Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities

As we leave Fall 2023 behind and head off to winter break, we are looking back at all the ways students, faculty, guest speakers, and our greater Cleveland community made this last semester one to remember. We hosted writing workshops, lectures, panel discussions, career events, works-in-progress, poetry and fiction readings, reading groups, and more! Thank you to all at CWRU and beyond who continue to devote their time, creativity, and scholarship to our shared pursuit of the humanities.

Thank you to our panelists who joined us last week for our Humanities@Work Career Panel! The Baker-Nord Center supports the humanities at CWRU and in the greater Cleveland area by providing opportunities for students to learn from professionals in the city who are using their training in the humanities in their work.

This past week we had the privilege of hosting four incredible people from around the city: Zachary Thomas, co-founder and executive director of Writers in Residence; Valentino Zullo, Assistant Professor of English and Anisfield-Wolf Fellow at Ursuline College and a Project Leader for Rust Belt Humanities Lab; Katharine Trostel, Associate Professor of English and Chair of Humanities at Ursuline College as well as a project leader for Rust Belt Humanities Lab; and Karen Long, manager of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards at the Cleveland Foundation.

Students got to hear about their work, learn about how their backgrounds led them to where they are today, and had the chance to ask questions. It was an instructive and inspiring conversation!

This promises to be a great event! Come learn from Deepak Sarma from the Department of Religious Studies about states of consciousness, what we consider to be normal, and how those assumptions can be challenged.

Is there an ordinary state of consciousness? with Deepak Sarma - Office of the Provost Join Dr. Deepak Sarma as they challenge attendees to think in new ways about states of consciousness.

Is there an ordinary state of consciousness? with Deepak Sarma - Office of the Provost Join Dr. Deepak Sarma as they challenge attendees to think in new ways about states of consciousness.

The Baker-Nord center supports graduate students in the humanities each semester by providing funding for students to develop their research into a lecture.

Charlie Ericson, a PhD student in the Department of English, will give our fall Graduate Work-in-Progress talk this afternoon. He will present his research in a lecture entitled “Djuna Barnes, Logic, and Metaphor: How to Take Fiction as Structure.”

Logic is a structural device that builds truth from axioms. Even analogies, the form of logic most obviously close to metaphor, rely on agreed-upon affinities as the basis of further comparison. Metaphors, on the other hand, rely on outright fictionality to gesture toward affinity between two things. In this gesture, metaphor does not refer to an existent affinity- it creates that affinity through false equivalence.

This lecture will examine the stakes of metaphor's forced affinities through the highly figurative examples of Djuna Barnes' Nightwood and The Antiphon. By setting the false equivalence of metaphor beside the contemporaneous model of symbolic logic developed in Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica, will consider the structure of aesthetic epistemology on its most granular level.

Tuesday, November 14th 4:30 PM
Clark Hall Room 206, 11130 Bellflower Road

Registration Requested.

The Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities is proud to announce we are holding a T-Shirt Design Contest, open to students majoring or minoring in the humanities. Submit your designs by this Friday, 11/10! We have some great prizes for the top three designs!

Contest Guidelines:

- Designs must only utilize the official CWRU primary colors and color combinations. Link in bio for more information.

- The official Baker-Nord Center logo will appear on the right chest of the front of the shirt. The student design will appear on the back.

- All designs must be appropriate for an academic setting.

It is recommended that the design is creative and brings in multiple components of what it means to study the humanities here at CWRU, and beyond.

Submit your design by Friday, November 10 to [email protected].

PRIZES:

1st Place Prize: $150 Amazon Gift Card + Design being on official Baker-Nord Center T-Shirts

2nd Place Prize: $100 Amazon Gift Card

3rd Place: CWRU Sweatshirt

The Baker-Nord Center looks forward to welcoming Timea Sipos next week to give the 2023 Joseph and Violet Magyar Lecture in Hungarian Studies.

In her talk, Hungarian-American writer and translator Timea Sipos will explore a selection of influential speculative Hungarian authors whose work reflects the complex cultural identity of Hungary, as well as the country's long history of invasion and migration. Sipos will discuss how translation has been a patient and thorough mentor, requiring her to to crawl inside a text and turn it inside out. This intimacy, she will argue, has been deep enough to teach Sipos how to create magic on the page where she had not been able to before.

She will also address how her lived experiences as a Hungarian-American affect her writing and how contemporary American authors showed her to weave her ethnic identity with speculative elements in fresh ways.

Finally, she will share an excerpt of her work-in-progress, The Stone Men. This novel told in stories follows statues that come to life on the streets of Budapest and the female artists who sculpt them.

Registration requested. Registration at link in bio.

