Events Archive
Mellon Fellows Seminar - Njelle Hamilton, "The Time is Now: Ecocritical Futures and Creolized Time Travel in Rita Indiana's Tentacle"
October 11, 2019
Wilson Hall 142 | 10:30 am - 12:00 pmMellon Fellows Seminar - Njelle Hamilton, "The Time is Now: Ecocritical Futures and Creolized Time Travel in Rita Indiana's Tentacle"
October 11, 2019
Wilson Hall 142 | 10:30 am - 12:00 pmNjelle W. Hamilton is Assistant Professor in the departments of English and African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. She specializes in 20th and 21st century Caribbean literary and cultural studies, especially the impact of orality, music, and trauma on the Caribbean postcolonial novel. Her first monograph, Phonographic Memories: Popular Music and the Contemporary Caribbean Novel (Rutgers, 2019), investigates how Caribbean subjects turn to nation music when personal and cultural memory have been impacted by time, travel, or trauma. Her current project, tentatively titled Caribbean Chronotropes: The Politics, Physics, and Poetics of Time in Contemporary Fiction, reads recent time-bending novels through the lens of physics, phenomenology, and Caribbean theory. She serves on the editorial board of Caribbean in Transit: An Arts Journal, and her essays on sound studies and trauma theory have appeared in Anthurium, Journal of West Indian Literature, Critical Perspectives on Indo-Caribbean Women’s Literature, Wasafiri, and SX Salon.
Jane Taylor, IHGC Distinguished Visitor Public Lecture, "Newes from the Dead"
October 4, 2019
Bryan Hall Faculty Lounge | 4:00 pm - 5:30 pmJane Taylor, IHGC Distinguished Visitor Public Lecture, "Newes from the Dead"
October 4, 2019
Bryan Hall Faculty Lounge | 4:00 pm - 5:30 pmIHGC Distinguished Visitor Public Lecture
Jane Taylor
Andrew W Mellon Chair of Aesthetic Theory and Material Performance
University of Western Cape
October 4
4.00-5.30pm
Faculty Lounge
Bryan Hall
“Newes from the Dead”
Abstract: An unnatural “Moment in the History of Natural Philosophy.” In 1650, a young woman was hanged in Oxford, England, for infanticide, and her body was given to the anatomists at the University for an anatomy lesson which was also a lesson in law, power, and patriarchy. This paper explores the remarkable circumstances surrounding her death. In 2011, following a commission from Renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt, Professor Taylor staged a theater work arising from this moment of history, in order to conceptualize, through performance, the relation between natural history, puppetry arts and the materiality of being. Professor Taylor’s talk will be based on her experience of this theatrical collaboration and larger questions about the history of biomedical sciences and changing attitudes to life, mortality, the infant and discourses on the woman’s body.
Bio: Professor Jane Taylor is Andrew W Mellon Chair of Aesthetic Theory and Material Performance at the University of Western Cape, South Africa. She has held numerous visiting positions at Harvard, Chicago, Cambridge, Leeds and elsewhere. A distinguished playwright, creative writer and scholar of performance theory, Professor Taylor leads several interdisciplinary projects on shifting conceptions of the human - biomedical, informatic, and geological - under conditions of late modernity. She engages with arts practitioners across visual representation and performance, activating a consideration of the ways in which the aesthetic defines and delimits the conditions of human existence. She has written several plays for puppets, working with artist William Kentridge and the Handspring Puppet Company, as well as a recent puppet play for Renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt – a work dealing with the early history of neurology. She has written a novel, The Transplant Men (2009), based on the life of Dr Christiaan Barnard, who performed the world’s first heart transplant surgery. She has recently published a monograph on William Kentridge’s production of The Nose, for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This study explores subject/object relations as well as aesthetic experiments associated with Soviet Constructionism. While at UVA, Professor Taylor will collaborate on a new IHGC Mellon Lab on Performance Cultures in the Global South.
Cinema, Architecture, Art: A Festival of Documentaries from India @ UVA
October 2, 2019
Various | 6:00 PMCinema, Architecture, Art: A Festival of Documentaries from India @ UVA
October 2, 2019
Various | 6:00 PM
Art and Confrontation in the Americas: An International Symposium
September 29, 2019
Various | 7:00 PMArt and Confrontation in the Americas: An International Symposium
September 29, 2019
Various | 7:00 PMAn International Symposium and Conversation with Colombian artist Juan Manuel Echavarria and members of his Fundación Puntos de Encuentro
This event seeks to provide Charlottesville and the University of Virginia with a space to reflect on how art can be at once a mode of confrontation and a vehicle of reconciliation. What aesthetic practices have artists, activists and intellectuals used to critique violence and prefigure better futures? When and where does confrontation art fuel societal change or, conversely, question its own utility? Defining “art” broadly to include film, literature, music, visual culture and performance, the UVA Symposium on Art and Confrontation in the Americas / Las Américas provides a forum for discussing the intersections between art, civic life and activism throughout the hemisphere.
Keynote speakers Juan Manuel Echavarría, Fernando Grisalez and Gabriel Ossa will open the symposium on Sunday, September 29 at 7:00pm with a discussion of their artistic work and activism in Colombia. Echavarría, an artist committed to confronting the difficult realities of a country that has experienced decades of civil war, uses visual art to recover memory and make visible experiences that have been rendered invisible by the normalization of violence. Politically, Echavarría’s art intervenes in the contradictory space between official peace narratives and the violent realities that still affect many parts of Colombia, seeking ultimately to reconstruct a social body dismembered by war. Through his non-profit foundation Fundación Puntos de Encuentro, Echavarría also produces collective projects in which he steps aside as an individual creative agent to let others tell their stories and shape how the Colombian conflict is perceived in broader society.
The keynote remarks will be followed by two days of symposium presentations. Key points of discussion include the nature of confrontation; public art and memory; art in contentious spaces; and the various ways in which artistic interventions may “ripple into extra-artistic institutions and practices” (Sommer 2014, 7). By engaging with these issues, the symposium and visiting artist activities intend to place artists, activists and scholars from the US and Latin America in dialogue with the Charlottesville community.
See full details here.
