Mummies as Cultural and Environmental Markers @ Rackham Amphitheatre
Apr 9 @ 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm

Animals have played a crucial role in human history, and continue to do so until today. The interaction between humans and animals can affect the environment, and vice versa. In the ancient Egyptian Nile Valley, in addition to providing food, transportation, raw materials, companionship and entertainment, animals played a key role in religion. As such, they inspired divine iconography and language, and served both as manifestations as well as offerings to gods. Ultimately, in the twilight of Egypt’s pharaonic history, animals played a part in defining cultural identity and world-view. This talk will focus on a critical locus of this agency: animal mummies in ancient Egypt, and what they tell us not only about Egyptian culture, economy, and human-animal relationships, but also about Egypt’s changing environment.

Salima Ikram is Distinguished University Professor of Egyptology at The American University in Cairo, and has worked as an archaeologist in Turkey, Sudan, Greece and the United States. After double majoring in history and classical and near eastern archaeology at Bryn Mawr College, she received her MPhil in museology and Egyptian archaeology and PhD in Egyptian archaeology from Cambridge University. She previously directed the Animal Mummy Project, the North Kharga Darb Ain Amur Survey, Valley of the Kings KV10/KV63 Mission co-directed the Predynastic Gallery project and the North Kharga Oasis Survey. She has also participated in several other archaeological missions throughout Egypt. She has lectured on her work internationally, and publishes in both scholarly and popular journals. She also has an active media presence.

Mary Stockwell: Unlikely General: ‘Mad’ Anthony Wayne and the Battle for America @ 150 Blau Hall
Apr 9 @ 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm

With the young republic in crisis, President Washington chose as general an aging brigadier whose private life was mired in scandal. Follow the story of General Anthony Wayne, drawn from his own passionate letters where he vividly confessed his deepest thoughts. Writer and historian Mary Stockwell was an Earhart Foundation Fellow at the Clements Library. Her book “Unlikely General: ‘Mad’ Anthony Wayne and the Battle for America” was published by Yale University Press in 2018. She has a B.A. in history from Mary Manse College and holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in history from the University of Toledo. Register online.

Apr
11
Thu
Catharine MacKinnon: Butterfly Politics: Changing the World for Women @ Rackham Amphitheatre
Apr 11 @ 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm

Literati is pleased to be partnering with Donia Human Rights Center at the University of Michigan to welcome Catharine MacKinnon at Rackham Amphitheatre. Literati will have copies of Professor MacKinnon’s latest book Butterfly Politics available for purchase.

Professor Catharine A. MacKinnon will address the politics and law of sexual harassment, focusing on its violation of equality rights, in light of the #MeToo movement, exploring those developments in light of the theory of her most recent book, “Butterfly Politics: Changing the World for Women.”

About Butterfly Politics:
Under certain conditions, the right small simple actions can produce large and complex “butterfly effects,” as the #MeToo movement has shown. Thirty years after Catharine A. MacKinnon won the U.S. Supreme Court case establishing sexual harassment in law, this timely collection captures MacKinnon in action: the creative and transformative activism of an icon. Butterfly Politics provides the grounding for #MeToo, explains its momentum, and proposes more legal interventions that could have further butterfly effects on women’s rights.

Catharine A. MacKinnon is Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School and the James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law (Long-Term) at Harvard Law School.

Motor Signal Reading Series: Elizabeth Schmuhl and Kelly Fordon, hosted by Anna Clark @ Signal-Return
Apr 11 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

Perfect for this new, fresh, sweet springtime: For the April edition of the Motor Signal Reading Series, two innovative, multi-genre writers are going to crack us open and help us imagine what’s possible.
Motor Signal, now in its sixth season, jolts the typical literary reading out of its traditional form. An activity of co-creation connects the featured writers with the audience in a unique way. In celebration of the beauty of text, an artist at Signal-Return makes a handset, limited-edition broadside of the writers’ work for event attendees. And we proudly pay writers for their time and talent.
Hosted by RC writing alumna Anna Clark.

