Annual Seminar: Recycle

Recycle, the 2007-08 FHI Annual Seminar, considers why and how used objects, ideas, places, images, practices are profitably or problematically reappropriated and put to different purposes. Through the empirical and theoretical consideration of specific historical salvage – texts, works, products, sites, methods, practices – either in the past or in the present, the seminar investigates the cultural and economic life of things and ideas. What do these instruments give up and what do they retain, what do they receive and what do they impose? Are there patterns or cycles of reuse and how do knowing agents join and modify them? How do changes in the work that objects perform document shifts in their political and economic circumstances? We encourage considerations of market, agency, and politics in an effort to extract treatments of reuse from the clichéd conceptions of tradition, influence and transmission. Those terms, and others like them, assume an improbable passivity on the parts of both the object and its appropriator in the transactions that they purportedly describe. 

Co-conveners
Neil De Marchi, Economics 
Annabel J. Wharton, Art, Art History & Visual Studies 
Mark Anthony Neal, African and African-American Studies

Duke Faculty Fellows
Pedro Lasch, Art, Art History & Visual Studies 
Peter M. McIsaac, Germanic Languages and Literature 
Rebecca L. Stein, Cultural Anthropology 
Susan G. Sterrett, Philosophy 
Kenneth J. Surin, Literature

Duke Graduate Fellows 
Alisha Gaines, English 
Sarah Lincoln, English
Britt M. Rusert, English

Duke Professional School Fellow
Catherine Fisk, Law

Duke Library Fellow
Ernest "Erik" Zitser, Librarian for Slavic and East European Studies

Postdoctoral Fellows
Jane E. Anderson, PhD, Law, University of New South Wales, 2003 
Andrew L. Russell, PhD, History of Science and Technology, Johns Hopkins University, 2007

UNC-Chapel Hill Exchange Fellow
Richard Langston, Germanic Languages and Literature

National Humanities Center Fellow
Ellen Gruber Garvey, English, New Jersey City University

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* Photo: Seminar fellows on a "field trip" to the Elsewhere Collaborative in Greensboro, NC. Left to right: Catherine Fisk, Ellen Garvey, Neil De Marchi, Britt Rusert, Alisha Gaines, Susan Sterret, Richard Langston.