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Topics in the Humanities
JCI Prison Scholars Program Spring 2016
Tuesdays 12-2pm
Mikita Brottman
Professor of Humanities
Maryland Institute College of Art
Each week, this course will address a different topic in the humanities. The humanities encompass a range of different subjects, including literature, history, philosophy, religion, creative writing, art history, music, art, anthropology, and languages. We will not cover all these subjects in this course, but will cover an indicative number. Guests are professors in the Department of Humanistic Studies at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and will be discussing their teaching interests, their research, their writing or their artistic or professional practice.
When the guests have readings, these will be distributed a week in advance. Please take the time to read them and come to class with notes and questions prepared. After each class, you will be required to turn in a short one-page response the following week, containing your personal response to the speaker’s work and ideas. Please be thoughtful and polite, as I will be handing these responses on to the guests. Subjects of the lectures will be given closer to the time.
Course Schedule
(1) Tuesday, January 26: Mikita Brottman
Mikita Brottman is a professor in the department of humanistic studies at MICA. She is also an author and psychoanalyst with particular interests in true crime, forensics, psychoanalysis, animals, and the unexplained. She has a D.Phil in English Language and Literature from Oxford University, in which she focused on contemporary critical theory. She was formerly visiting professor of comparative literature at Indiana University in Bloomington, and was Chair of the Program in Humanities and Depth Psychology at the Pacifica Graduate Institute in California from 2008 to 2010.Her articles and case studies have appeared in Film Quarterly, The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, New Literary History, American Imago, and elsewhere. She is the author of numerous academic books, including High Theory, Low Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), and Hyena (Reaktion, 2013), as well The Great Grisby (HarperCollins, 2014). Her book about the JCI Scholars Program, The Maximum Security Book Club, is coming out in May 2016 from HarperCollins.
(2) February 2: Edward Fotheringill
Edward Fotheringill is an adjunct professor in the department of humanistic studies at MICA. He received his B.S. degree in philosophy from Towson State College (1973) and his M.L.A. degree in the History of Ideas from the Johns Hopkins University (1978). From 1983-1986, he studied meditation and pranayama with Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, Head of the Sufi Order of the West; from 1986-2000, he studied meditation and Hindu Philosophy with Yoga Master Sri Swami Satchidananda. From 1979-1992, Ed was a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Towson State University; from 1989-2003, he was a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Peace Studies at Goucher College; from 1990-2005, he taught meditation, pranayama, and Hindu and Buddhist Philosophy at three yoga centers in Baltimore. He has worked at MICA since 2009, teaching courses in Philosophy, Intellectual History, and Literature. Ed is also the author of five philosophical novels and a children’s adventure story.
(3) February 9:Paul Jaskunas
Paul Jaskunas is a professor in the department of humanistic studies at MICA. He graduated from Oberlin College, received an MFA in fiction from Cornell University, and travelled to Lithuania on a Fulbright scholarship. At MICA, he leads creative writing workshops and seminars on American literature, creative nonfiction, postwar nonfiction, and The Wire, among other topics. Paul is the author of HIDDEN, a novel published by the Free Press in 2004. Winner of the Friends of American Writers Award for Fiction, the book has since been published in England, Sweden, Holland, and Serbia.
(4) February 16: Hugh Pocock
Hugh Pocock is conceptual artist. He received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA at UCLA. He is a professor of Sculpture, Installation, Performance and Video at MICA. Born and raised in the United States, England and New Zealand, Pocock’s work seeks as a location the points of transaction between culture and natural phenomena. Over the past decade, he has shown his work across the United States, in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Antonio as well as internationally in the former Soviet Union, Germany and China. He has shown in galleries and museums as well as in "non-art sites" such as private homes and movie theatres. Before he was an artist, he used to sell hot dogs at the Orioles stadium.