ELIZABETH SCHMUHL is a multidisciplinary artist–writer, dancer, and painter– and the author of Premonitions (Wayne State University Press). She illustrates essays for The Rumpus, has taught writing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and worked in digital development at the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts. She is currently Shamel Pitts’ Marketing and Campaign Manager and works at U-M; she is also an RC writing alum.

KELLY FORDON’S work has appeared in The Florida Review, The Kenyon Review (KRO), Rattle and various other journals. Her novel-in-stories, Garden for the Blind, was chosen as a 2016 Michigan Notable Book among other awards. On the Street Where We Live, a one-act play adapted from her poetry was chosen for the 2018 Dream Up Festival in New York. She is the author of three award-winning poetry chapbooks and a full-length poetry collection, Goodbye Toothless House (Kattywompus Press 2019). www.kellyfordon.com

Semester in Detroit’s Winter 2019 Detroiters Speaker Series: Imagining New Notions of Security @ Cass Corridor Commons
Apr 11 @ 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm

Each week will feature different Detroit-based speakers and guests who will explore the given topic and engage the students through a combination of formal remarks, presentations, and public discussion. Light dinner provided; free transportation from Ann Arbor to Detroit; public welcome and encouraged to attend.

Apr
15
Mon
Chloe Preedy: The Bishop, the Devil, and the Playwright: Responding to Air Pollution in Early Modern England @ Angell Hall, Rm 3154
Apr 15 @ 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm

DR. CHLOE PREEDY, UNIVERSITY OF EXETER

Hosted by the Animal Studies & Environmental Humanities RIW. Please RSVP to lageiger@umich.edu or cvfair@umich.edu

 

Louis Masur: How the Civil War Transformed America @ Robertson Auditorium (Ross)
Apr 15 @ 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm

The Civil War began as a battle to save the union but it ended as a struggle to abolish slavery and usher in “a new birth of freedom.” No aspect of society was left unchanged by the years of war and its effects continue to resonate more than one hundred and fifty years later. Dr. Louis Masur is Distinguished Professor of American Studies and History at Rutgers University. A graduate of the University at Buffalo and Princeton University, he is a cultural historian who has written on a variety of topics. His most recent work is Lincoln’s Last Speech: Wartime Reconstruction & The Crisis of Reunion (2015), Lincoln’s Hundred Days: The Emancipation Proclamation and the War for the Union (2012), and The Civil War: A Concise History (2011). Register online.

Apr
19
Fri
Hilton Als and Graduate and Undergraduate Hopwood Awards @ Rackham Auditorium
Apr 19 @ 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm

Please join us as we celebrate the winners of the 2018-19 Hopwood Awards.
Following the announcement of the awards, there will be a lecture from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Hilton Als and a light reception. Free to attend and open to all!

Hilton Als began contributing to The New Yorker in 1989, writing pieces for ‘The Talk of the Town,’ he became a staff writer in 1994, theatre critic in 2002, and lead theater critic in 2012. Week after week, he brings to the magazine a rigorous, sharp, and lyrical perspective on acting, playwriting, and directing. With his deep knowledge of the history of performance—not only in theatre but in dance, music, and visual art—he shows us how to view a production and how to place its director, its author, and its performers in the ongoing continuum of dramatic art. His reviews are not simply reviews; they are provocative contributions to the discourse on theatre, race, class, sexuality, and identity in America.

Before coming to The New Yorker, Als was a staff writer for the Village Voice and an editor-at-large at Vibe. Als edited the catalogue for the 1994-95 Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition “Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art.” His first book, The Women, was published in 1996. His book, White Girls, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2014 and winner of the 2014 Lambda Literary Award for Non-fiction, discusses various narratives of race and gender. He is author of the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of The Early Stories of Truman Capote. He is also guest editor for the 2018 Best American Essays (Mariner Books, October 2, 2018). He also wrote Andy Warhol: The Series, a book containing two previously unpublished television scripts for a series on the life of Andy Warhol.

In 1997, the New York Association of Black Journalists awarded Als first prize in both Magazine Critique/Review and Magazine Arts and Entertainment. He was awarded a Guggenheim for creative writing in 2000 and the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for 2002-03. In 2016, he received Lambda Literary’s Trustee Award for Excellence in Literature, in 2017 Als won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, and in 2018 the Langston Hughes Medal.

