Past Events

‘Aperture’

A “Dance for Camera” film festival premiering December 18, 2020 at 7 pm and streaming on-demand thru January 3, 2021.

An “aperture” is defined as “the space through which light enters a camera” and “an opening, hole or gap…”  In the time of COVID, we will not be able to perform dance in theaters for live audiences, and this feels like a big loss. But for artists, challenging times also create openings in which we adapt and respond creatively to try something new, in the “gap.” This is the lens through which we let our light shine. For the first time, Washington University Dance Theatre will be presented as a “Dance for Camera” film festival of new works by resident choreographers, performed by student dancers of the Performing Arts Department.

Saint Louis Art Museum Exhibition Virtual Tour: ‘Currents 118: Elias Sime’

Join Saint Louis Art Museum associate curator of modern and contemporary art, Hannah Klemm, and curatorial research assistant, Molly Moog, AB ’12, for a presentation of highlights from SLAM's current exhibition, Currents 118: Elias Sime. Hannah and Molly will discuss the work of important Ethiopian artist Elias Sime (b. 1968). For over a decade, Sime has created large-scale, modular artworks from discarded technological materials such as electrical wires, circuit boards, motherboards and computer keys. Sime sources his materials from the Merkato in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the biggest open-air market in Africa, where hundreds of vendors sell objects passed down a long line of global trade. These materials, as well as his artworks, tell a story of globalization and an interconnected world. His projects transform formerly functional items into something new, transcending their original utilitarian purpose.

King’s Message on Race, Science and Justice

Dorothy Roberts will present the 2021 Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration Lecture.The Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration Lecture is a remembrance of the life and legacy of the civil rights leader and his dream of acceptance and equality for all. The lecture recognizes national and local leaders who continue to advance King’s message through the pursuit of social justice and promotion of health equity.

Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration

Peniel E. Joseph, author of The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., will be interviewed by Lerone A. Martin. Joseph is the Barbara Jordan Chair in Political Values and Ethics at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and professor of history and the Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the University of Texas at Austin. Martin is associate professor, John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics; director, American Culture Studies program at Washington University.

About the book

This dual biography of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King upends longstanding preconceptions to transform our understanding of the 20th century’s most iconic African American leaders.

To most Americans, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. represent contrasting ideals: self-defense vs. nonviolence, black power vs. civil rights, the sword vs. the shield. The struggle for black freedom is wrought with the same contrasts. While nonviolent direct action is remembered as an unassailable part of American democracy, the movement’s militancy is either vilified or erased outright. In The Sword and the Shield, Peniel E. Joseph upends these misconceptions and reveals a nuanced portrait of two men who, despite markedly different backgrounds, inspired and pushed each other throughout their adult lives. This is a strikingly revisionist biography, not only of Malcolm and Martin, but also of the movement and era they came to define.

Book Club: Endurance

In 1914, explorer Ernest Shackleton sailed via the ship called Endurance to Antarctica. Just short of its destination, the ship became trapped in ice. This is the story of how Shackleton and his crew were forced to travel the 850 miles to the closest outpost of civilization.

Book Club will begin with a short presentation from the Newman Exploration Center, followed by a discussion of the book.

Free and open to all.

Osage Culture and History through the Lens of Art / Towards Thrivance

Osage Culture and History through the Lens of Art

A discussion on how art perspectives are used to uniquely view Osage Cultures historically and in the present.

Speaker 

Norman Akers was born and raised in Fairfax, Oklahoma. He is a citizen of the Osage Nation from Grayhorse District. He received a BFA in painting from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1982, and a certificate in museum studies from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 1983. In 1991, he earned an MFA from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. 

Towards Thrivance

Skawennati will present an overview of her work as a practicing artist and as the Co-Director of Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC). She hopes to show how these efforts to envision Indigenous people in the future encourage and empower our people today.

Speaker

Skawennati makes art that addresses history, the future, and change from her perspective as an urban Kanien’kehá:Ka woman and as a cyberpunk avatar. 

The Alliance for Native Programs & Initiatives’ speaker series “Native Futures, Native Voices” focuses on ways Indigenous Peoples continue to contribute and offer knowledge to the fields of art, education, history, humanities, environment and spirituality.

Details & RSVP

https://happenings.wustl.edu/event/native_futures_native_voices?_ga=2.16...

African American Architecture in St. Louis: The Case of Charles E. Fleming

In this panel discussion, Washington University architectural historians Shantel Blakely and Eric Mumford will join architect Michael Willis (AB ’73; MArch/MSW ’76) in an interview of Charles E. Fleming (UC ’61) about his more than 50 years of experience as an architect. As one of the first African Americans to earn a degree in architecture from Washington University, Fleming has made significant contributions both regionally and nationally to the field of modern architecture, including numerous residential projects in the St. Louis region. The discussion will delve into Fleming’s design approach and experience related to several of these projects completed during the late 1960s and early 1970s—a time of great social and spatial change in the United States following postwar efforts to address racial discrimination in housing. The program will feature projects emblematic of his architectural practice, most notably Fleming-designed houses in Town and Country, including a house for himself, completed in 1972. This house is an innovative three-story informal design in wood, reflecting Fleming’s design expertise with this material, and is the subject of a book in progress by Mumford and Blakely.

This program is a collaboration between the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum and the College of Architecture.

The program will include live closed captions.

Free, but registration is required.

Who is Safe in St. Louis? Examining Why Black Male Personal Safety is Critical for A Better St. Louis

This collaborative effort between HomeGrown StL, the Clark-Fox Policy Institute at Washington University and community partners will highlight the widespread impacts of Black male safety on individuals and systems, and explore tools for actionable change.

This event will feature discussions of the following topics:

• The current state of Black male personal safety in the St. Louis and its impacts on the region, demonstrated through presentations from topic experts
• Insights from Black male St. Louis residents about the factors that have threatened or enhanced their individual sense of safety, and how these factors may have changed over time
• Local efforts to improve Black male personal safety in the region, with opportunities to ask questions and provide feedback to the individuals and groups leading these efforts.

This event will be the first of a series of events for the First Annual St. Louis Black Male Week, which is being organized and co-sponsored by HomeGrown StL and the Regional Consortium of Higher Education.

Register to attend: https://happenings.wustl.edu/event/who_is_safe_in_st_louis_examining_why...

Transforming St. Louis: A Conversation with Kayla Reed and Blake Strode

The movement for racial justice has a long history in St. Louis. Local individuals and organizations continue to carry the work forward through coalitions and campaigns that target policies and structures.

This webinar will feature Kayla Reed, AB ’20, co-founder and director of Action St. Louis and lead strategist in the Movement for Black Lives, and Blake Strode, executive director at ArchCity Defenders, in a discussion about how they and their organizations are sparking action and changing structures in the St. Louis area and beyond. They’ll also discuss their partnership and how members of the WashU community can support and join their work. The conversation and Q&A will be moderated by John Robinson III, assistant professor of sociology, Washington University.

This event is sponsored by the WashU Alumni Association and the WashU Black Alumni Council.

RSVP: https://happenings.wustl.edu/event/transforming_st_louis_a_conversation_...

Saint Louis, a symbol for St. Louis?

Who was the real Saint Louis, Louis IX of France (1214–70)? What was his role in the Crusades? And what is the history of the statue on top of Art Hill? Why was this statue an object of controversy in our community on June 27, 2020? We will try to answer these questions thanks to  Julie Singer, associate professor of medieval French literature at Washington University; and Amy Torbert, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Assistant Curator of American Art at Saint Louis Art Museum.

The discussion (in English, free, open to the public) will be moderated by Lionel Cuillé, teaching professor of French in the Department of Romance Languages & Literature, and founding director, French Connexions Cultural Center at Washington University.

Zoom link: https://wustl.zoom.us/j/94212821245 

Meeting ID: 942 1282 1245

Where Blacks in America Have Been, Where We Are, Where We Must Go

The journey of Blacks in America has been complex and uneven, with undeniable progress made over the generations and still a disheartening distance to travel to achieve a truly level playing field.

In this talk, Brown School Associate Professor of Social Work Jack Kirkland will share analysis of the past and current state of the struggle for social justice for Black Americans and challenge the audience steps we must take to achieve the vision of a shared, equitable future.

