Humanities projects explore new perspectives

By Kathleen McGarvey


	Photo by Gelfand-Piper Photography

Pictured from left, a poster promoting the October 18 film screenings titled “Mario Montez Goes Hollywood”; author David Cole, who will discuss “Less Safe, Less Free: Why We are Losing the War on Terror” on February 20; and an image from last year’s Women in Music Festival.

The Humanities Project, an initiative for interdisciplinary artistic and research projects, is turning the spotlight on humanities at the University. The project involves 10 series of programs and offers performances, exhibitions, films, discussions, and other events to the University community and the public. “It has helped the creative juices to flow,” says Thomas DiPiero, professor of French and an organizer for the series on law and terrorism.

The project is supported by the Humanities Fund, established in July by President Joel Seligman. “It’s a way of drawing attention to the strength of the humanities at Rochester,” says Thomas Gibson, who chairs the Humanities Project committee and also is chair of the Department of Anthropology.

Three projects offer October events. They are Women and Music: Looking Back, Looking Forward; Lives of Performers; and Law and the “War on Terror.” Each also has a related course in the fall or spring semester.

Women and Music is part of the 20th anniversary of the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies. The project examines the significant gains by women in music and the obstacles that still exist. “We have made enormous strides—it’s unbelievable the things that have happened in 20 years,” says Honey Meconi, professor of music in the College’s Department of Music and professor of musicology at the Eastman School. Women composers are now an important component of music textbooks, for example, and more women are working in professional orchestras.

“At the same time, roadblocks are still there,” she adds. Much of the music written by women still is not performed, and strong societal expectations about gender and music—such as appropriate instruments for women and men to play—remain.

The topic of women and music was a natural fit for Rochester, says Susan Gustafson, the Karl F. and Bertha A. Fuchs Professor of German Studies and director of the Susan B. Anthony Institute. The topic is also emblematic, however, of women and academia generally. “It opens up a discussion,” she says.

That discussion began with a roundtable in September, and upcoming events include a lecture titled “Women, Singing, and Amateurism in the Early 19th Century” on October by Celia Applegate, professor of history. Among the many other events planned is a joint performance and lecture by novelist Margaret Atwood and composer Tania Léon, who has set to music some of Atwood’s poems. Sylvie Beaudette, artistic director of the Women in Music Festival and assistant professor of accompanying and chamber music at the Eastman School, is working to arrange a visit by Léon with students in the Rochester City School District. It is just one example of how the Humanities Project reaches the larger community.

Another series, Lives of Performers, examines the relationship between art, film, and performance around 1970. Organized by Douglas Crimp, Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History, the project is linked to his new course of the same name. It also features three nights of film screenings at the Eastman House Dryden Theatre. The films are classic avant-garde American underground and Viennese Actionists films from the 1960s.

“They’re very rare films, very difficult to see,” says Crimp. On October 18, he will screen a program of films—Andy Warhol’s Hedy (1966) and José Rodríguez-Soltero’s Lupe (1967)—called “Mario Montez Goes Hollywood.” Montez, a Hollywood B-actor and the New York underground’s first superstar, plays the lead in both films. Rodríguez-Soltero will appear in person to present the films and will bring with him the only existing print of Lupe. “It’s been very exciting to me to find him and to bring him here,” says Crimp.

He hopes the film screenings will help to generate interest in their preservation, and is excited that the project expands the collaborative relationship between the University and the Eastman House, which he calls a “goldmine for everyone in the community.”

The third project with an event this month, Law and the “War on Terror,” brings to campus internationally recognized speakers and recently produced films to investigate effects of the “war on terror” on political, civil, personal, and military institutions. On October 29, visiting filmmaker Bill Brown will present his recent documentary The Other Side, which examines the physical, historical, and political landscape of the U.S./Mexico border.

“The humanities are interpretive disciplines, and the law is a text for interpretation,” says DiPiero. The project probes what he calls “zones of ambiguity” where compelling interests—such as constitutional rights and national security—come into conflict.

The series began with a lecture by Arun Gandhi, founder of the M. K. Gandhi Institute for Non-Violence and grandson of Mahatma Gandhi. Other speakers include Rabbi Melissa Weintraub; David Cole, Georgetown University professor of law; and Juan R. I. Cole, University of Michigan professor of modern Middle East and South Asian history.

DiPiero says he and other project organizers are especially interested in examining the global implications of the topic. “We’re trying to bring in as many perspectives as possible.”

Those involved credit the Humanities Project with giving the humanities at Rochester a welcome spotlight and see it as a mechanism for further interdisciplinary work. “It’s an impetus to do what we’re longing to do,” says Meconi. The project takes advantage of the inherent interconnectedness of the humanities faculty, says Crimp, bringing that connection to the foreground and allowing it to expand and deepen.

To Gustafson, the initiative builds on one of Rochester’s greatest strengths. “That’s why faculty want to teach here, and students want to study here—because we think across boundaries,” she says.

For more information, visit the Humanities Project Web site at www.rochester.edu/college/humanities.