The Center for Humanities: Events this Week
Come Play with our VHS Archive
Mon, Apr 9, 2018, 6:30 PM | Rooms 9206 & 9207
Join the VHS Archives working group, who will be presenting select VHS video clips that depict the group’s interests in video, queer (of color) feminist bodies and sexuality, HIV/AIDS, and more. With participants, we will also demo and play with a prototype website for making use of small VHS data sets, under construction by Partner and Partners.
Click here for more information about these screenings and conversation.
War Widow: How the Six Day War Changed My Life
Wed, May 9, 6:30 PMÂ | The James Gallery
Join Ziva Flamhaft (Queens College) whose new memoir War Widow: How The Six Day War Changed My Life, is a story that could have developed with similar characters anywhere in the world. Beginning in Poland and Lithuania, moving to Palestine, Israel, and the United States, it depicts a bygone period of nation building, with love and tragedy, and lives forever changed by conflict and war. It includes tales of fate and suspense under the watching eyes of the British, who controlled the area from 1922 to 1948, and traces the author’s family story from Eastern Europe to Palestine, as well as her recent visits to her parent’s hometowns in Lithuania and Poland.
Click here for more information about this reading and discussion.
Visualizing Theory
Thu, May 10, – Fri, May 11, 10:00 AM – 8:00 PM | C-level Rooms and Proshansky Auditorium
Join us for the seventh annual 2-day conference in Critical Theory “Visualizing Theory” with keynote speakers Anne Carson and Kaja Silverman. This conference seeks to examine all aspects of visual perception—its evolution, practice, interpretation, and role in shaping literature, the arts, political discourse, ethics, and identity—in order to interrogate the functions and effects of what we see. We welcome a wide range of disciplines and theoretical approaches, including literary theory, psychoanalysis, identity theory, semiotics, philosophy, social theory, cultural studies, media studies, postcolonialism, gender studies, and political theory. Free and open to the public, but RSVP is required for the two keynote lectures:
Thu, May 10th, 6:30 PM–Â Anne Carson: Envisioning the Classics
Fri, May 11th, 6:30 PM–Â Kaja Silverman: The Photographic Image.
Click here for more information, to RSVP, and a complete conference schedule.
Objects of Study: Methods and Materiality in Theatre and Performance Studies
Thu, May 10, 11:00 AM – 8:30 PM | Martin E. Segal Theatre
Join us for “Objects of Study: Methods and Materiality in Theatre and Performance Studies” conference organized by the Doctoral Theatre Students’ Association which issues a challenge to the common understanding of scholarly work as focused on an “object of study.” The conference seeks to destabilize the terms “object” and “study” to explore how the ways in which we conceive of objects and materiality might influence the framework of our discipline. This day-long conference will culminate in two public events at Martin E. Segal Theatre (RSVP required).
5:00 – 6:30 PM: Roundtable Discussion by Katherine Behar, Maaike Bleeker, Rebecca Schneider, Soyoung Yoon
7:30 PM: Performance by Larissa Velez-Jackson (LVJ Performance Co.)
Click here for more information, to RSVP, and a complete conference schedule.
O, Earth! by Casey Llewellyn: A Staged Reading
Fri, May 11, 7:00 PMÂ | Martin E. Segal Theatre
Join us for a staged reading of O, Earth!, a play written by Casey Llewellyn. Led by Baruch College students Zeynep Akca, Roberta Cooper, Reuven Glezer, Ruth Ostrow, and Dana Spataru, and in collaboration with Baruch’s GLASS (Gender, Love, & Sexuality Studies) student organization, and CLAGS: Center for LGBTQ Studies. Mentored by Janet Werther and facilitated by Debra Caplan. This play transposes Thornton Wilder’s Our Town to a contemporary LGBTQ+ context, asking who lives (and dies) in “our” towns, and what queer legacies we hope to leave on this earth. Llewellyn queers Wilder’s self-contained world and colors outside the lines of its quiet, predictable framework. Quirky — even silly — and heart-wrenchingly earnest, O, Earth! challenges queer audiences to develop a more capacious notion of community and “progress.”
Click here for more information about this staged reading and performance.