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The "Work-in-Progress" Colloquium series of the Baker-Nord Center provides the opportunity for CWRU faculty to share the results of research or arguments in development with a small group of colleagues and interested listeners, as part of ongoing research in their discipline. The colloquia represent the process of intellectual work in the various humanities disciplines, the making of knowledge "in progress."
All talks are scheduled for 4:30 p.m. in the Baker-Nord Center, Clark Hall 206, with refreshments available at 4:00. Unless otherwise indicated, talks are held on Thursdays.
Upcoming Work-in-Progress Colloquia:
Fall 2006
Thursday, September 21 , 2006
Refreshments at 4:00 p.m. • Talk at 4:30 p.m.
Baker-Nord Center, Clark Hall 206
11130 Bellflower Road, Cleveland
 Elisabeth Köll
Associate Professor of Modern Chinese History
China Express: Railroads in the Imperial, Nationalist, and Communist Experience
Thursday, October 26, 2006
Refreshments at 4:00 p.m. • Talk at 4:30 p.m.
Baker-Nord Center, Clark Hall 206
11130 Bellflower Road, Cleveland
 David Rothenberg
Assistant Professor of Music
The Wisest Virgin and the Wise King: Music, Art,
and Literature for Emperor Maximilian I
Co-sponsored with the North East Ohio Medieval and Renaissance Studies Group
Thursday, November 16, 2006
Refreshments at 4:00 p.m. • Talk at 4:30 p.m.
Baker-Nord Center, Clark Hall 206
11130 Bellflower Road, Cleveland
 Per Aage Brandt
Department Chairperson in Modern Laguages & Literatures
Emile B De Sauzé Professor of Modern Languages
Professor in Cognitive Sciences
The Logic of Stories: New Cognitive and Semiotic Ideas on Narrative Structure
The human mind is structured in such a way that present experience will be not only stored but “storied” when recalled. The spatio-temporal dimensions of our imaginary, home of our recollections, inherit the dynamic and dramatic properties of direct perception. We spatio-temporally perceive to the extent that we desire. And when we desire, we are normally in trouble, so we call forth the relevant ideas we have of obstacles, barriers, forces that could oppose any “conjunction of a subject with an object” (A.-J. Greimas), in order to overcome them. This is the first narrative principle.
The second principle is that there are hidden properties in the barriers that call for special preparations of the character, the protagonist, who is to open them and pass them by responding to their challenges. (See and please read Hans Christian Andersen: Clumsy Hans, a short folk tale, at: http://www.andersen.sdu.dk/vaerk/hersholt/ClumsyHans_e.html).
In order to understand this mechanism, I propose to see the critical episode of a narrative conflict as a representation of a blended meaning construction, where new mental spaces are mobilized to possibly overcome difficulties in old spaces with well-known barriers. Stories thus combine the known and the unknown, the trivial and the extraordinary: the improbable encounter of areas of meaning that do not routinely overlap.
Humor is a part of this process, so normally, jokes are stories. I will give some examples and propose some generalizations of this aspect.
Are stories fictions? Yes, to the extent that we cannot go in and change details in their space-time “world”: they are “fixated”, frozen. No, in so far as the voice of their subjectivity calls for being understood as our own; I will give a contemporary example of this. I hope for a rich and animated debate.
Thursday, December 7, 2006
Refreshments at 4:00 p.m. • Talk at 4:30 p.m.
Baker-Nord Center, Clark Hall 206
11130 Bellflower Road, Cleveland
 Charles Burroughs
Chair of the Department of Art History and Art
Elsie B. Smith Professor of Liberal Arts
Archipelagos and Networks of the Second Slavery:
Mapping the Plantation World
Spring, 2007
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Refreshments at 4:00 p.m. • Talk at 4:30 p.m.
Baker-Nord Center, Clark Hall 206
11130 Bellflower Road, Cleveland
 Todd Oakley
Associate Professor of English
Director of Graduate Studies
Experience By Design: How Writers Make Distributed and Discrete Rhetorical Choices.
Thursday, March 1, 2007
Refreshments at 4:00 p.m. • Talk at 4:30 p.m.
Baker-Nord Center, Clark Hall 206
11130 Bellflower Road, Cleveland
 Peter Bennett
Assistant Professor of Music
Louis XIV, Lully, and Low Mass: revolution or evolution?
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Refreshments at 4:00 p.m. • Talk at 4:30 p.m.
Baker-Nord Center, Clark Hall 206
11130 Bellflower Road, Cleveland
 Marie Lathers
Treuhaft Professor of Humanities and French
It’s About Time: A Brief History of Women in Space
Thursday, April 19, 2007 (Humanities Week)
Refreshments at 4:00 p.m. • Talk at 4:30 p.m.
Baker-Nord Center, Clark Hall 206
11130 Bellflower Road, Cleveland
 Yanna Popova
Assistant Professor of
Cognitive Science
Title to be announced
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