Fellowship Details:

Cornelius Shinzen Boots will be in residence at Texas A&M the week of October 14, 2024.

"Root and Riffcraft: Woodwind Compositions by Cornelius Boots"
Boots will perform on October 17 at 7:00pm in the LAAH Black Box Theater.

Innovative and beyond category, Boots has been expanding the repertoire for under-represented woodwinds – shakuhachi and bass clarinet – since 1994. Founder/composer of the world’s first bass clarinet quartet, Edmund Welles, and of Black Earth Shakuhachi School, Boots continues the panstylistic, deep musicianship lineage of Duke Ellington and Eric Dolphy into the 21st century. The concert will feature solos, duos and quartets performed by Boots, Dr. Regan and Dr. Vos-Rochefort as well as bass clarinet students from Texas A&M-Kingsville campus.

Featuring:
Cornelius Boots
Martin Regan, Professor of Music | Texas A&M - College Station
Andrea Vos-Rochefort, Assistant Professor of Clarinet | Texas A&M - Kingsville

Free & Open to the public

Sponsors:
Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research
College of Performance, Visualization & Fine Arts

Contact host Dr. Martin Regan reganm@tamu.edu with questions.

Additional activities:

Boots will deliver a lecture, "Root & Riffcraft: Nature, Bass Lines and Depth in Woodwind Musicianship," on Wednesday, October 16 at 12:30pm in GLAS 311.

Woodwinds are among the oldest, if not the oldest, musical instruments, with examples of mammoth bone flutes dating back to over 40,000 years ago. What were our deep time predecessors doing with these flutes? What kind of consciousness did they have and, in what spiritual and ritual contexts were these very early musics engaged in? When our goal is to infuse our own woodwind performance landscape with old world energy, we need an imaginative, creative, and reverent holistic approach for looking deeper into the Why and How of `woodwinding at or near its origin point and applying it to today’s music.

Cornelius Boots established himself as a woodwind panstylist and hardcore creative composer-performer in the 1990’s and has performed in most types of ensembles, at international festivals and up-close for goats with big horns.  He has written, recorded, and released over a dozen albums of his compositions and teaches his full-blooded, signature style to the curious and dedicated around the world.  He is a three-time graduate of Jacobs School of Music (BM Classical Clarinet ’97, BS Audio Recording ’97, MM Jazz Studies ’99) and has received multiple awards, grants and commissions.  Beginning with gospel arrangements in 1996, Boots initiated the bass clarinet quartet as a viable, robust chamber music modality by creating the group Edmund Welles, and has created substantial new composition catalogs for both bass clarinet and shakuhachi. He spent nine years as a progressive rock electric bass clarinetist and bandleader in Chicago and San Francisco, then began exploring primeval nature as a core influence.  He started studying shakuhachi in 2001 with Michael Chikuzen Gould, from whom he earned the name Shinzen 深禅 in 2012, a shihan in 2013 and a dai shihan in 2022.  From 2016 onward, Boots has played only jinashi shakuhachi with an emphasis on big bamboo (Taimu) and original nature blues.  He is the founder of Black Earth Shakuhachi School, and the leader/composer of the Wood Prophets, the world’s first bass shakuhachi group.  He is a Vandoren Artist and member of Save the Redwoods, Sempervirens Fund and the Orangutan Project. He lives in Pennsylvania. www.corneliusboots.com

Fellowship Details:

Dr. Castro-Gómez will be in residence at Texas A&M the week of October 14, 2024.

Castro-Gómez will deliver a lecture on October 17 at 3:45pm in GLAS 311, entitled "Transmodern Primitivisms."

Registration is free and open to the public. Please register here.

Santiago Castro-Gómez challenges the story that equality, liberty, and fraternity, the core notions of the political revolutions of the United States and France, are of European origin. Through analysis of new historical sources, he shows that republican ideals from Rousseau to Benjamin Franklin were inspired by North American Indigenous communities. The emergence of these Enlightenment ideals was the product of an intercultural intellectual exchange between Europeans and Indigenous peoples, and in this sense, we can speak of “transmodernity.”

This event commences the Critical Thought and the Global South Workshop, which continues with invited speakers and a roundtable on Friday, October 18th. The workshop is the inaugural event for the International Consortium of Thought from the Global South.

Contact host Dr. Don Deere dtdeere@tamu.edu with questions.

