University of Virginia, College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Events Archive

African Photography: The Ethics of Looking and Collecting in the Age of Restitution

November 11, 2022

Webinar | 9:00 AM - 4:00 PM

African Photography: The Ethics of Looking and Collecting in the Age of Restitution

November 11, 2022

Webinar | 9:00 AM - 4:00 PM

Since the 1990s, exhibitions of African photographers such as Seydou Keïta have raised questions about the relationship of ownership to authorship, visibility to privacy. Concerns about the ethics of looking and collecting have grown more urgent with recent debates about the restitution of African cultural heritage. 

 

This online symposium draws together scholars, artists, and curators who explore the ethics of working with photographs and methods to decolonize the medium, and its histories. 

 

What rights do photographers have? In today's age of hypervisibility, can sitters claim their "right to opacity," to use Édouard Glissant's term? What is the future of collecting and curating photographs that originate in family and colonial archives on the continent? Can viewers embody “the active struggle of looking with,” in Tina Campt’s words - rather than observe passively - and can this engender new ways of seeing?  

 

REGISTER HERE

 

Keynote Temi Odumosu (University of Washington) 
Welcome David Freedberg (Columbia University) and Douglas Fordham (University of Virginia) 
Concluding Remarks Steven Nelson (National Gallery of Art) 

 

 

Presented by

The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America, Columbia University
Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University
Department of Art, University of Virginia

 

With the generous support of

Buckner W. Clay Endowment for the Humanities, University of Virginia
Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures, University of Virginia
UVA Arts & the Office of the Provost & the Vice Provost for the Arts
The Carter G. Woodson Institute, University of Virginia
The Institute of African Studies, Columbia University
The Department of African American & African Diaspora Studies, Columbia University
Photography Network   

 

And with a grant from

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

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Ricardo Padrón, Mellon Book Talk, “The Indies of the Setting Sun: How Early Modern Spain Mapped the Far East as the Transpacific West”

November 4, 2022

Online | 10:00 - 11:30 am

Ricardo Padrón, Mellon Book Talk, “The Indies of the Setting Sun: How Early Modern Spain Mapped the Far East as the Transpacific West”

November 4, 2022

Online | 10:00 - 11:30 am

Register here:

Ricardo Padrón is a Professor of Spanish who studies the literature and culture of the early modern Hispanic world, particularly questions of empire, space, and cartography. His recently published monograph, The Indies of the Setting Sun: How Early Modern Spain Mapped the Far East as the Transpacific West (Chicago 2020) examines the place of Pacific and Asia in the Spanish concept of “the Indies.”  His research for this book has taken him to China, Japan, and the Philippines, and has been sponsored by U.Va.’s Center for Global Inquiry and Innovation, Arts & Sciences at U.Va., and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has also published on early modern poetry and historiography, and on the mapping of imaginary worlds in modern times. Prof. Padrón is an active member of the Renaissance Society of America, and is currently serving as a member of its Board of Directors. He is also serving as Director of Graduate Studies in Spanish. During the Spring of 2022, Prof. Padrón will be on research leave, and will be spending part of that time as a visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

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Geoff Mann (Simon Fraser University), “Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of our Planetary Future”

October 28, 2022

Online | 12:00 - 1:30 pm

Geoff Mann (Simon Fraser University), “Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of our Planetary Future”

October 28, 2022

Online | 12:00 - 1:30 pm

Register here. 

Geoff Mann, Professor, Geography, Simon Fraser University

My teaching and research concern the politics and political economy of capitalism. I am interested in everything about it, theoretically, empirically, and politically, in all its varieties, past, present and future. I teach courses in political economy and economic geography, and sometimes SFU’s human geography foundation class, Our World: Introducing Human Geography (GEOG 100).

 

Currently, my research has developed along two general, and increasingly intertwined, lines. The first is the historical development and future trajectory of macroeconomic governance (monetary, fiscal and regulatory policy) in the affluent global North. I am particularly interested in the ways that the state attempts to address political-economic and ecological crisis: the policies it develops, the ideas and politics that shape those policies, and the historical and political-economic conditions that make these ideas make sense. This is the focus of In the Long Run We Are All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy and Revolution (Verso, 2017), an examination of the past, present and future of Keynesianism and its origins in anxiety concerning the fate of “civilization”. From another angle, it is also the subject of Money and Finance after the Crisis: Critical Thinking for Uncertain Times, edited with Brett Christophers and Andrew Leyshon (of the Universities of Uppsala and Nottingham, respectively). The collection considers how we must rethink the role and meaning of money and finance in modern capitalism in light of the most recent run of crises.

 

Beyond SFU, I am a Senior Fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, and sit on the editorial/advisory boards of Theory & EventThe Journal of Cultural EconomyAntipode, & Historical Materialism, and the book series Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation (University of Georgia Press) and Economic Transformations (Agenda). At SFU, outside the Geography department, I am associated with the Centre for Global Political Economy, the School for International Studies, and the Morgan Centre for Labour Studies.

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Amanda Phillips, Mellon Book Talk, “Sea Change: Ottoman Textiles Between the Mediterranean and Indian Oceans”

October 14, 2022

Online | 10:00 am - 11:00 am

Amanda Phillips, Mellon Book Talk, “Sea Change: Ottoman Textiles Between the Mediterranean and Indian Oceans”

October 14, 2022

Online | 10:00 am - 11:00 am

Register here. 

