Events Archive

Kasey Jernigan, Workshop on Digital Storytelling & Indigenous Cultures

November 12, 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.

Professor China Scherz Manuscript Workshop

October 22, 2021

Coastal Futures Festival Symposium

October 15, 2021

The Coastal Futures Conservatory at the University of Virginia presents a symposium on sonification and expression of data and dreams, mediating and meditating upon coastal futures.

Friday, October 15, 2021, 8pm Eastern US Time (EDT)

The symposium is on line and open to the public.

https://virginia.zoom.us/j/91896921556?pwd=VkRrQzlEcXovdEd2M3ZGVnNURnNSZz09

Meeting ID: 918 9692 1556

Passcode: 152452

The Coastal Futures Conservatory at the University of Virginia presents a symposium featuring Chris Chafe & Greg Niemeyer, Joyce To & Louis Pena, Jeremy Muller, and the EcoSono Ensemble. The symposium will center around issues of coastal futures at play in The Metered Tide, a work by Chris Chafe and Greg Niemeyer using sonification of the California Coast. Chafe and Niemeyer will discuss sonification and their collaborative work on sea level rise, and EcoSono Ensemble will perform a new version of the piece. 

In addition, Joyce To and Louis Pena from Australia will perform Chorale, a piece based on coral reef data. We will welcome reflections from a team of scholars who will have just completed a three-day field residency at the VCR. 

The symposium will begin and end with movements from Matthew Burtner’s Glisten of Places, a contemplative piece for sonified, geotagged sites and field recordings performed by percussionist, Jeremy Muller.

Stealing time: photographs and the long inception of colonialism in southern Angola - Webinar led by Patricia Hayes

September 23, 2021

Register Here

‘Stealing Time’ is an attempt to put the teleologies of colonization and progress on hold, to use the space-time compressions of photographs to pause and search for something else. It probes whether new modes of reading photographs might be able to connect us in unexpectedly rich ways with Africa’s more distant past. It explores the interpenetration of ‘sources’ and the durability of things surfacing in photographs that come from more remote histories. Periods of early encounter and the initiation of colonial rule are obviously dense in this regard but tend to be treated as overwhelmingly colonial and going in a certain temporal direction, inevitably foreclosing other eras. The either/or terminology of historical periodization (precolonial/colonial) confines us to a linear conception of time that shuts down other possibilities.

This lecture will concentrate on two separate photographic images from the Cuvelai floodplain located in what is now southern Angola and northern Namibia. In the early twentieth century it was a contested region between Portugal, Germany, several sizeable African kingdoms and later during World War 1, South Africa. The first photograph originates from an album of the Portuguese officer Velloso de Castro who participated in the 1907 military campaign against Cuamato. The second photograph is one of several group portraits emanating from the first official South African tour to Ovamboland in 1915 led by Major Pritchard. Both these images operate as a kind of prism to think about what might have converged in these spaces at that time, and the possible genealogies behind them. Given the ‘micro-levels at which we encounter the past’ through photographs, as well as the foreshortening of history that occurs by not taking ‘the precolonial’ seriously, can such photos help us to think about time differently and expand our spatial sense of Africa’s deeper pasts?  

Patricia Hayes is currently the NRF SARChI Chair in Visual History & Theory at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape. Her research background is in African history, and she engages extensively with photographic archives and their methodological challenges to bring together history and aesthetics. She is co-editor of the volume Ambivalent. Photography and Visibility in African History (2019), and the special issue on ‘Other Lives of the Image’ of the journal Kronos (2020).

"The Cambridge History of World Literature" Launch Event w/ Debjani Ganguly, Francesca Orsini, Jahan Ramazani, and B. Venkat Mani

May 27, 2021

On May 27th @ 4-5 pm BST and 11-12 pm EST, Please join us for a virtual launch event for the forthcoming The Cambridge History of World Literature, edited by Debjani Ganguly. Debjani Ganguly will be on a panel alongside Francesca Orsini, Jahan Ramazani, and B. Venkat Mani. 

Debjani Ganguly is Professor of English and Director of the Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures at the University of Virginia. She works in the fields of world literature, postcolonial studies and South Asian studies. Her research interests include novel studies, theories of world literature, global Anglophone literatures, technologies of war and violence, literature and human rights, planetary humanities, caste and dalit studies, and Indian Ocean literary worlds.

Francesca Orsini is a literary historian at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies working primarily with Hindi and Urdu materials and interested in exploring how multilingualism worked and continues to work within the literary cultures of South Asia. 

Jahan Ramazani is University Professor and Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of a number of books of criticism on poetry, including Poetry in a Global Age (2020) and Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres (2013).

B. Venkat Mani is Professor of German at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is also affiliated with the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture and the Institute for Regional and International Studies.