Details & RSVP

https://brownschool.wustl.edu/Resources-and-Initiatives/Open-Classroom/P...

‘Busting the Business Model of Trafficking:’ Eritrean Refugees, EU Migration Policy in Libya and the Politics of Transit

Eritreans are the second largest population after Syrians to make asylum claims in the European Union, yet Eritrean refugees are invisible in larger narratives around the European Migration Crisis. Moreover, recent European Union border externalization deals with Libya and Sudan work to block Eritrean refugees from reaching European shores. EU officials rationalize these border externalization schemes as a means to “bust the business model of human smuggling” and reduce the number of migrants who die in the Central Mediterranean crossing.

In particular, this talk interrogates how disparate political generations of Eritrean refugees and exiles engage with the “European Migration Crisis,” through debates around migrant rescue and detainment in the Central Mediterranean within larger Italian and EU discourses. I argue that transit — as represented by the Libyan “humanitarian” detention complex — as an analytic and a particular socio-political space is key for understanding the neocolonial and racialized violence that undergirds global migration regimes in this current historical juncture.

Event page: https://afas.wustl.edu/events/%E2%80%98busting-business-model-traffickin...

The First Amendment and the Mess We’re In: From the Streets to the Cloud

Gregory Magarian, the Thomas and Karole Greene Professor of Law at Washington University, is a well-known expert in free speech, the law of politics, and law and religion. 

This event is presented by the Washington University School of Law Public Interest Law & Policy Speaker Series, the American Constitution Society, the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government & Public Policy, and the Gephardt Institute for Civic & Community Engagement.

Click here to register.

Writing for the Public: How to Share Your Scholarly Work With Ordinary People

This workshop is offered as part of Washington University’s RDE Initiative (Redefining Doctoral Education in the Humanities, or “Ready”). RDE focuses on supporting faculty efforts to develop the best pedagogical practices in graduate education for instilling capacities essential for success — such as writing for the public — both within academia and in the world beyond. Faculty Workshops are offered once per year on a different topic.

Full event details available here: https://humanities.wustl.edu/rde-faculty-retreat-spring-2021. 

Public Tour: The Autonomous Future of Mobility

Olivia Mendelson, assistant educator, discusses a selection of works from the Teaching Gallery exhibition The Autonomous Future of Mobility, curated by Constance Vale, assistant professor of architecture in the Sam Fox School. The exhibition examines the car’s legacy over the past century as depicted in art and visual culture, offering a view toward today’s emerging technological developments and exposing our vulnerability in the face of the horsepower and political power that drive mass movement.

The program will include live closed captions.

Free, but registration is required: https://www.kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu/events/tours/14311 

Animals - First Fridays at Becker

On the first Friday of each month, join us on Zoom to see themed picks from the library's renowned archival and rare book collections. February's theme is "Animals."

Registration is not required. Simply join us on Zoom at the time of the event!

Virtual symposium on Plautus and the women of Washington University

In 1884, the Washington University Ladies’ Literary Society staged the first American performance of an ancient Roman comedy in Latin: Rudens (“The Rope”), first staged by Plautus in the early 2nd century BCE. The event was marked not only by the group’s efforts to make Plautus’ style and humor accessible to a contemporary audience, but by its striking engagement with social issues such as slavery and gender. This symposium will include lectures by scholars from Washington University and abroad, and a performance of the play.

This event is organized by the Department of Classics and co-sponsored by the Washington University Performing Arts Department.

https://classics.wustl.edu/events/virtual-symposium-plautus-and-women-wa...

Exhibition Discussion of ‘Firstlings’: Sculptures + Works on Paper

A part of the MLA Lecture Series. “Unprecedented times” is a phrase of this moment, encompassing the pandemic, political division, the Black Lives Matter movement, and their reverberations. Research and art help us understand.

Arny Nadler’s sculptures in Firstlings invite us to reflect on our own physical and mental transformations — the surprises of the previously familiar — as we navigate the pandemic.

Please join us for this lecture to consider his work through the lens of these unprecedented times.

Note: All attendees will need to register to receive a Zoom link for the lecture. 

RSVP here or call (314) 935-6700 to get the link.

To Do Without People: Moyra Davey’s Impossible Renunciation

The work of Moyra Davey is invested with individual subjectivity and autobiography. The distinct absence of any figures, however, in her photographs from 2003—along with Davey’s choice to focus attention instead on space, in its “empty,” uninhabited variations—harkens back to the decade in the artist’s life (roughly 1984–94) when, burdened by the notion of “image theft,” Davey retreated from the genre of portraiture. This talk by Jenny Wu, MA student in the Department of Art History & Archaeology in Arts & Sciences, will situate four of Davey’s photographs from the collection of the Kemper Art Museum within the artist’s most recently published meditations on craft and discuss her unpeopled interiors in relation to issues of ownership, medium, and the representation of time and space.

The program will include live closed captions.

Free, but registration is required.

International Writers Series: Baba Badji

In this virtual reading and discussion, Baba Badji will present his recently published first collection of poems, Ghost Letters. Badji is a Senegalese-American poet, translator, researcher, and PhD candidate in Comparative Literature. Ghost Letters creates a ghost mother who becomes a presiding presence. His poetry explores what it means to be Senegalese, American, and Black, as well as the bonds of Black people across the Black diaspora.

Explore Faculty Papers with the University Archivist

Ever wonder what faculty do with their papers when they retire?  Some come to University Archives where they are cared for and made available to researchers. Join University Archivist Sonya Rooney to hear about different faculty material, how they got to the Archives, and how they have been used.

Public Tour: Art, Untitled

Lingran Zhang (Arts & Sciences ’21) explores the practice of titling artworks, considering how the “Untitled” label shapes viewer responses to a range of modern and contemporary artworks from the collection.

Free, but registration is required: https://www.kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu/events/tours/14314

Monumental Anti-Racism

A part of the MLA Lecture Series. “Unprecedented times” is a phrase of this moment, encompassing the pandemic, political division, the Black Lives Matter movement, and their reverberations. Research and art help us understand.

Geoff Ward’s work on anti-racism links us to the racial inequity spotlighted by the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as COVID-19’s disproportionate effect on people of color.

Please join us for this lecture to consider his work through the lens of these unprecedented times.

Note: All attendees will need to register to receive a Zoom link for the lecture. 

RSVP here or call (314) 935-6700 to get the link.

Uncontrollable Blackness: African American Men and Criminality in Jim Crow New York

Inaugural Annual Black History Month Lecture, Department of History, College of Charleston. Douglas Flowe is an assistant professor of history at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches courses on urban history, criminality, masculinity and other subjects relating to race, crime and gender. He earned his PhD at the University of Rochester and has recently published his first book, Uncontrollable Blackness: African American Men and Criminality in Jim Crow New York (UNC Press).

This event is organized and moderated by Elisa J. Jones and Shannon Eaves, assistant professors of history at the College of Charleston. In order to attend, please register by 5:00PM on February 15. 

Details and registration here: https://blogs.cofc.edu/history/2021/01/12/history-depts-annual-black-his...

Pro-Trump Era: Resistance, Hope and Mobilizing among Black American Families

Historical vestiges of slavery and Jim Crow laws continue to have detrimental impact on Black American families in the U.S. Interdependent challenges with systemic and personal experiences of racism put Black American families at risk.

Under the former Trump administration, racial violence and hate crimes increased. How are Black American families resisting and mobilizing to ensure racial justice and equity in the Pro-Trump Era? Strategies for dismantling anti-blackness in research and practice will be discussed. 

The Brown School is pleased to co-sponsor this program with the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Equity.

Details & RSVP

https://happenings.wustl.edu/event/pro-trump_era_resistance_hope_and_mob...

Bloodied Waters, Hidden Histories: Race, Terror and the Unmaking of Freedom

Join us as Sowande’ Mustakeem (History) discusses her book Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage (University of Illinois Press, 2016),  revealing for the first time how the institution of slavery took critical shape at sea. The book was recognized with a 2017 Wesley-Logan Prize (American Historical Association) and a 2020 Dred Scott Freedom Award (Dred Scott Heritage Foundation). The talk will be followed by a Q&A.

Encounters of Color: How China and the African World Meet

Robeson Taj Frazier will discuss his 2014 book, The East Is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination.

