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January 18, 2013

John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress Announces Winter/Spring 2013 Lecture Season

The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress has announced its lecture series for winter/spring 2013. The season of lectures highlights the work of senior and junior scholars currently in residence at the center.

Lectures by two distinguished senior scholars headline the series during the week of April 29. Legal scholar John Witte, Jr., will discuss Western arguments for monogamy over polygamy on Tuesday, April 30, and Cold War historian Will Hitchcock will talk about the strategic worldview of President Dwight D. Eisenhower on Thursday, May 2.

Lectures by junior scholars include talks on Walt Whitman’s Civil War America, the early Hollywood magnate George Kleine, and 1960s vagrancy laws. All scholars use the Library’s rich collections to inform their research.

Programs occur in The John W. Kluge Center on the first floor of the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First Street S.E., Washington D.C. All are free and open to the public. No tickets are required. On rare occasions, event times and locations may change; please check the Kluge Center website prior to each event, www.loc.gov/kluge/.

Thursday, Jan. 24, at noon, in Room 113
"The Afterlives of Specimens: Science and Mourning in Whitman’s America."
Kluge Fellow Lindsay Tuggle examines the Civil War narratives of Walt Whitman and Union surgeon John H. Brinton as alternative histories of war casualties: military and poetic, phantom and physical. Co-sponsored with the Poetry and Literature Center

Thursday, Feb. 7, at noon, in Room 113
"Jonathan Going South: The Yankee and the Making of American National Character"
German Fellow Stefanie Schafer examines the origins and functions of the Yankee in 19th century literary and popular culture.

Thursday, Feb. 14, at noon, in Room 113
"The Lost Tycoon: Rediscovering George Kleine, Reframing Early American Cinema"
Kluge Fellow Joel Frykholm examines early Hollywood through the life of one of its first captains, George Kleine—why he drifted into historiographical oblivion and why his case is ripe for discovery. Co-sponsored with the Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound division

Thursday, Apr. 11, at noon, in Room 113
"People Out of Place: The Sixties, the Supreme Court, and Vagrancy Law"
American Council of Learned Societies Burkhardt Fellow Risa Goluboff examines how vagrancy laws kept those affected in place, and how the laws’ undoing was a key part of the era’s social revolutions.

Thursday, Apr. 25, at noon, in Room 113
"Charlemagne’s Europe"
Kluge Fellow Jennifer Davis discusses how Charlemagne united most of Western Europe, and then developed a new style of rule to suit his new empire.

Tuesday, Apr. 30, at 3 p.m., in Room 119
"Why Two in One Flesh: The Western Case for Monogamy over Polygamy"
Legal scholar John Witte, Jr., the Cary and Ann Maguire Chair in Ethics and American History, examines the West's historical predilection for monogamy over polygamy.

Thursday, May 2, at 4 p.m., in Room 119
"The Ike Age: Eisenhower, America and the World of the 1950s"
Cold War Historian Will Hitchcock, Henry A. Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations, explores America’s place in the world and President Eisenhower’s leadership during the tumultuous 1950s.

Wednesday, May 22, at noon, in Room 113
"Book Talk on ‘What Remains: Coming to Terms with Civil War in 19th Century China’"
Tobie Meyer-Fong, a Kluge fellow in 2006, discusses what preoccupied Chinese and Western survivors of one of the most brutal civil wars in human history in her new book. Co-sponsored with the Asian Division

Through a generous endowment from John W. Kluge, the Library of Congress established the Kluge Center in 2000 to bring together the world's best thinkers to stimulate and energize one another, to distill wisdom from the Library's rich resources, and to interact with policymakers in Washington. For more information about the Kluge Center visit www.loc.gov/kluge/.

Founded in 1800, the Library of Congress is the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution. The Library seeks to spark imagination and creativity and to further human understanding and wisdom by providing access to knowledge through its magnificent collections, programs, publications and exhibitions. Many of the Library’s rich resources can be accessed through its website at www.loc.gov.

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PR 13-010
01/18/13
ISSN 0731-3527

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