Upcoming Speakers/Fall 2008

Tuesday, October 7
Carol G. Duncan, “A Matter of Class: Art Collecting and Class Identity in an American Manufacturing City in theEarly 20th Century”
Yeager Recital Hall, 6 p.m.

Duncan, a professor emerita at Ramapo College of New Jersey, will discuss her latest book on John Cotton Dana and his revolutionary and often contradictory theories of museum practice. Author of several books and groundbreaking essays, she presents a new way of perceiving the role of the museum and its influence on the visitor’s experience.

Past Speakers/Spring 2008

Monday, March 3
Terry Smith, “Contemporary Art & Contemporaneity”
Yeager Recital Hall, 6:00 pm
 
Smith, current National Humanities Center fellow and Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Pittsburgh, will speak on his current research into the nature of Contemporary Art after decolonization.  Looking at the themes of time, place, mediation, affect, and effect, Smith will address the shift in avant-garde art practice and theorization from the 1980s to the present, when the realization that we do not have a globally shared sense of those themes has altered our understanding of them.  Working with ideas he recently published in the journal Critical Inquiry as well as those forthcoming in three essays and two books, Smith will attempt to define Contemporary Art from a more genuinely global perspective.

Wednesday April 2
Glaire D. Anderson, “Roman Landscape, Abbasid manners: Negotiating suburban villa culture in 10th century Spain"
LaRose Digital Theatre, Koury Business Center, 6:00 p.m.

Anderson is Assistant Professor of Art History at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her talk at Elon will focus on medieval Islamic villa cultures of Spain as part of a broader history of the villa in the Mediterranean.  Anderson is currently at work on a book about villas and court culture in Umayyad Cordoba. She is the editor of Revisiting al-Andalus: Perspectives on the Art & Material Culture of Islamic Iberia & Beyond, to which she contributes an article on the architecture of the Cordoban Umayyad villas. Her work also has been published in the Chicago Art Journal, Thresholds, and Medieval Islamic Civilization: An Encyclopedia.

Fall 2007

Wednesday, September 26
Gennifer Weisenfeld, “Publicity and Propaganda in 1930s Japan: Modernism as Method”
LaRose Digital Theatre, Koury Business Center, 6:00 p.m.

Weisenfeld, Associate Professor and Director of the Graduate Program in Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University, speaks on the links forged between the corporate and the art and design realms in 1930s Japan. Through a close examination of the practices of the foremost Japanese commercial design specialists of the day, Weisenfeld explores the modernist pictorial strategies deployed in the dynamic realm of national publicity and propaganda production.

Thursday, October 18
Elizabeth Lipsmeyer, "Holy Wars and Unholy Art: Images of the Muslim on Christian Churches"
Yeager Recital Hall, 6:00 p.m.

Art historian, Dr. Elizabeth Lipsmeyer will examine distorted and shocking images of Muslims on Romanesque churches in Spain and France.  Her lecture will provoke questions about the purposes of such sculptures, about their creators, and about art historical methodology.  How might one interpret art that is propagandistic and inflammatory within its medieval religious and cultural contexts?  Further, what meaning does such imagery have for us today?