Professor David Callies

Government Ownership of Land and the Limits Upon Transfers or Sale: The Public Trust Doctrine

How do Americans view public land?  In particular, what assumptions do we make about our individual rights to access and use?  Being a relatively law-bound society, when pressed, most Americans would look to the law for answers.  The common law of England - including that law applicable to property - was adopted in most of the American colonies before the American Revolution and most states after the formation of the Union after 1783, Most American lawyers used as a primary reference Blackstone's Commentaries on the Law of England by the latter third of the 18th Century as the source of common law principles.  However, the millions of square miles of land which ultimately became the United States resulted in principles of land ownership and management grounded in the inviolate nature of private rights in land to the exclusion of all others, together with the practice of national government  selling or leasing vast tracts of public land for exclusive private use.  This is in relatively sharp contrast to the theory of tenure, or of holding land, whether private or public, "for" someone else - often the king or his nobles - which prevailed in England. As a result, British land law is shot through with rights of the public to enter and use both private and public land (as in British national parks which consist primarily of private land, and in right-to-roam laws).   In America,  not so much.

Government ownership of land has always carried with it a series of public obligations which collectively limit the use of such land (usually for public and not for commercial or other private-like purposes) and its transfer or disposal.  Thus, for example, if government holds or acquires a parcel of land, it may broadly use it for park, recreation, government
administrative functions (postal service, fire and police stations, other government offices).   Also, broadly speaking, government may sell or lease such land if it is found to be surplus, often subject to no more than the odd disposal statute or regulation which may require public auction or other generalized offer to potential buyers or lessees.   An exception is land which the government formally holds in trust for the public:  subject to The Public Trust Doctrine.

Broadly stated, the public trust doctrine provides that government holds certain lands, waters, and (increasingly) other resources in some sort of trust for the benefit of its citizens, establishing the right of the public to fully enjoy them for a variety of public uses and purposes.  Implied in this definition are limitations on the private use of such water, land or
other resources as well as limitations on government to transfer interests in them to private parties, particularly if such transfer will prevent or hamper use by the public.  In particular: (1)  how and to what resources besides (traditionally ) water and land immediately adjacent to water does the public trust doctrine apply- inland trails and trailheads, for example? (2)  is public access to a public trust resource - like a pathway across private land to a  public beach, for example - automatically a part of the public trust, or must that access be separately acquired by government from the private landowner?  (3) what private uses can government permit on public trust water or land, short of  sale or other transfer which is generally prohibited - private wharves for the loading and unloading of passengers or freight from private vessels?

Duncan M. Porter
An introduction to Darwin's sciences
How Charles Darwin voyaged from rocks to worms in his search for facts to explain how the earth, its geological features, and its inhabitants evolved. By Duncan M. Porter and Peter W. Graham. [in ed.]

Charles Darwin is commonly perceived as having sailed around the world on HMS Beagle, during which voyage he discovered evolution by observing the finches of the Galápagos Islands, came home and toiled as a recluse in the
country for years before writing On the Origin of Species, which received such negative response that he became ill and lost interest in evolution, devoting the rest of his life to studying such non-controversial subjects as plants, which of course do not evolve. Our book destroys these myths and others about Darwin, discussing in detail his research in geology, zoology, and botany, almost all of which was evolutionary in nature. Examples will be given.

Wai Yi Feng
‘Enriching’ Learning in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics: Challenges and Contradictions in UK Policy and Practice

In Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education, the word ‘enrichment’ is often used to refer to educational provisions not prescribed by the school curriculum, which aim to enhance pupils’ learning and experience of STEM subjects.  In recent years, ‘enrichment’ provisions have assumed rising political importance in the UK, not only within its original educational context, but also as ready vehicles for delivering policy objectives in the broader arena of ‘public engagement in science’, ‘raising participation in higher education’, and ‘public governance of science’.  The emerging landscape is filled with contradictions that challenge both policymaking and the framing of ‘enrichment’ practices.  This talk will present an overview of current UK policies, practices and trends to ‘enrich’ pupils’ learning and experience of STEM subjects, and explore some of the contradictions and challenges therein.

