Groups - Center for Arts and Humanities - Office of Research

Interdisciplinary Collaborative Working Groups

All interested faculty and graduate students are invited to join one (or more) of these groups by contacting the group facilitator

Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Studies
Noah Heringman, English
heringmann@missouri.edu

The Interdisciplinary Working Group for Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Studies includes faculty, graduate students, and emeriti from the departments of English, History, German and Russian Studies, and Art History and Archaeology, as well as faculty from UCM and Columbia College. In past years our focus was on the British Empire but recently we have been expanding our range to the history of other cultures between 1700 and 1900. We meet three to four times per semester to discuss both primary texts and scholarship as well as work in progress by members. Since joining the CAH in Fall 2007 we have also hosted two mini-conferences and one guest speaker. All are welcome. Please contact Noah via email for more information.

Ethnographic Studies: Planning a Field School
Soren Larsen, Geography
larsens@missouri.edu

The Field School Planning Group will meet on a regular basis to discuss and plan holding a Field School on the MU Forestry’s field school site near Poplar Bluff , MO, in the summer of 2009. This group has already been talking with the Folklife Center in Washington DC which will send both “experts” on field schools and equipment to work with the group of faculty who are planning to teach during this field school—topics to be discuss include ethnographic research, qualitative vs. quantitative research, geography and landscape studies, photovoice, doing field research on cultural spaces and religions places, and other topics. All interested faculty and graduate students are welcome to come to this group and participate. Please contact Soren via email for more information, meeting times and places, and any questions.

Diaspora Studies Expanded and Revisited
April Langley, Diaspora Studies
langleya@missouri.edu

The Diaspora Group will be working on intersections and cooperative planning of research, teaching, and service endeavors. This group is interested in working cooperatively on a variety of themes, issues, and questions that drive the study, teaching, and understanding of African Diaspora (and other diasporic) cultures. In particular, we will be convening to consider how our scholarly, creative, and other research can be used to explore and invite engagement with the places where we
diversely intersect. This group invites any faculty and graduate students who are working on matters having to do with diasporic groups and studies of all diasporas. Last year we had presentations on work done in Africa, in South America and the Caribbean, and Katrina population reorganization. Please contact April Langley directly via email for more information, meeting times and places, and any questions.

Critical Theory and Public Culture
Jenny Rice, English
ricejh@missouri.edu

The topic "public culture" covers interdisciplinary interests in global
cultural forms of the public sphere. Faculty and graduate students with
interests in culture and discourse, economics, new media, rhetoric, and
material spaces are invited to join the Critical Theory and Public Culture
reading group. Topics for readings might include issues of cultural/capital
circulation, network theory, affect, new media and digital humanities,
globalization, science studies, post-humanist theory, public sphere, and the like. Please contact Jenny directly via email for more information, meeting times and places, and any questions.

The Creative Impulse
Arthur W. Mehrhoff, Museum of Art and Archaeology
mehrhoffw@missouri.edu

The Creative Impulse Symposium, sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities and coordinated by the Museum of Art and Archaeology, takes place on the first Friday afternoon of each month during the academic semester. This interdisciplinary, informal and highly collaborative group is meant for actors, artists, authors, musicians and poets—that is, anyone who ponders the nature and notion of “the creative impulse.” Since its inception in fall 2007, the Creative Impulse Symposium has explored a wide range of issues involving this intriguing and increasingly important phenomenon. These issues include the nature of human creativity, the role of social networks in fostering human creativity, how creativity and academic scholarship relate to one another, and the rapidly emerging public policy issue of “creative communities”.

The Creative Impulse Symposium grows quite naturally out of the Museum of Art & Archaeology’s long-standing role as a teaching museum for the University of Missouri, because a key dimension of the Museum’s mission involves providing meaningful contexts for considering our cultural heritage. In that regard, the Symposium (we provide refreshments and food for thought, but no wine!) demonstrates an interesting application of what the late Ernest Boyer, President of the Carnegie Foundation for Higher Education, referred to as the Scholarship of Integration, by helping scholars from many academic fields and disciplines place their own original data and research into broader, meaningful contexts. Please contact Symposium coordinator Arthur Mehrhoff for meeting times and places, or with any additional questions you may have about The Creative Impulse Symposium.

Social class and Culture
Richard “Chip” Callahan, Religious Studies
callahanrj@missouri.edu

At this juncture in American and global history, questions of class and culture are finding new audiences and new scholarship, drawing from both classical perspectives and more recent trends in critical theory and cultural studies. This group is for anybody working in areas having to do with the relationship between class (defined socially and/or economically) and cultural production, consumption, and/or expression (or other ways of thinking about culture).

Narrative and Healing
William Kerwin, English
Kerwinw@missouri.edu

This group, a continuation and expansion of last year's group "The Body Project," will consider a number of topics linked by the ways they hover around the edges of the medical and can be illuminated by the concept of "narrative." "The Body Project" focused on disability and the ways art has challenged some received ideas. This year's group will continue that line of thinking but also consider subjects such as disability, illness, and trauma, and the ways that narrative can help us reconfigure them. We have people interested in this gropu from theater, neuroscience, medicine, literature, social work, folklore, and film. Y'all come.

Visual Literacy
Kristin Schwain, Art History and Archaeology
schwaink@missouri.edu

This group has been meeting for some time and welcomes all persons who work with visual literacy, media, images, technology discourses, etc. Last year several members of this group presented on their research which included blogging, images of the World Trade Center in the media, images of domestic violence, film and literature, etc. Please consider continuing with this group or becoming a new member. The new facilitator, Kristin Schwain, would also like this group to begin a conversation about the possibility of developing a Visual Literacy or Visual Culture certificate program or graduate or undergraduate minor, which might provide a more formal relationship between those people and departments that work on visual culture and would give this group move of a power base for negotiating for services, databases, etc. on campus.