The Willson Center Distinguished Artist or Lecturer program supports individual faculty or interdisciplinary groups in bringing leading thinkers and practitioners to campus in support of ongoing and innovative research projects.
Distinguished Artists and Lecturers for 2012-2013:
Frank Shovlin
Host: Nicholas Allen
Title: “‘Their Friends, the French’: Joyce and Jacobitism”
Date: September 6, 4 pm
Location: 248 Miller Learning Center
Frank Shovlin is Senior Lecturer in the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool. His research interests include the Irish literary revival, the life and work of James Joyce, the history of reading in twentieth-century Ireland, the history of the book, and the work of John McGahern.
He is author of Journey Westward: Joyce, Dubliners and the Literary Revival (2012) and The Irish Literary Periodical 1923-1958 (2003).
Paul Tough
Host: Nicholas Allen
Title: “How Children Succeed”
Date: October 1, 7 pm
Location: The Chapel
Paul Tough is the author of Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America. His new book, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, will be published in September 2012 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He has written extensively about education, child development, poverty, and politics, including cover stories in The New York Times Magazine on character education, the achievement gap, and the Harlem Children’s Zone. He has worked as an editor at The New York Times Magazine and Harper’s Magazine and as a reporter and producer for the public radio program “This American Life.” He was the founding editor of Open Letters, an online magazine. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Slate, GQ, Esquire, and Geist, and on the op-ed page of The New York Times.
Donald Hodges
Host: Roy Legette (Hugh Hodgson School of Music)
Title: ”Peering Into the Musical Brain”
Date: October 4, 7:30 pm
Location: Edge Recital Hall, Hugh Hodgson School of Music
Donald Hodges is the Covington Distinguished Professor of Music Education and Director of the Music Research Institute (MRI) at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. At the MRI he oversees more than 40 active research projects divided into six categories: BioMusic, Neuroimaging of Musicians, Music Education, Musicians’ Hearing Health, Music Performance, and Ethnomusicology-Ecocriticism.
Dr. Hodges has authored more than 140 book chapters, papers, and multimedia programs in music education and music psychology. He was contributing editor of the Handbook of Music Psychology and the accompanying Multimedia Companion (1980, 1996). His newest book, Music in the Human Experience: An Introduction to Music Psychology, co-authored in2011, is designed for students of music psychology, enthnomusicology, anthropology, and acoustics. This writing critically examines why and how we make sense of music and respond to it cognitively, physically, and emotionally. Recent research efforts have included a series of brain imaging studies of pianists, conductors, and singers using Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI).
Over the past 20 years, Dr. Hodges has conducted a series of brain imaging studies designed to map the musical brain. His goal has been to understand how neural mechanisms support various components of musical behavior. Toward that end, he has scanned pianists while performing Bach, singers as they vocally improvised melodies, and conductors as they detected errors in performances of a musical score, and as they processed multisensory (i.e., auditory and visual) information. Most recently, Dr. Hodges and his colleagues have been investigating complex brain networks in trained musicians and untrained controls. While stating that there is still much to learn, Dr. Hodges believes that a picture of the musical brain is beginning to emerge. This presentation will include numerous colored brain images of PET and fMRI scans, as well as musical examples.
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Benjamin Reiss
Title: ”Wild Things vs. Sleep Nazis: How Children’s Bedtime Became a Problem“
Date: October 4, 2012, 4 pm
Location: 171 Miller Learning Center
Benjamin Reiss, Professor of English at Emory University, specializes in 19th-century American literature and culture, with strong interests in the history of medicine, race, disability, and popular culture. He is an editor of the Cambridge History of the American Novel, a collection of 70 new essays by leading scholars.
Reiss is the author of The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum’s America (Harvard UP, 2001; repr. 2010) and Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2008), as well as essays in journals including American Literary History, Social Text, ELH, American Quarterly, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Slate. In addition, he has appeared on numerous NPR and PRI radio programs discussing his work. He is now working on Managing Sleep, a book that explores how sleep came to be a problem in need of micro-management, medical attention, and pervasive worry. The book braids together literary, medical, religious, and social history from the Enlightenment to the present. A portion of this work, “Sleeping at Walden Pond,” is forthcoming in the journal American Literature.
Professor Reiss teaches courses in traditional literary periods (such as the Nineteenth-Century American Novel and Antebellum American Literature), as well as courses that blend literary analysis with cultural studies, cultural and social history, and the history of medicine and disability. These include Literature and Madness; Sleep in Science and Culture; and Disability and American Culture. Reiss has also taught at Tulane University, and he is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the NEH, the Louisiana Board of Regents, and Emory’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry.