Margaret Ann Goldstein, PhD
Professor of Medicine, Emeritus Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Baylor College of Medicine
From Bone Flutes to the Human Voice on the Moon: Sound in the Human Body

When it comes to biology, most think of sound in relation to hearing.  Language has so dominated our culture that we think of sound primarily as a medium for language.  Only recently has the idea been advanced that music may not have evolved from language, but separately on its own before language and subsequently co-evolved with language.

Attention paid to music and language emphasizes sound as a phenomenon outside the body.  But, of course, sound also exists inside the body.  Today, we are familiar with the use of sound to gain information about external objects, as in sonar.  However, we also use ultrasound for imaging inside the body.  Tonight we explore the sound waves inside the human body as a part of the total energy spectrum in our universe.

The talk will be divided into three parts.  The first deals with human activities involving sound and the importance of these activities in our health and well being.  The second part deals with sound in general as it pertains to humans.  The third part deals with sound in prenatal and postnatal human development.

Copyright  2009 Margaret Ann Goldstein   All rights reserved.

Peter Adriaens
Pathologizing Sexual Deviance

In this talk I will provide a historical perspective on how American (and European) psychiatrists have conceptualized and categorized sexual deviance throughout the past half century.  During this time, quite a number of sexual preferences, desires and behaviours have been pathologized and de-pathologized at will, thus revealing psychiatry’s constant struggle to distinguish mental disorder (‘sexual deviations’ or, more recently, ‘paraphilias’) from immoral or illegal behaviour.  This struggle is already apparent in the works of nineteenth  and early twentieth century European psychiatrists, about whom I shall say very little.  My main focus will be on the American Psychiatric Association’s dealings with sexual deviance in consecutive editions of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), 1952-2000.  I will argue that the sexual deviations have been vital in forcing the DSM  to provide a general definition of mental disorder, while they also continue to challenge this very definition.

Ronald Huebert
Invasions of Privacy in Hamlet

The German Romantics (Goethe, Schlegel) were the first to locate a distinctive inwardness in the character of Hamlet, a quality captured in part by Schlegel’s description of the play as “a tragedy of thought” (404) and modified in suggestive ways by Coleridge, Bradley, Booth, Maus, and Levy. But inwardness is not quite the same thing as privacy, a concept that seldom arises in Hamlet interpretation. My objective is to argue that privacy and the violations of privacy matter a great deal to Hamlet himself, and hence ought to matter to spectators and readers who try to make sense of his story. When he tells his mother that he has “that within which passes show” (1.2.85), when he berates Guildenstern for trying to “pluck out the heart of my mystery” (3.2.358), or when he speaks to us in his great soliloquies, Hamlet seems profoundly committed to defending his own privacy. So it may come as a shock that he shows little respect for the privacy of others. He disrupts Ophelia’s closet with a display of his “antic disposition,” he takes the invitation to visit Gertrude in her closet as an opportunity to assert an aggressive desire to control her sex-life, he opens the confidential “packet” which contains the secret commission that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are bearing to England, and so on. The question of whether he manages to invade the privacy of Claudius is a more difficult one, partly because Claudius too is trying of claim control of Hamlet’s private space. I will conclude by suggesting that, if the question of privacy offers us a critical window into the world of Hamlet, the converse is also true: Hamlet teaches us something of great interest about the nature of privacy, or at least about the way in which we experience it. To put it cryptically, Hamlet suggests that privacy is a two-way street, where my privacy is by definition taken to be important, and your privacy is always subject to suspicion.