Amanda Phillips is Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Material Culture, having joined the Department of Art in 2015 as Assistant Professor after positions at the University of Birmingham and the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin. My first book, Everyday Luxuries, was published with the National Museums of Germany in 2016; it explored the circulation of art and objects in the Ottoman capital of Istanbul in the years between 1600 and 1800. The book argued, among other things, that the consumption habits of men and women in Istanbul drove the production of textiles, ceramics, metalware, woodwork, and other crafts, as well as the arts of the book. While these categories of objects form the bulk of many museum collections, they are often neglected by both scholars and curators. Everyday Luxuries proposed new ways of seeing, studying, and exhibiting them, also moving Islamic art history beyond its traditional focus on the uppermost elites. 

 

My second monograph, Sea Change, published in 2021 with the University of California Press, explored Ottoman textiles from both a global and interdisciplinary perspective, uniting the eastern Mediterranean with the Indian Ocean on one hand, and social and economic history with art history, technical studies, and global history on the other. It also insists on a more comprehensive history of textiles, arguing that the plain, the non-canonical, the well-worn, and the downright mediocre are necessary parts of an expanded topography, and deserve treatment on their own terms. Artisans made decisions as the worked, and the book also returns agency to the men and women earning their livings in the textile sector. It shows how they coped with economic hardship and technological change, as well as how they resisted regulations imposed by the central authorities.

 

As an active researcher whose scholarship relies on close analysis of objects, I continue to work in museums across the US, Europe, and the Middle East, with occasional visits to South and East Asia. Using collections in Greece, Turkey, the UK, and the US, my third project will focus on the global language of flowers in the golden age of botany, as seen in textiles and other crafts. It will draw a through-line from the high arts and literature of the Ottoman court to vernacular modes of decoration, with a focus on textiles made and used by women.  

 

My research has been supported by the Fulbright Commission, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Max Planck and Marie Curie Foundations, the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, the British Academy, the Barakat Trust for Islamic Art, the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, the Pasold Foundation for Textile Research, the Clarendon Bursary at the University of Oxford, and the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art in Honolulu, among other sponsors. 

 

At UVa, I am Affiliated Faculty at the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures and the director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the Department of Art, and am currently teaching in the College Fellows Program, part of the Engagements curriculum for first year undergraduates. I continue to offer a comprehensive history of the art and architecture of the Islamic world in the spring of each year and occasionally advise Distinguished Major’s Papers. Students interested in graduate study of the material culture of the Islamic world, and the Ottoman Empire especially, are invited to email me to discuss admission to the doctoral program in Art and Architectural History.

Brinda Bose (Jawaharlal Nehru University, India), "'Together in the pages of the book': Notes on a Bengali Modernist Poetics of Desire"

September 27, 2022

Wilson 117 | 12:30-1:30 PM

Brinda Bose (Jawaharlal Nehru University, India), "'Together in the pages of the book': Notes on a Bengali Modernist Poetics of Desire"

September 27, 2022

Wilson 117 | 12:30-1:30 PM

Bengali modernism, one amongst many reverberating, echoing modernisms in far-flung parts of the globe, walks the tightrope between love and lanquage as precariously as desire itself. Modernist poetry has always wrestled with the impossibility of articulation and the limits of language; Bengali modernist poetry - speaking in vastly varied voices- continually pushes itself to transform desire into poetry, rather than to express desire in poetry. In this paper, I will explore some poems from modernist poets in Bengali to explore a poetics that turns the poem into desire itself. I intend to look at articulations of the poets on love and longing as well as the poems themselves, to close-read embedded minor' signals that throw up local habitations and names for the praxis of this poetry of desire. If the poem embodies desire, what images return, in imperfect shapes and sounds? What images fail, and wither? What images attain perfection - togetherness, as in the pages of the book where the poem appears - metamorphosing absence into the material presence of the poem. its signs and symbols, and its ink, now dry?

Brinda Bose is a Professor working at the Centre for English Studies and the School of Language Literature and Culture Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India

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Paul Edwards (Stanford University), “Technology Eats History: Techno-Metabolism and Time in the Anthropocene”

September 23, 2022

Wilson 142 | 2:00 pm

Paul Edwards (Stanford University), “Technology Eats History: Techno-Metabolism and Time in the Anthropocene”

September 23, 2022

Wilson 142 | 2:00 pm

Register here.

Paul N. Edwards is William J. Perry Fellow in International Security and Senior Research Scholar at CISAC, as well as Professor of Information and History at the University of Michigan. At Stanford, his teaching includes courses in the Ford Dorsey Program in International Policy Studies and the Program in Science, Technology & Society. His research focuses on the history, politics, and culture of knowledge and information infrastructures. He focuses especially on environmental security (e.g. climate change, Anthropocene risks, and nuclear winter). 

 

Edwards holds a PhD in History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz (1988) and a bachelor’s degree in Language and Mind from Wesleyan University (1980). His work has been funded by the US National Science Foundation, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, and the Sloan Foundation. He has been a Carnegie Scholar, a Guggenheim Fellow, a Senior Fellow of the Michigan Society of Fellows, and Distinguished Faculty in Sustainability at the Graham Sustainability Institute. Edwards has held visiting positions at the Paris Institute of Political Sciences (SciencesPo), France; the Oslo Summer School in Comparative Social Sciences, Norway; Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, Netherlands; the University of Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa; the University of Melbourne, Australia; and Cornell University.  

