UCD Clinton Institute for American Studies
UCD, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland | Director: Professor Liam Kennedy
Seminars Autumn 2007
Wednesday 17th October - 'The European Security Strategy and the American hegemony: a new multilateralism?'
Speaker: Dr. Daniela Irrera University of Messina
"In recent years, the global political system had been stressed by new several threats, i.e., terrorism and organised crime and challenges, i.e. failed/weak states. These changing political conditions are altering the traditional concept of security as well as the existing rules and mechanisms of multilateralism. it will unquestionably continue to be used as the main international method for security; nevertheless, it seems that its contents are going to be renewed".
Wednesday 31st October - 'The Cold War Emotion Factory: Motivational Aesthetics and the Affective Workplace after World War II '
Speaker: Dr. David Gray, UCD Clinton Institute
Venue: Seminar Room, Clinton Institute
Time: 5.30pm
David Gray received his Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Minnesota in 2007. His work focuses on labor, aesthetics and emotion. His dissertation, Visualizing a Classless America: Motivational Campaigns in the Industrial Workplace, 1920-1955, explores the use of posters and other motivational aesthetics in American factories and upon the management of workers’ emotions and affective states. He is currently developing his dissertation into a book project tentatively titled, Managing the Emotional Workplace: Motivational Aesthetics and the Management of Affect from the End of World War I to the Cold War. His publications include “New Uses for Old Photos: Renovating FSA Photographs in World War II Posters,” American Studies Fall/Winter 2006
Wednesday 7th November - 'Photography, Torture and Human Rights: Abu Ghraib Revisited'
Speaker: Professor Sabine Sielke University of Bonn
Venue: Seminar Room, Clinton Institute
Time: 5pm
The talk interrogates the tension between historical and current processes of democratization (primarily in the USA and currently in Iraq), on the one hand, and our shifting sense of physical violence, on the other, which, as I argue, is inseparably intertwined with the history of modern media such as photography and film. Focusing on the “unforgettable” photographs taken at Abu Ghraib Prison in 2003 my argument explores the function these images take both in the US American cultural imaginary and in current debates on the status of human rights. The talk with touch upon questions such as:
- Who or what defines concepts like torture?
- In view of US-American conceptions of torture what can be said about the status of the right of physical inviolability?
- How can we assess the relation between American culture’s understanding of physical violence and torture, on the one hand, and US-American human rights policies, on the other?
- How do photographs which focus our gaze on the pain of others tell stories about the US-American and our own ‘home front’?
- And why do the images that evolved from behind the Abu Ghraib prison walls hold such power over all of us?
Sabine Sielke is Chair of North American Literature and Culture and Director of the North American Studies Program, the German-Canadian Centre, and the Forum Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Bonn. Her publications include
- Reading Rape (Princeton 2002),
- Fashioning the Female Subject (Ann Arbor 1997),
- the series Transcription,
- the (co-)editions The Body as Interface (2007),
- Gender Talks (2006),
- Amerikanische Post moderne (2003) Der 11.
- September 2001 (2002),
- Making America (2001) and
- Engendering Manhood (1998)
As well as essays on poetry and poetics, modern and post-modern literature and culture, literary and cultural theory, gender and African American studies, popular culture, and the interfaces between cultural studies and the sciences.
Thursday 15th November - Is Iraq another Vietnam?
Speakers: Dr. David Ryan UCC, Prof. Robert Brigham Vasser College
Venue: Seminar Room, Clinton Institute
Time: 5pm
At the end of the Persian Gulf War, President George H.W. Bush proclaimed that the US had finally overcome the 'Vietnam syndrome'.
Today, US political and military difficulties in Iraq are prompting comparisons to the Vietnam War. How do the two wars compare? What are the differences and similarities, and what insights can be gained from
examining them. In this discussion, two highly qualified hsitorians of US foreign policy address these questions.
Prof Robert Brigham is Professor of History and International Relations at Vasser College in the US, where he teaches courses on the history of American foreign relations and modern America. He is author of numerous books and essays on American foreign relations, including
- Guerrilla Diplomacy:
- The NLF’s Foreign Relations and the Vietnam War (1998);
- Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy (1999) written with Robert S. McNamara and James G. Blight; and
- Is Iraq Another Vietnam? (2006).
Dr David Ryan is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at University College Cork. His books include
- US Foreign Policy in World History (2000),
- US-Sandinista Diplomatic Relations (1995), and
- Vietnam in Iraq: Tactics, Lessons, Legacies, and Ghosts (2006).
Wednesday 21st November - "The Scopic Regime of 'Africa': Understanding the Visual Economy of Humanitarianism."
Speaker: Professor David Campbell Durham University
Venue: Seminar Room, Clinton Institute
Time: 5pm
David Campbell is Professor of Cultural and Political Geography at Durham University, where he serves as an Associate Director of the Durham Centre for Advanced Photography Studies and Academic Director of the International Boundaries Research Unit. His research deals with the visual culture of geopolitics and international relations, political theory and global geopolitics, and US security policy. The author of
- Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and
- the Politics of Identity and National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia – which won International Forum Bosnia's Bosnia-Herzegovina Book of the Year 1999, and was published in translation Sarajevo in 2003
He is working on a project about geopolitics and visual culture which explores the imaging of Sudan in the post-WWII period. He gave the 2005 Sem Presser Lecture (“Has ‘Concerned Photography’ a Future?”) at the World Press Photo Awards in Amsterdam, and is one of the curators / editors of the “Imaging Famine” project.
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