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Suzanne Matson
Host: Nicholas Allen
Title: ”Reading”
Date: October 11, 7 pm
Location: Ciné
Originally from Portland, Oregon, Suzanne Matson received a BA in English from Portland State University in 1981, an MA in English and Creative Writing in 1983 from the University of Washington, and a PhD in English in 1987, also from Washington, where she was awarded the Robert B. Heilman Dissertation Prize, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and the Susannah McMurphy Fellowship. Since 1988 she has taught at Boston College where she is a full professor and the chair of the English department. In 2011 she also became a faculty member at Fairfield University’s Low-Residency MFA.
A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Massachusetts Cultural Council and the American-Scandinavian Foundation, Matson’s most recent novel is The Tree-Sitter, published by W. W. Norton in both hardcover and paperback (2006). Her previous two novels, also from Norton and reissued in paperback by Ballantine, are A Trick of Nature (2000) and The Hunger Moon (1997).
Her books of poems are Durable Goods (1993) and Sea Level (1990), published by Alice James Books. Many of the poems collected in these volumes were previously published in journals including The American Poetry Review, Poetry, The Boston Review, Poetry Northwest, The Southern Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, and Shenandoah.
Her autobiographical, literary, and op-ed essays have appeared in periodicals such as The New York Times Magazine, The Boston Globe, Child, The Seattle Times, The American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, and Mid-American Review.
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Robert Connor
Host: Nicholas Allen
Title: ”The Cliff, the River and the Sea: Reflections on Extreme Literature in Ancient and Modern Times”
Date: November 7, 4 pm
Location: 150 Miller Learning Center
Robert Connor is senior advisor and past president of the New York-based Teagle Foundation.The Teagle Foundation serves as an influential national voice and a catalyst for change in higher education to improve undergraduate student learning in the arts and sciences.
Connor is an advocate for liberal education, the humanities and especially the ancient Greek and Roman classics. He was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, graduated from Hamilton College, and after a stint in Oxford, received his Ph.D. in Classics from Princeton in 1961. A few years later, he returned to Princeton, where he taught and administered until 1989, when he became the president and director of the National Humanities Center in the Research Triangle Park of North Carolina (1989-2003). He holds honorary degrees from several colleges and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society
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Stephen Tepper
Host: Mark Callahan (Ideas for Creative Exploration [ICE], Lamar Dodd School of Art)
Title: “Creative Work and the Work of Creativity: How Colleges and Universities Can Prepare Graduates to Reinvent Our World”
Date: January 22, 4 pm
Location: M. Smith Griffith Auditorium of the Georgia Museum of Art
Steven Tepper is a leader in the field of cultural policy and research on the impact of the arts on everyday life. He is the Associate Director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy and an Associate Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University. At the Curb Center, Tepper works to develop national policy reports and to create research tools that examine and measure the effectiveness of support models for the arts. He currently serves as the principal investigator of “Artful Living: Examining the Relationship Between Artistic Practice, Subjective Wellbeing and Materialism Across Three National Surveys,” supported by a research grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Tepper’s most recent publication is a book entitled Not Here, Not Now, Not That! Protest Over Art and Media in America (University of Chicago, 2011). He was the co-editor, with Bill Ivey, of Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation of America’s Cultural Life (Routledge, 2007). His articles appear in numerous publications, including the Chronicle of Higher Education, Review of Policy Research, Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society, and the Journal of Cultural Economics.
Tepper earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s in public policy from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He received a Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton University, where he later served as Deputy Director of the Princeton University Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies.
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William A. Schabas
Host: Diane Marie Amann (School of Law)
Title: “Human Rights and Culture”
Date: February 7, 4:30 pm
Location: Hirsch Hall, 2nd floor, Room J
Chairman of the Irish Centre for Human Rights William A. Schabas will present “Human Rights and Culture.” Schabas, who is a professor of international law at Middlesex University London, is an internationally respected expert on human rights law, genocide and the death penalty and is a prolific author. He has often been invited to participate in international human rights missions on behalf of non-governmental organizations such as Amnesty International (International Secretariat) and the International Federation of Human Rights and served as a member of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission from 2002 to 2004.
The succinct codification that constitutes the fountainhead of modern human rights, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, speaks of “the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community” as well as of the right “to enjoy the arts.” One of the two main treaties to flow from the Declaration is called the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which reaffirms the notion of “cultural life” but does not repeat the reference to “the arts.” There is a tendency to confine the scope of “cultural rights” to the protection of various attributes of the lives of ethnic minorities. The long-neglected association between human rights, “culture” and “the arts” is the subject of the lecture. It will reflect upon the aspirational dimension of the culture and the arts, espoused by Matthew Arnold in the 19th century, including the concern that this may be an elitist vision ill suited to the egalitarianism of modern human rights.
