The Ethics and Aesthetics of Stand-Up Comedy
April 19-22, 2017
CALL FOR PAPERS, PANELS, WORKSHOPS, AND
OFFERS TO COMMENT OR CHAIR
DEADLINE: December 20, 2016

This conference aims to bring together scholars and practitioners interested in stand-up comedy from a range of academic disciplines, including but not limited to philosophy, performance studies, women’s and gender studies, African-American studies, theatre, art history, and culture studies.  In addition to academic papers, panels, comments, and discussion, the conference also includes workshops, an open mic night, roundtable discussion with comedians, and stand-up comedy performances. #BUStandUpComCon. CONFIRMED SPEAKERS: Luvell Anderson, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Memphis Noël Carroll, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, CUNY Graduate Center Eva Dadlez, Professor of Philosophy, University of Central Oklahoma Oliver Double, Senior Lecturer and Deputy Head of the School of Arts, University of Kent Tanya Rodriguez, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Sacramento State University Aaron Smuts, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Rhode Island College Cynthia Willett, Professor of Philosophy, Emory University Jason Zinoman, Comedy Critic for The New York Times CONFIRMED WORKSHOP LEADERS: Amy Seham, Professor of Theatre and Dance and Women’s and Gender Studies, Gustavus Adolphus College Oliver Double, Senior Lecturer and Deputy Head of the School of Arts, University of Kent We invite submissions for paper presentations, thematic panels, workshops, and offers to serve as commentator or chair.  Submissions are welcome on any topic in the aesthetics and ethics of stand-up comedy, broadly construed. POSSIBLE TOPICS INCLUDE (but are by no means limited to): Aesthetics of Stand-Up Comedy: theories of humor, satire, irony, style, theories of emotion and affect, self-conscious emotions (shame, embarrassment, guilt, pride), reflections on the state of the art, relations with other arts (e.g., poetry, spoken word, pantomime, music, improv), analyses of joke structure, boundaries of aesthetic taste, appropriation and originality, case studies of particular stand-up comedians, cross-cultural comparisons, historical reflections on the art form, public persona and comic identity. Ethics/Social Political Issues of Stand-up Comedy: alternative stand-up comedy, political stand-up comedy, ethnic humor, identity (gender, race, age, etc.) and performance, racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, bigotry, feminism, anti-racism, censorship, law, political correctness, agency and subversion, nationalism, stereotypes and tropes, political efficacy and limitations, the politics of representation, the ethics of heckling, hostility, aspects of identity in stand-up comedy, such as race, ethnicity, ability, gender, sexuality, ability, age, and/or class, performance and appreciation, social movements/activism. SUBMISSIONS AND OFFERS TO PARTICIPATE:  Please send either a 3000-word full paper draft or a 1000-word extended abstract outlining the paper, workshop, or panel via the conference website: http://www.bustandupcomcon.com. Include the paper/panel/workshop title, contact information and current affiliation (if any) of all participants. Please bear in mind that the papers should be suitable for a twenty-minute presentation; panels for less than 90 minutes; and workshops from 60-120 minutes.  Submissions will be evaluated for their clarity of content, strength of central arguments, relevance to the conference themes, and potential interest and use of content.  The submission deadline is December 20, 2016. We aim to make decisions within 6 weeks. ACCESSIBILITY AND INCLUSIVITY: We are adopting the BPA/SWIP-recommended good practices. We aim to host an inclusive conference and we will do our best, within our budgetary constraints, to accommodate all participants. We are committed to lowering the barrier of participation for disabled participants and will do our best to make the conference fully accessible and welcoming.  To this end we will anticipate needs and aim to make accommodations in response to all requests. Upon acceptance of proposals, participants will be invited to identify any needs in this regard. Childcare will be made available as needed.  In the meantime, please feel free to email with any questions or suggestions. GRADUATE STUDENTS AND UNDERWAGED ACADEMICS: We will provide travel assistance, within our budgetary constraints, for student and unwaged academics.  Upon acceptance of proposals, participants will be invited to identify any needs in this regard. In the meantime, please feel free email us to with any questions or suggestions. ORGANIZERS: Sheila Lintott (Bucknell University); Jason Leddington (Bucknell University); Meenakshi Poonuswami (Bucknell University); Alex Skitolsky (Goddard College); Nikki Young, (Bucknell University); James Haile, (Bucknell University); Aaron Meskin (University of Leeds); Steven Gimbel, (Gettysburg College). SPONSORED BY: Bucknell University and the American Society for Aesthetics. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed at this conference do not necessarily represent those of Bucknell University or the American Society for Aesthetics.

Jahi Omari will participate in PIKSI-Boston

Jahi Omari has been accepted into the competitive PIKSI-Boston summer institute and will be named an Alain Locke Fellow upon completion of the program. Congratulations, Jahi!  