Main Events
Symposium Opening and Reception:
“Silencios” by Juan Manuel Echevarria, Visiting Artist
Date: Sunday, Sept. 29, 7:00 pm.
Where: The Graduate Hotel Ballroom.
1309 W Main St, Charlottesville, VA 22903
The International Symposium
View full schedule
Date: Monday, Sept. 30, starts at 9:30 am
Date: Tuesday, Oct. 1, starts at 9:30 am
Where: Auditorium of the Harrison Institute/Small Special Collections Library
160 McCormick Rd, Charlottesville, VA 22904
Art Exhibition: Silencios: a photographic essay by Juan Manuel Echavarria
Monday, Sept 30 – October 30, 2019
Exhibition Opening and Reception: A conversation with Juan Manuel Echavarria, Fernando Grisalez and Gabriel Ossa.
Date: Monday, Sept. 30, 6:30 pm
Where: Nau Hall, South Lawn Commons
1540 Jefferson Park Ave, Charlottesville, VA 22904
Community Activities: Film screening of Bocas de Ceniza (Mouths of Ash)
Bocas de Ceniza (Mouths of Ash) 18:15 minutes. (Spanish with English subtitles)
Colombian artist Fernando Grisalez lead a conversation about this Colombian film.
Date: Wednesday, Oct.2 at 6:00 pm
Where: Vinegar Hill Center
200 W Main St, Charlottesville, VA 22902
Organizers:
This event is co-organized by:
Herbert (Tico) Braun (History)
Federico Cuatlacuatl (Studio Art)
Mona Kasra (Drama)
Lydia Moyer (Studio Art)
Mathilda Shepard (Spanish)
Lucie Stylianopoulous (Art and Indigenous Studies Librarian)
Miguel Valladares-Llata (Latin American Research Librarian)
Sponsors:
We thank the following centers and departments for supporting us:
UVA Arts Council: Enriching the Arts on Grounds.
University of Virginia Library.
Institute of the Humanities & Global Cultures (IHGC) Buckner W. Clay Endowment.
Center for Global Inquiry & Innovation (CGII)
UVA McIntire Department of Art.
UVA Department of Religious Studies
The Spanish Pacific
September 27, 2019
Wilson Hall 142 | 9:30 am - 5:00 pmThe Spanish Pacific
September 27, 2019
Wilson Hall 142 | 9:30 am - 5:00 pm9:00am – Continental Breakfast
9:30am – First Conversation – What is the Early Modern Spanish Pacific (EMSP)?
- Ricardo Padrón – Historical Introduction
- Participants – What are the geographical and temporal contours of the EMSP? Why not “the colonial Philippines”? How does East Asia fit in? How does colonial America fit in? Is this primarily an economic space? A political one? A cultural one?
10:45am – Coffee Break
11:00am – Second Conversation – How do we study the EMSP?
- Vincent Rafael – Opportunities, Challenges, To-Do List
- What are the relevant archives, journals, methods? What opportunities are there for cross-disciplinary work? Obstacles to the same?
12:15pm – Lunch with speakers and all attendees
1:30pm – Third Conversation – Regional Foci
- What are the unique challenges and opportunities presented by studying particular geographical foci (or studying the EMSP from the perspective of these foci?)
- The Philippines – Jody Blanco
- Spanish America – Dana Leibsohn
- East & Southeast Asia
2:45pm – Break
3:00pm – The EMSP and the Pacific Today
-
Introduction – Paula Park
- What is the relationship between the EMSP and the Pacific Rim today? Between the study of the EMSP and Pacific or Pacific Rim Studies? How is this particular past relevant to our understanding of the so-called “Pacific Century”? Paula Park leads off.
Burning the Library of Life: Species Extinction and the Humanities
September 26, 2019
Harrison Small Auditorium | 4:30 pmBurning the Library of Life: Species Extinction and the Humanities
September 26, 2019
Harrison Small Auditorium | 4:30 pmMany scientists conclude the current precipitous decline in global biodiversity and the thousand-fold increase in the rate of species extinction needs to be understood as marking the planet’s sixth era of mass extinction, but the first such event in which humans have played the primary role. This urgent, global and contemporary crisis is often described not only as the destruction of animals and plants but also as the destruction of knowledge, as “burning the library of life.”
This two-day symposium on Species Extinction and the Humanities will feature interdisciplinary humanities scholarship and public-facing research addressing this emerging issue from the perspectives of environmental humanities, literary and cultural studies, the history of science, native studies, conservation, sound ecology, archival studies, and the visual arts and media. Its theme is the challenge manmade extinction poses to knowledge: what we do and don’t know about the biodiversity crisis, the forms, genres and media that produce knowledge and their potential limits to document the biological violence wrought by imperialisms, globalization and development, as well as questions of the preservation of knowledge about the forms of life we are losing – the technological and material formats that preserve and record biodiversity, and their fragility.
Keynote by Ursula K. Heise, English Department and Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, UCLA (Sept 26 at 4:30pm)
The symposium is sponsored by the Institute of Humanities and Global Cultures, the Page-Barbour Awards, Environmental Humanities at UVA and the Department of English.
Bridging Science, Art, and Community in the New Arctic: A Multi-Day Symposium
September 23, 2019
Pavilion VII | 9:00 amBridging Science, Art, and Community in the New Arctic: A Multi-Day Symposium
September 23, 2019
Pavilion VII | 9:00 amThe Bridging Science, Art, and Community in the New Arctic will bring together researchers, students, community representatives, and policymakers from Alaska to facilitate knowledge exchange and catalyze a common interest in the future of the Arctic, in a setting that emphasizes creative collaborations and co-production of knowledge among scientists, designers, artists, and residents.
This three-day event starts with a Symposium on 9/23 with invited speakers presenting their recent Arctic research, thematically organized into three sessions: “Land, Coasts, and Ocean,” “Infrastructure,” and “Community.”
On 9/24, four themes (Land, Coasts/Ocean, Infrastructure, and Community) will be revisited in the format of interactive panel discussions, with each session topic facilitating exchange between Arctic scholars and stakeholders. There will also be a lunchtime poster session.
