Speakers

Friday, Feb. 24, 2023
noon-1:30 p.m.
UU-111

The High Desert: Black, Punk, Nowhere: A reading and book signing by James Spooner

Spooner is a graphic novelist, filmmaker and tattoo artist. His award-winning debut graphic novel, "The High Desert" (Harper) was named 鈥淏est of 2022鈥 by Publishers Weekly, The Washington Post and the New York Public Library. "The High Desert" is the 2023 recipient of the American Library Association's Alex Award. Spooner recently co-edited an anthology of Black punk writers and comic creators entitled "Black Punk Now" that will be published Oct 31, 2023, with Soft Skull Press. He is also a regular contributor to RazorCake Magazine.

Spooner directed the seminal documentary Afro-Punk, which premiered at national and international film festivals, including Toronto International and The American Black Film Festival. He also co-founded the AfroPunk Festival, which currently boasts audiences in the hundreds of thousands around the world.

His work has been recounted in various publications, including NPR, The Los Angeles Times, Vice, The Village Voice, The New Yorker, MTV, NBC News and Variety. He was a recipient of the ReNew Media Rockefeller Grant. He is an ongoing guest curator for the Broad Museum in Los Angeles and previously programmed for the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He continues to screen Afro-Punk around the world, giving talks on punk and Black identity.

Thursday, Nov. 3, 2022
6 p.m.
AA-G007

"Craft and Science: Making and Knowing in the Early Modern World" by Pamela H. Smith, the Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia University

An intriguing late 16th-century anonymous manuscript, Ms. Fr. 640 (now held by the Biblioth猫que nationale de France), contains over 900 鈥渞ecipes" for objects of art, technology and everyday use. In 2020, the Making and Knowing Project released Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France, an open-access digital edition and English translation of this manuscript. The technical and artistic instructions contained in Ms. Fr. 640 provide an opportunity to explore the meanings and conceptualization of making and materials in the 16th century, and shed light on the type of knowledge possessed by handworkers, showing how the work of making was (and is) related to knowing.

Thursday, April 28, 2022
6 p.m.
AM-189

"Seeing Silk in Sens in the Ninth Century" by Valerie Garver, chair and professor of history at Northern Illinois University

Wednesday, March 30, 2022
4:30 p.m.
AD-148

"Designing Democracy: Possible Lessons from Otto Neurath's Museum of the Future (1925鈥1934)" by Gernot Waldner, Department of German Studies, University of Vienna

Thursday, March 10, 2022
6 p.m.
黑料视频 Art Museum, Fine Arts Building

Artist's Talk and Conversation with Curator Claire Kovacs

Nathaniel Stern, professor of art & design and of mechanical engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and also with the University of Johannesburg, South Africa)

In conjunction with the exhibition "The World After Us: Imaging techno-aexthetic futures," with generous support provided by IBM Corporation in Endicott, N.Y. 

Thursday, Feb. 3, 2022 (rescheduled from Dec. 2, 2021)
6 p.m.
AM-189
"Becoming Neofeudal: The Inner Logic of Communicative Capitalizm" by Jodi Dean, professor of political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. 

The Dec. 2 talk on "Communism or Neofeudalism" by Jodi Dean, professor of political science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, has been postponed until next semester. A new date will be announced when it becomes available. 

Nov. 11, 2021
6:30 p.m.
黑料视频 Art Museum, Fine Arts Building

An Evening with Artist Mark Dion

Mark Dion's work examines the ways in which dominant ideologies and public institutions shape our understanding of history, knowledge and the natural world. The job of the artist, he says, is to go against the grain of dominant culture, to challenge perception and convention. Appropriating archeological, field ecology and other scientific methods of collecting, ordering and exhibiting objects, Dion creates works that question the distinctions between "objective" ("rational") scientific methods and "subjective" ("irrational") influences.

Held in conjunction with the current art museum exhibition, "Topographies: Changing Conceptions of the American Landscape," support for this event generously provided by Art Bridges, co-sponsored by the Material and Visual Worlds TAE, with additional support from the Sustainable Communities TAE.

Oct. 28, 2021
6 p.m.
黑料视频 Art Museum, Fine Arts Building

Singer-songwriter and memoirist Amy Rigby performance, reading from Girl to City (2019), her coming of age through music and motherhood story. Girl to City follows one young woman's progression from Elton John fan in the Pittsburgh suburbs to Manhattan art student; from punk show habitu茅 to fledgling musician to cult singer-songwriter who caused a sensation with 1996 debut solo album Diary Of A Mod Housewife. Plus a conversation with Jennifer Lynn Stoever, associate professor of English at Binghamton University. In conjunction with the exhibition "Now form a band" A punk exhibition in 3 chords.

In partnership with the departments of Art History; English; History; Music; and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies; and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities.

Sept. 30, 2021
6 p.m. via Zoom

Nick Seaver, assistant professor of anthropology at Tufts University, will speak on "Too Much Music: Informatic Cosmology and the Myth Overload." 

