Meaghan Morris, one of Australia's leading feminists and a central figure in cultural studies internationally, will deliver the fourth Craig Owens Memorial Lecture at 6 p.m. Friday, Dec. 3, in the Gowen Room of Wilson Commons on the University of Rochester's River Campus.
The annual lecture, which is sponsored by the University's Visual and Cultural Studies Program, is free and open to the public. A reception will follow in Hirst Lounge.
The lecture series was created in memory of Craig Owens, who died of complications resulting from AIDS in 1990. He taught in the Department of Art and Art History at the University from 1988 to 1990, and was one of the founders of the doctoral program in Visual and Cultural Studies. The series presents well-known scholars working in various areas of Owens' intellectual commitments: postmodern theory, contemporary art, feminism, lesbian and gay studies, and AIDS.
Morris describes her lecture, titled "True Lies: History and Class Consciousness in Action Cinema," as "a reading of Georg Lukacs through Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet to suggest what queer theory might tell us about classical problems of Marxist aesthetics."
Morris is currently visiting professor in the literature program at Duke University. For the past five years, she has been Australian Research Council Senior Fellow on the faculty of humanities and social sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney. She also is the author of Too Soon, Too Late: History in Popular Culture (Indiana University Press, 1998) and The Pirate's Fiancée (Verso, 1988).
The 1999 lecture is presented by the Visual and Cultural Studies Program with support from the Dean's Office of the College, and is co-sponsored by the Graduate Organizing Group, the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Friends Association, the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women's Studies, the Film Studies Program, and the Department of Anthropology, the Department of Art and Art History, the Department of English, and the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures.
For more information, call (585) 275-9249.