 

With Geoffrey C. Bowker, Edwards edits the MIT Press Infrastructures book series. He currently serves on the editorial boards of the journals Big Data & Society, Information & Culture, and Internet Histories: Digital Technology, Culture and Society, and was previously a deputy editor of Climatic Change.

 

Edwards' current research concerns the history and future of knowledge infrastructures, as well as further work on the history of climate science and other large-scale environmental data systems.

 

 

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In Solidarity With Salman Rushdie

September 12, 2022

Bryan Hall, Faculty Lounge | 4:00 - 5:30 pm

In Solidarity With Salman Rushdie

September 12, 2022

Bryan Hall, Faculty Lounge | 4:00 - 5:30 pm

In Solidarity With Salman Rushdie

 

We are disturbed, along with many others around the world, about the vicious attack on Salman Rushdie.

 

We'd like to express our solidarity with him and his work. On September 12 [Monday] from 4:00-5:30pm, the English department and the IHGC will host an event in honor of Rushdie. The event will be held in the Faculty Lounge, Bryan Hall.

 

Panelists: Rabih Alameddine, Mark Edmundson, Debjani Ganguly, Adrienne Ghaly, Micheline Marcom, and Herbert Tucker. 

 

They will read some favorite passages from Rushdie's works and comment on his contribution to literature and freedom of expression. Provost Ian Baucom will offer brief opening remarks in support of Rushdie. 

 

Please join us for this show of solidarity with one of the world’s most renowned and courageous writers. 

 

Department of English

Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures

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Shankar Nair, Mellon Book Talk, “Translating Wisdom: Hindu-Muslim Intellectual Interactions in Early Modern South Asia”

September 9, 2022

Wilson Hall 142 | 10:30 am - 12:00 pm

Shankar Nair, Mellon Book Talk, “Translating Wisdom: Hindu-Muslim Intellectual Interactions in Early Modern South Asia”

September 9, 2022

Wilson Hall 142 | 10:30 am - 12:00 pm

Join the IHGC for their first in-person event in two years! Coffee and treats will be served. Zoom link for out-of-towners here

 

Shankar Nair is Associate Professor of Religious Studies the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia. My general field of interest is the religious and intellectual history of the Indian subcontinent, particularly as it relates to broader traditions of Sufism and Islamic philosophy, Qur'anic exegesis, and Hindu philosophy and theology (especially Advaita Vedanta and other forms of Hindu non-dualism).

 

My research to date has centered upon Muslim-Hindu interactions and the encounter between Arabic, Sanskrit, and Persian intellectual cultures in early modern (Mughal) South Asia. Broadly speaking, I am interested in how Muslim and Hindu philosophers, theologians, and mystics interacted with one another, and the ways in which these figures conceptualized and responded to the fact of religious diversity in the world around them. I am especially interested in the phenomenon of translation, as we find numerous Sanskrit texts being translated into Persian and Arabic in this time period, often the result of teams of Muslim and Hindu scholars working in tandem. In my future research, I aim to trace the continuing history of such interactions into the colonial and modern periods.

 

A few of my other teaching and research interests include Sufi poetry and didactic literature, Sanskrit aesthetics and literary theory, Indian vernacular literatures, and classical Islamic ethics.

 

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Paul Edwards (Stanford), "Futurities" Lecture Series: “Technology Eats History: Techno-metabolism and Time in the Anthropocene”

April 21, 2022

Virtual | 12- 1:30pm

Paul Edwards (Stanford), "Futurities" Lecture Series: “Technology Eats History: Techno-metabolism and Time in the Anthropocene”

April 21, 2022

Virtual | 12- 1:30pm

Paul N. Edwards is William J. Perry Fellow in International Security and Senior Research Scholar at CISAC, as well as Professor of Information and History at the University of Michigan. At Stanford, his teaching includes courses in the Ford Dorsey Program in International Policy Studies and the Program in Science, Technology & Society. His research focuses on the history, politics, and culture of knowledge and information infrastructures. He focuses especially on environmental security (e.g. climate change, Anthropocene risks, and nuclear winter). 

Edwards’s book A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2010), a history of the meteorological information infrastructure, received the Computer Museum History Prize from the Society for the History of Technology, the Louis J. Battan Award from the American Meteorological Society, and other prizes. The Economist magazine named A Vast Machine a Book of the Year in 2010. Edwards’s book The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (MIT Press, 1996) — a study of the mutual shaping of computers, military strategy, and the cognitive sciences from 1945-1990 — won honorable mention for the Rachel Carson Prize of the Society for Social Studies of Science. It has been translated into French and Japanese. Edwards is also co-editor of Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance (MIT Press, 2001) and Changing Life: Genomes, Ecologies, Bodies, Commodities (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), as well as numerous articles.

Register here. 