Jahi Omari, Bucknell University
Class of 2017 Biology/Philosophy Double Major Chair of Rush/Recruitment, Alpha Phi OmegaHistorian, Black Student Union

Sheila Lintott, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Women's and Gender Studies presents "Getting Along Beautifully: The Aesthetics of Friendship"

The Faculty Colloquium Committee announces our final event of the 2014-15 academic year!  On Tuesday, April 14th in the Gallery Theatre, Sheila Lintott, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Women's and Gender Studies presents

Getting Along Beautifully: The Aesthetics of Friendship

​

Glossing the aesthetic aspects of friendship, as we too often do, impoverishes our understanding of the value and meaning of friendships, relationships which animate and give structure to our lives. The friendships we forge and those we forgo, the friendships we cultivate and those we lose, these varying and variable relations can broaden our experiences, intensify our feelings, and help our self-understanding and self-creation.  I shall investigate the aesthetic aspects of friendship, for example, how cultivating and enjoying friendship invites creative and relatively free expressions of self, the ways aesthetic taste factors into with whom we are friends, and the manner in which friendships can help to harmoniously round out a life.

A reception in Arches Lounge (Langone 304) will precede the talk, beginning at 4:30, and featuring the finest food and wine. Professor Lintott's lecture will begin in the Gallery Theater at 5:15. Afterwards, we will reconvene in Arches Lounge for a final round of refreshing adult beverages, delightful hors d'oeuvres, and stimulating conversation. We should be able to complete our agenda in time to attend the Solidarity Ceremony planned by BSG and other student clubs and organizations (beginning at 6:30 on the Quad).  Let's stand with our students in solidarity, and against racism and exclusion.

    Thanks to our speakers and our audience for another exciting year exploring the diverse interests and accomplishments of the Bucknell faculty. It has been quite a journey!  Our call for papers for next year's series is open until April 22. Please consider submitting a proposal for a lecture--the work of the faculty make this series what it is.

Professor Leddington Awarded John Fisher Memorial Prize in Aesthetics

It's been a good year for Professor Jason Leddington. Not only did he receive tenure in February — he will begin his tenure as Associate Professor next year — but he just won the John Fisher Memorial Prize in Aesthetics for his paper "The Experience of Magic". The paper will be published in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, the leading aesthetics journal, and he will be presenting it at the 2015 meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics in Savannah, Georgia.

From the prize description:

The American Society for Aesthetics sponsors the bi-annual John Fisher Memorial Prize in Aesthetics. The prize is awarded to an original essay in aesthetics, created in memory of the late John Fisher, editor of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism from 1973 to 1988.

The Prize is offered to foster the development of new voices and talent in the field of aesthetics.

You can read a recent draft of the paper here.

2015 Roy Wood Sellars Lecture (3/26): Robert Pippin, "Psychology Degree Zero? On the Representation of Action in the Films of the Dardenne Brothers"

Robert Pippin, Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago

 

Thursday, March 26, 7 pm in The Forum (ELC 272)  

 

Over the last twenty years, the Belgian team of Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne have made some of the most powerful and most praised films in world cinema. Their most celebrated is the 2002 film, The Son (Le flls), which will be the main focus of this discussion. In all the major films, the Dardenne brothers try to represent, literally to photograph, the mindedness (the intentions and motivations) of certain characters,  who are required to make a very difficult decision. But they proceed under two unmistakable assumptions: that there is often something very difficult to understand, even mysterious, about such motivations, decisions, and reactions by others; and that the social context within which these decisions must be made is novel, a product of free trade zones, migrant labor, the Common Market, and globalized capitalism, all creating a new context for labor and power, the social, and especially psychological, implications of which are not yet fully clear. The thesis to be explored: these films should be considered distinct forms of philosophical thought, not merely illustrative of philosophical problems.  

Robert B. Pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of numerous books and articles on German idealism and later German philosophy: Kant's Theory of Form (Yale, 1982); Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge, 1989); Modernism as a Philosophical Problem (Blackwell, 1991); Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations (Cambridge, 1997), The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath (Cambridge 2005), Hegel's Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life (Cambridge, 2008), Nietzsche, Psychology and First Philosophy (Chicago, 2010), Hegel on Self-Consciousness: Desire and Death in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Princeton, 2011), After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism (Chicago, 2014) and Interanimations: Receiving Modern German Philosophy (Chicago, 2015). He has also published several books on literature and film, including Henry James and Modern Moral Life (Cambridge, 2000), Hollywood Westerns and American Myth: The Importance of Howard Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy (Yale, 2010), and Fatalism in American Film Noir: Some Cinematic Philosophy (Virginia, 2012), and on issues in political philosophy, theories of self-consciousness, the nature of conceptual change, and the problem of freedom. He was twice an Alexander von Humboldt fellow, is a winner of the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award in the Humanities, and was recently a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a member of the American Philosophical Society.