About his book:

During the Cold War, several prominent African American radical activist-intellectuals—including W.E.B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois, journalist William Worthy, Marxist feminist Vicki Garvin, and freedom fighters Mabel and Robert Williams—traveled and lived in China. There, they used a variety of media to express their solidarity with Chinese communism and to redefine the relationship between Asian struggles against imperialism and black American movements against social, racial, and economic injustice. In The East Is Black, Taj Frazier examines the ways in which these figures and the Chinese government embraced the idea of shared struggle against U.S. policies at home and abroad. He analyzes their diverse cultural output (newsletters, print journalism, radio broadcasts, political cartoons, lectures, and documentaries) to document how they imagined communist China’s role within a broader vision of a worldwide anticapitalist coalition against racism and imperialism.

Sponsored by the Department of African and African-American Studies and the East Asian Studies program.

Chinese-Language Tour: Art, Untitled

On February 19, Lingran Zhang (Arts & Sciences '21) explores the practice of titling artworks, considering how the “Untitled” label shapes viewer responses to a range of modern and contemporary artworks from the collection. This program is conducted in Chinese.

Free, but registration is required: https://www.kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu/events/tours/14315 

Blurring the Boundaries: The Rise of Blockbuster Museum-Quality Exhibitions in Commercial Galleries

The past ten years have witnessed the rise of historical, museum-quality blockbuster exhibitions in commercial art galleries. This is a sign of a changing art environment, where traditional roles are interchangeable and boundaries are blurring. Why and how are these very expensive shows conceived and put together, what is their goal, and what are the results for the galleries that organize them? And what is their impact on the public, the critic, and the market in general?

In this inaugural Women and the Kemper Public Lecture, Valentina Castellani, former director of New York’s Gagosian Gallery, will discuss the rise of blockbuster exhibitions in commercial art galleries, focusing on the Gagosian exhibitions Picasso: Mosqueteros and Piero Manzoni: A Retrospective.

Cosponsored by Women and the Kemper and the Olin Business School.

Public Tour: Figures of Myth and Legend

This tour considers how artists working in various artistic mediums have connected figures from ancient Greek and Roman mythology to their own historical contexts.

Free, but registration is required: https://www.kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu/events/tours/14319 

WashU Libraries Virtual Book Club: ‘Fever’

At first glance, the story of Mary Mallon seems like a model of the so-called American Dream. As an Irish immigrant at the turn of the twentieth century, she worked her way up from theposition of a domestic servant to working as a cook to several elite New York families. But the trail of disease she left in her wake led to the moniker by which she is famous: Typhoid Mary.

In this novel, author Mary Beth Keane sets out to tell the story of Mary Mallon—headstrong and independent—set against the vibrant landscape of early twentieth-century New York. Free and open to all. 

“Misogynoir”: American Contempt Towards Black Women and How to Change It

In this discussion speakers will draw from their field specific insights to discuss Black women's experiences in the United States. Leveraging contemporary and historical examples, they will offer frameworks for understanding structural bias, harassment and violence against Black women and contemplate opportunities to disrupt it. The Brown School is pleased to co-sponsor this program with the Washington University Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Equity.

Speakers

Adrienne Davis
Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs & Diversity & William M. Van Cleve Professor of Law; Co-Director, Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity (CRE2)

Hedy Lee
Professor, Department of Sociology, Washington University in St. Louis; Co-Director, Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity (CRE2) 

Matifadza Hlatshwayo
Associate Program Director, Fellowship Program, Division of Infectious Diseases, Washington University School of Medicine; Faculty Leadership, Office of Inclusion and Diversity

Kenly Brown
Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of African and African American Studies, Washington University in St. Louis; CRE2 Postdoctoral Affiliate

Details & RSVP

https://happenings.wustl.edu/event/misogynoir_american_contempt_towards_...

How should we theorize injury in fan studies?

Perhaps no issue makes disciplinary differences in approaches to the popular transparent like the question of injury. In Fan Studies, scholars are very attentive to the agency of fans and concerned about reductive characterizations of them, just as fans are attentive to dismissive interpretations of their love objects. Fans and media studies scholars more broadly push against causal claims about the injuriousness of popular culture that are more common in the social sciences, as such scholarship rarely without examines the transformational and utopian work of the popular. This talk takes as a case study a popular text in which accounts of injuriousness came from multiple directions: the HBO limited series Watchmen. Damon Lindelof called the show “a very expensive bit of fanfic,” and for some fans of the original comic book, the injury was the emphasis on race and social justice. Many fans were also sympathetic to comic book writer Alan Moore’s understandable objections to constant infringement on his intellectual property by the publishers. For some descendants of the Greenwood Massacre, the writers were guilty of cultural theft. And for others, the political discourse of the show was injurious because of its casting of a Black woman as a police officer and the treatment of reparations. In this talk Wanzo will explore how injury is just as important as pleasure in our understanding of the role of the popular in our lives, and discuss how competing injuries often structure evaluations of the popular text’s value.

Interlocutors:

Grace Gipson, Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Malika Imhotep, Ph.D candidate in African American Studies at University of California, Berkeley.

Patrick Johnson, Assistant Professor of American Multicultural Studies at Sonoma State University.

Hosted by Abigail De Kosnik, Associate Professor in the Berkeley Center for New Media and the department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies at University of California, Berkeley.

Direct link: http://bcnm.berkeley.edu/events/4223/conference/4193/fandom-piracy-keyno...

Public Tour: The Autonomous Future of Mobility

This tour presents a selection of works from the Teaching Gallery exhibition The Autonomous Future of Mobility, curated by Constance Vale, assistant professor of architecture in the Sam Fox School. The exhibition examines the car’s legacy over the past century as depicted in art and visual culture, offering a view toward today’s emerging technological developments and exposing our vulnerability in the face of the horsepower and political power that drive mass movement.

Free, but registration is required: https://www.kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu/events/tours/14312 

Human Centered Computing Approaches to Issues of Social Justice

Eric Corbett, PhD, CUSP Smart Cities / Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow, New York University

Eric Corbett is currently a postdoctoral researcher at New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress. His background is in computer science and human-computer interaction. He has worked on projects across various subjects including: resisting and countering gentrification; supporting trust in civic relationships between local government officials and marginalized communities; and most recently, creating new opportunities for democratic participation in public sector algorithm use. Throughout his research, the overarching thread has been exploring the intersections between design, social justice, democracy, and technology.

Register here: https://wustl.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3wqWK5Yvo2wlPM2

Lina Bo Bardi Draws: Pictures at an Exhibition

Zeuler Lima, associate professor, Sam Fox School. Lima is the author of the acclaimed biography Lina Bo Bardi about the Italian-born Brazilian architect (Yale University Press, 2013), with several worldwide lectures and deferential reviews, including in The New York Review of Books. He has contributed extensively to national and international journals, museum catalogues and book editions and is co-editing a forthcoming anthology of texts by architects from Latin America for the Museum of Modern Art (New York).

Register here: https://wustl-hipaa.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_GfrM53fYSKquU7tR_OlbZw 

Poorly Understood: What America Gets Wrong About Poverty

The idealized image of American society is one of abundant opportunities, with hard work being rewarded by economic prosperity. But what if this picture is wrong? What if poverty is an experience that touches the majority of Americans? Join Professor Mark Rank for a discussion regarding his latest book Poorly Understood, which systematically addresses and confronts many of the most widespread myths pertaining to poverty.

Register here: https://bit.ly/2yaXyBC 

Artist Talk with Christine Sun Kim

Join us for an artist talk with the California-born, Berlin-based artist Christine Sun Kim. Kim explores concepts of sound, its visual representations, and how it is valued by society, from her perspective as part of the Deaf community. She uses performance, video, drawing, writing, and sound installation to uncover the depth and complexity of communication, including the politics of voice, listening, and language. In her talk she will discuss her new site-specific mural in the Kemper Art Museum’s atrium, Stacking Traumas, and its relation to her work with American Sign Language, musical notation, televisual captioning, and other systems of visual communication to address the intricacies of social exchange and the power of representation. Stacking Traumas will be virtually accessible on the Museum’s website in late January.

The program will include ASL interpretation by Denise Kahler and live closed captions.

Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellow Lecture: Dana Levy

Israeli-born, New York–based artist Dana Levy, recipient of the 2019–2020 Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellowship, will join Saint Louis Art Museum curator Hannah Klemm for a conversation about Levy’s Currents 119 exhibition. On view February 26–August 15, 2021, the exhibition explores how humans interact with historic architecture and highlights disparities between what we expect of architecture and urban planning and the real, nuanced histories of the built environment.

This virtual program will take place via Zoom and will include opportunities for participants to ask questions with the Q&A feature. Capacity for the live program is limited, and attendees must register to receive the Zoom link.

Register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_N38zhCh7Sk6aMXQmrL6jvw 

Conversation: Environmental Racism and the Arts

This discussion will focus on environmental racism, social justice and the arts. It brings together artist-in-residence Jordan Weber, Des Moines-based multi-disciplinary artist; Michael Allen, senior lecturer in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis; Inez Bordeaux, organizer for Close the Workhouse and manager of community collaborations at ArchCity Defenders; and Geoff Ward, professor of African and African-American studies in Arts & Sciences at Washington University.

Weber is currently an artist-in-residence in a collaborative project by the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Equity (CRE2) and the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, and the Pulitzer Arts Foundation. This initiative is supported through the generosity of an endowment created by Emily Rauh Pulitzer to support collaboration between the Pulitzer and the Sam Fox School.

Weber’s St. Louis residency focuses on social and environmental justice, incarceration, and healing with a specific focus on the Close the Workhouse campaign.

This free program will be hosted on Zoom; registration is required: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_xdWTEJjWRBWcTVx68EzDHA 

Discussions Series Panel Discussion: Architectural History as a Global Discipline

The featured panelists will explore several questions: What does it mean for a historian to be global? What are the blind spots in achieving a truly global architectural history? What are the main lessons of global architectural histories that have been written in the last twenty years? What will be the impact of the current pandemic and social unrests on the notion of “global”?

Panelists

• Mark Jarzombek, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Kathleen James-Chakraborty, University College Dublin
• Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Columbia University
• Tao Zhu, University of Hong Kong

Register here: https://wustl.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_aP02IOWrTgawr6X862raOg 

International Writers Series: Olivia Lott

In this virtual reading and discussion, doctoral candidate Olivia Lott will present her recent translation of Lucía Estrada’s Katabasis, the first full collection of poetry by a Colombian woman to be translated into English. It takes its title from the Greek word for descent, referring to both classical knowledge quests into the underworld by epic heroes and, more broadly, to any journey into madness, darkness, the unknown. A three-part plunge into the darkness of the world, and of the mind, Estrada’s prose poems depict the night, the subconscious, and the surreal. Katabasis is longlisted for the 2020 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. Lott will be joined in discussion by Rebecca Hanssens-Reed, a doctoral student in Comparative Literature and fellow literary translator.

‘Guilty People’: A Conversation with Abbe Smith and Paul Butler

Abbe Smith and Paul Butler in conversation about Smith’s latest book, Guilty People, which challenges the dangerous assumption that the guilty are a separate species, unworthy of humane treatment.   

Criminal defense attorneys protect the innocent and guilty alike, but, the majority of criminal defendants are guilty. This is as it should be in a free society. Yet there are many different types of crime and degrees of guilt, and the defense must navigate through a complex criminal justice system that is not always equipped to recognize nuances.
 
In Guilty People, law professor and longtime criminal defense attorney Abbe Smith gives us a thoughtful and honest look at guilty individuals on trial. Each chapter tells compelling stories about real cases she handled; some of her clients were guilty of only petty crimes and misdemeanors, while others committed offenses as grave as rape and murder. In the process, she answers the question that every defense attorney is routinely asked: How can you represent these people?

Speakers

Abbe Smith is a criminal defense attorney, professor of law at Georgetown University, and director of Georgetown’s Criminal Defense & Prisoner Advocacy Clinic and the E. Barrett Prettyman Fellowship Program. 

Paul Butler, the Albert Brick Professor in Law at Georgetown University, is a former federal prosecutor, legal analyst for CNN, MSNBC and NPR. He is one of the nation’s most frequently consulted scholars on issues of race and criminal justice. 

Presented by the Washington University School of Law Public Interest Law & Policy Speaker Series and the Washington University Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity. 

Click here to register.

Reproductive Justice and the Prison-Industrial Complex: Examining the Connections

Join the Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies for a discussion with organizers and practitioners in the fields of reproductive justice and prison abolition to learn about the connections between racial and sexual violence, transphobia and the prison-industrial complex. Speakers will address how barriers to health services and economic resources are shaped by white supremacy, settler colonialism, transphobia and sexism, and how collectives and individuals are organizing against mass incarceration. Topics include gender self-determination, the disproportionate impact of mass incarceration on Black, brown, and indigenous populations, alternatives to policing, sexual assault survivors and the law and collective access to reproductive resources. Q&A to follow panelist presentations. 

Registration & details: https://wgss.wustl.edu/events/reproductive-justice-and-prison-industrial...

Public Tour: ‘Art, Untitled’

Join us for live, interactive tours on Zoom. Student educators design and lead virtual tours featuring several artworks in the Kemper Art Museum collection, showing images of the artworks through screen sharing and answering participant questions.

On March 13, Lingran Zhang (Arts & Sciences ’21) explores the practice of titling artworks, considering how the “Untitled” label shapes viewer responses to a range of modern and contemporary artworks from the collection.

The program will include live closed captions.

This hour-long tour is free, but registration is required. Register here: https://wustl.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_vpaQFzTETkaiTt49I9Tn9Q. 

The Fruits of Empire: A Book Talk About Art, Food and Racism

Join the WashU Alumni Association for a virtual conversation featuring Shana Klein, AB ’05, author of The Fruits of Empire: Art, Food and the Politics of Race in the Age of American Expansion. Angela Miller, professor of Art History and Archaeology, will be moderating the event.

Still-life paintings of food look innocent at first sight. Pictures of bowls bulging with oranges and grapes were fashionable in American dining rooms, but were fruits merely delicious gems in pretty pictures to admire? The Fruits of Empire argues otherwise. This book talk will discuss Klein’s research on representations of food to understand how they reflected and shaped conversations about race and national expansion in the United States. In a moderated discussion, Klein will discuss the paintings, photographs and silverware objects in her book and ask: Who do images of food serve? And at whose expense? The results are not always delicious.

Shana Klein is a professor and historian of American art. She holds a doctorate in art history from the University of New Mexico, where she completed the dissertation — and now book — The Fruits of Empire: Art, Food, and the Politics of Race in the Age of American Expansion. This book investigates food in paintings, photographs, advertisements and cookbooks to understand how representations of fruit pressed upon the nation’s most heated debates over race and citizenship. Klein has been awarded several fellowships for this research at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, among others. Klein’s research interests include American visual culture, food studies, race and post-colonial studies, and art and social justice. 

Registration required: https://wustl.advancementform.com/event/fruits-of-empire-shana-klein/reg...

Public Tour: ‘Figures of Myth and Legend’

Join us for live, interactive tours on Zoom. Student educators design and lead virtual tours featuring several artworks in the Kemper Art Museum collection, showing images of the artworks through screen sharing and answering participant questions.

This tour considers how artists working in various artistic mediums have connected figures from ancient Greek and Roman mythology to their own historical contexts.

This hour-long tour is free, but registration is required. Register here: https://www.kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu/events/tours/14320 

Biggs Family Residency in Classics: Raffaella Cribiore

Raffaella Cribiore is Professor of Classics at New York University. She is a specialist in ancient education, from the fourth century BCE to the fourth century CE, and also studies Greek rhetoric in the Second Sophistic period. She is a papyrologist, mostly a literary papyrologist, and spends time every year at the NYU excavation in Egypt, Dakhla Oasis, where a school of higher education was found. 

WashU Libraries Virtual Book Club: ‘Marcel’s Letters’

A true story of graphic designer Carolyn Porter, who stumbled across a bundle of letters while searching antique stores for inspiration to create a new font. As she struggled to design the font, she searched for information about the man who had written these letters during World War II and clues to what had become of him.

Book club will begin with a showcase of typography in the rare book collections, followed by a discussion of the book. Free and open to all. 

