2004-5 Faculty Lecture Series

Grant Farred, Associate Professor of Literature
“What’s My Name?: Black Vernacular Intellectuals”
Wednesday, September 29, 2004 @ 12:00 noon

Based on his book What’s My Name?: Black Vernacular Intellectuals, Dr. Farred discusses a conception of the intellectual that is grounded in the popular experiences of seminal cultural figures such as Muhammad Ali and Bob Marley. Reading from his latest work, Dr. Farred suggests that intellectuals are not only thinkers who are located within the academy, politics, or cafe society. His talk will argue that cultural icons perform the role of critical spokespersons for marginalized and disenfranchised communities.

Dr. Farred is an Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Literature Program at DukeUniversity. He is the General Editor of the Duke-based journal The South Atlantic Quarterly. He is also the author of Midfielder’s Africa: Coloured Literature and Culture in Contemporary South Africa, editor of Rethinking CLR James, and author of What’s My Name?: Black Vernacular Intellectuals. His new book is titled Long Distance Love: A Passion for Football.

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Peter Wood, Professor of History
“Weathering the Storm: Winslow Homer,
‘The Gulf Stream’, & African American History”
Monday, October 25, 2004 @ 5:00pm

No American painting is more familiar, or more misunderstood, than Winslow Homer’s “Gulf Stream.” In 1899, Homer created this striking image of a black man on a boat, surrounded by sharks, and it has hung in New York’s MetropolitanMuseum for a century, becoming one of the admired artist’s best-known works. Dr. Wood argues in a provocative new book that traditional scholars have long overlooked the picture’s deepest meanings. In his slide presentation, he will discuss ways in which the picture has a great deal to do with current events of the era, such as the Wilmington race riot and the Spanish-American War, as well as the long history of slavery in America.

Dr. Wood teaches "Early American History" and "Native American History" at Duke, along with occasional classes on documentary film and “History and the Visual Image.” Ever since his first book on slavery on colonial South Carolina titled Black Majority, Dr. Wood’s work has emphasized race relations in the Southeast. He is a co-author of Powhattan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast, and of a major recent textbook in U.S. History entitled Created Equal. Dr. Wood, a graduate of Harvard and Oxford, has a longstanding interest in the intersection of art and history. Two decades ago, Dr. Wood brought a Smithsonian traveling exhibit to Duke entitled “The Image of the Black in Western Art,” and in 1989 he organized an exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Art on “Winslow Homer’s Images of Blacks: The Civil War and Reconstruction Years.” Building on his long fascination with Winslow Homer, this fall Dr. Wood has published a new book that focuses on one famous image by the great American artist.

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Sherman A. James, Susan B. King Professor of Public Policy Studies
“Life-Course Socioeconomic Position & the Health of African Americans”
Thursday, October 28, 2004 @ 5:00pm

The contribution of social and economic deprivation during childhood and adulthood to premature morbidity and mortality from heart disease, diabetes, stroke, etc. has attracted strong interest among researchers and health policymakers in the U.S. and Western Europe. To date, however, this research has focused almost exclusively on European and European American populations. Dr. James extends his research to African Americans, a population notably at high risk for both life-long poverty and the early onset of risk factors such as hypertension and obesity that are largely responsible for the well-known excess mortality among African Americans from heart disease, diabetes, and stroke. This presentation discusses findings from his ongoing work on African Americans in Pitt County, NC. Two questions will be addressed: (1) how does socioeconomic deprivation in childhood influence risk for hypertension and obesity later in life, and (2) to what degree does social mobility, whether upward or downward, alter health trajectories initiated in childhood?

Dr. James has built a distinguished career as a social epidemiologist. He is internationally known for his innovative research on racial and ethnic health disparities, and originated the concept of “John Henryism,” named for the legendary African American steel driver who died after competing fiercely with and defeating a steam-powered machine to drive steel railroad stakes. The CaliforniaCenter for Social Epidemiology calls the term “a synonym for prolonged, high-effort coping with difficult psychological stressors” that may help explain the disproportionately higher rates of cardiovascular disease among African Americans and other people of color.

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Orin Starn, Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology
“Ishi’s Brain: In Search of America ’s Last ‘Wild’ Indian”
Wednesday, November 10, 2004 @ 5:00pm

Dr. Starn will discuss his new book Ishi’s Brain: In Search of America ’s Last “Wild" Indian. The book chronicles Dr. Starn’s search for the missing brain of Ishi, the legendary Native American who hid out in the wilderness of California for almost fifty years. His journey takes him back to the ugly history of the mistreatment of Indian tribes, the sometimes scandalous behavior of early 20th century anthropologists, and the changing lives of Native Americans today.