Evianne Laetitia van Gijn
How do Sex Offenders Manipulate Children?
An Examination on the Modus Operandi

Preventing child sexual abuse is an important social concern. To develop effective child abuse prevention programmes, it is important to understand the process whereby offenders ‘groom’ or prepare children for abuse, maintain children’s involvement, and ensure that children conceal the incidents. I will present a review of previous research on the operational processes or ‘modus operandi’ of alleged abusers which draws upon reports by both victims and perpetrators. Because offenders’ reports may be biased by their fear of severe punishment or feelings of shame, the research I conducted involves, firstly, a study focused on alleged victims’ descriptions of the sex offenders’ behaviour and, secondly, a study in which trained and experienced police officers in the UK were questioned about sex offenders’ behavioural processes. I will discuss the implications of the findings and recommendations for future research.

Joanne H. Wright
The politics of love and domestic space in María de Zayas and Mary Astell

In this paper, I consider the perspectives of two early modern women writers, María de Zayas of Spain and Mary Astell of England, on the politics of familial relations and domestic space. Although writing in different genres and with very different world views, Zayas and Astell shared an impulse to demystify prevalent discourses of passion and sentiment which were aimed at the continued subordination of women in an era marked by the extension of political rights. In reading these two writers together, we become aware of the transnational connections in women's political interests and of the roles that passion and sentiment played in justifying hierarchical gender relations and violence against women.

Masanori Ito
Joseph Conrad and Journalism

Joseph Conrad’s professed antipathy towards newspapers has often been associated with his aestheticism, to endorse the generally accepted view of his art as opposed to contemporary journalism. In The Secret Agent (1907), however, we find that Conrad deliberately lets the language of newspapers, instead of the sympathetic cry of intellectually-disabled Stevie, dominate the narrative, and ultimately employs it as a means to realise the text’s original concern for human sufferings. In this paper, I will attempt to investigate how the fiction, in its struggle to seek an appropriate language to speak for humanity, had to face the fact that journalism had already occupied the central part of human life, and could not be readily countered by any compassionate voice of the traditional narrative.

Kevin J. Edwards
When science meets the humanities in the Faroe Islands - or when is it necessary to chain an archaeologist to a chair?

In a presentation which will probably transgress every expectation and confirm every prejudice that ASH aficionados have of the scientist who involves himself with the humanities and social sciences, I introduce a series of vignettes concerning the human development of the Faroe Islands. The Faroes archipelago sits in the North Atlantic Ocean and was an important stepping-stone during the Norse/Viking colonization which stretched from Scandinavia to Greenland, including a brief sojourn in Newfoundland.
Invoking prehistory, history, historiography, nationalism, ethnography, language, and doubtless other components of the academic’s arsenal, I shall introduce, in a reasonably non-technical and jargon-free fashion, selected findings from an extensive interdisciplinary study of the Faroe Islands and its human and landscape history. Questions to be addressed include:

• Were the Faroe Islands occupied before the Norse arrived ca AD 800 and what has this got to do with a monk at the Frankish court?
• What extreme measures are required to discover the extent of early settlement in the Faroe Islands?
• Irish, Celtic, Frisian, Ancient – or did nationalism just get in the way?
• Do pollen grains do more than cause hay fever?
• Was Jóhannes Jóhansen vilified – and has he been rehabilitated?
• What can be done when language and dialect create a stack of problems?

Andrew Skilton
The ‘Lost’ Buddhist tradition: an accessible overview of recent research into pre-reform Buddhist meditation techniques in S E Asia. 