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Humanities Week 2022, April 18-23

April 18, 2022

Various | Various

Humanities Week 2022, April 18-23

April 18, 2022

Various | Various

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Enrico Cesaretti, Mellon Book Talk, "Elemental Narratives: Reading Environmental Entanglements in Modern Italy"

April 15, 2022

Virtual | 10:00 am - 11:00 am

Enrico Cesaretti, Mellon Book Talk, "Elemental Narratives: Reading Environmental Entanglements in Modern Italy"

April 15, 2022

Virtual | 10:00 am - 11:00 am


 

Enrico Cesaretti is a Professor of Italian at UVA, and a Mellon Humanities Fellow for 2016-17. He holds a Laurea in Modern Languages and Literatures (English and German) from the University of Pisa (Italy), a M.A. from the University of Virginia and a Ph.D. from Yale University. His articles appeared in Italian Studies, Italica, Annali d’Italianistica, Modern Language Notes, Comparative Literature, Romance Studies, Ecozon@ and Symposium, among others. His most recent research has been focused on the fields of the Environmental Humanities and ecocriticism. He is the author of four books: Castelli di carta: retorica della dimora tra Scapigliatura e Surrealismo (Longo, 2001),  Fictions of Appetite: Alimentary Discourses in Italian Modernist Literature (Peter Lang, 2013), Landscapes, Natures, Ecologies. Italy and the Environmental Humanities (co-edited with Serenella Iovino and Elena Past, University of Virginia Press, Series “Under the Sign of Nature”, 2018), and Elemental Narratives. Reading Environmental Entanglements in Modern Italy (Penn State University Press, 2020). This latest book explores the narrative eloquence and agency of some of the materials (i.e. concrete, steel, marble, petroleum, asbestos) that have contributed to make (and, simultaneously, “un-make”) modern Italy.

 

Respondent: Monica Seger’s research and teaching address twentieth and twenty-first century Italian literature, film and media; the environmental humanities; and gender studies. At William & Mary she serves as the Program Director for Italian Studies and is affiliate faculty in the programs of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies; Film and Media Studies; and Environmental Science and Policy. She completed her B.A. at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and her M.A. and Ph.D. (2010) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Monica is the author of Landscapes in Between: Environmental Change in Modern Italian Literature and Film (Toronto UP, 2015). She is currently working on a new monograph considering narrative expressions of toxic embodiment in contemporary Italy.

Register here

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Noémie Ndiaye Talk, “Afro-Romani Connections in Early Modern Drama (and Beyond)”

April 15, 2022

Virtual | 12:00 - 1:30 pm

Noémie Ndiaye Talk, “Afro-Romani Connections in Early Modern Drama (and Beyond)”

April 15, 2022

Virtual | 12:00 - 1:30 pm

Please join us 

 

at the Early Modern Workshop 

 

on 

 

Friday, April 15 | 12-1:30pm EST 

 

for a presentation by 

 

Noémie Ndiaye 

Assistant Professor  

Department of English Language and Literature 

University of Chicago 

 

“Afro-Romani Connections in Early Modern Drama (and Beyond)” 

 

This event is co-sponsored by: 

 

Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures 

Department of English 

Department of French 

 

Our events are free and open to the public. Please register on the Zoom link below: 

 

https://virginia.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0qd-mprDIvHtBk3qnQd_RZTjMirgzWkDlz 

 

 

Bartolomeo Manfredi, “The Fortune Teller” (1616/1617), oil on canvas.

 

Abstract 

This talk brings to light a hitherto unnoticed network of Afro-Romani connections in later seventeenth century French and English drama, and it construes that network as conceptual and ethical genealogy for the bonds that exist today between Black studies and the fledgling field of Critical Romani studies. Close reading, among other objects, Molière’s Les fourberies de Scapin (1671) and its 1677 adaptation by Edward Ravenscroft through the lens of Critical Race Theory, I will show how theatrical culture across the Channel reckoned with the similar positionings of enslaved Roma and Sub-Saharan Africans within the logic of early modern white supremacy. 

 

Noémie Ndiaye is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She works on early modern English, French, and Spanish theatre and performance culture, with a critical focus on race and gender. Her first monograph Scripts of Blackness: Early modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race is forthcoming with University of Pennsylvania Press (August 2022). She is the co-editor of Seeing Race Before Race: Visual Culture and the Racial Matrix in the Pre-modern World (ACMRS Press, forthcoming, Spring 2023), and she has published articles in journals such as Renaissance QuarterlyRenaissance DramaEarly Theatre, English Literary Renaissance, and Literature CompassThaêtre, and in various edited collections. 

 

The Early Modern Workshop is a multidisciplinary forum where scholars working on the early modern period (broadly defined) can discuss their work with colleagues across departments. The aim is to foster conversations that go beyond departmental, disciplinary, and regional parameters, and to create an active community of early modernists here at the University of Virginia. We convene once a month on Fridays, 12-1:30pm, on Zoom. If you would like to be added to our mailing list, please contact us. Please visit our website for an archive of past presentations and for information about future events. 

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Carlo Caduff (King’s College London), Workshop: “Pandemic Prophecy or How to have Faith in Reason”

April 8, 2022

Virtual | 9:30 am

Carlo Caduff (King’s College London), Workshop: “Pandemic Prophecy or How to have Faith in Reason”

April 8, 2022

Virtual | 9:30 am

Dr Carlo Caduff is a Reader in the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine. He also serves as the Director of Postgraduate Research Studies and Chair of the Culture, Medicine and Power (CMP) research group. Carlo is an affiliate of King's India Institute and Visiting Faculty at the Graduate Institute Geneva. He received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley. His first book, The Pandemic Perhaps, shows how pandemic influenza became a global threat. Articles on biomedicine, bioscience and biosecurity have appeared in journals such as Cultural Anthropology, Current Anthropology, Critical Inquiry, BioSocieties, Annual Review of Anthropology, Cambridge Anthropology and Anthropological Theory.