On 9/25, there will be an eco-acoustics workshop. A final synthesis discussion will seek to develop a set of guidelines for community-oriented research, and identify new forms of multidisciplinary collaborations in the Arctic.
The presentations and discussions will be complemented in the evenings of 9/23 and 9/24 with an eco-acoustics performance, and an art exhibition and reception, respectively.
Register here.
Manners and Civility in Practice with Amy Olberding (University of Oklahoma)
September 23, 2019
The Gibson Room, Cocke Hall | 4:00PM - 6:00PMManners and Civility in Practice with Amy Olberding (University of Oklahoma)
September 23, 2019
The Gibson Room, Cocke Hall | 4:00PM - 6:00PMAn event in the Asian Cosmopolitanisms Lecture Series
What does it mean to be civil or well-mannered? The early Confucians suggest that it involves both patterns of conduct and patterns of mind. The account the Confucians offer is different from the usual accounts of civility we most often hear, suggesting a far more robust connection between civility and personal well being and thriving social relations. This talk will canvass those parts of Confucian ethics most promising in our own age, looking at what it might mean to cultivate more robust forms of civility, both what we would need to do and how this would influence how we think.
Coastal Futures Conservatory Fall Festival, September 19-25
September 19, 2019
Various Locations | 12:00 PMCoastal Futures Conservatory Fall Festival, September 19-25
September 19, 2019
Various Locations | 12:00 PMThe Coastal Futures Festival is an environmental arts festival created by UVA’s Coastal Futures Conservatory (http://www.coastalconservatory.org), a collaboration between artists, humanities scholars, and scientists with the Virginia Coastal Reserve, a long-term ecological research site supported by the National Science Foundation. Through various forms of listening, the Conservatory integrates arts and humanities into the scientific investigation of coastal change in order to deepen understanding and stimulate imaginations. The Coastal Futures Festival is presented in collaboration with UVA’s Resilience Institute, the Virginia Coast Reserve long-term ecological research station, the Department of Music, and the Institute for the Humanities and Global Cultures. The Festival opens on September 19th with an arts exhibit that responds to Caribbean coasts in crisis. On September 21, it moves to the Eastern Shore for the opening of a sound art exhibition at the Barrier Islands Center in Machipongo, VA. The Festival returns to UVA for talks and performances on Monday, September 23, culminating in a concert featuring Grammy and MacArthur Award-winning ensemble Eighth Blackbird, and a keynote address by ecoacoustic sound artist Leah Barclay on September 25th. Featured residents include environmental philosopher Michael Nelson, Leah Barclay, UVA alumnus and composer Erik DeLuca, Arctic scientist Christina Bonsell, and Eighth Blackbird. In addition to bringing these distinguished guests to UVA, the festival showcases work by UVA faculty, students and alumni whose interdisciplinary research focuses on sound and coastal environments. Through a series of performances, talks, installations, and collaborative work sessions, the Coastal Futures Festival brings together art, film, and multimedia music that represents global issues such as coastal erosion, sea level rise, and melting ice along with the attendant impacts on human and non-human habitats.
Thursday, September 19th
Coasts in Crisis: Art and Conversation After Recent Hurricanes
Hurricane María and the Puerto Rican Art Museum
12:00-1:30 Hotel A, Global Grounds
Sandra Cintrón, Chief Registrar and Collections Manager of the Fralin Museum will speak about her experience during Hurricane Maria as a staff member at the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico. This event is free and open to all, but RSVP is required.
4:00 pm Brooks Hall Commons
Why do the arts matter after a hurricane? In a time of rising sea levels and global climate change, the answer to this question has never been more important. This kick-off event of the Coastal Futures Fall Festival will offer creative ways of addressing environmental disaster by bringing together live music, poetry, photography, painting, and installation art about recent hurricanes from the U.S. South and the Caribbean. The participating artists will perform, display and discuss their work forged out of the experiences common to climate refugees and hurricane survivors: homelessness, forced migration, family separation, food insecurity, and living without electricity or running water. Works by artists from the U.S. South and Greater Caribbean including David Berg (St. Croix, Virgin Islands), Sally Binard (Florida/ Haiti), Jo Cosme (Puerto Rico/ Seattle), Nicole Delgado (Puerto Rico), Alfonso Fuentes (Puerto Rico), and Sarabel Santos Negrón (Puerto Rico).
Friday, September 20th
“ShoreLine” Interactive Documentary Opening, with filmmaker Liz Miller
10:00 am Clark Hall Mural Room
The Shore Line, a collaborative interactive documentary project, is a collection of dynamic maps, visualizations, soundscape and over 40 videos featuring individuals who are confronting the threats of unsustainable development and extreme weather with persistence and ingenuity. Described as “a storybook for the future,” The Shore Line conveys ways that 43 people, living in the urban cities and remote islands of nine countries, have confronted the climate impacts of rising seas and violent storms. By navigating films, interactive maps, databases, and chapters, The Shore Line users learn about the innovative ways that people have managed the effects of climate change. They can navigate by tags, including strategy toolkits, country, threat, and language. Users can also navigate by occupation — activist, architect, artist, biologist, communication, and so forth — this feature allows The Shore Line to locate ways that they might contribute to their own communities based on their own particular skills and talents.
Elizabeth (Liz ) Miller is a documentary maker and professorwho uses collaboration and interactivity as a way to connect personal stories to larger timely social issues. Liz is the co-founder of the Concordia Documentary Centre and has served on the board of the International Association of Women in Television and Radio. She has directed award-winning documentaries including – The Shore Line (2017), En la casa (2013), Hands-on (2014) and The Water Front (2008). She is the co-author of has published several articles and book chapters on collaborative and interactive documentaries. http://redlizardmedia.com
Saturday, September 21st
Listening for Coastal Futures: Sounding Science Opening Reception
4:00-6:00 pm Barrier Islands Center (Machipongo, VA)
This event features sound-art from musicians working with scientists to understand coastal change. Through individual listening stations, the exhibit features field recordings, data sonifications, and eco-acoustic compositions. Listeners can hear the Eastern Shore anew, and also experience the sounds of coastal change in Australia and the Arctic. Exhibit remains open through December.