Register here

Trans-National Ties: Formation Between the Episcopal Mission of Hankow and the Chinese Bible Church of Greater Boston (w/ Natasha Heller & Emily Yen)

May 4, 2021

While there is extensive scholarship on protestant missions in China prior to 1950 and the emergence of Chinese American protestant churches in the United States during the second half of the 20th Century, there is a limited understanding of the mechanisms that allowed the former to shape the growth of the latter.  There is little empirical research on the relationships between the recalled missionaries in China and the Chinese student migrants fleeing to the United States during the McCarthy Era. This case study traces how the social ties formed between a missionary and congregants at the Episcopal Mission of Hankow shaped the emergence of the Chinese Bible Church of Greater Boston.  These pre-migration ties significantly shaped the Chinese Christian community in Boston and complicate our understanding of the mechanisms facilitating Boston’s Quiet Revival and Chinese American church planting.  More broadly, this case study provides insight into how recalled missionaries can shape immigrant communities.

Register here

Natasha Heller studies Chinese Buddhism in the context of cultural and intellectual history. Her research includes both the pre-modern period (10th through 14th c.) and the contemporary era. Heller's study of an eminent monk of the Yuan dynasty, Illusory Abiding: The Cultural Construction of the Chan Monk Zhongfeng Mingben, was published by Harvard University Asia Center in 2014.  This monograph examines Mingben’s use of poetry, calligraphy, and gong’an commentary in the context of his distinctive Chan (Zen) teachings. Heller’s current book project concerns picture books published by Buddhist organizations in Taiwan, and how such children’s fiction not only teaches young people about the Buddhist tradition, but also addresses how to relate to clergy, family members, and society. She has published in journals such as History of Religions, the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, and Material Religion.

Emily H. A. Yen is a Visiting Faculty Scholar at the Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures at the University of Virginia. She earned a doctorate in Sociology at UCLA and was Kelter Postdoctoral Fellow in Urban Studies at Trinity College.

Teaching the 'Long' 18th Century

April 23, 2021

Humanities Week 2021: UVA Sustainability

April 22, 2021

Join Humanities Week as we partner with UVA Sustainability on Earth Day to explore normalcy in the environment.

Watershed Clean-Up
1-3PM // Meadow Creek and Pollock's Branch​

Join The Nature Conservancy and Charlottesville Parks for an Earth Day Celebration! You will be helping to clean up the watershed around Meadow Creek and Pollock's Branch to prevent plastic pollution from reaching the Chesapeake Bay. Volunteers must read and sign our COVID field guidelines and health screening questions. Guidelines include having a mask readily accessible if working less than 6' apart, bringing hand sanitizer and confirming you have health insurance. Email caitlin.embly@tnc.org for more information.
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Leave No Trace Awareness Workshop
6-7PM // Zoom
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Learn the 7 principles of Leave No Trace during this Awareness Workshop! Participants will learn how to hike, camp, and explore outside in a way that leaves a minimal impact. We will also touch on the upcoming City Nature Challenge and how to participate while leaving no trace.
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Zoom registration link

SUN SiNG in Place Earth Day Concert
7-8PM // Livestreamed on Vimeo, Youtube, and Facebook
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Join ARTivism Virginia and the SUN SiNG Collective for #EarthDay2021 at 7:00PM Eastern for one hour of music, spoken word, and action opportunities as we stay connected in resistance to new fossil fuel infrastructure, united in our fights for environmental justice, and together in solidarity for a livable future! Streaming live on:

Vimeo: https://www.vimeo.com/artivismvirginia 
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/artivismvirginia 
And Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/artivismvirginia

Humanities Week 2021: PechaKucha Presentation Night

April 21, 2021

Join Humanities Week in our inaugural PechaKucha night! PechaKucha (Japanese for “chit chat”) is the world’s fastest-growing storytelling platform, used by millions around the globe. Watch a selection of PechaKucha presentations by UVA students for an evening of engaging and informational fun.

Prizes available for submissions! Submit your own PechaKucha video below for a chance to win!
 

Submission link

Music and Mimesis: A Roundtable Discussion

April 20, 2021

Music and Mimesis: A Roundtable Discussion 

Register here

Imitation, or mimesis, may be the glue that binds culture, but we have yet to take the full measure of its forms, processes, and effects. This two-hour session is devoted to exploring mimesis within the realm of music—a line of inquiry that is still in its early stages. How does mimesis manifest itself within music? What makes musical mimesis important to study? How does it relate to other instances of mimesis in culture? We will broach these and other questions in a roundtable discussion moderated by Michael Puri (UVa), and featuring Arnie Cox (Oberlin College), Roger Mathew Grant (Wesleyan University), and Daniel Villegas Vélez (KU Leuven).  

Humanities Week 2021: The Story of Plastic Film Screening

April 20, 2021

Register here