Other Sponsored Talks
The Hall Center co-sponsors public talks throughout the school year.
Seaver Lecture - Divas and Chorus Girls: Art, Commerce, and Nation in 19th- and early 20th-century Spanish Cultural Production
Margot Versteeg (Professor, Spanish and Portuguese)
WED OCT 30, 4:00 PM
Hall Center Conference Hall (also online at crowdcast.io/c/versteeg)
The cultural production of 19th- and early 20th-century Spain is obsessed with dancers, singers, and other female performers. In Spanish fiction, poems, (auto)biographical writings, and plays produced between 1845 and 1936 by both male and female authors, numerous often very talented women sing, dance, and act. In her presentation, Versteeg will discuss some of the interconnected discourses that are projected on the bodies of these female performers, such as gender ideology and ideas about feminine self-realization and women’s participation in celebrity culture. Female performance is also a crucible for a whole range of larger questions raised by the processes of social and cultural change that we associate with modernity. These concerns are related to art and commerce, body, and nation, to mention only a few. And that’s not surprising: Female performers catered to an emerging mass culture market, developed marketing strategies, and they used their bodies to negotiate ethnic, racial, and national identities as they participated in modernity’s mobility and circulated in transnational networks.
The 35th Annual Seaver Lecture, named after James E. Seaver, long-time director of the Humanities and Western Civilization Program at the University of Kansas, offers faculty at KU the chance to present their research related to “continuing issues in Western Civilization.” This talk is hosted by the Hall Center and co-sponsored by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.
Visiting Interdisciplinary Scholar - Invisible Warriors: African American Women in World War II
Gregory S. Cooke (Documentarian)
WED NOV 20, 7:00 PM
Hall Center Conference Hall
Documentary historian Gregory S. Cooke, creator and director of Invisible Warriors: African American Women in World War II, will screen his film and discuss it with KU Film & Media Studies Emeritus Professor Kevin Willmott. The film tells the story of the 600,000 African American women who worked as “Rosie the Riveters” in factories, shipyards, and government offices during World War II. The film explores social, economic, and political influences on these women, and how they overcame racism and sexism while supporting American operations overseas and dealing with Jim Crow at home. The women featured in the film share their personal stories of triumph and struggle, and how their resilience and strength paved the way for generations of Black women. Invisible Warriors is an inaugural recipient of the Better Angels Lavine Fellowship and also received the Congressional Black Caucus Veterans Braintrust Award.
After retiring from a teaching career at Drexel University, Cooke looked to film as a vehicle for education. Cooke was an executive producer for the documentary Choc’late Soldiers from the USA. He is also featured in My Father’s War: How Pearl Harbor Transformed America and WWII Battles in Color: The Bulge.