Carlo's work explores global health at the intersection of science, medicine, media and the state. More recently, he started work on a new project on cancer in India. This work examines experiments with accessible and affordable care in public cancer centres. For his research, he received funding by the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Wellcome Trust and the Swiss National Science Foundation. In 2019 Carlo received an Investigator Award from the Wellcome Trust to examine, over the next five years, the changing landscape of oncology in India.

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Carlo Caduff (King's College, London), "Futurities" Lecture Series: “The Social in Social Distancing: Rethinking Stigma”

April 7, 2022

Virtual | 12:00- 1:30pm

Carlo Caduff (King's College, London), "Futurities" Lecture Series: “The Social in Social Distancing: Rethinking Stigma”

April 7, 2022

Virtual | 12:00- 1:30pm

Dr Carlo Caduff is a Reader in the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine. He also serves as the Director of Postgraduate Research Studies and Chair of the Culture, Medicine and Power (CMP) research group. Carlo is an affiliate of King's India Institute and Visiting Faculty at the Graduate Institute Geneva. He received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley. His first book, The Pandemic Perhaps, shows how pandemic influenza became a global threat. Articles on biomedicine, bioscience and biosecurity have appeared in journals such as Cultural Anthropology, Current Anthropology, Critical Inquiry, BioSocieties, Annual Review of Anthropology, Cambridge Anthropology and Anthropological Theory.

Carlo's work explores global health at the intersection of science, medicine, media and the state. More recently, he started work on a new project on cancer in India. This work examines experiments with accessible and affordable care in public cancer centres. For his research, he received funding by the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Wellcome Trust and the Swiss National Science Foundation. In 2019 Carlo received an Investigator Award from the Wellcome Trust to examine, over the next five years, the changing landscape of oncology in India.

Register here. 

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UVA Center for Poetry & Poetics Annual Symposium

April 1, 2022

Brown College Tent | 2:00 - 6:00 pm

UVA Center for Poetry & Poetics Annual Symposium

April 1, 2022

Brown College Tent | 2:00 - 6:00 pm

“Poetry, Place, Displacement”

Friday, April 1, 2022

2:00-6:00 PM

Brown College Tent

 

The event will bring together several renowned poets, scholars, and poet-scholars to discuss such questions as: How do poems represent place and displacement? How do they differ from other ways of mapping place? How do they attest to histories of human and environmental dislocation? 

 

An afternoon of panel presentations and interactive dialogue will feature the following speakers—

 

Harris Feinsod, Northwestern University: https://english.northwestern.edu/people/faculty/feinsod-harris

Rachel Galvin, University of Chicago: https://english.uchicago.edu/people/rachel-galvin

Sonya Posmentier, New York University: https://as.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/as/faculty/sonya-posmentier

Vidyan Ravinthiran, Harvard University: https://english.fas.harvard.edu/people/vidyan-ravinthiran

 

—after which the symposium will conclude with a reading and reflections by the Jamaican poet Kei Miller (https://poetryarchive.org/poet/kei-miller), who won the prestigious Forward Prize for the best poetry collection of 2014. 

 

For more information, visit https://poetry and poetics.as.virginia.edu.

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Amitav Ghosh, "Futurities" Lecture Series: "The Nutmeg’s Curse: A Parable of the Anthropocene"

March 24, 2022

Virtual | 12:00- 1:30pm

Amitav Ghosh, "Futurities" Lecture Series: "The Nutmeg’s Curse: A Parable of the Anthropocene"

March 24, 2022

Virtual | 12:00- 1:30pm

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria and is the author of The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique LandDancing in CambodiaThe Calcutta ChromosomeThe Glass PalaceThe Hungry Tide, and The Ibis TrilogySea of PoppiesRiver of Smoke, and Flood of Fire.

The Circle of Reason was awarded France’s Prix Médicis in 1990, and The Shadow Lines won two prestigious Indian prizes the same year, the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Ananda Puraskar. The Calcutta Chromosome won the Arthur C. Clarke award for 1997 and The Glass Palace won the International e-Book Award at the Frankfurt book fair in 2001. In January 2005 The Hungry Tide was awarded the Crossword Book Prize, a major Indian award. His novel, Sea of Poppies (2008) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, 2008 and was awarded the Crossword Book Prize and the India Plaza Golden Quill Award.

Amitav Ghosh’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages and he has served on the Jury of the Locarno Film Festival (Switzerland) and the Venice Film Festival (2001). Amitav Ghosh’s essays have been published in The New YorkerThe New Republic and The New York Times. His essays have been published by Penguin India (The Imam and the Indian) and Houghton Mifflin USA (Incendiary Circumstances). He has taught in many universities in India and the USA, including Delhi University, Columbia, Queens College and Harvard.  In January 2007 he was awarded the Padma Shri, one of India’s highest honours, by the President of India. In 2010, Amitav Ghosh was awarded honorary doctorates by Queens College, New York, and the Sorbonne, Paris. Along with Margaret Atwood, he was also a joint winner of a Dan David Award for 2010. In 2011 he was awarded the International Grand Prix of the Blue Metropolis Festival in Montreal.

