AHCS Speaker Series 2015-16

Winter 2016

February 4: Dont Rhine and the Ultra-Red Sound Art Collective

Professor, Vermont College of Fine Arts and Founder, Ultra-RedCollective, Visiting Professor, IPLAI and IGSF

"Against Participation: Listening, Action and Neoliberalism"

Dont Rhine co-founded the sound art collective Ultra-red in 1994. While the image determines much of the current understanding of activist art, Ultra-red turns the focus to the ear. Drawing on the traditions of popular education, conceptualism, and musique concrète, Ultra-red developed sound investigations with art audiences, community groups and political struggles. The collective currently has ten members based in Los Angeles, New York, Berlin, London and the rural Southwest of England. The collective works in a variety of media including performance, sound composition, video, works on paper, poetry, and curriculum-development. They have been hosted by art institutions across North America and Europe, developing sound investigations alongside social movements for housing justice, anti-racism, the struggles of migration, gender and sexual rights, the dignity of the poor, and HIV/AIDS activism.

Arts W-215 5:30 p.m.

 

Feb 19-20: Magic: Between Embodiment and Ontology | 2016 Emerging Scholars and Faculty Symposium

The aim of this symposium is to examine the ways in which magic, in any incarnation, is used as both a transformative element to inspire civil action as well a communicative channel for intersubjective relations. The symposium seeks to trace magic’s communicative capacities through material culture. Keynote Speakers include Liliana Leopardi and Aliza Shvarts.

Friday: Thompson House Ballroom / Saturday: Leacock 26

For more information.
       

March 11-12: Hardwired Temporalities: Technology and the Patterning of Time 

Hardwired Temporalities is a two-day symposium that will stage an important encounter between scholars working on the significance of technology and temporality and their ramifications for social relations, stratifications of power, and ways of life. International and interdisciplinary in scope, the symposium brings together a conversation on temporal artifacts and the lived experience of time between researchers working in the fields of communication and media studies, cultural studies, history of science and technology, cinema studies, social science, and computer science. The keynote speaker is John Durham Peters, A. Craig Baird Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa.

Thompson House Ballroom, 3650 McTavish
http://www.hardwiredtemporalities.org

 

March 17: Jeffrey Saletnik

Assistant Professor of Art History, Indiana University 

Jeffrey Saletnik’s research engages the social infrastructures and mechanisms that undergird cultural production: pedagogy, emigration networks, material culture, and modes of translation. He has published essays on Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, John Cage, and Robert Rauschenberg and co-edited Bauhaus Construct: Fashioning Identity, Discourse, and Modernism, a volume that addresses how so-called Bauhaus objects—from teapots and documentary photographs to the Bauhaus manifesto broadsheet and copyright documentation—were employed to model the school’s identity. Additional information about his research is available here. As of fall 2016 he will be an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation fellow at the Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Arts W-215, 5:30 p.m.
 

March 18-19: Media@McGill International Colloquium - Aisthesis and the Common: Reconfiguring the Public Sphere

Media@McGill’s international colloquium Aisthesis and the Common: Reconfiguring the Public Sphere will take place at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. The event is free and open to the public. Bilingual interpretation services will be provided to the public in attendance. The entire colloquium will be livestreamed.
Musée d'art contemporain de Montreal
http://www.aisthesis.ca

 

March 31: Jennifer Jolly
Associate Professor of Art History, Ithaca College

"Creating lo típico Pátzcuaro: Architecture, Race, and Historical Preservation in 1930s Mexico"

Jennifer Jolly is Associate Professor of Art History at Ithaca College. Professor Jolly researches the intersection of art and politics in modern Mexico. She specializes in the work of the Mexican muralists, and has recently published on the work of David Alfaro Siqueiros and Josep Renau at the Mexican Electricians’ Syndicate. Broader research interests include understanding the Muralists within the context of international politics of the 1930s, the intersections of art and technology, and the regional dissemination of Mexican Muralism. Her current project investigates the art--murals, sculptures, and their architectural settings--commissioned by Lázaro Cárdenas in Michoacan, Mexico, as part of a program of tourism development and national integration.

Arts W-215, 5:30 p.m.

 

April 7: Robin Celikates

University of Amsterdam

"Can Digital Disobedience Be Civil?"

Robin Celikates is Associate Professor (UHD) of Political and Social Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. He is also an associatedmember of the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) in Frankfurt am Main, where he taught political philosophy before coming to Amsterdam, and a Program Leader at the Amsterdam Center for Globalization Studies. Currently he co-ordinates the NWO-funded research project "Transformations of Civil Disobedience". Hismain areas of specialization are: theories of civil disobedience, democracy, collective action, recognition, migration and citizenship, and methodological questions in political and social philosophy (especially critical theory). Other areas of interest include the philosophy of the social sciences, moral philosophy, Rousseau, and sociological and political theory.

Arts W-215, 5:30 p.m.

 


Fall 2015

September 25: Anonymity in Authorship and Activism Workshop

One-day workshop hosted by Gabriella Coleman (Communication Studies) and Emily Kopley (English)
Morrice Hall 17 (Tuesday Night Café Theatre), 9am-5pm

This one-day workshop is hosted by Gabriella Coleman (Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy, Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill) and Emily Kopley (Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of English, McGill). Speakers will include Andrew Bricker (Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, English, McGill), Simon Macdonald (Max Weber Fellow, European U Institute), Eli MacLaren (Assistant Professor, English, McGill), Emily Kopley (Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, English, McGill), Robert Griffin (Associate Professor, English, Texas A&M), Darin Barney (Chair, Art History and Communications, McGill), Sophie Toupin (Media @ McGill), Molly Sauter (PhD student, Communications, McGill), Gabriella Coleman (Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy, Art History and Communications, McGill).