In 2009, Als worked with the performer Justin Bond on “Cold Water,” an exhibition of paintings, drawings, and videos by performers, at La MaMa Gallery. In 2010, he co-curated “Self-Consciousness,” at the VeneKlasen/Werner gallery, in Berlin, and published “Justin Bond/Jackie Curtis.” In 2015, he collaborated with the artist Celia Paul to create “Desdemona for Celia by Hilton,” an exhibition for the Metropolitan Opera’s Gallery Met. In 2016, his debut art show “One Man Show: Holly, Candy, Bobbie and the Rest” opened at the Artist’s Institute. In 2017 he curated “Alice Neel, Uptown” at the David Zwirner Gallery in New York City.

Als is an associate professor of writing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and has taught at Yale University, Wesleyan, and Smith College. He lives in New York City.

Poetry at Literati: Sue William Silverman: If The Girl Never Learns: Poems, with Keith Taylor, Elizabeth Schmuhl, and Marc Sheehan @ Literati
Apr 19 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

Literati is excited to welcome poet Sue William Silverman in celebration of her new poetry collection If the Girl Never Learns: Poems. Sue will be joined by fellow poets Keith Taylor, Elizabeth Schumhl, and Marc Sheehan who will be reading from their own work.

About If the Girl Never Learns:
From the opening lines, it’s clear The Girl at the center of these poems is damaged–which is another way to say she’s a survivor. If the Girl Never Learns moves from the personal to the mythic to the apocalyptic, because The Girl would do anything, even go to hell, to save her soul. So, she resists, takes action to overturn society’s suffocating ideal of Good Girldom. The poems’ sense of breathlessness reflects The Girl’s absolute need to control her own destiny, to outrun her past, while at the same time chasing a future she alone has envisioned and embodied. Because The Girl is, above all else, a badass.

Sue William Silverman’s first poetry collection is Hieroglyphics in Neon. She is also the author of four books of creative nonfiction. Her most recent book, The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew, was a finalist in Foreword Reviews’ INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award. Her memoir, Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You, won the AWP Award, and Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey through Sexual Addiction is also a Lifetime TV original movie. Her craft book is Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir, and she teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

The poet Marc Sheehan is a life-long Michigan resident. He has earned degrees from Western Michigan University, Central Michigan University and the University of Michigan, where he received a Major Hopwood Award in Poetry. His honors also include grants from the Michigan Council for the Arts and Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has served as Writer Center Coordinator at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, and has reviewed books for both the Lansing Capital Times and On the Town.

Elizabeth Schmuhl is a multidisciplinary artist whose work appears in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, Paper Darts, PANK, Hobart, Pinwheel, and elsewhere. She has worked at various nonprofits, including the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, and currently works at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Keith Taylor has published many books over the years: collections of poetry, a collection of very short stories, co-edited volumes of essays and fiction, and a volume of poetry translated from Modern Greek.

Apr
30
Tue
David Priess: How To Get Rid of a President: History ‘s Guide to Removing Unpopular, Unable, or Unfit Chief Executives @ Ford Presidential Library
Apr 30 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

Join David Priess, author and former CIA insider, as he discusses his new book, “How to Get Rid of a President: History’s Guide to Removing Unpopular, Unable, or Unfit Chief Executives.”

To limit executive power, the founding fathers created fixed presidential terms of four years, giving voters regular opportunities to remove their leaders. Even so, Americans have often resorted to more dramatic paths to dis-empower the chief executive.

“How to Get Rid of a President” is a lively narrative showcasing various dark sides of the nation’s history: a stew of election dramas, national tragedies, and presidential departures mixed with party intrigue, personal betrayal, and backroom shenanigans.

In this briskly-paced and approachable sweep of history, Priess barnstorms through history, showing all the ways – from impeachment to death – that presidents have either left office prematurely or just barely avoided doing so. While the pomp and circumstance of presidential elections might draw more attention, the way that presidents are removed teaches us much more about our political order.

Free Admission. Free Parking. Book sales/signing and reception follow program.

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