Register here. 

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Douglas Fordham, Mellon Book Talk, "Aquatint Worlds"

March 18, 2022

Virtual | 10:00 am - 11:00 am

Douglas Fordham, Mellon Book Talk, "Aquatint Worlds"

March 18, 2022

Virtual | 10:00 am - 11:00 am


 

As a historian of art and the British empire, Douglas Fordham is interested in a wide array of visual art from the seventeenth century to the present in the Anglophone world. He is a co-editor with Tim Barringer and Geoff Quilley of Art and the British Empire (Manchester University Press, 2007), which helped to place empire at the center of the study of British art. His first monograph, British Art and the Seven Years' War: Allegiance and Autonomy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010) examined the relationship of imperial politics to artistic organization in London in the mid-eighteenth century. His second monograph, Aquatint Worlds: Travel, Print, and Empire (Yale University Press, 2019) considered how the newly discovered medium of aquatint printmaking conditioned the representation and reception of the world beyond Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The book takes a particularly close look at the representation of the cave temples of western India, the indigenous and white settler communities of southern Africa, and the Macartney expedition to Qing China. Artists in each of these locations returned to London to collaborate with a team of printmakers, hand-colorists, booksellers, and distributors to produce some of the most beautiful and innovative picture books of the modern era.

 

Respondent: Tom Young joined the University of Warwick in late 2020 as a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the History of Art Department. Tom’s current research is centred on two projects. The first explores the global history of lithography, with the ambition of writing a book called Lithography and the Modern World. Lithography’s global impact has never previously been charted, despite the technology enabling the first truly international decentralisation of mass media. The book will chart how the technology’s invention catalysed dramatic cultural and political upheavals across the globe, giving rise to modern ideas and institutions. His second project is a book called British Art in India’s ‘Age of Reform’, c.1813–58. This project developed from his PhD research, which examined a collection of previously unstudied prints, drawings, and paintings produced in nineteenth-century India. The book uses these materials to present a new interpretation of the East India Company’s nationalisation. Challenging the established idea that British Parliament brought a ‘rogue’ corporation to heel, it argues instead that a revolution in the artistic worlds of colonial society worked to destabilise the Company’s political legitimacy—supporting the growth of middle classes with alternative ideas about how India should be governed, and undermining Anglo-India’s idiosyncratic politics by better connecting the cultural worlds of the British empire.

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Nomi Dave, Mellon Book Talk, "The Revolution’s Echoes: Music, Politics, and Pleasure in Guinea"

February 25, 2022

Virtual | 10:00 am - 11:00 am

Nomi Dave, Mellon Book Talk, "The Revolution’s Echoes: Music, Politics, and Pleasure in Guinea"

February 25, 2022

Virtual | 10:00 am - 11:00 am

Nomi Dave is an interdisciplinary researcher working across music and sound studies, law, and anthropology. Her work explores the limits and possibilities of voice, music, sound, and silence in political contexts. She is the author of The Revolution’s Echoes: Music, Politics, and Pleasure in Guinea (2019, University of Chicago Press), which considers how authoritarianism becomes meaningful for ordinary people. Through a study of voice and quietness in Guinea, the book explores why musicians and their audiences might choose to support an authoritarian state. The book was awarded the Ruth Stone Prize in 2020 for most distinguished first monograph in ethnomusicology. 

 

Respondent - Anne Meng is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. Her research centers on authoritarian politics and institutions, and game-theoretic approaches to the study of dictatorship. Her book, Constraining Dictatorship, examines how executive constraints become established in dictatorships, particularly within constitutions and presidential cabinets. Dr. Meng also has other work on leadership succession, autocratic parties, and powersharing. She has a regional focus on Sub-Saharan Africa and is interested in finding new and creative ways to collect data on authoritarian institutions. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the British Journal of Political Science, The Journal of Theoretical Politics, Columbia Law Review, and Studies in Comparative International Development.  

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Asian Urbanism Collaborative (AUC) Inaugural Workshops

February 18, 2022

Rotunda Dome Room | 1:00 pm

Asian Urbanism Collaborative (AUC) Inaugural Workshops

February 18, 2022

Rotunda Dome Room | 1:00 pm

AUC Inaugural Workshops
Friday, February 18 – Saturday, February 19, 2022 
Rotunda Dome Room, University of Virginia

 

Events Schedule Overview

Friday, February 18
01:00pm-1:30pm         Introduction
                                                Rotunda Dome Room
01:30pm-4:30pm        Workshop #1: Geopolitics
                                                Rotunda Dome Room
05:00pm-6:30pm        Book Launch and Reception
                                                Naug, 1/F, Campbell Hall

Saturday, February 19
07:30am-08:00am        Coffee
08:00am-11:00am        Workshop #2: Culture
                                                  Rotunda Dome Room
Lunch break
01:00pm-04:00pm      Workshop #3: Ecology
                                                  Rotunda Dome Room
04:00pm-04:30pm      Closing

 

Workshop Themes and Participants

Friday, February 18
 

01:00pm-1:30pm
Introduction
Shiqiao Li and Esther Lorenz
 

01:30pm-4:30pm
Workshop #1: Geopolitics
The neoliberal world order known as the Washington Consensus has been replaced by a different kind of geopolitical reality. How do we characterize today's world, if not a kind of world order? How do nations and cities jostle for influence, power, and sustainability? This session discusses how cities develop and respond to surprising shifts in geopolitical balance in the world, and to new kinds of cultural and economic opportunities in the rapidly changing conditions of technology and trade.