The lecture is presented in cooperation with the University of Georgia School of Law’s Dean Rusk Center for International Law and Policy.
Edgar Schneider
Host: William Kretzschmar (Department of English)
Title: “World Englishes: New Language Forms Mushrooming in New Contexts”
Date: February 27, 2013, 4 pm
Location: 148 Miller Learning Center
Edgar W. Schneider holds the Chair of English Linguistics at the University of Regensburg, Germany, after previous appointments as an assistant professor at the University of Bamberg (where he received his PhD in 1981), as a research associate at the University of Georgia, and as a Full Professor at the Free University of Berlin.
He has written and edited several books, including American Earlier Black English (1989, a revised version of his dissertation, published in Alabama), Variabilität, Polysemie und Unschärfe der Wortbedeutung (2 vols, 1988), Introduction to Quantitative Analysis of Linguistic Survey Data (1996); Focus on the USA (ed., 1996); Englishes Around the World (2 vols., ed., 1997); Degrees of Restructuring in Creole Languages (ed., 2000); Handbook of Varieties of English (2 vols., ed., 2004); Postcolonial English (Cambridge UP, 2007) and English Around the World: An Introduction (CUP 2011).
He has also published many articles and reviews on the dialectology, sociolinguistics, history, semantics and varieties of English in leading journals, collective volumes, and international handbooks. He has lectured in many countries on all continents, served as a reviewer and advisor for universities, publishers and other academic institutions, and held a variety of academic functions, including Dean of his faculty. He is the editor of the scholarly journal English World-Wide and edited its associated book series, Varieties of English Around the World.
The last few decades have seen an unprecedented growth and expansion of the English language all around the globe – originally as postcolonial heritage in countries such as India, Singapore, The Philippines, Nigeria, or South Africa, but increasingly also outside of such domains, e.g. as the sole working language of ASEAN, the Association of South-East Asian Nations. In close to a hundred countries, mostly in Asia and Africa, new local varieties of English have emerged and become established, so an international traveler is exposed to a bewildering range of new accents and dialects today.
A new sub-discipline of linguistics has grown to investigate these processes and language forms, as well as associated issues of identity expression, multilingualism, language policy and pedagogy, language contact effects, etc. This lecture will introduce the audience to some of these phenomena and new varieties of English, based on a short historical and geographical survey of the processes which stand behind it, a discussion of a few political, cultural and linguistic issues that have been raised in this context, and the presentation and characterization of a few audio and text samples of select varieties in question.
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Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel
Host: Lorgia García Peña (Department of Romance Languages)
Title: “The Afro-Boricua Mirror Stage: Down These Mean Streets as Foundational Narrative of Puerto Rican and Chicano Studies”
Date: April 1, 2013, 4 pm
Location: 213 Miller Learning Center
Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel is Professor I and Director of the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers University. In addition she teaches in the Latino Studies Program and the Comparative Literature Program at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She holds a PhD in Spanish from the University of California, Berkeley (1996). Her areas of research and teaching are Colonial Latin American discourses and contemporary Caribbean and Latino narratives; colonial and postcolonial theory, migration and cultural studies.
Professor Martínez-San Miguel is the author of Saberes americanos: subalternidad y epistemología en los escritos de Sor Juana (Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 1999); Caribe Two Ways: cultura de la migración en el Caribe insular hispánico (Ediciones Callejón, 2003); and From Lack to Excess: ‘Minor’ Readings of Colonial Latin American Literature (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2008). She edited with Mabel Moraña the compilation of essays Nictimene sacrílega: homenaje a Georgina Sabat de Rivers (México: Iberoamericana and Claustro de Sor Juana 2003). She is currently working on her fourth book project entitled Coloniality of Diasporas: Rethinking Intra-Colonial Migrations in a Pan-Caribbean Context, a comparative study on internal Caribbean migrations between former/actual metropolis and colonies, to question transnational and postcolonial approaches to massive population displacements and their cultural productions.
In his foundational book Black Skins, White Masks (1952), Frantz Fanon questions the applicability of Lacan’s mirror stage to the constitution of the Black subjectivity of the colonized Antillean child. Fanon argues that in the crucial moment for the constitution of his identity, the Black child confronts the dissonance of his racial identification when confronting the “universal” and racially blind narrative of subjectification proponed by psychoanalysis. Fanon’s criticism of Lacan’s mirror stage has been discussed by David Eng in Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (2001) and by Antonio Viego in Dead Subjects: Towards a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies (2007). Lorgia García Peña argues that in his foundational narrative Down These Means Streets (1967), Piri Thomas offers another reading of the mirror stage scene, specifically when Piri travels to the South of the United States to confront racial segregation.
