Professor of History, Rutgers University
“Mrs. Henry Hobhouse Goes to War: Sexuality, Christianity and Conscience in World War I Britain”
The Tri-Co Digital Humanities Initiative and the Bryn Mawr College Center for Visual Culture present:
Ruth Ahnert
2015-16 External Faculty Fellow
Stanford Humanities Center
and Senior Lecturer in Renaissance Studies
School of English and Drama
Queen Mary University of London
and
Sebastian Ahnert
Royal Society University Research Fellow
Theory of Condensed Matter (TCM) Group
Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge
and Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge
“Tudor Networks of Power: A Digital Project”
Monday, April 11, 4:30 PM
Thomas Library 224, Bryn Mawr College
and
Tuesday, April 12, 12:00 PM
Popular Reading Room, first floor of McCabe Library
Swarthmore College
This project seeks to reconstruct the evidence for Tudor government networks that survives in the state papers archive (now digitized at State Papers Online). By analyzing the metadata from these 132,000 letters, Ruth and Sebastian Ahnert are able both to map the social network implicated in this correspondence, and to measure the relative centrality of each of its members using a range of mathematical tools. These measures enable them to trace large-scale patterns and anomalies, and to identify significant people and bodies of letters within the network requiring closer analysis. In this paper they will discuss both the process behind this large-scale project, and their initial findings.
Dr. Phil Stinson
Associate Professor of Classics, University of Kansas
“Digs and Drones? Digital Experiments in Documenting Roman Architecture”
Thursday, April 7, 2016 at 4:30pm
Bryn Mawr College
The Ely Room
Wyndham Alumnae House
In this lecture, Phil Stinson discusses how digital photogrammetry enhanced by
drone photography is revolutionizing the way Roman architecture is documented and
researched at the sites of Aphrodisias and Sardis in western Turkey.
Free and Open to the Public
Co-sponsored by the Mellon Digital Humanities Seed Grant,
the Bryn Mawr College Growth and Structure of Cities Department,
the Center for Visual Culture and theTri-Co Digital Humanities Initiative
DVMA Spring Meeting
Saturday, April 9, 2016
Thomas Hall, Bryn Mawr College
1:00 – 6:00 PM
Co-Sponsored by the Center for Visual Culture
and the Provost’s Office of Bryn Mawr College
To register for the event, please go to: http://dvmamedieval.com/
For directions to Bryn Mawr College, please go to:
http://www.brynmawr.edu/campus/directions.shtml
The Bryn Mawr College 1902 Lecture Fund, Center for Visual Culture and
360 Course Cluster present:
Darra Goldstein
Willcox and Harriet Adsit Professor of Russian, Williams College
Founding Editor, Gastronomica
“Looking at Cookbooks Seven Centuries of Visual Feasts”
Thursday, February 18
4:30pm
Bryn Mawr College
Carpenter Library B21
This talk will offer a feast for the senses, revealing cookbooks as more than just functional manuals for the kitchen. Cookbooks are also aesthetic objects that convey important cultural information, and the progression from text-based recipes to today’s lavish
illustrations mirrors the history of typographic design. For their often-irreverent takes on the culinary arts, artists’ cookbooks will be a special focus.
For more information, please contact Kate Thomas
kthomas@brynmawr.edu
Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Art, Colby College
“Changing the Joke: Racial Humor and American Vernacular Photography”
In the decades following black emancipation, African Americans were the frequent subjects of humor in commercial photographs. Racial caricatures, which imagined black bodies as physically and socially deviant, set the stage for amateur photographic performances in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Not only did white Americans appropriate racial humor with remarkable regularity in their family snaps, but African Americans attempted to revive and subvert such humor in their own vernacular photographs. Focusing on the images and handwritten captions in family photo albums, this talk examines the personal and political work performed by comic photographic tropes in the Progressive Era.
Tanya Sheehan is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Art at Colby College, where she teaches American art history. She is the author of Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (2011). Her edited books include Photography, History, Difference (2014), Photography and Its Origins (co-edited with Andres Zervigon, 2015), and the forthcoming Grove Guide to Photography (2016). As a research associate at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, she is completing a book that explores ideas about race in American visual humor. Tanya Sheehan currently serves as editor of the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art Journal and organizes the Photography and Migration Project based at Colby College.
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Maryland Institute College of Art
“Coloring the Corpse: The Visual Culture of Chinese Death”
From the black of a widow’s weeds, to the sackcloth of a mourning gown, and the white of a shroud, death ritual is threaded through with color. In the English language, sorrow is described as “the blues,” while Chinese societies refer to the events that surround death as “white through and through.” Yet, while the study of mortuary rites is an enduring subject of humanistic inquiry, there has been little consideration of color as a pivotal way death is codified. Drawing on perspectives from material culture studies— color understood as a property of things—I interrogate how color structures grief, challenging current anthropological understandings of the connection between ritual, emotion, and materiality. My examples are drawn from ethnographic fieldwork in Chinese funeral parlors Singapore, where I worked as both anthropologist and embalmer. To consider color is, I argue, to attend to the very matter of life and death.
Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History, Swarthmore College
“Miraculous Images and the Devotional Topography of Colonial Mexico City”
At the height of the baroque period in colonial Mexico City (ca.1650-1775), miraculous paintings and statues drew throngs of devotees to countless chapels arrayed across the urban landscape. Professor Burdette will examine the important role played by these miraculous statues in the construction of a sacred landscape within the urban sphere of Mexico City and its environs. Looking beyond the more famous examples of miraculous imagery found in rural shrines, including Our Lady of Guadalupe, Burdette will argue that the city’s lesser-known statues and paintings played a vital role in shaping the devotional and political life of Mexico City. These neighborhood images, although less well-known, were woven into the fabric of the city, shaping a devotional topography that concretized religious and social order within the contested space of the city.
“Archaeology, Museums, and War”
The last fifteen years, in particular, have been dominated by discussions of cultural property–either its destruction in zones of military conflict or its involvement in litigation and claims for repatriation. This lecture reviews recent developments in the art and antiquities market, the shifting acquisition policies in museums, and cultural heritage training programs for U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.