Western cultural perceptions of the human body will be the focus as the East Asian Studies Program in Arts & Sciences holds a free seminar at 4 p.m. May 4 in Hurst Lounge, Room 201, Duncker Hall, on the university’s Hilltop Campus.
Titled “Western Perceptions of the Body: Framing the Mellon Sawyer Seminar,” the event is a prelude to a four-semester seminar program on Japanese views of the body that East Asian Studies plans to roll out in fall 2010. The seminars are funded by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar Grant titled “Japan Embodied: New Approaches to Japanese Studies.”
The Mellon Sawyer seminars seek to understand and incorporate the many perspectives on Japan that focus on the body. Each semester-long seminar will examine one of four themes: “Discovery of the Body,” “Bodies at War,” “Bodies at Play,” and “Beyond the Body.”
The May 4 prelude seminar features discussion by two members of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program in Arts & Sciences. Barbara Baumgartner, PhD, associate director and senior lecturer, examines the ways in which women’s bodies were represented, discussed and understood in 19th century medical texts, medical journals, and popular literature. Lecturer Amy Cislo, PhD, discusses the history of the body from medieval Europe to contemporary America, in particular, changing body perceptions in 16th century German medical writing.
The Mellon Sawyer seminar program includes a postdoctoral fellowship and two dissertation fellowships. The seminars will be free and open to the campus community. Advance readings will be assigned and audience participation encouraged. For information, call 935-4448; or visit: http://eastasian.artsci.wustl.edu/mellon.
The Mellon Foundation’s Sawyer Seminars program was established in 1994 to provide support for comparative research on the historical and cultural sources of contemporary developments. The seminars, named in honor of the Foundation’s long-serving third president, John E. Sawyer, have brought together faculty, foreign visitors, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students from a variety of fields mainly, but not exclusively, in the humanities and social sciences, for intensive study of subjects chosen by the participants.