Buddhism in South East Asia is well known in the West. We are familiar in the UK with orange-robed Buddhist monks from Sri Lanka, Burma and Thailand, and aside from minor national differences we see the Buddhism of these and the other countries of Southeast Asia as a monolithic religious institution. We also have been taught that this kind of Buddhism represents ‘original’ Buddhism, and goes back to the Buddha’s historical disciples. Beginning about 35 years ago, a small trickle of research has begun to alert us to an interesting and controversial pre-modern history for this tradition. I will try to put these developments in context, by way of introducing a recent ‘manuscript hunting’ expedition in Thailand in which I participated, and to show how the research team involved is producing research that expands our understanding of that pre-modern history and has interesting implications for many contemporary Thai Buddhists.I’ll be talking extempore to some photographs and web-based materials and hope this will be an accessible introduction for people with no background knowledge of Buddhism in the region to some current research that is revolutionising the  understanding of what  Buddhists here ‘did’ before they were subject to what we call ‘modernity’, and why many contemporary Thai Buddhists care. Questions welcome.

Dr. Pavel Blažek
The Wives of the Saracens
Medieval Western Perceptions of Islamic Marriage
One of the main differences between medieval Islam and medieval Christianity was to be found in the  doctrine of marriage. Whereas medieval Christianity recognised only monogamous marriage and taught its indissolubility, medieval Islam, following the Koran, permitted divorce as well as polygamy. It is not surprising that this fundamental difference soon become one of the key elements of the medieval western image of Islam. Islamic polygamy and divorce, usually interpreted by medieval authors as the proof and result of “Mahometan licentiousness”, looms large in the writings of medieval Christian anti-Islamic polemicists, as it does in accounts by western travellers to Islamic countries. In my talk I will present and discuss these numerous and diverse medieval Christian responses to Islamic marriage, asking how they shaped and participated in the broader western image of Islam and Islamic culture.

Joyce Coleman, University of Oklahoma
The Birth of the Author: The Iconography of Authorship from Virgil to Chaucer

Pick up a book in any bookstore, and on its back or dust jacket you’re likely to find a headshot of the author. This may seem like an obvious and sufficient piece of imagery: you are about to enter into private, privileged communication with this one individual, and you want to see what s/he looks like.

The “iconography of  authorship,” however, is no more transparent than any other cultural category. It encodes and reinforces certain dominant values—particularly, here, that books express the unique personality and worldview of authors eager to share their insights with the reader through the medium of the text. Underlying such invitations to engagement, however, are democratic and capitalistic premises unknown to earlier contexts and visualizations of authorship.

Drawing on research for a monograph on the iconography of the book, this paper will attempt to trace the imagery of authorship within Western culture from the earliest surviving example (the fifth-century Vergilius Romanus manuscript) through the first actual likeness of an English author (the early fifteenth–century portrait of Geoffrey Chaucer in the Ellesmere Canterbury Tales).

Lisa Hodgetts
The Archaeology of Past Hunting Landscapes in the western Canadian Arctic

For many, the Arctic represents a mythic land that is at once exotic, remote and inhospitable, but for the past 4000 years generations of people have called the islands of the Canadian Arctic archipelago home.  These hunters left a record of their activities in their dwelling remains, discarded tools, and food waste, which allows us to piece together the rhythms of their daily lives from season to season and over the long term.  This talk will outline my ongoing research project on Banks Island, which aims to reconstruct short- and long-term trends in people’s use of the landscape by bringing together evidence from archaeological fieldwork, traditional Inuit knowledge, and genetic studies of two important prey species - muskox and caribou.  In particular, I will focus on the archaeological evidence for land use during the Copper Inuit period, and the differences in men’s and women’s experiences of the landscape at that time.

Agnes I. F. Lam
Did Gutenberg Change China? The Rise of Chinese Modern Newspapers and its Relationship with the Transformation of Western Printing Technology

It has been often asserted that the introduction of printing by Western missionaries  in China in the 19th Century marks the start of the modern period in the history of Chinese newspapers, and further, that this modernization resulted in a long period of intellectual, cultural and political reform that changed China in the late 19th Century and 20th Century.  However, long before Western missionaries brought the Gutenberg press to China and indeed long before the Gutenberg invented his printing press, starting in Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907), Chinese newspapers were being printed and circulated, and they  have enjoyed an uninterrupted history since then.  In this talk, I will share some of the findings from my ongoing research.  I will focus on two main questions: 1) How and why did traditional Chinese printing technology not have the impact that the Gutenberg  press did later? 2) Was the reason for this difference entirely technological or were there other important factors as well?