Sponsors:
Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research, Department of Philosophy, Department of Global Languages and Cultures, College of Arts & Science, International Consortium of Thought from the Global South, Critical Theory Collective, and the Buttrill Endowed Fund for Ethics

Additional activities:

Critical Thought of the Global South Workshop - An Inaugural Meeting

Friday, October 18 | 9:00am - 6:00pm | GLAS 311

Featuring:
Santiago Castro-Gómez (Javeriana University)
Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson (Syracuse University)
Cintia Martinez Velasco (University of Oregon)
William Paris (University of Toronto)
Massimiliano Tomba (UC Santa Cruz)

More info: www.sites.google.com/tamu.edu/ictgs

Santiago Castro-Gómez holds a degree in Philosophy from the Universidad Santo Tomás in Bogotá, an MA in Philosophy from the Karl Eberhard Universität Tübingen and a PhD with honors from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität in Frankfurt. For 25 years he was a professor of Political Philosophy at the Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá and a researcher at the Instituto Pensar. He has been a Visiting Professor at Duke University, the University of Pittsburgh, and Goethe University of Frankfurt. He is the author of over 10 books, including Critique of Latin American Reason (1996, English translation in 2021), Zero-Point Hubris: Science, Race, and Enlightenment (2005, English 2021), Tejidos Oníricos (2009), Historia de la gubernamentalidad I-II (2010, 2016), Revoluciones sin sujeto (2015), El tonto y los canallas (2019) and, most recently, La rebelión antropológica (2022). He is a key figure in contemporary social and political philosophy, Latin American philosophy, and decolonial thought.

Fellowship Details:

Dr. McManamon will be in residence at Texas A&M the week of January 20, 2025.

Contact host Dr. Deborah Carlson dnc@tamu.edu with questions.

Events:

"Dying at Sea in Greek Epigrams: A Statistical Overview"
January 21, 12:00pm, GLAS 311

"Dying at Sea in Greek Epigrams: The Human Dimension"
January 22, 12:00pm, GLAS 311

"Dying at Sea in Contemporary Film: The Perfect Storm" | Film screening & discussion
January 23, 12:00pm, GLAS 311

John McManamon is Emeritus Professor of Renaissance History and Medieval Nautical Archaeology at Loyola University Chicago. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina in Late Medieval-Early Modern European History, and he has won major research grants from the American Academy in Rome (fellow), Harvard’s Renaissance Research Center at Villa I Tatti near Florence (fellow), and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation for Venetian research. McManamon’s scholarship on Renaissance humanism includes two books on Pierpaolo Vergerio the elder, the first Western thinker to propose goals and curricula for an education in the humanities. Among his publications in nautical archaeology, Prof. McManamon has written two books (published by Texas A&M University Press) on the ships of Caligula abandoned in Lake Nemi and supervised the final report on the Byzantine ship that sank near Bozburun, Turkey. Prof. McManamon has taught over 20 university courses that include the undergraduate core in Western Civilization, advanced undergraduate surveys of the Italian Renaissance and European Reformation, advanced undergraduate colloquia on the Human Condition in Early Modern Thought and Humor in Western History, the undergraduate History Capstone seminar, and graduate seminars and colloquia in Italian Humanism, Late Medieval Intellectual History, Encounters between Europe and the Americas, and Medieval Shipwrecks.

Fellowship Details:

Dr. Wesner will be in residence at Texas A&M the week of January 27, 2025.

Contact host Dr. Meg Perret megperret@tamu.edu with questions.

Wesner will deliver a public lecture on January 29 from 5:30-6:30pm in GLAS 311:

“Trash and Trophy?: Settler Colonial (De)mobilizations of Sturgeon in the Columbia River”

When the U.S. dammed Nch´i-Wána (the Columbia River) for hydroelectric power the migratory natural history of the river’s oldest and largest fish, wiláps (white sturgeon), was obstructed. Columbia River Indigenous fishers have long protested dams as deadly for sturgeon, yet settler fisheries science of the twentieth century–shaped by ever-changing notions of sturgeon as ‘trash fish’ and ‘trophies’–did not account for sturgeon movement in regulatory configurations of the river’s ecosystem. This talk examines how settler practices of counting and constructing the value of fish are shaped by, and in turn shape, sturgeon in motion. I use hatchery archives, scientific reports, and published testimonies from Yakama fishers to reveal the relationship between settler cultural and empirical practices of measuring, monitoring, and monetizing sturgeon from the mid-1800s to present.

Ashton Wesner is an assistant professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Colby College, where she also co-chairs the Environmental Humanities faculty seminar and is an organizing member of the Critical Indigenous Studies Initiative. Her work intersects the fields of queer feminist STS, political ecology, critical environmental history, and Native American and Indigenous Studies. Her recent publications can be found in The American Naturalist, on the history of coloniality, data, and power in the natural sciences, and Women’s Studies, on the gendered slippages in studies on jumping spider mating behavior and the possibilities for queer modes of attention to disrupt heteropatriarchy in the scientific study of animals. Her article “Making Sturgeon Count: Settler Colonial (De)mobilizations of Fish in the Columbia River” is forthcoming in Osiris vol 40 (June 2025).