Karen L. Cox is an award-winning historian who has written op-eds for the New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, TIME magazine, Publishers Weekly, and the Huffington Post. Her expertise on the American South has led to interviews with the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, The Daily Beast, Mic, The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, Slate (France), the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, the Houston Chronicle, and the Charlotte Observer, as well as international newspapers in Germany, Denmark, Ireland, and Japan. She has also appeared on BBC Newshour, Black Politics Today, The Mike Smerconish Show (Sirius XM), C-SPAN, Canadian Public Broadcasting, Minnesota Public Radio, Georgia Public Radio, and Charlotte Talks.
Cox is the author of three books and numerous essays and articles on the subject of southern history and culture. Her first book, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture, won the 2004 Julia Cherry Spruill Prize from the Southern Association for Women Historians for the Best Book in Southern Women’s History. Her second book, published by UNC Press in 2011, is Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture. She is also the editor of Destination Dixie: Tourism and Southern History (University Press of Florida, 2012), which won the Allen G. Noble Book Award from the Pioneer America Society for the Best Edited Book on North American material culture. She authored the blog Pop South: Reflections on the South in Popular Culture where she wrote over 100 essays about representations of the region and its people in popular media.
Her most recent book, Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South, was released in October 2017.
Cox is originally from Huntington, West Virginia, and is professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
The RC’s Center for World Performance Studies Faculty Lecture Series features Faculty Fellows and visiting scholars and practitioners in the fields of ethnography and performance. Designed to create an informal and intimate setting for intellectual exchange among students, scholars, and the community, faculty are invited to present their work in an interactive and performative fashion.
Emily Wilcox is Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese Studies at U-M.
During the latter half of the 1980s, a popular dance craze known as “piliwu” 霹雳舞 swept urban communities across China. Incorporating two new styles of U.S. urban popular dance–New York-based b-boying/b-girling or “breaking” and California-based popping and locking– piliwu was China’s first localized movement of hip-hop culture, which reflected new circuits of intercultural exchange between China and the United States during the first decade of China’s Reform Era. Analyzing the dance choreography recorded in a 1988 Chinese film, Rock Youth 摇滚青年 (dir. Tian Zhangzhuang), together with media reports and testimonials from members of China’s piliwu generation, this talk reconstructs the history of the piliwu movement, arguing for the central influence of U.S. pop culture icon Michael Jackson, the growth of China’s underground commercial dance (zou xue 走穴) economy, and the agency of dancers’ bodies in transnational movements of media culture.
Tad Schmaltz (philosophy) and George Hoffman (French) discuss Schmaltz’s new book “Early Modern Cartesianisms.”
About the book:
“There is a general sense that the philosophy of Descartes was a dominant force in early modern thought. Since the work in the nineteenth century of French historians of Cartesian philosophy, however, there has been no fully contextualized comparative examination of the various receptions of Descartes in different portions of early modern Europe.
“This study addresses the need for a more current understanding of these receptions by considering the different constructions of Descartes’s thought that emerged in the Calvinist United Provinces (Netherlands) and Catholic France, the two main centers for early modern Cartesianism, during the period dating from the last decades of his life to the century or so following his death in 1650. It turns out that we must speak not of a single early modern Cartesianism rigidly defined in terms of Descartes’s own authorial intentions, but rather of a loose collection of early modern Cartesianisms that involve a range of different positions on various sets of issues.
“Though more or less rooted in Descartes’s somewhat open-ended views, these Cartesianisms evolved in different ways over time in response to different intellectual and social pressures. Chapters of this study are devoted to: the early modern Catholic and Calvinist condemnations of Descartes and the incompatible Cartesian responses to these; conflicting attitudes among early modern Cartesians toward ancient thought and modernity; competing early modern attempts to combine Descartes’s views with those of Augustine; the different occasionalist accounts of causation within early modern Cartesianism; and the impact of various forms of early modern Cartesianism on both Dutch medicine and French physics.”
Maya Barzilai (modern Herbrew and Jewish culture) and Kathryn Babayan (Iranian history and culture) discuss Barzilai’s new book Golem: Modern Wars and Their Monsters, a monster tour of the Golem narrative across various cultural and historical landscapes.
About the book:
“In the 1910s and 1920s, a “golem cult” swept across Europe and the U.S., later surfacing in Israel. Why did this story of a powerful clay monster molded and animated by a rabbi to protect his community become so popular and pervasive? The golem has appeared in a remarkable range of popular media: from the Yiddish theater to American comic books, from German silent film to Quentin Tarantino movies. This book showcases how the golem was remolded, throughout the war-torn twentieth century, as a muscular protector, injured combatant, and even murderous avenger. This evolution of the golem narrative is made comprehensible by, and also helps us to better understand, one of the defining aspects of the last one hundred years: mass warfare and its ancillary technologies.
Neutral Zone literary arts director and award-winning local slam poet Molly Raynor discusses writing poetry from initial idea through final revisions. For adult and teen (grade 6 & up) fiction and nonfiction writers. Also, local short story writer Alex Kourvo and young adult novelist Bethany Neal host an open house for writers to connect with one another and/or work on their projects at 7 p.m. on Apr 16.
7-8:45 p.m., AADL Westgate. Free. 327-8301.
Former deputy assistant Attorney General Jim Turner, who served under 7 consecutive presidents, discusses his new book about the landmark case that ended with the conviction of klansmen, despite 2 all-white juries who refused to convict.
4 p.m., 100 U-M Hatcher Grad Library Gallery, enter from the Diag. Free. 936-2314
Detroit children’s book writer Jack Cheng, author of See You in the Cosmos, discusses the art of writing and presents awards to the winners of the AADL short story contest for 3rd-5th graders.
1-2 p.m., AADL Westgate. Free. 327-4200.
U-M sociology professor Geneviève Zubrzycki and U-M anthropology professor Andrew Shryock discuss Zubrzycki’s book examining the importance of the annual Feast of St. John the Baptist to Quebecois national identity.
5:30 p.m., 100 U-M Hatcher Grad Library Gallery, enter from the Diag. Free. 763-8994.
Jim May STORYTELLING WORKSHOP. 1-3 pm. No charge, but you must register for this event as participation is limited.
Several Detroit writers discuss their contributions to this essay collection about Detroit neighborhoods, edited by Detroit native Aaron Foley, author of How to Live in Detroit Without Being a Jackass. Signing.
4 p.m., Nicola’s, Westgate shopping center. Free. 662-0600.