Margaret Pearson
Has Clare Hall Changed the Changes?

Can we see an ancient text’s meanings more clearly with a new translation?
Can a rational modern scholar gain useful insights from an ancient method of ‘consulting’ a divination text?  These perennial issues will be addressed by Margaret Pearson, life member, as she discusses her new book, the Original I ching: an Authentic Translation of the Book of Changes Based on Recent Discoveries. (Tuttle 2011; ebook 2012)

The Book of Changes (yijing, I ching) is a compendium of wisdom which evolved over many centuries around a core text, the Zhou Changes (Zhouyi, pronounced Joey)  The Zhou Changes is a divination text associated with the early years of the Zhou dynasty (circa 1045-700 BCE).  We have no dictionaries dating from this period, and the language of the Zhouyi is elliptical and difficult.  Still, scholars today know much more about the period of its composition than did Confucius or the authors of early commentaries to it.  This has resulted in efforts to recover the original meanings.  Pearson will discuss why she joined this endeavor and how her translation differs from others’. 

Margaret Pearson (VF 1997-1998) received her Ph.D. in Chinese History from the University of Washington in Seattle.  Her first book was a translation and analysis of a dissident’s critique of his era, the Comments of a Recluse (Qianfulun) by Wang Fu (fl. 150).  (Arizona State University Press, 1989).  Her new reading of the Zhouyi evolved over fourteen years and was nurtured by feedback at many Thursday noon seminars at Clare Hall.  She returns to thank all those who helped make this book possible.

Pearson will demonstrate a method of consulting the Changes based on her study of historical records of its uses. Copies of her book will be available for purchase.

Thomas Glave
Scenes from a Jamaican Childhood

Reflections, via several narrative "scenes," on youth, culture, desire, and near-tragedy in the author's native Jamaica.

Andrea Gamberini
The Clash of Legitimacies
The Process of State-Building in Early Renaissance Italy

Renaissance Italy and its political cultures are a fundamental but controversial topic of Western historiography on the late medieval and early modern State: the political, economic and cultural innovations introduced both by the civic humanism and the Renaissance political thought from Marsilio da Padova to Machiavelli, the merchant and bankers’ networks and empirical culture, the somehow mythicized artistic, literary and cultural achievements, from Giotto to Michelangelo, from Petrarca to Ariosto, have been considered ever since as some of the most significant steps towards ‘modernity’.The paper is intended to provide a synthesis of the current Italian research on the political history of Italy, and to illuminate myriad conflicts attending the legitimacy of power and authority at different levels of society. Through the analysis of the rhetorical forms and linguistic repertoires deployed by the many protagonists (not just the prince, but also cities, communities, peasants and factions) to express their own ideals of shared political life, I propose to reveal the depth of the conflicts in which opposing political players were not only inspired by competing material interests - as in the traditional interpretation to be found in previous historiography  - but often were also guided by differing concepts of authority.

Miriam Levin
American Women’s Foreign Missionary Colleges and the Internationalization of Science (1850-1945)