A Conversation with Twyla Tharp

Join WashU alumnus Jamie Schutz, AB ’95, Emmy Award–winning producer and director, president of Stick Figure Entertainment, for a conversation with legendary dancer Twyla Tharp. Stick Figure Entertainment, in association with American Masters Pictures, is debuting the documentary Twyla Moves on March 26, 2021, on PBS. This documentary will feature never-before-seen interviews and select performances from Tharp’s vast array of more than 160 choreographed works, including 129 dances, 12 television specials, six major Hollywood movies, four full-length ballets, four Broadway shows, and two figure skating routines. The documentary will feature appearances by Misty Copeland, Herman Cornejo, David Byrne, Billy Joel, and more. Director Steven Cantor will also join this conversation, with the trailer for the film to open the event.

Register to attend: https://wustl.advancementform.com/event/conversation-with-twyla-tharp/re...

Public Tour: ‘Art, Untitled’

Join us for live, interactive tours on Zoom. Student educators design and lead virtual tours featuring several artworks in the Kemper Art Museum collection, showing images of the artworks through screen sharing and answering participant questions.

This tour explores the practice of titling artworks, considering how the “Untitled” label shapes viewer responses to a range of modern and contemporary artworks from the collection.

This hour-long tour is free, but registration is required. Register here: https://wustl.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_BLxPLX5QRW-NjamksNKTcw 

15th Annual African Film Festival

For more information, visit the African Film Festival website.

Virtual African Film Festival 2021 Poster.jpg

Chinese-Language Tour: Picasso and Spain

Pablo Picasso was born and raised in Spain, and the impact of this cultural background can be perceived in many of his artworks. In this Zoom tour, Yue Dai, doctoral student in the Department of Art History & Archaeology in Arts & Sciences, discusses Picasso’s works in the Kemper Art Museum collection in a range of media including paintings, prints, and ceramics, and their connections to Spanish culture.

This hour-long tour in Chinese is free, but registration is required. Register here: https://www.kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu/events/tours/14345 

30th Annual Washington University Pow Wow

The 30th Annual Washington University Pow Wow will be held virtually on March 27-March 28. This event is organized and hosted by the Katherine M. Buder Center for American Indian Studies in the Brown School. The Department of Art History and Archaeology is a co-sponsor for this event.

For event details, visit buder.wustl.edu or facebook.com/budercenter, or contact bcals@wustl.edu.

‘The Story of Plastic’ Panel Discussion

The Story of Plastic is a powerful documentary exposing how the plastic industry is harming ecosystems and communities. Director and WashU alum Deia Schlosberg will join us for a lively panel discussion about issues and solutions surrounding plastic production, consumption and pollution.

Register for the panel discussion in advance to receive a link to stream the award-winning documentary “The Story of Plastic” in advance of the panel. If you are not able to make the panel discussion, you can still register to receive the streaming link.

First Fridays at Becker: ‘Botanical and Herbal Books’

On the first Friday of each month, join us on Zoom to see themed picks from the library’s renowned archival and rare book collections. April’s theme is “Botanical and Herbal Books.”

Registration is not required. Simply join us on Zoom at 2 p.m. on April 2!

Public Tour: ‘Figures of Myth and Legend’

Join us for live, interactive tours on Zoom. Student educators design and lead virtual tours featuring several artworks in the Kemper Art Museum collection, showing images of the artworks through screen sharing and answering participant questions.

This tour considers how artists working in various artistic mediums have connected figures from ancient Greek and Roman mythology to their own historical contexts.

The program will include live closed captions.

This hour-long tour is free, but registration is required. Register here: https://wustl.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_HL1J4qf7RgKdIMF3CaclHw 

Belonging in Opera: Learning from Our Past, Engaging with Our Future

Co–presenters Opera Theatre of Saint Louis and Washington University’s Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, & Equity present “Belonging in Opera: Learning from Our Past, Engaging with Our Future.” This two-night symposium (April 6 and April 13), led by Naomi André, will explore the history of Black composers and the current and future landscape of Black creativity in opera and adjacent spaces.

Naomi André is professor in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and the Residential College at the University of Michigan. She earned her B.A. from Barnard College and M.A. and Ph.D. (Music: Musicology) from Harvard University. Her research focuses on opera and issues surrounding gender, voice, and race in the US, Europe, and South Africa. 

Joining André for this series will be composers Anthony Davis and Damien Sneed; artists Nicole Cabell (soprano), Briana Hunter (mezzo-soprano), Will Liverman (baritone), and Morris Robinson (bass); leaders Afton Battle (General Director, Fort Worth Opera), Quodesia “Quo” Johnson (Education and Company Culture Manager, The Dallas Opera), and Marcia Sells (Chief Diversity Officer, the Metropolitan Opera); and scholars Todd Decker (Washington University), Lauren Eldridge Stewart (Washington University), Maya Gibson (University of Missouri), Kori Hill (University of North Carolina), Marcía Porter (Florida State University), and Louise Toppin (University of Michigan).

This event is free and open to the public.

21st Century Anti-Semitism: Exploring Hate, Oppression and Identity

Join WashU Hillel for a conversation on identifying and combatting anti-Semitism in all its forms. This program will consist of roughly an hour of panel conversation followed by half an hour of breakout-room learning on various topics moderated by the panelists. 

This event aims to jumpstart the creation of a community of students, both Jewish and non-Jewish, who are passionate about building relationships across cultural lines, fighting anti-Semitism, and discovering new allies in the fight against hate. No prior knowledge is needed to leave with a working definition of anti-Semitism, how to identify it, and how to address it, in addition to how anti-Semitism interacts with other types of oppression and hate. We will address topics such as anti-Semitism on social media and in the classroom, the intersections of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, and the role that white supremacy plays in anti-Semitism.

Panelists include:

Yasmine Esther (@yasmine.dreamz), activist and social media influencer

Rachel Fish, founding Executive Director of the Foundation to Combat Anti-Semitism

Koach Baruch Frazier, activist, rabbinical student, and co-founder of the Tzedek Lab

Debbie Lechtman (@rootsmetals), Jewish Israeli and Latina artist, writer, and educator

Yom HaShoah Memorial Speaker Event

Film Screening and Live Q&A: Amy Sillman: After Metamorphoses

Join artist Amy Sillman; Rebecca Sears, lecturer in the Department of Classics in Arts & Sciences; and Meredith Malone, associate curator, as they discuss Sillman’s animated film After Metamorphosis (2015–16), the artist’s response to the Roman poet Ovid’s mythic tale of transformation, desire, and power. Sillman’s five-minute film will be screened in advance of the Q&A and will be available for viewing via the Kemper Art Museum’s website the week prior to the program.

The program will include live closed captions.

Free, but registration is required.

Public Tour: ‘Art, Untitled’

Join us for live, interactive tours on Zoom. Student educators design and lead virtual tours featuring several artworks in the Kemper Art Museum collection, showing images of the artworks through screen sharing and answering participant questions.

This tour explores the practice of titling artworks, considering how the “Untitled” label shapes viewer responses to a range of modern and contemporary artworks from the collection.

This hour-long tour is free, but registration is required. Register here: https://wustl.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_TLkSZkG7R0GHvEBQn9ezag 

Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration

Nicole R. Fleetwood is professor of American studies and art history at Rutgers University. She is a writer, curator, and art critic whose interests are contemporary black diasporic art and visual culture, photography studies, art and public practice, performance studies, gender and feminist studies, black cultural history, creative nonfiction, prison abolition and carceral studies, and poverty studies.

RSVP required; see website.

I Dream of Popo: Celebrating the Special Connection that Crosses Time Zones and Oceans

Join the WashU Alumni Association for a virtual conversation and reading with author Livia Blackburne, editor Connie Hsu, and illustrator Julia Kuo, BFA ’07, of I Dream of Popo.

I Dream of Popo presents a story about a young girl who immigrates to California from Taiwan and her relationship with the grandmother she leaves behind. This event will feature a short reading, and then Livia, Connie, and Julia will discuss the immigrant experience, the nuances of growing up between two worlds, and how linguistic and geographic distance affects family relationships. Watch the trailer for I Dream of Popo here.

International Writers Series: Esther Dischereit

In this virtual reading and discussion, Max Kade Visiting Writer Esther Dischereit will present her first volume of poems in translation, Sometimes a Single Leaf (Arc Publications, 2020, translated by Iain Galbraith), which includes selections from three of her books as well as a sampling of more recent, uncollected poems. Based in Berlin, Dischereit is regarded a leading figure of second-generation German Jewish literature after the Holocaust. Dischereit will be joined in conversation by Erin McGlothlin, Professor of German and Jewish Studies.

