Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow, New York University

The Paradoxical Fetish of Humanitarian Ephemera

The humanitarian mobiles associated with international first response present bold images of temporary refuge, and yet belie spectacular permanent infrastructures and a hardware of transportation and communications networks etched into territories in the global South. This paper examines aesthetics and technopolitics in the histories and social lives of a range of artifacts designed for ephemerality, from sheltering textiles to hastily-produced borderlands. As unexpectedly architectural interventions into emergency contexts, these portable objects and spaces contour a problematic desire for impermanence while enacting settlement through the production of the commodity. This paper examines this process through various scales of humanitarian ephemera—materially urgent, subtly temporal, and ultimately spatial—interrogating an ambiguity in forms of architecture (and humanitarianism) we think we see.

Assistant Professor of Communication
Core Faculty in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
The Annenberg School for Communication
The University of Pennsylvania

“Playing Ugly to be taken Seriously: Actresses and the Oscar”

This talk explores the trend of female actresses undergoing radical or seemingly radical physical transformation in service of a broader career transformation. I problematize the idea of “deglamming,” asking how celebrity structure presents challenges to female actors attempting a range of roles.  I argue that these physical transformations aim at estrangement rather than getting ugly for its own sake.

Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Italian and Italian Studies
Bryn Mawr College

“Anachronism, the Late Medieval Patrona Statue of Lucera, and a Modern Angevin Cult”

This talk examines the so-called Santa Maria Patrona statue of Lucera, a late medieval wooden Throne of Wisdom venerated as an eighth-century statue for a southern Italian civic cult that dates to the eighteenth century. This talk examines the tensions that have formed between the Patrona statue as a work of art—or more precisely a product of a late thirteenth-, early fourteenth-century Angevin cultural milieu—and the statue as an important cult object and the center of a southern Italian city’s foundation legends. Second, it examines the tension between local legends that trace current devotional practices to the year 1300, and the reality that those practices were institutionalized only after a period of civic medievalism at the turn of the eighteenth century.

Visiting Assistant Professor, Art Department, Swarthmore College

“Messy Vitality:” Designing Architecture and Urbanism in Roman Africa”

One might ask, how does the study of large-scale public buildings contribute to the new discussions regarding the diversified material culture of the heterogeneous populations of the Roman provinces? The case studies presented in this lecture indicate that while there are certainly commonalities in building types and forms, the evidence suggests that there was a clear intentionality to create site-specific monumental public architecture in Africa Proconsularis that responded to the various conditions of each place.

Visiting Assistant Professor
Department of Italian and Italian Studies
Bryn Mawr College

“Sites of Colonial Memory in Postcolonial Rome”

This presentation focuses on the latest work of the second-generation Somali-Italian writer, Igiaba Scego. In this book, the touristic map of Rome will be replaced by a lesser known map of Postcolonial sites of memory. I will discuss the relation between memory, forgetting, monuments of colonialism in Rome and postcolonial literature.

Associate Professor, Department of History of Art, Bryn Mawr College
“Christian Marclay’s Two Clocks”

Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010) is a 24-hour digital video work composed entirely of found footage of clocks, watches, and people announcing or inquiring about the time, culled from film and television history. Shown only in installation form, it is synched to function as an accurate timepiece. But is Marclay’s clock digital or analog? This talk will define these terms and consider their relationship in light of Henri Bergson’s theory of durational time.

Reader in Spanish, Oxford Brookes University