Lecturer, Department of History of Art
Bryn Mawr College

“On the Decorative Edge: Function and Form in Western Han Eave Tiles (206 BCE-9 CE)”

During the Western Han dynasty (206 BCE-9 CE), the skyline of its capital at Chang’an was composed of lines of eave tiles—circular ceramic fixtures that hang off the edges of roofs. This talk examines eave tiles with writing as their main decorative feature to argue that the ways in which these characters were designed, manufactured, and replicated reveals how Han designers blurred the grammars of ornament and writing in order to produce a unified decorative skin for Western Han imperial architecture.

Thanksgiving Holiday

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.