Party like it’s 1969: the Center celebrates 40 years

by Willy Dintenfass

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Center for 21st Century Studies. To acknowledge the occasion, the Center sponsored a symposium called C21: celebrating 40 years. The event, which was co-sponsored by the Dean of the College of Letters & Science, featured speakers Kathleen Woodward, Herbert Blau, and Victor Greene.

The symposium was something of a family affair: Woodward and Blau are married, and their son Dick Blau and daughter-in-law Jane Gallop (who introduced the elder Blau) are both UWM faculty. In a less conventional sense, the occasion exuded familial tone. A slide show at the beginning chronicling the Center’s 40 years was met with amusement as Center fellows and employees came face to face with past fashion choices.

After brief introductory remarks, Kathleen Woodward presented her lecture, “Inexhaustible Feelings: Cultural Politics and Poetics of the Emotions.” Woodward was the director of the Center for 19 years (a span that Dean Meadows referred to as the “indoor record”) and portions of her talk–a defense of the incorporation of personal experience and emotion into academic discourse–alluded to her tenure here.

Herbert Blau’s lecture “The Free Trade of Appearance: Historicizing, Hybridizing and Decentering the Real,” moved from the personal to two very different realms: the cosmological and the subatomic. Ostensibly an interrogation of historical practice (the kind performed by “history historians” as Blau termed them), the amount of time spent in space and on a particle level hinted at Blau’s first field of study, chemical engineering. At an event earlier in the day, Blau claimed Henry James as a major formal influence on his work, and at times the Jamesian nature of his sentences was liable to leave you lost two digressions back. Blau primarily seemed to be arguing for the pursuit of history as an art.

Victor Greene, a Center fellow in 1973 and 1974, led the audience through a timeline of events leading up to the conception of the Center and through its early years. Greene read a number of humorous pieces of correspondence that highlighted the academic politics that made the birthing process of the Center less than smooth. More seriously, Greene helped emphasize the goals of the Center from the beginning: to provide a space for collaborative, cross-disciplinary research and study, in an environment sheltered from some of the other distractions of academic life.

At C21, Kathleen Woodward and Herbert Blau presented lectures that demonstrated two of the numerous and diverse lines of inquiry encouraged by and pursued within the Center for 20th/21st Century Studies. Between shots of bulky shoulder pads and unwieldy-framed glasses on the slideshow commemorating the first forty years of the Center, we caught glimpses of past guests like Stuart Hall and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and couldn’t help but be excited about the next forty.