The Humanities Project Events for March 2007
Celebrated American artist Carrie Mae Weems will be featured at the Hartnett Gallery to coincide with university and community events commemorating Black history month. The show will feature a cross section of her current and previous work: including sections from Dreaming in Cuban, Not Manet's Type, and Coming up for Air. Weems will visit the University of Rochester in February for a special reception and artist's talk at the gallery. Working in collaboration with active student groups, the Frederick Douglas Institute, and the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women's Studies, Hartnett Gallery will also publish a catalogue to mark this important exhibition.
In all of her work, Weems addresses the complex formal and political issues surrounding African American culture and focuses on the ways in which images shape our perceptions. Using narrative as a counterpoint to imagery, she recounts stories and myths and invents texts. As a politically conscious and sophisticated artist, she is interested in deconstructing the status quo of our society and its still unresolved attitudes towards race and gender.
Richard Staley, History of Science Department, University of Wisconsin, Madison, will give a talk entitled "Quantum Theory, Disciplinary Time, and the Origins of Classical Physics."
This talk will discuss the period from the 1890s through to 1911 and offer a historical take on the foundations of quantum theory in relation to the development of a broader concept of classical physics, and a discussion of the nature of 'disciplinary time' -- by which I mean narratives of change and periodization within the physics discipline.
Sylvie Beaudette, Professor of Accompanying and Chamber Music, Eastman School of Music, will present a talk entitled "Performing Atwood: Stylistic Approaches in Setting Margaret Atwood's Poetry" as part of the ongoing Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender & Women's Studies Research Seminar series.
Richard Kraut (website), is Charles and Emma Morrison Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University.
Professor Kraut's interests include moral and political philosophy, particularly in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. He is the author of numerous books, the latest of which is entitled What Is Good and Why: The Ethics of Well-Being.
Convening from different places in the political landscape and as the peace process in the Middle East stagnates, an exhibit by Piece Process, a collective of professional Jewish and Arab-American artists committed to working together in spite of the current situation will demonstrate that an environment of dialogue, tolerance, integrity, dignity and attentiveness can exist.
Artist’s Talk and Discussion
Rajie Cook, Jenny Polack, Granite Amit, Hanah Diab and John Weber will be at the
University of Rochester on Thursday, March 22 for a cooperative artist's talk and
discussion beginning at 5:00 p.m. in Havens Lounge, Wilson Commons followed by a
reception in the Hartnett Gallery at 6:30 p.m.
(This visit is part of the Plutzik Reading Series)
A special evening event will kick off this year's Women and Music Festival featuring the Rochester premiere of Atwood Songs, commissioned specifically for this occasion. This song cycle for soprano and piano is written by Cuban-American composer and the festival's first composer-in-residence, Tania León, and set to the poetry of Margaret Atwood. León's new work was co-commissioned by Eastman's Hanson Institute for American Music and Syracuse University.
After the performance, the audience will have the rare opportunity to hear both artists discuss their creative processes during a conversation facilitated by WXXI-FM host Julia Figueras. Included in the discussion will be questions from the audience. The piece will then be performed again allowing the audience to experience the song with newly acquired knowledge of the artists' perspectives.
Who is hysterical, and why? How do people quite literally display their unconscious thoughts directly on or with their bodies? Does psychoanlysis perpetuate gender norms, or can it help us think through some of the concepts and problems we encounter when trying to understand human subjectivity.
Thomas DiPiero, Professor, Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, will give a public talk entitled "Hysterical Thoughts: Psychoanalysis and Gender."
All workshop participants are asked to bring their instrument along. Auditors are also welcome. Please direct all questions regarding Hasu Patel's workshop to Dr. Sylvie Beaudette ().
To request a place, please fill out the on-line reservation form.
Hasu Patel (website) teaches Sitar, Tabla, and Vocal music to many students at her Sursangam School of Music as well as credit hours course at Conservatory of Music at Oberlin College of Ohio.
The Women in Music Festival is organized by Sylvie Beaudette (Assistant Professor, Accompanying and Chamber Music, Eastman School of Music).
There will be a concert devoted to works of Tania León on Wednesday, March 28 at noon in the Main Hall of the Eastman School of Music. Please see the festival website for more detailed event infomation.
This event is free and open to the public.
Despite exaggerated claims about the death of the book, digital technologies have indeed raised questions about the status of the book as a cultural artifact and symbolic object. Whither the printed page in the age of the networked screen? While traditional bound books remain dominant in the publishing market, how books are written, edited, published, sold, accessed, read, and preserved are becoming increasingly untethered from a spatially and temporally fixed materiality.
As part of a year-long series of events on The Future of the Archive in the Digital Age, the symposium on The Future of the Book gathers together media scholars and experts in both digital and traditional publishing to discuss the issues surrounding this cultural shift.
Joan Bromberg, Department of History of Science and Technology, Johns Hopkins University, will present a talk entitled "Reflections on the Roots of Foundations Research in Quantum Mechanics."
The controversy over the meaning and adequacy of quantum mechanics had a dramatic history over the 20th century. After vigorous debate in the 1920s and 1930s it seemed to be settled, only to re-emerge with new force in the century's final decades. What role did new scientific instrumentation play in the resurgence of interest?