Learn more about the Research of the Humanities Center's Dissertation Fellows

Time: Jan. 26, 2018, 9:30 a.m. - 11:30 a.m.

Location: 304 Tolley Humanities Building

Maria Carson (Ph.D. Candidate, Religion)
T.J. West III (Ph.D. Candidate, English)

Enjoy a refreshment as this year's Humanities Center Dissertation Fellows for 2017-18 talk about their current work:

Gender as an Affective Tool in the Thought of Abraham Joshua Heschel (Maria Carson)
Women are not explicitly discussed in Abraham Joshua Heschel’s 1951 work, The Sabbath. However, a particular kind of affective femininity is central to his larger argument about (Jewish) ritual time and space. This conception of gender as an affective technology illustrates how women in 1950s Jewish America were increasingly concerned with “marketing” Judaism to children and the broader community. Carson argues that to understand this cultural context is to understand how Heschel's work was impacted by the larger American Jewish socio-political landscape.

Paradise Lost: Melancholic Utopia and the Experience of History in Cleopatra (T.J. West III)
In the film Cleopatra (1963), viewers get a sense of hopeful mourning for a brighter future that the film never brings to fruition. The film’s narrative, driven toward failure, suffuses time-stopping, utopian spectacles with the despair of inevitable historical decline. West argues that Cleopatra expresses the profound uncertainties of a Cold War American culture struggling to find its place in history in a time when the future seemed uncertain due the ever-present possibility of atomic war.

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Humcenter@syr.edu, Humanities Center