Weiping Wu, Interim Dean, Professor and Director of Urban Planning Program, GSAPP, Columbia University
Peter Rowe, Raymond Garbe Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, GSD, Harvard University
Paul Rabé, Senior Land Expert, IHS Erasmus University Rotterdam, Head of Cities Programs, IIAS
Brantly Womack, Professor Emeritus of Foreign Affairs, Department of Politics, University of Virginia
 

Saturday, February 19
 

08:00am-11:00am
Workshop #2: Culture
The striving for global cultural and political equity spearheaded by postcolonial critique has given us a new awareness of the diversity of cultures. If we acknowledge cultures have indigenous frameworks different from those interpreted through Euro-centric scholarships, how do we understand indigenous frameworks across language and lifeworld divides? This session asks: how does a different kind of understanding of these language and lifeworld divides give us new tools to engage and intervene in cities in different cultures?

Lawrence Chua, Associate Professor, School of Architecture, Syracuse University
Gordon Mathews, Professor, Department of Anthropology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Christian de Pee, Professor, Department of History, University of Michigan
María González Aranguren, Assistant Professor, School of Architecture, University of Virginia
 

01:00pm-04:00pm
Workshop #3: Ecology
Cities account for most of the environmental pollution and most of the energy consumption. Do cultures, geographies, climates, economies, and sustainable life come as a whole package? How do cities in different parts of the world organize themselves in relation to the use of resources through varying levels of urban density and distinctive understanding of individuality and commonality? This session discusses what may be described as composite modalities of cities in relation to a sustainable living environment as the most challenging issue of our time.

Tom Leader, Principal and Founder, TLS Landscape Architecture
Zhongjie Lin, Associate Professor, Department of City and Regional Planning, University of Pennsylvania
Camille Frazier, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Clarkson University
Anne Rademacher, Professor of Environmental Studies, New York University
 

04:00pm-04:30pm   
Closing
Shiqiao Li and Esther Lorenz

Funding:
Buckner W. Clay Endowment for the Humanities, IHGC, UVA
Center for Global Inquiry & Innovation, UVA

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Sarah Nuttall (Witwatersrand), "Futurities" Lecture Series: “Wet Futures: Reading for Rain”

February 17, 2022

Virtual | 12:00- 1:30pm

Sarah Nuttall (Witwatersrand), "Futurities" Lecture Series: “Wet Futures: Reading for Rain”

February 17, 2022

Virtual | 12:00- 1:30pm

Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies and the Director of WISER (Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research) in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is the author of Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Postapartheid; editor of Beautiful/Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics, and co-editor of many books, including Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa, Johannesburg – The Elusive Metropolis and Load Shedding: Writing On and Over the Edge of South Africa. Recent essays include ‘Private Lives and Public Cultures in South Africa’, ‘Mandela’s Mortality’ and ‘Secrecy’s Softwares’. She has for many years taught the Fall semester at Yale and then Duke Universities. From January to May 2016, she was an Oppenheimer Fellow at the Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. For three years Sarah has directed WiSER, one of the largest and most established Institutes of humanities scholarship across the global South.

Reigister here. 

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Kasey Jernigan, Workshop on Digital Storytelling & Indigenous Cultures

November 12, 2021

Kasey Jernigan, Workshop on Digital Storytelling & Indigenous Cultures

November 12, 2021

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“Coasts in Crisis:” A Digital Exhibit of Art After Hurricanes Virtual Launch

November 12, 2021

“Coasts in Crisis:” A Digital Exhibit of Art After Hurricanes Virtual Launch

November 12, 2021

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Book Seminar on South Asian Politics, History, and Culture (Featuring Prathama Banerjee & Rochona Majumdar

November 11, 2021

Book Seminar on South Asian Politics, History, and Culture (Featuring Prathama Banerjee & Rochona Majumdar

November 11, 2021

The seminar will feature talks and a discussion on two recent publications on South Asian political thought, history, and culture by the featured authors.

 

 

Prathama Banerjee, Elementary Aspects of the Political: Histories from the Global South

Duke University Press, 2020

https://www.dukeupress.edu/elementary-aspects-of-the-political

 

In Elementary Aspects of the Political Prathama Banerjee moves beyond postcolonial and decolonial critiques of European political philosophy to rethink modern conceptions of "the political" from the perspective of the global South. Drawing on Indian and Bengali practices and philosophies from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Banerjee identifies four elements of the political: the self, action, the idea, and the people. She examines selfhood in the light of precolonial Indic traditions of renunciation and realpolitik; action in the constitutive tension between traditional conceptions of karma and modern ideas of labor; the idea of equality as it emerges in the dialectic between spirituality and economics; and people in the friction between the structure of the political party and the atmospherics of fiction and theater. Banerjee reasserts the historical specificity of political thought and challenges modern assumptions about the universality, primacy, and self-evidence of the political

 

 