Seaver, an assistant professor of anthropology, studies how people who make technology deal with cultural materials. His current book project, "Computing Taste," draws on several years of ethnographic research and interviews with U.S.-based developers of algorithmic music recommender systems 鈥 services that model their users' taste. Where popular critical accounts presume that engineers inevitably misunderstand culture, he instead examines how they theorize about culture and technology 鈥 what they are and how they should interact. He is currently investigating the technocultural life of attention in the United States. 

May 6, 2021
6 p.m. via Zoom


Robert McRuer, professor of English at George Washington University, will speak on "Disability Art on Lockdown."

"Disability Art on Lockdown" attends to disabled ways of knowing, or cripistemologies, that have been particularly useful for navigating the global economic, political and health crises we are facing. This title has a double valence, gesturing first toward the ways in which disability and art have been, increasingly, on lockdown (facing massive cuts from governments everywhere), even before 2020. Second, however, the title points to some of the amazing ways that crip art was generated during the lockdown of 2020.

April 15, 2021

6 p.m. via Zoom

Reading and Conversation featuring award-winning literary artist Tameka Cage Conley

Tameka Cage Conley is a graduate of the fiction program of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was awarded the Truman Capote Fellowship and the Provost Postgraduate Visiting Writer Fellowship in Fiction. Her work is published in Ploughshares, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Callaloo, The African American Review and elsewhere.

She has received writing fellowships from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Cave Canem Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and the Vermont Studio Center. The opera for which she wrote the libretto, A Gathering of Sons, was awarded the Bronze Medal in the Society and Social Issues category of the New York Festivals TV and Film Awards.

Cage Conley received her PhD from Louisiana State University in 2006, where she was a recipient of the Huel Perkins Doctoral Fellowship and recipient of the Lewis Simpson Distinguished Dissertation Award for her dissertation, Painful Discourses: Borders, Regions, and Representations of Female Circumcision from Africa to America. She is at work on her first novel, You, Your Father, an epic family saga that considers the untimely deaths of African American men over six decades beginning in the early 1940s in northern Louisiana. An excerpt of the novel is forthcoming in the Spring 2021 edition of The Iowa Review. 

Nov. 14, 2019

"Rethinking the 'One-sex Body': Sex Gender and Medicine in the Medieval World"

Katharine Park
Samuel Zemurray, Jr. and Doris Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Research Professor of the History of Science, Emeritus at Harvard University

Katharine Park, the Samuel Zemurray, Jr. and Doris Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Research Professor of the History of Science, Emeritus, at Harvard University, will speak at 6 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 14, in AM-189 (the Admissions Center).

Her research and teaching focuses on the history of science and medicine in medieval and early modern Europe, with special attention to gender, sexuality and the history of the body. Her work stresses the interconnection of knowledge and practice and the importance of relating both to the social, institutional, and cultural contexts that produced them. She has pushed these interests in several different directions. One group of works, including her first book, Doctors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Florence (Princeton University Press, 1985), highlights the importance of studying the work of artisanal and empirical practitioners, male and female, alongside that of university-educated physicians. In more recent articles, as well as in her monograph, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (Zone Books, 2006), she describes the way in which the medical technique of human dissection grew out of empirical practices such embalming, forensic autopsies, midwifing procedures and obstetrical surgery.

Additional areas of interest include the visual cultures of medieval and early modern science, including the use of allegorical imagery to express changing attitudes toward nature and human authority; the history of ideas of sex difference and sexuality in medieval and early modern natural philosophy and medicine; and changing ideas of the natural order reflected in the intense fascination with wonders and miracles on the part of all sectors of European society in this period.

April 4, 2019

"The Concept of the Digital"

Alexander Galloway
Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University

Alexander Galloway, professor of media, culture and communication at New York University, will speak on "The Concept of the Digital" at 6 p.m. Thursday, April 4, in FA-258.

What is the digital? The question is typically answered via reference to things 鈥 things like Twitter, Playstation or computers in general. Indeed the definition of "digital" is often given through various descriptions of the latest commercial ventures and the industrial techniques that provide their footing. Yet the digital is not a description of a media artifact so much as it is a specific mode of thinking and being. In this lecture, we will define the digital explicitly, not merely by reference to actually existing media technologies, but also, and perhaps more importantly, as a specific event within philosophy.

Feb. 28, 2019

"Art/Archaeology: Beyond an Archaeology of Art"

Doug Bailey
Professor of Archaeology at San Francisco State University

Doug Bailey, professor of archaeology at San Francisco State University, will speak on "Art/Archaeology: Beyond at Archaeology of Art" at 6 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 28, in FA-258.

How do we move beyond practicing an archaeology of art that normally sees artifacts as art objects for us to examine and interpret? In this lecture, I suggest that one way forward is to explore the potentials of an art/archaeology. My proposal is that we should move beyond traditional efforts to explain or interpret the past, and that we do this in a creative way that has impact on contemporary societies. To make such a move is to break with long-standing traditions of archaeological practice and thinking. An art/archaeology follows three steps: disarticulation (i.e., to break an object from its historical context); repurposing (i.e., to use that object as a raw material to make new creative work); and disruption (i.e., to fashion that new creative work in such a way that it has impact in contemporary social and political debate).