Public Tour: ‘Figures of Myth and Legend’

Join us for live, interactive tours on Zoom. Student educators design and lead virtual tours featuring several artworks in the Kemper Art Museum collection, showing images of the artworks through screen sharing and answering participant questions.

This tour considers how artists working in various artistic mediums have connected figures from ancient Greek and Roman mythology to their own historical contexts.

This hour-long tour is free, but registration is required. Register here: https://wustl.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ky4JRNWEQKCAyrA8vgO75w 

Intersection of LGBTQ and African American Health in St. Louis

Erise Williams Jr., MPH, is the co-founder of Williams & Associates, Inc, a community based non-profit agency addressing minority health disparities and health equity issues that impact minority health for 19 years. He has served as the founding executive director of Blacks Assisting Blacks Against AIDS (BABAA, 1990-2002), which under his leadership, became one of the premier minority ASOs (AIDS Service Organization) in the Midwest region. Williams served in this position for 12 years, before leaving and starting Williams & Associates Inc, to address minority health disparities and health equity.  

CRE2 Research Workshop: Sincere in Their Perversity: Refugee Laughter in the Aftermath of the Vietnam War

What are the possibilities for refugee laughter to reverberate from and against efforts to commemorate the violent aftermaths of the Vietnam War? This chapter from Eng’s book project “Extravagant Camps: Constraint and Queer Conviviality in Asian America” explores a growing repertoire of cultural productions by Vietnamese diasporic artists who proffer perverse re-visions of the war that laugh in the face of moralistic expectations of refugee suffering and helplessness.

Discussants: Anca Parvulescu, professor of English, Washington University

The Making of A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill

American poet James Merrill wrote thousands of letters in his lifetime to hundreds of recipients. Joel Minor, curator of the Modern Literature Collection at Washington University Libraries where the James Merrill Papers reside, moderates a discussion with four panelists about how these letters were aggregated and organized for a book of Merrill’s selected letters (Knopf 2021). The book’s co-editors — Langdon Hammer, the Niel Gray, Jr. Professor of English at Yale University, and Stephen Yenser, Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA — will be joined by Chelsie Malyszek, visiting assistant professor of rhetoric at Hampden-Sydney College, and Tim Young, curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts at Yale University’s Beinecke Library, both of whom played major roles in these efforts. The event includes an audience Q&A and book sales from the Washington University Campus Store.

Memory and Resistance: Charles Méryon's Paris on the Eve of Transformation

Lacy Murphy, doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History & Archaeology in Arts & Sciences, considers the etchings of French printmaker Charles Méryon, which celebrate the maze-like anarchy of the Île de la Cité in 19th-century Paris on the eve of Georges-Eugène Haussmann's massive urban renewal project. Through the etchings, the city is able to boldly assert itself, offering one final stand on the eve of certain destruction.

The program will include live closed captions.

Free, but registration is required.

Virtual Book Club: ‘People of the Book’

When asked to conserve the priceless and famed Sarajevo Haggadah, Hannah Heath jumps at the chance to work with the beautiful Jewish text. She unlocks the books mysteries and past through her conservation work, learning about the extraordinary illuminations, the Catholic priest who saved it from burning, and the man who risked his life to save the book from the Bosnian war.

Special guest Danielle Creech, head of preservation, digitization, and exhibitions, will give a brief presentation on conservation and preservation at WashU and lead discussion of the novel.

Free and open to all.

Change ‘Gon Come: Black Love-Power and The Inner Work of Racial Justice

The inaugural talk of the CRE2-funded Mindfulness & Anti-Racism series presents the work of Rhonda Magee. Rhonda is professor of law at the University of San Francisco and an internationally recognized thought and practice leader focused on integrating mindfulness into higher education, law and social justice.  

Magee’s book, The Inner Work of Racial Justice: Healing Ourselves and Transforming our Communities Through Mindfulness (TarcherPerigee, 2019), was named one of the top 10 books released for the year by the Greater Good Science Center, and received similar recognition by Psychology Today and the editors of Mindful.org. Her work has received numerous awards, including the Impact Award from the American Public Health Association’s section on Integrative, Complementary and Traditional Health Practices (2020), and the Garrison Institute’s Impact+Insight Award (2019).

Preserving the Interviews with African American Athletes in William Miles’ ‘Black Champions’ (1986)

William Miles’ 1986 three-part TV program Black Champions is a classic of the sports documentary genre, partially for its interview with African American athletes, and American heroes, including Althea Gibson, Curt Flood, Jim Brown, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Wilma Rudolph.  While the original series is, unfortunately, difficult to see, the Washington University Libraries has preserved the full-length versions of the thirty-two interviews from the series and made them accessible online, thanks to a grant from the National Historic Publications & Records Commission.

This event will discuss the process of conserving and digitizing these thirty-four-years-old film reels, play a variety of clips from the interviews, and discuss the documentary work of Mr. Miles and the importance of Black Champions.

Free and open to all, pre-registration required.

Chinese-Language Tour: Deciphering Human Forms

The concept of likeness plays a central role in Eastern and Western figurative art traditions. Some artists, however, render human forms through distortion, simplification, or other modification, pursuing goals other than mimetic representation. In this Zoom tour, Yue Dai, PhD student in the Department of Art History & Archaeology in Arts & Sciences, will discuss several artworks in the Kemper Art Museum collection from different geographic locations and historical moments that feature a variety of depictions of human forms.

This hour-long tour in Chinese is free, but registration is required. 

Scholarly Writing Retreat 2021

The Scholarly Writing Retreat offers Washington University humanities and humanistic social sciences faculty, post-docs and graduate students the opportunity to jump-start their summer writing in a motivated, supportive and collaborative atmosphere, even as we are spread out in our own work spaces. Participants will work intensively on their individual projects, following a schedule of check-ins, focused writing periods and virtual communal breaks. 

Online meetings 

Small writing groups meet online periodically to provide a forum to exchange ideas, support one another and engage in social interaction. Each group will determine their own structure: frequency and duration of writing days/times, which virtual platform to use, types of meetings, etc.

Dates 

Weekdays, June 1–11
^{Participants are not required to participate daily nor to attend the entire duration of the retreat.}

How to participate

1. Register by clicking the button below by noon on May 20.
2. Await your small group assignment, to be made by the end of May, based on your registration responses.
3. Join the online welcome session on June 1 at 10 am. Each group will then meet to determine their plans going forward.

Public Tour: Women’s Work

Join the Kemper Art Museum for live, interactive tours on Zoom. Student educators design and lead virtual tours featuring several artworks in the Kemper collection, showing images of the artworks through screen sharing and answering participant questions.

Leslie Liu (Sam Fox School ’22) discusses a selection of works from the Teaching Gallery exhibition Women’s Work, curated by Lydia McKelvie (AB ’22), Alice Nguyen (AB ’22), and Hannah Ward (AB ’21), the recipients of the 2019 Arthur Greenberg Undergraduate Curatorial Fellowship. The exhibition examines the depiction of feminized labor within sociopolitical contexts that have affected women’s economic agency and identity from the late 19th century to today.

Book Club: The Signature of All Things

Hostile Terrain 94 at Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum

See full event details

More than the Kewpie: The Rose O’Neill Collection at the D.B. Dowd Modern Graphic History Library

Rose O’Neill was an American cartoonist who is most famous for creating the Kewpie doll—child-like, winged creatures named after Cupid, the Roman god of love. She was also a successful magazine and book illustrator, writer, sculptor, bohemian, and suffragette, and for a time was the highest-paid female illustrator in the world. O’Neill settled near Branson, Missouri, where she lived until her death in 1944. Join Curator Skye Lacerte for a visual tour of this trailblazer’s work.

Public Tour: Art on Campus

Panel Discussion: Hostile Terrain 94 with the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum

View Event Recording Here

Join Tabea Linhard, professor of Spanish and comparative literature and Global Studies affiliate; Mattie Gottbrath, coordinator for international programming in Global Studies; and Ila Sheren, associate professor of art history & archaeology, all in Arts & Sciences, as they discuss Hostile Terrain 94, a global pop-up exhibition that gives representation to the thousands of migrants who died crossing the US–Mexico border since the mid-1990s and raises awareness of this humanitarian crisis. They will discuss the impact of border policies and border crossing on local and global communities and will share their experiences organizing this participatory exhibition in St. Louis.