Monday, September 23rd
“Land, Coasts, Oceans” talks and presentations on the Arctic
8:30 Coffee and introductory remarks
09:00-12:00 Arctic Bridges Session I: Land, Coasts, and Oceans
12:00-13:30: Lunch
Coastal Futures Conservatory Presentations and Performances
2:00-4:00 pm Pan-University Institute (1400 University Ave)
The Coastal Futures Conservatory integrates arts and humanities into the investigation of coastal change. Conservatory researchers work with scientists at the Virginia Coast Reserve and with scientists working in other parts of the world. The Conservatory brings the arts and humanities into conversation with the sciences in order to open new ways to listen to and experience the dynamics reshaping coasts. In doing so, we hope to stimulate imagination and deepen public understanding. This lab session features keynotes by Michael Nelson and Erik DeLuca.
Coastal Futures Concert
8:00 pm, Old Cabell Hall
Eighth Blackbird with Rivanna String Quartet
Music by Leah Barclay, Lemon Guo, Matthew Burtner, Peter Swendsen, Fjiola Evans, John Cage, Christopher Luna-Mega, Jonathan Holland
Wednesday, September 25th
Leah Barclay Keynote Presentation on Underwater Ecoacoustics
2:00 pm, VCCM B11, Old Cabell Hall
Dr. Leah Barclay is an Australian sound artist, composer and researcher working at the intersection of art, science and technology. She specialises in electroacoustic music, acoustic ecology and emerging fields of biology exploring environmental patterns and changes through sound. Her sonic environments draw attention to changing climates and fragile ecosystems; the works are realised through live performances, interactive installations and site-specific interventions, and often draw on environmental field recordings, data sonification, live streams and immersive sound diffusion. Her work has been commissioned, performed and exhibited to wide acclaim across Australia, New Zealand, Canada, USA, Peru, Colombia, Europe, India, South Africa, China and Korea by organisations including UNESCO, Ear to the Earth, Streaming Museum, Al Gore’s Climate Reality and the IUCN. She has been the recipient of numerous awards and has directed and curated interdisciplinary projects across the Asia-Pacific and USA.
Coasts in Crisis: Art & Conversation After Recent Hurricanes
September 19, 2019
Brooks Hall Commons | 12:00 PM - 1:30 PMCoasts in Crisis: Art & Conversation After Recent Hurricanes
September 19, 2019
Brooks Hall Commons | 12:00 PM - 1:30 PMThursday, September 19th at 4:00 pm
Brooks Hall Commons
Why do the arts matter after a hurricane? In a time of rising sea levels and global climate change, the answer to this question has never been more important. This kick-off event for the Coastal Conservatory Festival will offer creative ways of addressing environmental disaster by bringing together live music, poetry, photography, painting, and installation art about recent hurricanes from the U.S. South and the Caribbean. The participating artists will perform, display and discuss their work forged out of the experiences common to hurricane survivors: homelessness, forced migration, family separation, food insecurity, and living without electricity or running water.
Works by artists from the U.S. South and Greater Caribbean, including: David Berg, Sally Binard, Jo Cosme, Nicole Delgado, Alfonso Fuentes, and Sarabel Santos-Negrón.
Mellon Fellows Seminar - Erik Linstrum, "Age of Emergency: Living with Violence at the End of Empire"
September 13, 2019
Wilson Hall 142 | 10:30 am - 12:00 pmMellon Fellows Seminar - Erik Linstrum, "Age of Emergency: Living with Violence at the End of Empire"
September 13, 2019
Wilson Hall 142 | 10:30 am - 12:00 pmErik Linstrum is a historian of modern Britain in its imperial and global contexts. His research explores the politics of knowledge and the circulation of information, with particular interests in science and technology, war and violence, and the long history of decolonization. His first book, Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire, won the George Louis Beer Prize of the American Historical Association for the best book of the year in European international history. He is currently writing a history of knowledge about colonial violence in post-1945 Britain. Tentatively titled Age of Emergency, it traces reports of atrocities in Malaya, Kenya, and Cyprus as they circulated through British society: from the anticolonial left to the unabashedly imperialist right, from Fleet Street to the Church of England, from veterans' associations to the British Red Cross, from BBC teleplays to the West End theater scene.
Mellon Fellows Symposium (Matthew Hedstrom and Jennifer Rubenstein)
April 19, 2019
Wilson Hall 142 | 10:30 amMellon Fellows Symposium (Matthew Hedstrom and Jennifer Rubenstein)
April 19, 2019
Wilson Hall 142 | 10:30 am
10.30-11.30am
Jennifer Rubenstein, Associate Professor, Department of Politics
"Urgency Without Emergency? Emergency Politics and Its Alternatives"
11.30am-12.30pm
Matthew Hedstrom, Associate Professor, Religious Studies and American Studies
"Spiritual Cosmopolitanism: The United Nations in US Religious Politics"
12.30-1.00pm - Lunch
Jennifer Rubenstein is an associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia specializing in political theory. Her interests include the political role and ethical responsibilities of non-governmental organizations; global justice; non-ideal theory; democratic theory (especially theories of non-electoral representation and advocacy that attend to global inequalities); theories of office, and the role of imagination and experience in politics. She has published or forthcoming articles in Journal of Politics, Journal of Political Philosophy, Journal of Social Philosophy, and the British Journal of Political Science, as well as chapters in several edited volumes. She is currently finishing a book manuscript about the political ethics of international non-governmental humanitarian organizations, entitled Between Samaritans and States: the Political Ethics of Humanitarian INGOs. Before coming to UVa she was the Cotsen-Link post-doctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows at Princeton University. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago.
Matthew Hedstrom teaches in the Department of Religious Studies and the Program in American Studies at the University of Virginia. As a historian he specializes in religion and culture in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His central questions probe the intersections of American modernity and Protestant and post-Protestant religious modernity in the United States. He also has longstanding and ongoing interests in the history of the book, especially as it applies to American religious history. Race, religion and psychology, the history of spirituality, mass culture, religious liberalism, cosmopolitanism and internationalism all figure into hisresearch and teaching.