My talk will summarize a project on which I’m now working and then focus on Ginling College in Nanjing, China—one of the ten institutions on which I’m concentrating.  Readers will find a brief description of the project below:Between 1840 and 1945 over 300 American foreign Protestant schools for women served as agents of global change. In particular, Christian colleges and seminaries exported western science and scientific culture, adapting this knowledge and their evangelizing agenda to a variety of indigenous cultures and shifting political circumstances during a period of western imperialism and modernizing revolutions in Africa, China, India, the Ottoman Empire [Turkey] and Japan. Science was part and parcel of their mission to Christianize foreign women, create a cadre of Christian leaders in these societies, and open channels for them to earn a living in new missionary supported modern institutions and networks being formed.  The education they offered was shaped by their belief that scientific knowledge affirmed the sanctity of the individual soul and body, as well as by their firm views on the intellectual equality of women and men and on proper Christian conduct and lifestyle. Over this period, these colleges came to define an agenda for science education that emphasized women’s individual rights, women’s health and social and economic worth. They also created international institutional exchange networks for Protestant women in science that tied the U.S. and these regions more closely together. The study focuses on a group of signal schools for women, each with important ties to influential U.S. colleges and universities and with American Protestant missionary boards. The institutions were founded in four regions where American missionary work was strong: two in South Africa, two in China, two in India, two in South West Asia (Turkey and Persia), and two in Japan.  Each institution allows us to understand Western modernizers’ efforts to adapt their goals to distinctive political, cultural and religious circumstances, to recognize the important role American women in the missionary movement played in the international dissemination of science and more broadly in the history of American foreign relations.

Amy Hill Shevitz
Arizona State University
Mother, Wife, Lover: Three Women in the Life of Franz Rosenzweig

My project is a triple biography of three individuals that German Jewish philosopher and theologian Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) described as “the most important women” in his life:  his mother Adele Alsberg Rosenzweig, his wife Edith Hahn Rosenzweig, and his lover Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy.  Relationship as a concept has a central place in Rosenzweig’s dialogical philosophy, and it is evident that his lived relationships deeply correlated with aspects of his thought. 

Yet there is a great deal that we do not know about the women with whom he had these relationships.  Though all three are well known for having been part of Rosenzweig’s life, little has been written about them as individuals.  In addition to detailing the ways in which Adele, Edith, and Margrit each influenced Rosenzweig as a thinker, I will reconstruct their context as a dynamic social world of its own, suggesting how the women created a web of connections that anchored Rosenzweig in Jewish history, how they mediated between him and others, and even how the structure of their mutual social world appears to reproduce the model of reality presented in Rosenzweig’s philosophical theology.

William E Conklin
The Phenomenology of Legal Space

This paper will be introduced with a reference to the traditional distinction between law and pre-law. Two or 3 examples will be offered as to how law has assimilated a traditional territorial sense of space into various areas of law. The Paper is primarily concerned with the pre-legal or pre-conceptual world. Drawing from Edmund Husserl’s early work during the early 20th century and that of Alfred Schutz in the 1940s and ‘50s, I shall identify from their own and other phenomenological writings some of the themes which bring the traditional sense of legal space into question. 

Brendon O'Connor
What is anti-Americanism? A History of Negative Stereotypes about Americans

Much of what is called anti-Americanism should be more precisely and sensibly given other titles: anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, anti-modernism, anti-consumerism etc. Furthermore, the term is frequently used by the overly prideful and defensive to silence or wave off criticism. Given these tendencies it is tempting to declare anti-Americanism a contrived term best to be avoided. I resist this suggestion arguing that there is a useful way to study anti-Americanism and that is to treat it as an ideology; in other words to take the “ism” at the end of this word seriously. To develop this argument I have focused on essentialising criticisms of America and Americans in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, particularly those arguments that see Americans collectively as uniquely or especially deficient in their basic human character. From this literature I have established a core set of negative stereotypes that were developed about America and Americans, arguing that these stereotypes have been very persistent ever since. Given the multifaceted nature of criticism of America, and of American society itself, there is much to complicate this story; however, I see this approach to anti-Americanism as a useful starting point for a more fruitful conversation on this topic.

Brief bio: Brendon is an Associate Professor in American Politics at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. Brendon was the Australia Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington DC in 2008 and in 2006 he was a Fulbright Fellow at Georgetown University. In 2012 he has been a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge and a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. He is the editor of seven books on anti-Americanism and has also published articles and books on American welfare policy, presidential politics, US foreign policy, and Australian-American relations.