Past Cantor Seminars

The following are previous courses in a series of interdisciplinary seminars founded to honor the legacy of former Provost and Dean of the Graduate School Nancy Cantor, with her cardinal commitments to diversity, interdisciplinarity, and public goods. Jointly sponsored by the Rackham School of Graduate Studies and the Provost's Office.

Winter 2006

Rackham 575: Thinking About Culture

  • Instructor: Professor Geoffrey H. Eley, Department of History

This seminar will explore the contemporary intellectual landscape of interdisciplinarity mapped and illuminated -- but sometimes flattened and obscured -- by what we now call the "cultural turn." Most of the so-called human sciences have been influenced and even entirely recast by the remarkable popularity of cultural studies since the later 1980s. Some form of a turning to culture has become central to both contemporary social theory and historical understanding. Likewise, if anthropology has opened itself increasingly to approaches drawn from the literary and visual disciplines, those disciplines have in their turn sought to broaden and historicize their understandings of culture in far more material ways than before. Similar might be said of the "new art history," the "new photography," the extraordinary flourishing of film studies, the cross-disciplinary interest in visual culture, and so forth. Yet the concepts of culture running through these contemporary intellectual movements remain as rich, complex, and confusing as they are pervasive. Edward Thompson called culture "a clumpish term, which by gathering up so many activities and attributes into one common bundle may actually confuse or disguise discriminations that should be made between them."

In seeking to pin down this notoriously difficult and disorderly term, the seminar will seek to address a wide range of issues in cultural theory, cultural history, and cultural studies. As currently practiced, cultural analysis reaches from the arts, letters, and aesthetics, through some generalized notion of the life of the mind, to an extremely open-ended range of analytical domains. For example, these may include institutional, sociological, and social historical perspectives on the public sphere of artistic and intellectual activity, the educational system, other institutions of higher learning, the contexts and practices of the avant-garde, and so on (broadly speaking, everything encompassed by the "high-cultural" tradition of scholarship); the realm of symbolic and ritual meaning in a society's forms of cohesion and overall ethos (the anthropological field of approaches); current social-science theories of agency and action; and what Terry Eagleton calls "the whole complex of signifying practices and symbolic processes in a particular society" (or Raymond Williams called "a whole way of life"), which has become the domain of cultural studies. Over the course of the term, each of these areas will be explored. We will also consider a range of theoretical debates about the place of "culture" in defining (or refusing) a (post)modern totality. What images of the whole do such debates propose, and why? What modes of connection are considered, or exploded, especially between socio-economic and cultural logics? What distinctive theories of the individual and of situated forms of subjectivity have emerged during the past several decades? How can we recognize the varying, contingent and constructed forms of identity and the self, while using theoretical lenses that presume those very categories as foundations? How do we describe the spaces in which new types of personhood can be produced? Finally, the seminar will explore the range of meanings entailed by concepts of modernism and postmodernism in cultural theory and the arts, focusing especially on the relations between the production of theory per se, political visions, and historical formations of society and culture. In all of these ways, the seminar will approach its subject as an exercise in the intellectual history of the present, embracing the impact of a wide array of theories, scholarship, and wider intellectual work across the disciplines between the 1960s and now.

Winter 2005

Rackham 575: The Museum and Public Culture

  • Instructor: Professor James Steward (History of Art, School of Art & Design, Museum of Art)

For the past 30 years, museums have substantially reconceived their purpose to move away from the isolated study and presentation of the objects they collect to a focus on the visitor experience. This shift has arguably brought with it increased engagement with issues at large in civic life—responding to motivations as diverse as a commitment to building attendance, to answering the desires of corporate and foundation sponsors, to a desire to be “relevant,” to a deeper understanding of the museum’s educational role. But is the museum still clinging to simplistic, Victorian notions of “improvement”? Has it done enough? Through both 1) guided philosophical investigations into areas such as cultural policy, the breakdown of the communal in American life, and the hunger for “authentic” experience, and 2) case studies illustrating how museums have engaged with issues ranging from diversity and globalization to reconciliation and restitution, this course will explore the efforts museums have made to insert themselves more actively into the public cultural dialogue and where they may have failed. Our goal will be to understand the best purposes museums might serve in public cultural life, and to envision new paths for these institutions in a time of troubled social and political cohesion.

The course is open to graduate students from all disciplines, with permission of the instructor. The course will be offered on a discussion-based seminar format so enrollment will be limited. Further information can be obtained by emailing .

Read more about the Cantor Seminar in The University Record

Winter 2004

Rackham 575.01: Doctoral Seminar on Education for a Diverse Democracy

  • Barry Checkoway, Professor, Social Work and Urban Planning
  • Pat Gurin, Professor Emerita, Psychology
  • Earl Lewis, Dean of the Graduate School and, Professor of History, African-American Studies

This doctoral seminar will examine strategies for strengthening higher education for a diverse democracy. It will provide perspectives on the changing context of democracy and diversity, several strategies for increasing their integration in higher education, and specific initiatives for advancing this purpose in the research university. It will include discussions of student learning and teaching, scholarship of engagement, faculty roles and rewards, university-community partnerships, bridging diversity and democracy, and other topics.

Course Materials (PDF)

Read more about the Cantor Seminar in The University Record

Fall 2002

Hybridities: Collaborative Investigations of the Verbal and the Visual Image

  • Professor Linda Gregerson, Department of English and Program in Creative Writing
  • Professor Edward West, School of Art and Design and Institute for the Humanities

This studio seminar explored the conceptual and logistical parameters of artistic collaboration and the public sphere. Participants were collaborators from a broad spectrum of disciplinary and personal affiliation: visual artists, poets and prose writers, architects, filmmakers/videographers, performers, and those in analytic fields -- historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars -- with a particular interest in hybrid forms of identity and expression. Hybridity, in other words, was both our method and our subject.

Through a series of small-scale projects, students in varied and successive groups of two or three identified issues of common concern and strategies for interdisciplinary/mixed media investigation. Issues tended to draw upon the intellectual and affective identifications of seminar members, whether these are racial, ethnic, religious, gender-, class-, or field-inflected. Methods drew upon the various disciplinary competencies individual members of the seminar brought to our collaborations and demanded of us the shared acquisition of new skills.

Building upon this period of private and small-group exploration, the seminar designed and produced a collaborative public installation or installations at the end of the term.