KU News Release

LAWRENCE — The Humanities and Western Civilization Program at the University of Kansas will host this year’s Mid-America Humanities Conference, a forum for interdisciplinary research for undergraduate and graduate students.

The conference will take place from 8:45 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday, March 11, and Saturday, March 12, at the Kansas Union. The theme of the conference is “Bodies, Pleasures, Spaces.”

More than 40 presentations will address a number of topics, including

— Trauma and embodiment
— Identities and distances
— Racialized bodies
— Genders and sexualities
— Visual experience and material culture

The keynote address will be delivered by Susan Bordo, the Otis A. Singletary Chair in Humanities at the University of Kentucky. Bordo is the author of many critically acclaimed, highly influential books and articles, including “Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body,” “The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private” and “Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J.” The keynote address, “What Did Anne Boleyn Really Look Like? Lessons from History on Representation, Beauty and the Body,” will be presented at 5 p.m. March 11 at Alderson Auditorium in the Kansas Union.

The event is co-sponsored by College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Hall Center for the Humanities and the departments of American studies, English, history, history of art, philosophy, sociology, theatre and women, gender and sexuality studies.

The conference is free and open to the public. For more information, go to the Humanities and Western Civilization Program's website.