Departures and Destinations: Opening Space in our Gender Imagination
Friday, October 27th 4:30 PM
Indigo Room, LGBTQ Center of Greater Cleveland, 6705 Detroit Road, Cleveland, OH 44102

If to speculate means to see things in becoming, what can it mean to see gender non-conforming lives within the process of soulful and ambiguous affirmation? Genders can be departed from as well as being destinations, and our understandings of gender can be left behind to arrive at different ones. Between departure and destination stretches a potent and powerful indeterminacy where the ambiguity and nuances of gender thrive.

This year, the baker Nord Center for the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University is sponsoring a working group on q***ring masculinities. Its conveners, Braveheart Gillani (MSASS) and Jeremy Bender-Keymer (Philosophy) wish to open the public facing dimension of that group with a community-based conversation on gender departures and gender destinations- and all the transformations between that such movement can imply.

Participants are asked to bring their own tales, photos, mementos, etc. of gender ambiguity and fluctuation for a discussion in the round about the meanings of gender fluidity and nuance, q***r masculinities (including departing from masculinity or arriving at it), non-conforming gender identities, and transgenderings. Gillani and Bender-Keymer will begin by sharing some works of art concerning gender nonconformity. The audience, seated in the round as part of the circle, are invited to gradually take part in the discussion and, if they wish, share what they have brought from the concrete poetry of their lives.

Registration requested.

Enjoy a safe and restful Fall Break, CWRU!

Wednesday, October 4th 7:00 PM
Parma Snow Branch, Cuyahoga County Public Library - 2121 Snow Road, Parma, OH 44134

Thrity Umrigar, Distinguished University Professor of English at Case Western Reserve University, is the best-selling author of the novels Honor, Bombay Time, The Space Between Us, If Today Be Sweet, The Weight of Heaven, The World We Found, The Story Hour, Everybody's Son, and The Secrets Between Us. She is also the author of a memoir and three children's picture books. Umrigar is winner of the Cleveland Arts Prize, a Lambda Literary award and the Seth Rosenberg prize, as well as a recipient of the Neiman Fellowship to Harvard. Her new novel, The Museum of Failures, will be released in September. At this event, Thrity will be in conversation with Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winner Karan Mahajan, Associate Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University.

A book sale and signing will immediately follow the event.

This event is co-sponsored by the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards and Cuyahoga County Public Library.

Registration requested.

We’re looking out our front door at another beautiful September morning here at !

We have a busy week ahead! Our 2023 Rose Wohlgemuth Weisman Women's Voices Lecture: Readings and Conversation with Marjorie Hudson and Jocelyn Johnson is happening Tuesday, 9/26 at 6:00 p.m.

A Writing Workshop with Marjorie Hudson will be held on Wednesday, 9/27 at 10:30 a.m.

Please join us! All events are free and open to the public. Information and registration can be found at the link in our bio.

It's National Postdoc Appreciation Week, so we'd like to take the opportunity to thank our postdoc, Aaron Hammes for his contributions to the humanities at CWRU.

Aaron holds a PhD in English from the CUNY Graduate Center. He has a book forthcoming from Cambridge University Press entitled, TransGenre. His research has been published in numerous journals and focuses on s*x work studies, prison abolition, and trans literature. Currently, he is in the process of writing his second monograph and has a forthcoming publication on q***r abolitionism in GLQ and a forthcoming chapter in The Routledge Handbook of Transgender Literature. Across his work, Aaron traces a through-line from literary critical theories and fiction to social justice activism and a better world for some of the most marginalized subjects.

Thank you, Aaron, for your scholarship. Best of luck for a productive year in your role as a postdoc!

One week from today! 2023 Rose Wohlgemuth Weisman Women's Voices Lecture: Readings and Conversation with Marjorie Hudson and Jocelyn Johnson
Tuesday, September 26th 6:00 PM
Tinkham Veale University Center, Ballroom A - 11038 Bellflower Road

Jocelyn Johnson is the author of My Monticello winner of the Library of Virginia Fiction Award, the Weatherford Award, the Balcones Fiction Prize, and the Lillian Smith Award. She has been a fellow at TinHouse, Hedgebrook, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Marjorie Hudson is a fiction writer, memoirist, and community activist. Her story collection Accidental Birds of the Carolinas was a PEN/Hemingway honorable mention. Her recent debut novel, Indigo Field, digs into the hidden history of an abandoned field as well as the deepest secrets of its Black, white, and Indigenous neighbors.

This event will feature Hudson and Johnson in conversation about writing across boundaries of difference, notions and themes of community, justice, and a hopeful future. They will also offer readings and participate in audience Q&A. A book sale and signing will immediately follow.

Registration requested.

It's a beautiful day at Clark Hall! Our fall schedule of events will kick off this afternoon at 4:30 in Clark 206 with a Faculty Work-In-Progress given by Elysia Balavage entitled, "Class and Consumption: George Orwell and the Desecration of Bread." We hope you can join us! Watch for more announcements about our events and the great work our humanities scholars here at CWRU are doing.