Conversations & Cocktails
Sharing the exciting research of UT’s faculty with the public!
Conversations & Cocktails is a free public lecture and discussion series that showcases the original research of our distinguished UT arts and humanities faculty. Join us as we feature groundbreaking work exploring a wide range of topics in the arts and in humanities fields such as philosophy, history, and literature studies.
Presentations are 30–40 minutes long, are held as webinars on Zoom, and are designed for the general public. A spirited question-and-answer discussion follows each presentation. You can check the Zoom Help Center to learn more about setting up an account and joining a meeting. Contact us if you have any questions at humanitiesctr@utk.edu or 865-974-4222!
Schedule for 2024-2025
This year, as we adjust to life in our new space at Cherokee Mills, we’ll be reimagining some of our programming, including the Conversations & Cocktails series. Please stay tuned for future updates.
2023-2024 Series Details
October 5, 2023
“The Reparative Remake in Contemporary American Cinema” with Eleni Palis
Time: 7:00 pm ET
Register here for the Zoom link
Speaker: Eleni Palis, Assistant Professor of English and Cinema Studies
Talk Title: “The Reparative Remake in Contemporary American Cinema”
Reparations and reparative justice become increasingly common buzz words in American public life. These ideas extend from law, legal proceedings, and theories of justice to education, public memory, and literary theory. They also build on a much longer history of Black, Indigenous, immigrant, and other minoritized intellectuals’ advocacy and activism. When it comes to contemporary American media, how might reparations or reparative justice manifest on-screen? In this talk, cinema studies expert Eleni Palis discusses how film remakes—films that reboot or re-imagine a preexisting film—offer “re-visions” of film history, using Nia DaCosta’s Candyman (2021) as an example of a recent “reparative remake.”
About the Speaker:
Eleni Palis is an assistant professor of English and Cinema Studies at the University of Tennessee. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of the book Classical Projections: The Practice and Politics of Film Quotation (Oxford University Press, 2022). Her work has also appeared in Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, Screen, The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (Cinema Journal), and [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies. An article on Jordan Peele’s film authorship is forthcoming from Film Quarterly.
November 2, 2023
“Inventing Our Golden Years” with Ernest Freeberg
Time: 7:00 pm ET
Register here for the Zoom link
Speaker: Ernest Freeberg, Professor of History
Talk Title: “Inventing Our Golden Years”
Sixty years ago, Americans began to invent a new phase of life, those years between work and old age dependency that we call “retirement.” So entrenched in our culture has this idea become that we often consider this a natural part of the life span, but the modern experience of retirement is actually a post-World War Two creation. Reviewing the history of how Americans have come to understand and live their retirement years, this talk will explore our ambivalent and evolving relationship to our jobs, our culture of leisure, and our anxieties about aging. Starting in the mid-20th century, the search many Americans embarked upon for a “good retirement” has been a search for meaning; and so, the origin and evolution of retirement provides a vantage point from which we can reflect on what we think constitutes a life well and fully lived.
About the Speaker:
Ernest Freeberg’s teaching and research interests center on the cultural and intellectual history of the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. His books have examined the history of disability, the origin of civil liberties and free speech doctrine in America, the impact of technology and invention on American life, and the founding of the movement to protect animal rights.
November 30, 2023
“The Hidden Dimensions of Greek Heroes and Myth” with Justin Arft
Time: 7:00 pm ET
Register here for the Zoom link
Speaker: Justin Arft, Assistant Professor of Classics
Talk Title: “The Hidden Dimensions of Greek Heroes and Myth”
While Greek mythology still captures our attention and invites constant reinvention, there are
“hidden” dimensions to these stories that are not apparent when we just read them in
translation, namely their ancient performance as oral, verbal art and Greek culture’s
engagement with heroes in cult. This Conversations & Cocktails will introduce you to how
mythology was performed in the ancient world and how the Greeks envisioned their heroes as
powerful, troubled figures from a doomed era of mortals but ones who also survived as
powerful, sometimes helpful figures in cult practice. The heroes of myth were defined by their
ability to suffer and cause suffering, making the performances of their stories opportunities for
reflection on culture, meaning, and mortality. For the Greeks, performance of myth was a
communal way to remember a past alien to their own experience, but one still useful for
defining and differentiating their own culture.
About the Speaker:
Justin Arft is an associate professor of Classical Studies whose main research focus is on ancient
Greek poetry and comparative oral epic. Arft has authored articles on the technical
dimensions of Homeric poetry with an eye to comparative examples of how other cultures
perform oral epic, and his recent book, Arete and the Odyssey’s Poetics of Interrogation (Oxford
2022), applies interdisciplinary methods to address a long-standing problem in Homeric studies,
namely the role of Arete, the Phaeacian queen, in the Odyssey. By analyzing an Indo-European
interrogation formula seen across many bodies of literature and in Greek funerary texts, Arft
argues that Arete serves as a gatekeeper for Odysseus’ journey and the epic’s own quest to
define him as a hero of homecoming. His future projects will focus on the broader role of
Greek heroes in ancient epic and how the Greeks used marginalized and non-heroic characters
in these stories to critique them.
POSTPONED – New date TBD
“Life, Death, and Faith Among Congolese Refugees” with Nicole Eggers
Time: 7:00 pm ET
Speaker: Nicole Eggers, Assistant Professor of History
Talk Title: Life, Death, and Faith Among Congolese Refugees
The question of how people in contexts of upheaval and displacement cope with their experiences of trauma and loss is one of enduring significance to the humanities. It matters not just because of its implications for international humanitarian policy, but because attention to the historically and culturally situated experiences of displaced people helps us to see them not just as “victims” or a “problem” that needs solving, but as creative actors in their own right. Over the past two decades, conflicts and political instability in the Democratic Republic of Congo have rendered it one of the world’s most significant producers of international refugees. Based on an ongoing collaborative oral history research project, this talk will explore the experiences of some of these Congolese refugees in both Africa and the US, focusing on the role that religious community and faith have played during thier flight and resettlement.