The program will begin with a performance of “MY BABY” by artist Mee Jey that honors the unidentified people who lost their life in the desert of Arizona. Visitors are invited to view the exhibition before and/or after the program.

About the speakers

Tabea Linhard is professor of Spanish, comparative literature, and Global Studies at Washington University. She is the author of Fearless Women in the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War (2005), Jewish Spain: A Mediterranean Memory (2014), and the co-author of Mapping Migration, Identity, and Space. She recently completed Unexpected Routes: Refuge in Mexico (1931–1945) and regularly teaches courses on global migration.

Mattie Gottbrath is the coordinator for International Programming for Washington University’s undergraduate Global Studies major, and one of the lead organizers for St. Louis’s Hostile Terrain 94 exhibit. In her current role she teaches first-year students in the workshop for the Global Citizenship Program, which includes an immersive border awareness program in Tucson. She enjoys connecting locally with individuals impacted by immigration by volunteering with Casa de Salud, the International Institute, IFCLA, and other organizations. Gottbrath graduated from Washington University in 2018 with degrees in international affairs and Spanish. After graduating, she volunteered for a year in Guayaquil, Ecuador, with Rostro de Cristo. While there, she developed youth outreach programs with a local community development nonprofit, Hogar de Cristo.

Ila N. Sheren is associate professor in the Department of Art History & Archaeology at Washington University in St Louis. She is the author of Portable Borders: Performance Art and Politics on the US Frontera since 1984 (University of Texas Press, 2015), as well as articles published in The Journal of Borderlands Studies, GeoHumanities, and the anthologies Border Spaces (University of Arizona, 2018) and Liquid Borders/Fronteras Liquidas (Routledge, 2021). As part of the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Equity’s Innovation Space initiative, she is launching a collaborative map of community art on the US–Mexico Border in 2022. Click here for more information about the map.

Mee Jey is a multidisciplinary artist concerned with lived experiences. Mee focuses on the collective politico-cultural identity and experiences, communal creativity and connections through her immersive installations, performances, relational art projects, and time-based media. She is a recipient of McDonnell International Scholarship and Legislative Fellowship, USA. She works out of St. Louis and New Delhi.

Sweat

As timely as ever, this Pulitzer Prize winner addresses the complexities of race, class and friendship at a pivotal moment in America. This deeply heartfelt drama is crafted with generous humor and tells the story of a group of co-workers who find friendship working together on a factory floor. When layoffs and picket lines enter the picture, these friends must decide if they should look out for each other — or prioritize themselves.

How to Fight Injustice Without Hating: Connecting Mindfulness with Social Justice

Screening & Artist Talk with Hugo Crosthwaite

Public Tour: The Outwin—American Portraiture Today

You’re Paid What You’re Worth: Book Talk by Professor Jake Rosenfeld

Joy Williams Reading & Celebration

Me, You, Us: Stories as Portraits

Public Tour: New on View

Virtual Book Club: Fahrenheit 451

The September book club meeting falls during Banned Books Week, so we have chosen Fahrenheit 451 to recognize this special week.

In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s frightening vision of the future, firemen don’t put out fires — they start them in order to burn books. Bradbury’s vividly painted society holds up the appearance of happiness as the highest goal — a place where trivial information is good and knowledge and ideas are bad. Celebrate Banned Books Week by reading this classic. 

German Film Series: Aguirre, the Wrath of God

German kicks off our Film Series off with one of Werner Herzog’s earlier feature films: Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), which follows a colonial expedition of Spaniards into Peru and the descent of the titular character into madness.

The screening is free and open to the public.

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the event.

Content Warning: Intense sequences, Violence

Divided City Graduate Fellows Colloquium

We invite you to listen to a series of PechaKucha style presentations on the research of Divided City Summer Graduate Fellows. PechaKucha is a presentation format where 20 images are shown each for 20 seconds, keeping presentations concise and fast paced. Graduate students in the humanities, humanistic social sciences, architecture, urban design and landscape architecture will present their summer research on urban segregation.

Fear of the Muslim Planet: Global Islamophobia in the New World Order

Join us for a conversation with author and human rights lawyer Arsalan Iftikhar, who will discuss his book Fear of the Muslim Planet: Global Islamophobia in the New World Order.

This event is presented by the Washington University School of Law Public Interest Law & Policy Speaker Series; Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute; Weidenbaum Center for Economy, Government & Public Policy; and John C. Danforth Center on Religion & Politics.

Pari in Perpetuity: Peeling Back the Layers of Agricultural Policy in a Prayerful Way

An Evening with Danielle Allen

A Marvelous Work: Reading Mormonism in West Africa

LAURIE MAFFLY-KIPP, the Archer Alexander Distinguished Professor & Interim Dean and Vice Provost for Graduate Education, Washington University. Maffly-Kipp’s lecture will discuss how the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints pamphlets, books and other church materials circulated in West Africa two decades before offical missionary work began, leading to a unique “native” Mormonism. Believers crafted churches from these bare materials and doctrinal interpretations during the 1960s and 1970s. The lecture will also be broadcasted live at youtube.com/USULibraries. Utah State University Libraries’ Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture series.

Public Tour: ‘The Outwin: American Portraiture Today’

Join student educator Jay Buchanan, graduate student in the Department of Art History & Archaeology at Washington University, for an online tour of The Outwin: American Portraiture Today. This exhibition features the finalists of the National Portrait Gallery’s fifth triennial Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. The selected portraits in a variety of media respond to the current political and social context, offering perspectives on a range of themes of sociopolitical relevance, including immigration, the status of American workers, mass incarceration, gun violence and LGBTQ+ rights.

Farming, Gardening and Food Sovereignty in Native American Communities

Devon Mihesuah, a member of the Choctaw Nation, is the Cora Lee Beers Price Professor in International Cultural Understanding at the University of Kansas. Elizabeth Hoover is an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management at the University of California Berkeley. This event is part of the Indigenous Knowledge & Sustainability | Food conference.

Hosted by Missouri Botanical Gardens, in partnership with Washington University Climate Change Program.

Sisters of Carceral Liberation: Building a Movement of Social Justice for Black Women in Higher Education in Prison

BREEA WILLINGHAM is an interdisciplinary scholar and criminal justice professor whose teaching and research examines the intersections of race, gender, higher education and the criminal injustice system. She is particularly interested in examining Black women’s experiences with higher education in prison and amplifying the voices of Black women impacted by the injustice system.

Restoration

Syrita Steib started Operation Restoration in 2016 to eradicate the roadblocks she faced when returning to society after incarceration. Syrita serves as the executive director and is responsible for overseeing the administration, programs and strategic plan of the organization. She created Operation Restoration because of her experience with the legal system. At the age of 19, Syrita was sentenced to 120 months in federal prison. After serving nearly 10 years in prison, she was released into a community vastly different than the one she left. Other formerly incarcerated women helped her to readjust to the world she had left behind.

International Writers Series: Mary Jo Bang

In this virtual reading and discussion, Mary Jo Bang will present her recent translation of Dante’s Purgatorio. Mary Jo Bang is a nationally recognized author of eight books of poems and professor of English here at Washington University in St. Louis. Her adaptation of Purgatorio is the extraordinary continuation of her journey with Dante, which began with her transformative version of Inferno. In her signature lyric style, accompanied by her wise and exuberant notes, Bang has produced a stunning translation of this fourteenth-century text, rich with references that span time, languages, and cultures. Bang will be joined in discussion by Aaron Coleman, PhD student in Comparative Literature and fellow poet and translator.

Artificial Intelligence: Applications, Promises, Pitfalls and Misperceptions

Artificial intelligence (AI), characterized by machine and deep learning, has swept in today’s society like a perfect storm, leaving no stone unturned. From pizza delivery to crime control, from creative arts to chatbot companion, from autonomous driving to auto-trading, AI is already present in many facets of our lives. Of the many views of the future of AI, what version should we believe, if any? Should we embrace it, or should we fear it? Join us for a discussion of the enduring myths and debates surrounding AI.

