The pre-circulated text for discussion in this seminar will be Professor Ng's forthcoming article, "Dutch Wars, Global Trade, and the Heroic Poem:
Dryden's Annus Mirabilis (1666) and Amin's Sya'ir Perang Mengkasar (1670)." The essay is attached.

BIOGRAPHY:
Dr. Ng is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma.

"You taught me language, and my profit on't/ Is, I know how to curse," thus Shakespeare's Caliban accused his master Prospero of linguistic colonialism. But how accurate was this picture of transnational communication? When Europeans entered the sphere of the Indian Ocean, in what language or languages did they speak? This paper considers early modern European translingual exchanges with Southeast Asia, the aim of European long-distance voyaging as the ultimate source of sought-after spices, examining in particular the role of Malay, a lingua franca of the spice trade, as a global language.

Paul Adams is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg. His research interests center around the relations between the European Union and Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, and the Microstates of Europe. He has also written articles on corporatism and comparative politics. Dr. Adams will be presenting this lecture, which is also on the program for the 2012 International Studies Association Convention in San Diego in April 2012.

Lunch will be served.

The gap between the art and the science involved in producing Early Modern bird’s-eye views has long puzzled historians. On a visual level, city views were posited as being oriented toward a single perspective while simultaneously opening up vast, impossibly elevated cityscapes. Frequently they included the artist–cartographer’s self-portrait within the image, often shown sketching the city from a high hilltop—as if to verify the view as something witnessed and drawn directly from life.

Matteo Galli, who teaches at the University of Ferrara, is one of the foremost German Studies scholars in Italy and is also an expert on German cinema. He has published books on Elias Canetti, Thomas Mann, and E. T. A Hoffmann, and he has translated works by Jens Sparschuh and Uwe Timm, among others. He is also the editor of a major volume on the history of German cinema, Da Caligari a Good Bye, Lenin! (2004).

During the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the Portuguese court collected and commissioned objects of art from artists working in Sierra Leone. The patronage of West African art formed an important part of the visual culture of the Portuguese court and was integral to the king’s larger artistic and cultural program intended to enhance his prestige and to promote his imperial ideology to other European courts.

The events collectively described as the “Arab Spring” are marked, at the local level, by the invention of novel modes of social and political action. On a transnational scale, these events are reshaping global alliances and raising pressing questions about the relationships between international political institutions and social movements driving change in North Africa and the Middle East. In the context of this rapidly evolving political landscape, this conference considers the implications of the Arab Spring for European politics and cultures.

Piyusha Mutreja, Syracuse University

International Trade & Composition Of Capital Across Countries

Trends in Chinese Higher Education
MA Wanhua, Professor, Peking University, China

One Book, One Community Lecture Series:

"The Worldwide Fusarium Keratitis Epidemic of 2004-2006: What Would Dr. John Snow and Dr. Henry Whitehead Have Done?"
John Bullock, MD, MPH, MSc. Bullock is an infectious diseases epidemiologist at Wright State School of Medicine.

Also, part of the C.F. Reynolds Medical History Society Lecture Series.