Peter Jelavich (website) is a Professor in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University who specializes in the cultural and intellectual history of Europe since the Enlightenment, with emphasis on Germany. His areas of interest include the interaction of elite and popular culture; the history of mass culture and the media; and the application of cultural and social theories to historical study.

Graduate students in the English Department and the Visual and Cultural Studies Program will be hosting an interdisciplinary conference on the theme of Archive of the Future/Future of the Archive.

Conference Highlights

Image from The Dawn at my Back: Memoir of a Black Texas Upbringing (detail)

Labyrinth Project is a research initiative on interactive narrative at the University of Southern California's Annenberg Center. Under the direction of cultural theorist Marsha Kinder since 1997, Labyrinth has been working at the pressure point between theory and practice. With digital media artists Rosemary Comella, Kristy H.A. Kang and Scott Mahoy, Kinder has been producing award-winning database documentaries that juxtapose fictional and historical narratives in provocative ways. They design their works as interactive transmedia networks--installations, DVD-ROMs, and websites - that grow out of productive collaborations with artists, scholars, scientists, students, archivists, museums and other cultural institutions.

Marsha Kinder

Marsha Kinder is Professor of Cinema, Comparative Literature and Spanish, at the University of Southern California. Since 1997 she has also been director of the Labyrinth Project, a research initiative on interactive narrative at the USC Annenberg Center for Communication. Besides being a multimedia producer, Kinder is a cultural theorist specializing in new media, narrative theory, national media culture and children's media culture. She is also a prolific film scholar whose work on Spanish cinema has been particularly influential.

Joel J. Kupperman (Curriculum Vitae), is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at University of Connecticut. Professor Kupperman's three principle areas of research include ethical theory, philosophical psychology and Asian and comparative philosophy. He is author of the recent book Six Myths about the Good Life.

Ammiel Alcalay

Ammiel Alcalay, (website), Professor of Hebrew, Department of Classic, Middle Eastern, Asian Languages Cultures, City University of New York.

Prof. Alcalay has taught Sephardic Literature (both Hebrew and in-translation), and a variety of courses on Middle Eastern and Mediterranean literacy and intellectual culture and its contemporary and modern reception, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, as well as creative writing. A comparatist by training, he specializes in these topics and in Balkan literatures and history, poetics, and theories of translation; he publishes translations of Hebrew and Bosnian, as well as his own poetry.

Lori Burns

Professionally trained as both a pianist and composer, music theorist Lori Burns has written extensively on a wide range of subjects from Bach to new music. She is especially noted for her work on women in popular music. Her most recent book is Disruptive Divas: Feminism, Identity and Popular Music, and her current research project is "'Covering and Interpreting the Blues: Musical Expressions of Gender, Identity, and Sexuality." Burns is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Ottawa, where she is chair of the Department of Music.

Sylvie Beaudette

This event is free and open to the public.

The concert will feature: the Antara Winds and Joseph Werner, pianist, performing Libby Larsen's "Blue Windows" written for them; Margaret Leenhouts & Pia Liptak, violins; Olita Povero, viola; Kathleen Murphy Kemp, cello; and James Douhit, piano, performing Amy Beach's Piano Quintet in f-sharp minor; Eileen Strempel, soprano and Sylvie Beaudette, pianist, performing selected songs from the "Atwood Commission Project"; and Eastman student Madeline Miskie, soprano and Christina Lalog, pianist, performing songs by Madeleine Dring.

Richard Pells (website) is a Professor in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. A specialist in 20th Century American cultural and intellectual history, Prof. Pells' current interest is in the global impact of American culture, and the ways that foreign cultures have affected the United States.

Heather Willems

Absence / Excess / Loss is a group exhibition of site specific, installation-based art work, curated by Marni Shindelman and Sarah Webb, which considers how the process of repetition informs memory and melancholia. Specifically, how does the creation of repeated objects relate to the act of mourning? This exhibition considers the work of seven artistseach sharing an affinity for vernacular and domestic materials in which process comes to bear as much meaning as the (final) object. Each artist will create an installation unique to the gallery space, considering how the act of repetition, and the making of multiples, generates memory and meaning.

In conjunction with the opening of Absence / Excess / Loss there will be a panel discussion with all eight artists, Patricia Matthews (guest art historian and the catalog essayist), and the two curators, Marni Shindelman and Sarah E. Webb.

Juan Cole

This conference on "Religious Transgressions of Modernity" is designed to serve as a counterpoint to the year-long series on "Law and War on Terror" in which scholars from a range of disciplines examined "the impact that the current 'war on terror' has had on political, civil, personal, and military institutions" in the "West". The conference on "Religious Transgressions" will examine the impact that this war is having on peoples in the "East".

As a conclusion to the two series, Professor Juan Cole will deliver a keynote address in the evening, at 7:30 in the Interfaith Chapel.

Tim Kasser

Tim Kasser (website), is Associate Professor of Psychology, at Knox College, Illinois. He will give a talk entitled "The Good Life or the Goods Life?: Psychological Explorations of Values and Well-Being."