About the Speaker:
Nicole Eggers is an assistant professor of history at UT. Eggers’ research interests include 20th-21st-century Congolese history, health and healing, refugees, and religion and politics in Central Africa. Her first book, Unruly Ideas: A History of Kitawala in Congo (Ohio University Press, 2023) follows the history of the influential religious movement Kitawala from its colonial beginnings in the 1920s to its present-day influence in some of the most conflicted parts of Eastern Congo. The study highlights practitioners of Kitawala as intellectuals and innovators and considers broad theoretical questions about how they have historically drawn on and reformulated practices of spiritual and social healing in times of upheaval, creating a historically situated framework for understanding how they and their communities have experienced and understood power and violence. In the process, the book engages a number of fields of inquiry: health and healing, violence and power, religion and rebellion, intersections of gender and power, colonial incarceration, prayer and spiritual agency, and nationalism and the post-colonial imagination.
April 4, 2024
“How the Nazis Made Disinformation Appealing” with Daniel Magilow
Time: 7:00 pm ET
Speaker: Daniel H. Magilow, Professor of German (Dept. of World Languages & Cultures)
Talk Title: “How the Nazis Made Disinformation Appealing”
In interwar Germany, photographically illustrated magazines informed and entertained readers much as television and the internet do today. And they were equally popular, with millions of copies circulating each week. Yet surprisingly, little scholarship exists about one of the most influential illustrated titles: the Illustrierter Beobachter (Illustrated Observer), the Nazi Party’s official illustrated magazine. This talk revisits this popular Nazi publication in which antisemitic screeds and excerpts from Mein Kampf occupied the same pages as swastika-shaped crossword puzzles, cartoons, and ads for toothpaste. In a manner that sheds light on contemporary strategies of media disinformation, this talk examines how the Nazis’ enormously consequential tabloid paradoxically copied the cosmopolitan and modernist-inspired visual style of politically mainstream illustrated titles to advance anti-modern, anti-Enlightenment, and anti-democratic ideas.
About the Speaker:
Daniel H. Magilow is Lindsay Young Professor of German as well as an affiliated faculty member with the Fern and Manfred Steinfeld Program in Jewish Studies, the Cinema Studies Program, and the Department of History at UT. He earned his BA in Comparative Literature from Columbia University and his MA and PhD in German from Princeton University. With Helene Sinnreich, Dr. Magilow serves Co-Editor-in-Chief of Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He serves on the Academic Council of the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University and the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Dr. Magilow’s teaching and research, which have been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Getty Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service, the Blavatnik Archive, and the University of Tennessee Humanities Center, center on photography and film and their intersections with Holocaust Studies, Weimar Germany, and postwar memory. Alongside many articles, book chapters, and reviews focusing on photography, film, and memorials, he is the author, co-author, editor, or translator of the several books.
April 25, 2024
“Renaissance Sport: An Athletic Art” with Kelli Wood
Time: 7:00 pm ET
Speaker: Kelli Wood, Dale G. Cleaver Assistant Professor of Art History, School of Art
Talk Title: “Renaissance Sport: An Athletic Art”
This talk will explore the development of the athletic arts in Renaissance Italy as they responded to intellectual, courtly, and civic revivals of antiquity as well as to an unprecedented expansion of artisanal and professional work related to leisure. In the sixteenth century exercises which emphasized agility over brute strength increasingly gained prominence as venues for the maintenance of physique and the performance of aristocratic masculine virtue during social and political conduct. A rhetorical slippage between sport and war frequently ascribed the virtues of virility to aristocratic athletes. The rising need for a professional class of athletes paid to perform on the street and as salaried members of courts—experts who also wrote about and taught their athletic arts—alongside the rising need for craftsmen to produce and manage equipment and spaces, proved a complication to the maintenance and perception of social hierarchies. Sports were a central tool in literally and imaginatively shaping the bodies of early modern men and women within intersecting systems of bodily signification, political performance, and social decorum.
About the Speaker:
Kelli Wood, Dale G. Cleaver Asst. Professor in the School of Art, is an interdisciplinary researcher, writer, and curator whose work combines methods from fields such as art history, game studies, sports science, and museology. Dr. Wood’s research on the visual and material culture of games and sports spanning from Renaissance board games to contemporary video games has been published in journals such as Art History, Renaissance Studies, ArLis, and in edited volumes and art magazines. Her first book based on her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, The Art of Play in Early Modern Italy, is under contract with Amsterdam University Press. In 2021-2022 Wood undertook an NEH-Mellon Fellowship in Digital Publication for her project on digitizing board games from the Renaissance as playable video games. Her new scholarly projects also turn toward sixteenth and seventeenth-century Goa, India as a port city including recently as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar to India in 2022-2023. Wood’s research has also been generously supported by the Fulbright Italy, a Kress fellowship at the National Gallery of Art, the Michigan Society of Fellows, and the Renaissance Society of America. Wood curated a permanent wing of the Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum, A Global History of Sport, which opened in 2022 in anticipation of the FIFA World Cup.
“Investing in the Humanities Center is investing in our entire campus and our entire academic community.”
—Joshua Ortiz Baco
Digital Scholarship Librarian, UT Libraries
Cutting-edge intellectuals brought to the public with lectures, discussion, symposia & conferences.
The center shares the study of the humanities with the public and, in so doing, brings new perspectives and valuable insights to important topics that affect every person. The Public Humanities at UT are made available through programming like the Distinguished Lecture Series, Conversations & Cocktails, and conferences and symposia.