(5) February 23: John Barry
John Barry is an adjunct professor of humanities at the Maryland Institute College of Art. He is also an independent journalist, a theatre critic, and a fiction writer. His writing has appeared in N + 1, Salon, the Washington Post, DC Theatre Scene, American Theatre Magazine, Baltimore City Paper, Urbanite Magazine, Baltimore Style, and elsewhere. With Baltimore writer Deborah Rudacille, he founded and curates the New Mercury Readings, a monthly nonfiction reading series that features writing by journalists and writers inside and outside Baltimore. He has taught writing at Johns Hopkins University, Goucher College, and Carver High School for the Arts.
(6) March 1:Jess Bither
Jess Bither is an adjunct professor in the department of humanistic studies at MICA. She took a double major in art history and English at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia; then she worked as an administrative intern at the Arlington Arts Center (AAC) in Arlington, Virginia. She graduated from MICA with an MA in Critical Studies, and now teaches courses in academic writing, critical inquiry, and horror movies.
(7) March 8: Amy Eisner
Amy Eisner received her AB in English from Harvard University and her MA in poetry from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. She is an adjunct professor of humanistic studies at Maryland Institute College of Art, and has been a primary school poet-in-residence through Baltimore City and the Maryland State Arts Council. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many publications, as well as the WYPR radio show "The Signal," and the exhibits Entangled: Art and Word at Case[werks] Gallery and The Album Project at MICA.
(8) March 15: Firmin Debrabander
Professor DeBrabander is a professor in the department of humanistic studies at MICA. He studied Philosophy at Boston College and the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, and received his Ph.D. in the field from Emory University in 2002. He has taught at MICA since 2005, and served as chair of the Humanistic Studies department from 2009 until 2012. His specialties include the History of Western Philosophy, Ethics, Political Theory, and Environmental Ethics. He also teaches courses on Media Ethics, Economic Theory, Eastern Philosophy, Philosophy of Science, and Medical Ethics. In 2007, he published a book entitled Spinoza and the Stoics (Continuum). He has published academic articles in journals such as History of Philosophy Quarterly, International Philosophy Quarterly, and in a volume issued by Cambridge University Press entitled Stoicism: Traditions and Transformations. Most recently, he is the author of Do Guns Make us Free? Democracy and the Armed Society (Yale University Press, 2015).
(9) March 22: Ruth Toulson
Professor Toulson is a professor in the department of humanistic studies at MICA. She is an anthropologist with a PhD from Cambridge University. Her ethnographic research shifts between sites in Southeast Asia and Mainland China. Her current research examines the relationship between religion and politics in Southeast Asia, particularly in Singapore. In her book project, Transforming Grief: Life and Death in a Chinese Funeral Parlor, Toulson documents the unprecedented transformation of the religious landscape. Her ethnographic fieldwork focuses on families who receive the order to exhume, an event that many resist, believing that destroying a grave transforms ancestors into ghosts. Drawing on fieldwork in funeral parlors, Toulson also probe other shifts in Singaporean Chinese mortuary rites, examining why funerals have been simplified, "traditional" mourning garb has vanished, and ancestral altars have been removed from family homes. Professor Toulson was raised in a family funeral home and is also a certified reconstructive embalmer.
(10) March 29:Christine Manganaro
Christine Manganaro is a professor in the department of humanistic studies at MICA. She is a historian of science and of the modern United States with interests in US imperialism, racial formation, scientific expertise, and the history of the social sciences, life sciences, and medicine. She received her PhD in the history of medicine and the biological sciences at the University of Minnesota in July 2012 and a BA in history from the University of Puget Sound in 2003. During the 2009-2010 academic year, Manganaro was visiting professor of history and American studies at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. During her graduate studies she was a fellow at the University of Minnesota and the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia and a recipient of a National Science Foundation dissertation improvement grant. Manganaro's book project traces how American scientists who researched race and race relations and wrote the history of Hawai‘i between the 1880s and the territory's transition to statehood in 1959 supported American settler colonialism in the islands.
