23 Feb. 2024 — 12:00 noon — GAR 4.100

Volodymyr Kulikov (UT– Slavic and Eurasian Studies)

“In the Service of Resources: Extractive Company Towns across Twentieth-Century Political Regimes”

Company towns are a historical phenomenon that particularly thrived during the era of industrial capitalism. These towns were typically established to ensure a sufficient workforce for extracting and processing natural resources. While predatory extraction of natural resources is often associated with capitalist enterprises, in terms of appetite for natural resources, socialist enterprises were comparable to their capitalist counterparts. The paper will focus on Ukrainian coal company towns and incorporate examples from the United States and China to provide a broader, comparative view. The argument is that the extractive model employed in company towns demonstrated striking similarities across different geographical regions, transcending various political systems. Additionally, the paper will examine the impact of coal extraction on the political institutions, enterprises, and communities involved in natural resource extraction.

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Volodymyr Kulikov is a visiting assistant professor at the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Before joining UT, he taught at universities in Austria, Hungary, and Ukraine. His major works focus on the history of businesses, natural resources, and industrialization in the Russian Empire and Ukraine. He is working on a book project, “Forging Industrial Capitalism in Eastern Ukraine, 1870–1917: The Role of Company Towns,” to be published by Routledge.

16 Feb. 2024 — 12:00 noon — GAR 1.102

Stefan Schöberlein (Texas A&M-Central Texas)

“Wiring the Brain: A Literary History of Neurotransmission in the Nineteenth Century”

The years between 1800 and 1880 are often described as the emergence of modern neuroscience. While the strictly scientific history of this period is well-documented, its cultural echoes and entanglements remain overlooked and underappreciated. This talk will revisit a central moment in this history—the discovery of the electro-chemical, nervous nature of the brain—to find it deeply enmeshed in media fantasies of wired communication. From Coleridge’s cranial wind harps and Thoreau’s telegraphed minds to Freud’s early theories of brains as relay networks, the western world in the nineteenth century debated the idea of thought as transmissible material impulse. What grounded this discourse was a cultural referent shared between science and literature: communication media. In tracing this nexus through canonical works as well as textual rediscoveries, this talk will sketch out an overlooked prehistory of cranial transmission in nineteenth-century literature and media culture.
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Stefan Schöberlein is an Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University–Central Texas and the author of Writing the Brain: Material Minds and Literature, 1800-1880 (Oxford University Press, 2023). His research focuses on textual recovery and the history of science in literature, with a particular focus on the poet Walt Whitman.