Rochona Majumdar, Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures, Columbia University Press, 2021

http://cup.columbia.edu/book/art-cinema-and-indias-forgotten-futures/9780231201056

 

In this pioneering book, Rochona Majumdar examines key works of Indian art cinema to demonstrate how film emerged as a mode of doing history and that, in so doing, it anticipated some of the most influential insights of postcolonial thought. Majumdar details how filmmakers as well as a host of film societies and publications sought to foster a new cinematic culture for the new nation, fueled by enthusiasm for a future of progress and development. Good films would help make good citizens: art cinema would not only earn global prestige but also shape discerning individuals capable of exercising aesthetic and political judgment. During the 1960s, however, Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, and Ritwik Ghatak—the leading figures of Indian art cinema—became disillusioned with the belief that film was integral to national development. Instead, Majumdar contends, their works captured the unresolvable contradictions of the postcolonial present, which pointed toward possible, yet unrealized futures.

 

Prathama Banerjee is Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, India, and author of Politics of Time: "Primitives" and History-Writing in a Colonial Society (2006) and Elementary Aspects of the Political: Histories from the Global South (2020).

 

Rochona Majumdar is Associate Professor in the Departments of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal (2009), Writing Postcolonial History (2010), and Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures (2021).

 

Aswin Punathambekar is Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. He is the author of From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry (2013), co-author of Media Industry Studies (2020), and co-editor of Global Bollywood (2008), Television at Large in South Asia (2013), and Global Digital Cultures: Perspectives from South Asia (2019). 

 

Samhita Sunya is Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Sirens of Modernity: World Cinema Via Bombay (in press,). Her interests span world film history, informal practices of media distribution across South / West Asia and the Indian Ocean, and intersections of audio-visual media and literary forms.

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Ed Welch (University of Aberdeen), “Spatial Planning's Time Machine: Spaces of Speed in a Modernized France”

November 5, 2021

Webinar | 10:00 am

Ed Welch (University of Aberdeen), “Spatial Planning's Time Machine: Spaces of Speed in a Modernized France”

November 5, 2021

Webinar | 10:00 am

Spatial Planning's Time Machine: Spaces of Speed in a Modernized France

Edward Welch, University of Aberdeen

Register here

 

 

During the presidency of Charles de Gaulle (1958-1969), France’s look and feel began to be transformed by an extensive programme of spatial planning and modernization (aménagement du territoire). Unfolding over the subsequent decades, aménagement du territoire produced New Towns, holiday resorts, motorways, airports, rapid rail networks and other forms of infrastructure. Yet while modernized space was the most obvious outcome of their work, France’s aménageurs were perhaps even more preoccupied with time. More specifically, they were obsessed with the future. Even, on occasion, they gave the impression that planning was somehow from the future.

 

Writing in 1965, Oliver Guichard, director of the newly created DATAR spatial planning agency, suggested that ‘l’aménagement ne vit pas dans l’époque présent: il doit toujours la devancer, projeter sur l’avenir’ [spatial planning doesn’t live in the present: it must always be one step ahead, projecting into the future]. Being ahead of its time, planning’s job was to return to the present with insights from the future, and use them to propel the country towards its destiny. Guichard’s comment comes in his book Aménager la France, and is a moment of time-travelling brio in an otherwise relatively sober account of the aims and requirements of French spatial planning. It is also a glimpse of some of the more striking philosophies of time and history lurking beneath the planners’ administrative and technical discourse. In particular, it betrays the influence of the philosopher Gaston Berger, whose notion of la prospective as anticipatory thinking would guide their work during the 1960s and early 1970s.

 

This paper explores how France’s post-war spatial planners think about and negotiate time, and the complexities which emerge as they do so. At stake is their understanding of time, speed and acceleration, as well as the sorts of spaces they create, and how those spaces transform the lived experience of time. One of the key aims of aménagement was to improve circulation, mobility and productivity by means of infrastructure. Spatial planning thus became a form of machine designed to shrink the French hexagon by engineering time-space compression, and an example of how technocratic states sustained the ‘dromocratic revolution’ diagnosed by Paul Virilio (1977) as the driving force of western civilization. One of its most notable and visible outcomes was the development of France’s system of motorways (autoroutes). In order to think about the nature and consequences of modernized France’s infrastructure spaces, the paper explores the presence of motorways in some French texts and films, including Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop’s Les Autonautes de la cosmoroute (1983) and Agnès Varda’s Sans toit ni loi (1985), considering how they at once depict and interrogate the peculiar temporalities and modes of being motorways bring with them.

 

 

Biography

Edward Welch is Carnegie Professor of French at the University of Aberdeen. His research explores modernization, space, and change in post-war France, and their representation in literary and visual culture. Publications include France in Flux: Space, Territory and Contemporary Culture, co-edited with Ari Blatt (Liverpool University Press, 2019); Contesting Views: The Visual Economy of France and Algeria, co-authored with Joseph McGonagle (Liverpool University Press, 2013); and François Mauriac: The Making of an Intellectual (Rodopi, 2006). He is currently completing a book on spatial planning and modernization, provisionally entitled Making Space in Post-war France.

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Professor China Scherz Manuscript Workshop

October 22, 2021

Wilson Hall 142 |

Professor China Scherz Manuscript Workshop

October 22, 2021

Wilson Hall 142 |

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