Deborah Baker, Reading & Conversation (with Sangeeta Ray, U of Maryland)
April 12, 2019
Wilson Hall 142 | 4:30 PM - 6:00 PMDeborah Baker, Reading & Conversation (with Sangeeta Ray, U of Maryland)
April 12, 2019
Wilson Hall 142 | 4:30 PM - 6:00 PMDeborah Baker was born in Charlottesville and grew up in Virginia, Puerto Rico and New England. She attended the University of Virginia and Cambridge University. Her first biography, written in college, was Making a Farm: The Life of Robert Bly, published by Beacon Press in 1982. After working a number of years as a book editor and publisher, in 1990 she moved to Calcutta where she wrote In Extremis; The Life of Laura Riding. Published by Grove Press and Hamish Hamilton in the UK, it was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography in 1994. Her third book, A Blue Hand: The Beats in India was published by Penguin Press USA and Penguin India in 2008. In 2008–2009 she was a Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis C. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at The New York Public Library. There she researched and wrote The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism, a narrative account of the life of an American convert to Islam, drawn on letters on deposit in the library’s manuscript division. The Convert, published by Graywolf and Penguin India, was a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award in Non-Fiction. In August 2018, she published her fifth work of non-fiction, The Last Englishmen: Love, War and the End of Empire.
Professor Sangeeta Ray (University of Maryland) received her PhD from the University of Washington. She is professor of English and Comparative Literature. She teaches anglophone postcolonial and world literature, US minority literature and environmental literature. She is currently interested in postcolonial reading practices and the relationship between aesthetics, ethics and politics in literature from South Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. She is also interested in genre and form. She has published two books, Engendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives (Duke UP 2000) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: In other Words (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). She has coedited the Companion To Postcolonial Studies (Blackwell, 2000) and the 3 volume Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016). Her book, Reading for Form is forthcoming. She has published widely in key journals, given many talks nationally and internationally. She is the recipient of several grants and serves on the editorial boards of important journals in the field. She has served as President of a few divisions in the MLA, has been the President of the Cultural Studies Association and currently is serving a second term on the supervisory Board of the English Institiute. She is second Vice-President of ACLA and currnly serving atwo year term as amember of the MLA Russsell Lowe Prize (108-2020). At the University she has, in the past, been the Director of the Asian American Studies Certificate Program, Director of the Cultures of the Americas, College Park Scholars Program as well as the Director of Graduate Studies in the English department.
Oceanic Humanities: Perspectives from the Global North & South
April 12, 2019
Wilson Hall 142 | 10:30 amOceanic Humanities: Perspectives from the Global North & South
April 12, 2019
Wilson Hall 142 | 10:30 amThe Global Novel: Comparative Perspectives (co-sponsored by New Literary History)
April 10, 2019
Wilson Hall 142 | 2:30 PMThe Global Novel: Comparative Perspectives (co-sponsored by New Literary History)
April 10, 2019
Wilson Hall 142 | 2:30 PMIHGC Symposium on
The Global Novel: Contemporary Perspectives
Co-sponsored by New Literary History
Convener: Debjani Ganguly
April 10-11, Venue Wilson 142
The looming presence of the novel in world literary studies is unmistakable. More than any other literary genre, the novel is perceived as future-oriented and open-ended, ready to absorb within its polymorphous ambit the indeterminacy of the present, a genre that, in Bakhtin’s words, ‘has a living contact with the unfinished, still evolving contemporary reality.’ It not only travels well, but is also, arguably, the genre par excellence of the mutating lifeworld of global capitalism. Recent world literary approaches to novel studies have ranged from theories of comparative morphology (Moretti); of the mutual shaping of the world novel and human rights discourse (Slaughter); of born-translated works that have an aspiration for cross-lingual circulation embedded in their crafting (Walkowitz); of formal adaptation to the visual stimulation of our new media age, global wars after 1989 and the proliferation of genres of witnessing (Ganguly), and of the novel's planetary scale in works of speculative fiction on climate change (Heise), to name only a few.
This workshop will bring together scholars with expertise in various literary regions – South Africa, South Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, North America, Southern Europe and East Asia – to examine the transformation of the novel across these cultural zones. It will explore recent theories of the novel and compare their relative provenance across multiple novelistic traditions. Offering close readings of works across various vectors – historical, political, cultural, ethical, technological and planetary – the workshop aims to generate new comparative perspectives on the global novel in the twenty-first century.
April 10
2.30pm – Welcome and Introduction: Jahan Ramazani, NLH
3.00-4.30pm – Ignacio Sanchez Prado (Washington St Louis)
“Transculturation and the Necropolitical: Theory of the Novel from Latin America.”
4.30-6.00pm – Debjani Ganguly (UVA)
“Catastrophic Form and Planetary Realism: Reading James George and Amitav Ghosh”
April 11
9.30-11.00am – Rebecca Walkowitz (Rutgers)
“On Not Knowing: Lahiri, Tawada, Ishiguro”
11.00-11.30am - Coffee
11.30-1.00pm - Ranjana Khanna (Duke)
“Touch, Water, Death: Affect and Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer”
1.00-2.00pm - Lunch
2.00-3.30pm - Daniel Kim (Brown)
“Translations and Ghostings of History: The Novels of Han Kang”
3.30-3.45pm - coffee
3.45-5.15pm –Baidik Bhattacharya (CSDS Delhi)
“Does the Global Novel have a Democratic future? Reading Orham Pamuk and J.M. Coetzee”
5.15-5.30pm – Concluding Remarks
Speakers’ Bios
Ignacio Sanchez Prado is Jarvis Thurston and Mona Van Duyn Professor in Humanities and
Professor of Spanish, Latin American Studies, and Film and Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. His research interests include Mexican literary, film and cultural studies, Latin American intellectual history, neoliberal culture, and world literature theory. In addition to his numerous articles and monographs, he has recently published Screening Neoliberalism. Mexican Cinema 1988-2012 (2014), and Strategic Occidentalism: On Mexican Fiction, The Neoliberal Book Market and the Question of World Literature (Northwestern, 2018). He is also the editor of eleven collections, including (as co-editor) A History of Mexican Literature, and a member of the editorial board of various journals, such as Forma, Chasqui, Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, ASAP/Journal, and Confluencia. Ignacio is co-editor, with Leslie Marsh, of the SUNY Press Series on Latin American Cinema.