(11) April 5: Saul Myers
Saul Myers is a professor in the department of humanistic studies at MICA. He has a Ph.D. from the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University, and teaches courses in philosophy, literature, and intellectual history. His research interests are in theories of interpretation and understanding; aesthetics; the philosophy of music; German; and the problems of relativism and incommensurability. His teaching interests in the areas of intellectual history include the Enlightenment; ancient Greek culture; the history of ethnography; French anthropology; the Holocaust; and the Israel-Palestine conflict. In literature, he teaches courses in high modernism; twentieth-century German and French literature, Shakespeare, and the Western Epic tradition from Homer to Pound. He has published articles on Paul Celan and the Book of Job as well as Image and Death in the Drama of Jean Genet, and has presented conference papers on the spatial orientation of Giacometti's sculpture and anti-realism in contemporary politics. More recently, Saul has been writing fiction and autobiography, not always keeping these separate.
(12) April 12:Timmy Aziz
Timmy Aziz is a professor in the department of humanistic studies and the department of environmental design at MICA. He studied Physics at Trinity College, Oxford University, and architecture at The Architectural Association, London, and the Cooper Union, New York City, where he received his professional degree. He is a registered architect whose designs have included products, furniture, new buildings and renovations. He has practiced in the USA, Europe and Asia. His work has been published in Domus, ArchTech, Interiors, the Japanese magazine I’m Home Design, and New York, New Faces of AIANY in 2002. Timmy has taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, at Hampshire College, New Jersey Institute of Technology, and also taught as visiting professor at design schools in Xiamen, China in 2008.
(13) April 19: Ian Bourland
W. Ian Bourland is a professor in the department of art history at MICA. He is also a critic and historian of the global contemporary. He holds a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Chicago and an undergraduate degree in International Relations from Georgetown University. His research explores the intersections between recent art, the legacy of modernism, and the history of globalization. He has taught or lectured at the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Barnes Foundation, and the Smithsonian, and is an alum of the Whitney ISP in Critical Studies. Ian's writing has appeared in a range of publications, and he is the author of the forthcomingGhosts of Modernism, on photography and politics in the 1980s.In addition to courses on the history of photography, African-American studies, and art in the twentieth century, he has taught seminars on urban theory and landscape, postcolonialism, and African antiquity and divination.
(14) April 26: John Peacock
John Peacock is a professor of humanistic studies at MICA. He has an undergraduate degree in anthropology from Harvard and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Columbia; Professor Peacock has also been an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow, a Senior Fulbright Lecturer, and a grantee of the American Philosophical Society. He has taught at MICA since 1986, in undergraduate and graduate academic and studio programs, and has been a critic-in-residence in the Rinehart School of Sculpture for many years. As an enrolled member of the Spirit Lake Dakota Nation in Fort Totten, North Dakota, he collaborates with tribal elders on such Dakota language projects as The Dakota Prisoner of War Letters, translated by Clifford Canku and Michael Simon, introduction and afterword by John Peacock (St. Paul: Minnesota History Society, 2013), the winner of a 2014 American Association for State and Local History Award.
(15) May 4: Michael Sizer (Graduation Day)
Mike Sizer is a professor at humanistic studies at MICA. He is a historian with interests in political culture and philosophy, cultural history, interdisciplinary studies of literature and ideas, urban history, and the history of revolt and revolution. He received his PhD in Medieval French History from the University of Minnesota in 2008, and during his graduate studies he was also a fellow of the Ecole des Chartes at the Sorbonne in Paris.He will be a Kluge Research Fellow at the Library of Congress in spring 2016.His current book project studies the Cabochien revolt in 1413 Paris, the role of the public and the public sphere in medieval history, and the boundaries between pre-modern and modern in conceptions of political history. Prior to attending graduate school, Mike worked in a non-profit organization devoted to grass roots community beautification and historical preservation initiatives.Mike lives in Baltimore with his wife and two beautiful daughters.