For more information

 

October 2: Ann Marie Yasin

Associate Professor of Classics and Art History, University of Southern California

Making Old Churches New in Sixth-Century Byzantium: Rhetorics of Ruin and Renewal.
Ann Marie Yasin specializes in Roman and late antique art and material culture; she holds a joint appointment in the departments of Classics and Art History. Professor Yasin's research examines the long histories and impact of Roman and late antique buildings and objects in the lives of the people who interacted with them. Much of her work focuses on the social and political dimensions of sacred architecture and art, including her first book, Saints and Church Spaces in the Late Antique Mediterranean: Architecture, Cult, and Community (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and more recent studies on memory and sacred landscapes, materiality and perception of devotional graffiti, and the collection, handling and display of relics.

Co-sponsored with Professor Tassos Anastassiadis (Papachristidis Chair in Modern Greek and Greek-Canadian Studies).
Arts W-215, 11:35a.m.-12:55p.m.
 

October 13: Wendy Brown

Class of 1936 First Professor of Political Science, University of California Berkeley

Neoliberalism Contra Democracy: Ten Theses.
Beaverbrook Annual Lecture
Faculty of Law, Moot Court, 3644 Peel Street, 6 p.m.

Professor Brown is Class of 1936 First Professor of Political Science at Berkeley. Her fields of interest include the history of political theory, nineteenth and twentieth century Continental theory, critical theory and theories of contemporary capitalism.  She is best known for intertwining the insights of Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Frankfurt School theorists, Foucault, and contemporary Continental philosophers to critically interrogate formations of power, political identity, citizenship, and political subjectivity in contemporary liberal democracies. She is single-author of six books including Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution (Zone Books, forthcoming), Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (Zone Books, 2010), and Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Empire and Identity (Princeton University Press, 2006). 

Co-sponsored with Media@McGill.

October 15: Paula Findlen and Dan Edelstein

Mapping the Republic of Letters

Paula Findlen: Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History, Stanford University
Dan Edelstein: Professor of French, Stanford University

Paula Findlen is Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History and Director of the Suppes Center for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at Stanford. She is the single-author (most recently) of the book Early Modern Things: Objects and their Histories, 1500-1800 (Routledge, 2012). Dan Edelstein is Professor of French at Stanford and his most recent book is The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (University of Chicago Press, 2010). At McGill they will be presenting research from their new NEH-funded digital humanities project, “Mapping the Republic of Letters,” which examines networks of correspondence that stretched across countries and continents; the social networks created by scientific academies; and the physical networks brought about by travel. These networks were the lifelines of learning, from the age of Erasmus to the age of Franklin. They facilitated the dissemination and the criticism of ideas, the spread of political news, as well as the circulation of people and objects.

Co-sponsored with the Interacting with Print Research Group.

Arts W-215, 5:30-7p.m.

November 12: Jimena Canales

Thomas M. Siebel Chair in the History of Science, University of Illinois

The Media of Relativity: Einstein and Telecommunications Technologies

Professor Canales is the Thomas M. Siebel Chair in the History of Science at Illinois and the author of numerous scholarly and journalistic texts on the history of modernity, focusing primarily on science and technology. Her first book, A Tenth of a Second (Chicago, 2010), explores the relation between science and history as one of the central intellectual problems of modern times. Her second book, The Physicist and The Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time has been recently published by Princeton University Press. Canales' work on the history of science had been published in Isis, Science in Context, History of Science, the British Journal for the History of Science, and the MLN, among others; topics on visual, film and media studies have appeared in Architectural History, Journal of Visual Culture, Thresholds, Aperture, Artforum and WiRED magazine.

Arts 260, 4-6 p.m.

November 17: Panel: The Long Eighteenth Century’s Public Spheres

Arash Abizadeh, Matthew Hunter, Andrew Piper, Angela Vanhaelen, and Paul Yachnin

Leacock 232, McGill University, 855 Sherbrooke W., 6 p.m.


November 26: Michel Weemans

Professor of Art History, École Nationale Supérieure d'Art de Bourges

Insidiosus Imago: Pieter Bruegel's Trap Images

Docteur en histoire de l’art, de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, spécialiste de la peinture néerlandaise du XVIe siècle, il se passionne pour la période contemporaine. Ses activités de recherche sont internationales, il a été invité en 2005-2006 au J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art and the Humanities, États-Unis. En 2008-2009, il a obtenu une bourse d’un an au Netherlandish Institute for Avanced Study, à Wassenaar, pour travailler avec un groupe de recherche sur : Discourses of Meditation and Self-Reflection in Art and Literature, 1300-1600. En 2009-2010, il a obtenu un congé étude et recherche durant lequel il a réalisé avec Jean-Hubert Martin l’exposition intitulée Une image peut en cacher un autre aux Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, d’avril à juin 2009. Il est membre de plusieurs centres de recherches, du Centre d’Histoire et Théorie de l’Art, EHESSS, de Renaissance Society of America, du College Art Association, du GEMCA (Group for Early Modern Cultural Analysis) de l’université Catholique de Louvain, du Sixteenth Century Society et du comité scientifique de la revue Art in translation. Professor Weemans is visiting at the University of Montreal this Fall.

Arts W-215, 5:30-7p.m.

 

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