Debjani Ganguly is Professor of English and Director of the Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures at the University of Virginia. She has written widely on postcolonial theory, caste and subaltern histories, dalit literature, world literature, the global Anglophone novel, war and humanitarianism, and Indian Ocean worlds. She is the author of This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form (Duke 2016) and Caste, Colonialism and Counter-Modernity (Routledge 2005), and General Editor of the Cambridge History of World Literature (2 vols. forthcoming 2020). She is also the General Editor of the CUP book series Cambridge Studies in World Literature. She is currently working on a book project provisionally called Catastrophic Form: Drones, Toxins, Climate. She serves on the advisory boards of the Harvard Institute for World Literature, the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA), the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI) and the Academy of Global Humanities and Critical Theory (Bologna).
Rebecca L. Walkowitz is Professor and Chair in the English Department and Affiliate Faculty in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. She works on modernism, twentieth-century British fiction, the contemporary Anglophone novel, translation, world literature, and transnational approaches to literary history. Her current research focuses on the concept of the Anglophone and the representation of world languages in contemporary writing.
She is the author of Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (Columbia, 2006) and Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (Columbia, 2015), which received Honorable Mention for the first annual Matei Calinescu Prize from the MLA and has been translated or is forthcoming in Danish, Polish, Hungarian, and Japanese. She is also the editor or co-editor of eight books, including, with Eric Hayot, A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism (Columbia, 2016). Walkowitz is also editor, with Matthew Hart and David James of Literature Now, a book series published by Columbia University Press.
Ranjana Khanna is Director of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute and Professor of English, Women's Studies, and the Literature Program at Duke University. She has published widely on Anglophone and Francophone postcolonial literature, psychoanalysis, and transnational feminist theory, literature, and film. She is the author of Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Duke, 2003) and Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation 1830 to the present (Stanford, 2008). Her works have appeared in journals like Differences, Signs, Third Text, Diacritics, Screen, Art History, positions, SAQ, Feminist Theory, and Public Culture. Her current book projects in progress are Asylum: The Concept and The Practice and Technologies of Unbelonging.
Daniel Y. Kim is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Brown University. He is the author of Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow: Ralph Ellison, Frank Chin, and the Literary Politics of Identity (Stanford, 2006) and the co-editor, with Crystal Parikh, of The Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature (Cambridge, 2015). He is currently working on a book provisionally titled The Intimacies of Conflict: A Cultural History of the Korean War, forthcoming from NYU Press. Essays based on material from this project have been published in the journals American Literary History, Cross-Currents, positions and Trans-Humanities. His articles have also appeared in the Journal of Asian American Studies, Novel and Criticism.
Baidik Bhattacharya is Associate Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, India. He works at the crossroads of literary studies, social sciences, and philosophy. He is the author of Postcolonial Writing in the Era of World Literature: Texts, Territories, Globalizations (Routledge, 2018), and the co-editor of The Postcolonial Gramsci (Routledge, 2012) and Novel Formations: The Indian Beginning of a European Genre (Permanent Black, 2018). His essays have appeared in Critical Inquiry, New Literary History, Boundary 2, Novel, Interventions, Postcolonial Studies, among other places. He serves on the editorial board of the journal Postcolonial Studies. Currently Bhattacharya is working on two projects. First, an interdisciplinary inquiry into the origins and institutionalization of the modern idea of “literature” since the eighteenth century, and a detailed exploration of the histories of imperialism which shaped the contours of the new idea. The second project is an exploration of a paradigm of imperial politics-developed through the nineteenth-century debates on crime and related disciplines (e.g. criminology, criminal anthropology, eugenics, race-theory, and penology) and deployed as part of colonial governance.
Decolonizing the Digital Humanities: Indigenous Arts, Histories, and Knowledges from the Material to the Screen
April 5, 2019
Center for Global Inquiry and Innovation, Hotel A | 9:30 amDecolonizing the Digital Humanities: Indigenous Arts, Histories, and Knowledges from the Material to the Screen
April 5, 2019
Center for Global Inquiry and Innovation, Hotel A | 9:30 amSince the advent of “humanities computing” in the 1940s, known today as “digital humanities” (DH), the field has defined itself as a convergence of technologies and methods that shed light on areas of humanistic inquiry – that is, the study of human experience and expression as mediated through art, history, music, literature, performance, philosophy, and religion, among other frames (Klein and Gold 2012, 2016). Over the years, DH has redefined itself in response to the “ongoing churn of digital innovation” (Reid 2012: 354) and changing scholarly paradigms, from sound studies, new media, and graphic writing systems to intersectional feminism, critical race theory, and Global South studies. As DH practitioners work to diversify and decolonize the field, we confront tensions between DH mantras and the beliefs of communities we work with. These tensions are laid bare in 2019, UNESCO's declared year of Indigenous Languages. Artists and scholars from historically marginalized communities do not approach decolonization in the same ways. African-American writers have used DH tools as an “ethos of recovery” to document their histories of creative work (Gallon 2016), while Indigenous artists and scholars in Aotearoa (New Zealand), Canada, and the US have developed policies of data sovereignty that regulate recovery and revelation to outsiders. Policies and practices in Indigenous communities of Latin America diverge from those enacted in the "first-world English-speaking (US and Canada) context)" (Duarte 2017: 5).
This conference thus brings together leading scholars and artists from Australia, Latin America, and the US to explore the possibilities and limits of digital decolonization within the context of Indigenous artwork, histories, and knowledges. All events -- panel presentations, keynote address, reception, and roundtable -- are free and open to the public, thanks to funding from the Page-Barbour Foundation, Buckner W. Clay Endowment at the University of Virginia Institute of Humanities & Global Cultures, Center for Global Inquiry and Innovation, Center for the Americas, and McIntire Department of Art.
Register for this conference at this link.