Dr. Starn is an Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke, and a specialist in Latin America and Native American culture and politics. He won this years’s Robert B. Cox Distinguished Teaching Award, and lives with his family in Durham. His books include The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics; Nightwatch: The Politics of Protest in the Andes; and, most recently, Ishi’s Brain: In Search of America ’s Last “Wild” Indian. For more information, see his website at www.orinstarn.com.

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Deborah A. Thomas, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology
"Dancing for Social Change: Research, Performance & Artistic Activism"
Wednesday, January 26, 2005 @ 12:00 noon

Dr. Thomas will talk about her experience performing from 1990-1995 with the Urban Bush Women (UBW), a New York City-based dance theater company that draws from the sacred and secular traditions of Africans throughout the Americas to create work that pushes the envelope both aesthetically and politically. In particular, she will talk about the Company's research-to-performance methodology and its grassroots
residencies called Community Engagement Projects (CEP).

Dr. Thomas received her Ph.D. from New YorkUniversity in 2000. She is an anthropologist whose research focuses on the changing relationships among the political and cultural dimensions of nationalism, globalization, and popular culture. She is interested in the ways a changing global political economy structures and restructures the ways people of African descent think about, experience, represent, and mobilize around racial, class, national, gender, and generational identities. Her book Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica will be published later this year by Duke University Press. Dr. Thomas is currently working on a new project focusing on a contract labor program, developed by the Jamaican Ministry of Labour, that sponsors the seasonal migration of Jamaican women for work in hotels throughout the United States.

Prior to her life as an academic, she was a professional dancer with the New York-based Urban Bush Women. She has also been a Program Director with the National Council for Research on Women, an international working alliance of women’s research and policy centers whose mission is to enhance the connections among research, policy analysis, advocacy, and innovative programming on behalf of women and girls. An Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke, Dr. Thomas is also a Research Fellow for the Research Institute for the Study of Man (RISM).

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Sean Metzger, Lecturer of English & Assistant Professor of Theater Studies
"Fetishizing Chineseness"
Wednesday, February 9, 2005 @ 5:00pm

Dr. Metzger examines constructions of Chineseness that circulate in theater and film during pivotal U.S. historical shifts, each of which can be characterized by and represented through a different fetish object. Beginning with the queue, the hairstyle that served as a nineteenth-century signifier of Chinese masculinity, Dr. Metzger continues his analysis by looking at the qipao, the "long dresses" that Chinese women wore as a symbol of emerging equality at the dawn of the early Chinese republic in the 1930s.

In the U.S., Anna May Wong embodied nationalist China in American imaginations through her costume choices. When China's government switched to communism in 1949, the specifically gendered fashions of men and women yielded to the unisex Mao suit and its connotations of idealized gender equality. In the U.S., such dress heralded the rise of a communist threat. Dr. Metzger concludes his analysis by looking at the representation of Maoist regalia during the Cold War.

Dr. Metzger joined the faculty in English and Theater Studies this fall having been hired for his specializations in Asian American and sexuality studies. He earned his B.A. at the University of Colorado at Boulder in Humanities and Psychology, his M.A. at the University of Southern California in Comparative Literature, and his Ph.D. at the University of California at Davis in Theater. He also spent three years working in social services for the Los Angeles Gay and LesbianCenter and as an educational consultant.

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Elizabeth Marsh, Assistant Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences
"Tricks of Memory"
Wednesday, March 9, 2005 @ 12:00 noon

Memory errors and illusions involve remembering events differently from the way things really happened. Such errors are commonplace and a byproduct of a normally functioning system. Dr. Marsh will describe the experimental psychologist’s approach to studying these errors, and demonstrate how we try to induce memory errors in the lab. In the same way that studying visual illusions tells us something about how perception normally works, studying memory illusions tells us something about how memory normally works.

Dr. Marsh’s research revolves around such basic memory processes as how a memory is attributed to a source, the effects of rehearsal and retrieval practice, and how generated ideas and thoughts are later remembered. When possible, Dr. Marsh searches for ways to link her interests to natural situations such as engaging in conversations, testifying in court, and taking a final exam. She has several lines of research that reflect this combination of basic and applied perspectives. They include autobiographical memory, especially the effects of retellings on memory; memory illusions; the characteristics of internally-generated memories; and the acquisition and source of general world knowledge. While she primarily studies young adults, she has recently become interested in extending her work to older adults.