Newberry Seminar - Spring 2005

The Newberry Library
Center for Research in Festive Culture - Seminar
Spring 2005

The Seminar theme is the same as that pursued in the spring, 2004, seminar: How have festive customs been influenced by the politically motivated interventions of individuals, interest groups, or institutions—including those making and acting in a given festivity themselves—in the times and places that you are investigating? In each case two papers will be discussed, having been circulated to correspondents of the Center one month in advance. In each case also the first named of the two discussants will be speaking in lecture format on the same subject on the Thursday preceding the Friday seminar at Northern Illinois University.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 2:00-5:00 P.M.
Sally-Beth MacLean, University of Toronto
Lord Strange's Men: Performance and Patronage in Elizabethan England.

James Riddle, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Playing at the King's Commandment: The 1487 Performance of York’s Corpus Christi Play.

FRIDAY, APRIL 8, 2:00-5:00 P.M.
Samuel Kinser, Northern Illinois University
Halloween, Mardi Gras, Pancake Tuesday: Can an American Carnivalesque Style Resist Political Correctness?

Mitch Kachun, University of Western Michigan
Politicized Images of Festive Culture: Visual Representations of African-American Freedom Festivals, 1865-1895

FRIDAY, APRIL 22, 2:00-5:00 P.M.
Janet Afary, Purdue University
Turning a Trickster Figure from Performance to Politics: Newspaper Uses of Mullah Nasreddin in Early Twentieth-Century Iran.

Hakki Gurkas, Purdue University
The Nasreddin Hodja Festival in Aksehir, Turkey, Since 1959: The Trickster Becomes a Sage.

Please send your request for a copy of the paper to be discussed about one month before the date of the seminar in question. Send requests to Erin Lucido, Secretary of the Seminar, at the Newberry Library (lucidoe@newberry.org). Requested papers will be sent to your e-mail address. If you do not have an e-mail address, send your mailing address to Erin Lucido, Newberry Library, 60 West Walton Street, Chicago, IL, 60610, or to me: Samuel Kinser, History Department, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL, 60115 (sakinser@aol.com).

Please call Renee Kerwin, Secretary, History Department, NIU, for further information (815-753-6820).