Panel on Climate Change & Historical Method | Amitav Ghosh, Julia Adeney Thomas, Ian Baucom
April 4, 2019
Wilson Hall 142 | 5:00 PM - 6:30 PMPanel on Climate Change & Historical Method | Amitav Ghosh, Julia Adeney Thomas, Ian Baucom
April 4, 2019
Wilson Hall 142 | 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
Program 5.00-5.10pm: Welcome and Introduction 5.10-5.30pm: Julia Adeney Thomas, "The Multidisciplinary Anthropocene: Scales and Causes" 5.30-5.50pm: Ian Baucom, "History 4 Degrees Celsius: Of Forces and Forcings” 5.50-6.10: Respondent: Amitav Ghosh 6.10-6.45: Audience Q&A
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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 Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, and the three volumes of The Ibis Trilogy; Sea of Poppies, River 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 Yorker, The 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 honors, 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.
Bringing critical theory to bear on questions of power in modern societies, Julia Adeney Thomas (University of Notre Dame) investigates concepts of nature in Japanese political ideology, the impact of the climate crisis on historiography, and photography as a political practice. Her book, Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology, received the John K. Fairbank Prize from the American Historical Association in 2002 and her essay on wartime memory in Japan, "Photography, National Identity, and the 'Cataract of Times:' Wartime Images and the Case of Japan" in the American Historical Review received the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians' Best Article of the Year Award in 1999. She brings her research interests into the classroom teaching courses that range from Neolithic Japan to politics and the environment, from comparative fascism to contemporary questions of photography's relationship with suffering.
Ian Baucom came to the University of Virginia after serving 17 years in Duke University’s Department of English as a professor and as the director of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute. Since arriving at UVA in the summer of 2014, Dean Baucom has led a series of initiatives within the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. He earned his undergraduate degree in political science from Wake Forest University and holds a master's degree in African studies and a doctorate in English, both from Yale University. Baucom is the author of Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the Locations of Identity, and Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. He is the co-editor of Shades of Black: Assembling Black Arts in 1980s Britain.
Humanities Week 2019 - "Log In!"
April 1, 2019
Wilson Hall 142 | 10:00 amHumanities Week 2019 - "Log In!"
April 1, 2019
Wilson Hall 142 | 10:00 am
WHY LOG IN?Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. Podcasts. Gaming. Texting. Email. Spotify. Tinder. Google. Snapchat.
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Aihwa Ong (UC Berkeley), "The China Flight: Territorializing Rights in Global Platforms
March 28, 2019
Nau Hall 101 | 5:15 pm - 6:45 pmAihwa Ong (UC Berkeley), "The China Flight: Territorializing Rights in Global Platforms
March 28, 2019
Nau Hall 101 | 5:15 pm - 6:45 pmBio: As a foreign-born anthropologist, Aihwa Ong has always approached research from vantage points outside or athwart the United States. This angle of inquiry unsettles and troubles stabilized viewpoints and units of analysis in the social sciences. From her early work on Muslim factory women in Malaysia, to the experiences of migrant Chinese and Cambodian refugees in California; from the selective deployment of neoliberal norms to the rise of biotech projects in Asia, Ong explores how the interaction between global forms and situated politics and cultures shape emerging globalized contexts.
Ong's inter-disciplinary approach and her ideas -- "flexible citizenship," "graduated sovereignty," "global assemblages," among others _ are featured in debates on globalization and modernity. She has lectured internationally and been invited to the World Economic Forum. Her awards include grants from the MacArthur Foundation and the National Science Foundation, and some book prizes.
"The China Flight: Territorializing Rights in Global Platforms"
Thursday, March 28, 5:15-6:45pm, Nau 101
Reception to follow
A tidal wave of people and capital out of China highlights contrary claims on liberalism. Whereas liberal citizenship underpins the rights of citizen- subjects, economic liberalism instigates territorialized rights for elite migrants. Indeed, accelerated flows intensify the symbiosis between mobile foreign elites and global zones governed by liberal regulatory regimes. Western cities compete to capture and organize flows of capital and talents from emerging economies by acting as global enclaves of protected wealth, rights, and privilege. Such de facto city-states seek less to be national containers of citizenship than to be international platforms for territorializing mobile actors, assets, and activities in a world of global liquidity.
Amitav Ghosh: Reading and Conversation on upcoming novel Gun Island
March 25, 2019
Nau Hall 101 | 5:00 pm - 6:30 pmAmitav Ghosh: Reading and Conversation on upcoming novel Gun Island
March 25, 2019
Nau Hall 101 | 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm
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 Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, and the three volumes of The Ibis Trilogy; Sea of Poppies, River 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 Yorker, The 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 honors, 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.
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Sharon Sliwinski (Western University, London, Ontario) Visit & Workshop
March 22, 2019
Wilson Hall 142 | 2:00 pm - 3:15 pmSharon Sliwinski (Western University, London, Ontario) Visit & Workshop
March 22, 2019
Wilson Hall 142 | 2:00 pm - 3:15 pmSharon Sliwinski is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work forges a bridge between the fields of visual culture, political theory, and the life of the mind. Her first book, Human Rights In Camera (2011), explored the visual politics of human rights. She has contributed broadly to the field of photography studies, most recently co-editing Photography and the Optical Unconscious (2017). Sliwinski’s most recent work investigates the social, political, and cultural significance of dream-life, which is represented in her book Dreaming Dark Times (2017) and The Museum of Dreams.
Apart from her affiliation in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies, Sliwinski is a core member of the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism and an affiliate in the Centre for Transitional Justice and Post-Conflict Resolution. In 2017, she was elected to the Royal Society of Canada's College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists. She currently holds the 2017-19 Rogers Chair in Journalism & New Information Technology. She serves on the editorial boards of Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development and Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies and has been a long-time member of the research collective known as the Toronto Photography Seminar. Sliwinski received her PhD from the Social and Political Thought Program at York University in 2005.
Alexander Galloway (NYU), "The Concept of the Digital"
March 18, 2019
Wilson Hall 142 | 4:30 pm - 6:00 pmAlexander Galloway (NYU), "The Concept of the Digital"
March 18, 2019
Wilson Hall 142 | 4:30 pm - 6:00 pmWhat is the digital? The question is typically answered via reference to things -- 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.