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Maggie Nelson
Date: April 4, 2013, 7:30 pm
Location: Ciné
Millicent Hodson
Date: April 16, 2013, 11 am
Location: New Dance Theatre, Dance Building
Dr. Millicent Hodson, American choreographer and dance historian, is best known for her research and pioneering reconstruction of the 1913 Nijinsky-Stravinsky ballet Le Sacre du Printemps (“The Rite of Spring”). This reconstruction work was done in tandem with designer and art historian Kenneth Archer, the leading expert on the work of Nicholas Roerich, the designer of the first production of Le Sacre. Drs. Hodson and Archer will visit UGA together.
Featured in the WNET/BBC film “The Search for Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring” and the ARTE film, “Les Printemps du Sacre”, Hodson with Archer has often been a guest on radio and television in the US, UK, and Europe. Their lectures are a lively combination of scholarly discourse, multimedia display, and, often, physical demonstration. In 1992 both were recipients of the Nijinsky Medal from Poland.
Hodson and Archer’s reconstruction of Le Sacre du Printemps was first produced by the Joffrey Ballet in 1987, revised (Chicago, 2001) and has had a significant number of productions since, including the Paris Opera Ballet (1991), the Finnish National Ballet (1994), Companhia Nacional de Mailado, Lisbon (1994), the Zurich Ballet (1995), the Ballet of the Theatro Municipal, Rio (1996), the Rome Opera Ballet (2001), and in April 2008 with the Kirov Ballet as part of the 300th Anniversary of the City of St. Petersburg.
Dr. Hodson’s book Nijinsky’s Crime Against Grace: Reconstruction Score of the original choreography for ‘Le Sacre du Printemps’ (Pendragon Press, 1998) has become a standard reference for dancers, artists, and musicologists interested in the phenomenon of “The Rite of Spring” in dance reconstruction and in 20th century cultural studies in general. Dr. Archer’s book Nicholas Roerich was published by Parkstone Press in English and French (Bournemouth and Paris, 1999). His monograph on Roerich was published in Russian by Pinokoteka (Moscow, 2000).
Dr. Hodson has been a Senior Lecturer in Music and Dance at Princeton University (2005), and has also taught at Roehampton University, the University of Surrey and Middlesex University in England. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships in writing and choreography, including the Selma Jean Cohen Fellowship (Fulbright Association, 2004), the Patten Lecturer at Indiana University, Bloomington (2003) and an NEA Bicentennial Fellowship in dance for work in the UK. Dr. Archer is the leading expert on the work of Nicholas Roerich, designer of the original production of “Sacre”, and has received grants from the Indian Council for Cultural Relations in India and International Research and Exchanges Board in New York to document collections of Roerich paintings in India, Paris, Moscow, and Leningrad. Dr. Archer was featured at the international Roerich conference in New Delhi in 2009.
Dr. Archer received the PhD in Art History and Theory from the University of Essex, England and Dr. Hodson received the PhD in Cinema and the Arts of Spectacle from the University of California, Berkeley.
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Dalia Judovitz
Title: “Artistic Gesture and Critical Commentary: Duchamp and Lyotard”
Date: April 18, 4 pm
Location: Special Collections Library Auditorium
Professor Judovitz was a student of Jean-Francois Lyotard and like Lyotard, she has explored modernity in its many guises and in its early and late forms. She is the author of The Culture of the Body: Genealogies of Modernity (2001) and of Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes: The Origins of Modernity (1988), and she is the co-editor of Dialectics and Narrative(1993) and of the University of Michigan Press book series The Body, in Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism. Professor Judovitz is currently working on a book titled Georges de la Tour: The Enigma of the Visible.
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Scott Russell Sanders
Date: April 22, 2013
Location: Day Chapel, State Botanical Garden of Georgia
The gravest threat to human well-being is not terrorism, economic depression, or disease; it is the degradation, on a planetary scale, of the conditions necessary for life. What shift in outlook and values would be required if we are to halt that unraveling and begin the work of restoration?
Scott Russell Sanders is the author of 20 books of fiction and nonfiction, including A Private History of Awe and A Conservationist Manifesto. The best of his essays from the past 30 years, plus nine new essays, are collected in Earth Works, published in 2012 by Indiana University Press. Among his honors are the Lannan Literary Award, the John Burroughs Essay Award, the Mark Twain Award, the Cecil Woods Award for Nonfiction, the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2012 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at Indiana University, where he taught from 1971 to 2009. He and his wife, Ruth, a biochemist, have reared two children in their hometown of Bloomington, in the hardwood hill country of Indiana’s White River Valley.
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Peter Brown
Date: March, 2013 (TBD)
Location: (TBD)


