Associate Professor of English
Department of English, Bryn Mawr College

“Depth Perception: The Visual Experience of Writing Popular Fiction”

THE RIVER OF NO RETURN (Dutton 2013), an adventure novel I wrote under the pen name Bee Ridgway, is poised somewhere between so-called “high” and so-called “low” culture.  From one perspective, it is stuffed with historical detail and literary citation and has been critically well received, with the Washington Post naming it a notable book of 2013.  From another, it is resolutely frothy, with time travel, cliffhangers, sex scenes, and handfuls of exclamation points driving it forward.  I will discuss the visual stimuli and the visual experience of writing such a Janus-faced novel, and talk about how my own compromised depth perception, both literal and cultural, led me into the sparkling shallows of popular fiction.

Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies
Affiliated with American, East Asian, Gender and Sexuality, and Ethnic Studies
Brown University, Providence, RI 02912-1897.
Author of Brown Boys and Rice Queens (NYU Press, 2013)

“Future Island Sexuality”

Maeve Doyle, Ph.D. Candidate
History of Art, Bryn Mawr College

“Penitential Pleasures in a Late 13th-Century Book of Hours”

A series of historiated initials in a prayer book from northern France (Cambrai, Bibl. mun. ms. 87) shows a laywoman—presumably representing the book’s owner—rejecting a series of temptations presented by a monstrous figure. Her depicted self-denial of carnal pleasures seems at odds with the evidently pleasurable experience of owning and reading such a deluxe book. This paper explores the role of visual pleasure within the penitential function of this illuminated manuscript.

Carrie Robbins, Ph.D.
Bryn Mawr College
Adjunct Assistant Professor
Temple University and La Salle University

“Reproduced Reproductions: An Overlooked Iconography in Trompe l’Oeil Paintings”

Associate Professor of Art History, Department of Visual Arts, University of Chicago

“Scanning and Seeing:  Art Installations in Interwar France”

The surprising nostalgia for densely hung exhibitions that developed among some French museological circles in the 1920s and 30s has much to tell us about interpreting display practice.  This talk considers critical commentary and exhibition practice in relationship to new  methodologies at the time, especially as concerned with the role of attention, memory and materiality in art historical understanding.

Assistant Professor of Art History, La Salle University

“Resonating Casta within Costumbrismo”

In colonial Mexico, the miscegenation of the indigenous, African and European populations produced diverse offspring that challenged racial and ethnic purity and disrupted social stability. During this period and the post-Independence era, the visual arts played a critical role in depicting how race was understood scientifically and culturally. This lecture will examine the racialized social spaces represented in eighteenth-century casta and nineteenth-century costumbrista painting and explore the resonances between the two genres.

Curator and Academic Liaison for Art and Artifact Collections, Bryn Mawr College

“Traits of the Artist: Narrative and Form in Early and Current Works of Carolee Schneemann”

What distinguishes Carolee Schneemann’s investigations—and what characterizes the varied and interconnected works that constitute them—is their insistent challenge to powerful cultural mechanisms that define a mind-body split. With drawing, painting, installation, performance, writing, and hybrid media, Schneemann mourns, and, at the same time, celebrates, a kind of founding cultural tragedy—the sundering of shape and story—that is central to the narratives and forms of her work and thought.

Associate Professor of Modern & Contemporary Art
Director of the M.A./Ph.D. Program in Art History & Criticism
Department of Art History and Criticism, SUNY Stonybrook

“The Past inside the Present: The New York Film Festival and Selma Last Year (1966)”

This talk will consider Selma Last Year,” a largely forgotten multimedia installation that took place during the Winter of 1966 as part of the New York Film Festival’s fleeting interest in Expanded Cinema. A collaboration between the street theater producer Ken Dewey, Magnum photojournalist Bruce Davidson, and Minimalist composer Terry Riley, this groundbreaking media installation juxtaposed large scale projected images, an immersive audio collage, small scale photographic prints, 16mm documentary film, and a delayed video feedback loop to create a series of intentionally disjunctive environments. During the Festival’s Expanded Cinema Symposium, Annette Michelson would explicitly dismiss Dewey’s work as a “revivial of the old dream of synaesthesia”— insisting upon a Modernist conception of medium-specificity as the only legitimate grounds for aesthetic radicalism. While the success of the “Structural Film” in the years immediately following might be taken as evidence for Michelson’s position, I contend that Dewey’s prescient concern for what would come to be known as “site-specificity” would prove the more enduring model for critical media aesthetics in the decades to come.

Andrew V. Uroskie is Associate Professor of Modern & Contemporary Art, and Director of the MA/PhD Program in Art History & Criticism at Stony Brook University in New York. His book, “Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art,” was recently published by the University of Chicago Press.

Professor of the Arts, Director of the Creative Writing Program
Department of English, Bryn Mawr College

“Rome as Palimpsest: Image and Poem in the Eternal City”

In one of his sonnets in “Les Antiquitez de Rome” (1558), Joachim Du Bellay describes Rome as a ruined city, corpse-like but galvanically brought back to life as each generation incorporates fragments into its own constructions. The landscape, architecture and art of Rome have been built up, destroyed and rebuilt for some three thousand years, providing a fertile source of inspiration to poets, who not only write the city’s art (in part by means of ekphrasis) but also over-write it, responding to the rich tradition of art that precedes them. This colloquium will present images and work from a new book entitled “Stumbling Blocks: Roman Poems” by Creative Writing Program Director and Professor of the Arts Karl Kirchwey.

Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture
The American University in Cairo

“The Writing on the Walls: The Importance of Epigraphy in Medieval Cairo”

We have in Cairo an unbroken sequence of inscriptions on major and minor religious monuments from the 9th century onwards. The size of this corpus enables us to discuss a wide variety of topics, and in particular the ways in which religious monuments advertised their presence through the medium of writing, an art form that has been regarded as the most intrinsically Islamic of them all. Areas that could be analyzed include the visual aesthetics of texts, their relative lengths, the sizes of the scripts used, issues of legibility or the lack of it, and the make-up and design of the inscriptions from their textual contents to the non-literary uses that they served.

Attention could be drawn to them in various ways, through their size, through repetition, and through the care taken with their calligraphy and with intrinsic or surrounding decorative details. Evaluations of what was legible and what was not problematic because of the lack of the painted colors that have been lost. But even so today they still provide a feast for the eye, so we can be sure that their impact in medieval times was much greater.