Alexander R. Galloway is a writer and computer programer working on issues in philosophy, technology, and theories of mediation. He is author of several books on digital media and critical theory, including The Interface Effect (Polity, 2012). His collaboration with Eugene Thacker and McKenzie Wark, Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation, has recently been published by the University of Chicago Press. With Jason E. Smith, Galloway co-translated the Tiqqun book Introduction to Civil War (Semiotext[e], 2010). For ten years he worked with RSG on Carnivore, Kriegspiel and other software projects. Galloway's newest project is a monograph on the work of François Laruelle, published in October 2014.
Galloway has given over two hundred talks both across the U.S. and in ten countries around the world. His writings have been translated into eleven languages. He is recipient of a number of grants and awards including a Creative Capital grant (2006) and a Golden Nica in the 2002 Prix Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria). The New York Times has described his practice as "conceptually sharp, visually compelling and completely attuned to the political moment."
A member of the NYU faculty since 2002, Galloway has also held visiting posts at the University of Pennsylvania (Spring 2012) and Harvard University (Fall 2016).
Mellon Fellows Symposium (Shankar Nair and Ricardo Padrón)
March 1, 2019
Wilson Hall 142 | 10:30 amMellon Fellows Symposium (Shankar Nair and Ricardo Padrón)
March 1, 2019
Wilson Hall 142 | 10:30 am
10.30-11.30am
Shankar Nair, Assistant Professor, Religious Studies
"An Iranian Wanders Early Modern India: Deciphering a Muslim Account of Hinduism"
11.30am-12.30pm
Ricardo Padrón, Associate Professor of Spanish
“Early Modern Ethnography and Imperial Geopolitics: Framing the Boxer Codex”
12.30-1.00pm - Lunch
Shankar Nair's 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).
Ricardo Padrón is an Associate Professor of Spanish who studies the literature and culture of the early modern Hispanic world, particularly questions of empire, space, and cartography. Currently, he is completing a monograph about the transpacific imagination in sixteenth century Spanish imperialism. Provisionally entitled ReOrienting the Indies: Spain, the Pacific, and Asia, 1513-1609, the book will be published by the University of Chicago Press. 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, in which he has served as Disciplinary Representative for the Americas section, and of the Latin American Studies Association.
"Beyond Dreamings: The Rise of Indigenous Australian Art in the United States" Symposium | Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection
February 21, 2019
Harrison Small Auditorium | 5:00 pm"Beyond Dreamings: The Rise of Indigenous Australian Art in the United States" Symposium | Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection
February 21, 2019
Harrison Small Auditorium | 5:00 pm
ABOUT THE SYMPOSIUM
The 1988 exhibition Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia at the Asia Society Galleries in New York catapulted Aboriginal art onto the world stage. Dreamings was the first major introduction of Aboriginal art to American audiences and represented a major turning point in its international reception. Anthropologist Fred Myers describes it as the moment when “Aboriginal art emphatically became “fine art.” Dreamings also signaled a radical shift in the ways Indigenous artists and communities were represented in the modern museum. This symposium celebrates three decades since Dreamings, reconsidering its historical moment and examining its legacies. Speakers include artists, curators, art historians, anthropologists and critics who will consider the future of contemporary Indigenous Australian art in the post-Dreamings era.
SCHEDULE
Thursday, February 21, Harrison Small Auditorium
5:00 pm: Keynote, Aboriginal Art Over the Last 30 Years with Indigenous Curator Djon Mundine
Friday, February 22, Harrison Small Auditorium
9:30 am: Coffee and refreshments
10:00 am – 12:00 pm: When Aboriginal Art Became Fine Art, with John Carty, Peter Sutton, Françoise Dussart, Chris Anderson and Fred Myers.
12:00 pm: Lunch
1:00 pm – 4:00 pm: Indigenous Australian Art in Contemporary Art Discourse, with Terry Smith, Maia Nuku and Henry F. Skerritt
5:30 – 7:00 pm: Reception at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of UVA (note that this event is in a different location, a 20 minute drive from Harrison Small Auditorium)
Saturday, February 23, Kluge-Ruhe Collection
10:30 am: A special program, soon to be announced.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
CHRIS ANDERSON Principal at Yirri Global and Senior Advisor Acorn International
JOHN CARTY Head of Humanities, South Australian Museum, and Professor of Anthropology, University of Adelaide
FRANÇOISE DUSSART Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, University of Connecticut
DJON MUNDINE OAM Indigenous Australian curator, writer, artist and activist (Bandjalung)
FRED MYERS Silver Professor of Anthropology, New York University
MAIA NUKU Evelyn A.J. Hall and John A. Friede Associate Curator for Oceanic Art (Maori – Ngai Tai), Metropolitan Museum of Art
HENRY F. SKERRITT Curator of the Indigenous Arts of Australia, Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of UVA
TERRY SMITH Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory, University of Pittsburgh
MARGO SMITH AM Director of the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of UVA
PETER SUTTON Curator, anthropologist and Senior Research Fellow, University of Adelaide
Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert (Vassar College), "Archipelagic Plastic: Art and Sea Currents in Caribbean Art"
January 25, 2019
Wilson Hall 142 | 2:00 PMLizabeth Paravisini-Gebert (Vassar College), "Archipelagic Plastic: Art and Sea Currents in Caribbean Art"
January 25, 2019
Wilson Hall 142 | 2:00 PMThis project addresses art projects that speak to plastic debris and rising sea levels in the Caribbean, putting them in conversation with literature from the region.
Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert works in the fields of literature, ecocriticism and environmental history, art history, and cultural studies, specializing in the multidisciplinary, comparative study of the Caribbean. Growing up in native Puerto Rico, she became fascinated by the many cultural connections between Caribbean peoples despite our different histories and languages and have made that the subject of my research and teaching. Professor Paravisini-Gebert is based in the Hispanic Studies Department at Vassar College and is a member of the Programs in Environmental Studies, Latin American Studies, International Studies, and Women’s Studies. She is currently working on The Amazon Parrots of the Caribbean: An Environmental Biography, a new book project, and on a translation of Dominican author Pedro Vergés’ 1982 novel, Solo cenizas hallarás with her friend and colleague Margarite Fernández Olmos.