Cutting through the stereotypes of incarcerated people: The benefits of student mentorship and support networks inside prison

Grant E. Tietjen is an associate professor in the St. Ambrose University–Davenport Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, and also has direct criminal justice system contact. Tietjen earned his doctorate from the Department of Sociology at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He has written, researched and lectured on convict criminology, mass incarceration, class inequality, criminological theory and pathways to correctional/postcorrectional education. He has published in multiple peer reviewed journals, book chapters and academic encyclopedias; with multiple works in progress. Tietjen’s most recent peer reviewed research has been published in The Prison Journal and Critical Criminology. Additionally, he has given over 60 conference presentations, invited talks/public forums, and media interviews. Tietjen has been involved with the Convict Criminology (CC) group since 2005, mentoring new CC members, and serving as the group’s co-chair from 2017–19.  Further, in 2020, he was appointed the inaugural chair of the newly formed American Society of Criminology Division of Convict Criminology.

Joy Williams Reading & Celebration

The Washington University Libraries and English Department are hosting legendary writer Joy Williams for a special reading and conversation. Williams’ first novel in 20 years, Harrow, will be released on September 14. The exhibition “Joy Williams: Honored Guest”, featuring materials from the Joy Williams Papers, is on display in John M. Olin Library, with a digital version coming soon.

Isolation, Bisected: Dan Graham’s Pavilion at Washington University

Prioritizing Higher Education and Career Goals in Prison & Reentry

Terrell A. Blount is a motivational speaker, mentor, and advocate for quality postsecondary education and career opportunities and policy change affecting justice-involved people. Approaching the completion of a six-year sentence, Terrell pursued his goal of graduating with a college degree, which he set for himself years before being released from prison.  “I just kept telling myself: ‘If I can do five years in prison, I can do five years in college.’” Soon, he found himself a BA graduate of the School of Communication & Information (SCI) and later, achieving his MPA in nonprofit management from the School of Public Affairs and Administration (SPAA), both at Rutgers University.

Today, he serves as the director of the Formerly Incarcerated College Graduates Network, a nonprofit organization supporting postsecondary education attainment among justice-involved individuals, while connecting formerly incarcerated students and professionals across the country. A leader in the higher education and justice space, Terrell participates on various steering committees and advisory boards and has experience in policy change and advocacy, program administration, philanthropy and college reentry programs. 

The Transformative and Rehabilitative Power of Higher Education in Prison

Bryan Jordan was born and raised in the city of New Haven, Conn. He is the oldest of five siblings: two brothers and two sisters. After dropping out of high school, he received his GED while incarcerated in 1994. However, in 2016, while serving a sentence that would later be overturned, he was accepted into Second Chance Educational Alliance to pursue higher education in prison. Subsequently, Jordan went on to be 1 of 600 inmates to apply and be accepted into Yale University. Since his release, he has begun the enrollment process into Yale in pursuit of a law degree.

Trauma, Incarceration and Ability to Learn

Em Daniels is a master educator and leading expert on the impacts of trauma on adult learning. They are a skilled facilitator and speaker, with an extensive background in adult education that includes alternative high schools, prisons, free college campuses, private and nonprofit organizations, government institutions and community agencies. Their expertise focuses on countering the impacts of trauma on learning by expanding beyond a mental health approach and defining multiple points of entry to the work. Daniels emphasizes the necessity of addressing individual and systemic trauma as crucial to create and sustain a just and compassionate world.

Longevity for the World: Self and the Social Body in Early Modern China

Self-perfection and immortality are central to understanding Chinese medical history, but He Bian (Ch. 邊和), associate professor of History and East Asian Studies at Princeton University, highlights the rise of the social body and techniques for the masses.

Faculty Book Talk: Henry I. Schvey

Fear and Loathing in New Spain: Antiblackness in Colonial Mexico

Region and Enmity: A RaceB4Race Symposium, October 19–22, 2021

Download program

Enmity is a sustaining force for systemic racism, a fervent antipathy toward a category of people. Enmity exists at the nexus of individual and group identity and produces difference by desiring opposition and supremacy, imagining separation by force, and willing conflict. Enmity unfolds in different ways in different places, according to local logics of territory, population, language, or culture, even as these geographical divisions are subject to constant change.

This interdisciplinary symposium, hosted by Rutgers University, focuses on how premodern racial discourses are tied to cartographical markers and ambitions. The notions of enmity and region provide a dual dynamic lens for tracing the racial repertoires that developed in response to increasingly hostile contention between premodern cultural and political forces. The symposium will invite scholars to take up this intersection between region and enmity, and to examine how belief in difference, or the emergence of polarizing structures and violent practices, configured race thinking and racial practices in ways that are both unique to different territories and that transcend them.

Miguel A. Valerio is an assistant professor of Spanish at Washington University in St. Louis. His work has appeared in several journals, including Slavery and Abolition and Colonial Latin American Review. He is currently completing a book on Afro-Mexican festive practices, “Sovereign Joy: Afro-Mexican Festive Practices, 1539–1640,” under contract with Cambridge University Press. Besides exploring black joy and communal sovereignty, the book studies how Iberian racial ideology impacted Afro-Mexicans’ daily and festive lives. 

Co-sponsored by Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, the Folger Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Arizona State University.

Tear Down the Walls: White Radicalism and Black Power in 1960s Rock

From the earliest days of rock and roll, white artists regularly achieved fame, wealth, and success that eluded the Black artists whose work had preceded and inspired them. This dynamic continued into the 1960s, even as the music and its fans grew to be more engaged with political issues regarding race. In Tear Down the Walls: White Radicalism and Black Power in 1960s Rock, Patrick Burke tells the story of white American and British rock musicians’ engagement with Black Power politics and African American music during the volatile years of 1968 and 1969. The book sheds new light on a significant but overlooked facet of 1960s rock — white musicians and audiences casting themselves as political revolutionaries by enacting a romanticized vision of African American identity. Patrick Burke is associate professor of music at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of Come In and Hear the Truth: Jazz and Race on 52nd Street, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Artists Jess T. Dugan and David Antonio Cruz with Amber Johnson

Art Movement - Online Premier

Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth

Moderated by Daniel Harawa, associate professor and director, Appellate Clinic, WashULaw. This event is presented by the Washington University School of Law Public Interest Law & Policy Speaker Series; the Department of African & African-American Studies; the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity; the Brown School; Clark-Fox Policy Institute; Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy; the Black Law Students Association; and the Women of Color Law Society. 

In Conversation: Colonizing the Past: Constructing Race in Ancient Greece and Rome

This panel explores critical issues raised by the fall 2021 Teaching Gallery exhibition, Colonizing the Past: Constructing Race in Ancient Greece and Rome. How have modern ideas on race influenced the interpretation and representation of racialized identities across different cultures, geographies, and religions in classical antiquity? How do narratives of whiteness influence contemporary understandings of ancient Greece and Rome?

Faculty Book Talk: Patrick Burke

From the earliest days of rock and roll, white artists regularly achieved fame, wealth, and success that eluded the Black artists whose work had preceded and inspired them. This dynamic continued into the 1960s, even as the music and its fans grew to be more engaged with political issues regarding race. In Tear Down the Walls, Patrick Burke tells the story of white American and British rock musicians’ engagement with Black Power politics and African American music during the volatile years of 1968 and 1969.

Advocacy & Allyship: Establishing a Racial Equity Framework that Goes Beyond HR

Everyone in an organization contributes to its culture, which makes equity and inclusion everyone’s responsibility. This conversation will focus on steps to establish a racial equity framework in your organization, how to identify inequities within your organization, and empowering colleagues to constructively advocate for people with marginalized identities. While we will center the experience of Black people in the workplace, the ideas shared will also apply to other groups and to an intersectional understanding of equity.

A Chinese Confucianist’s Philosophy: Interpreting the Ink Rubbings of the Wu Liang Shrine Stone Engravings

International Writers Series: Matvei Yankelevich

Informal Cities Workshop Kickoff Lecture: Chelina Odbert

The annual Informal Cities Workshop provides students with an intensive, hands-on opportunity to grapple with frictions and interconnections that exist between the informal and the formal aspects of the city. It consists of a keynote lecture, which is free and open to the public, followed by a one-credit, weekend-long design charrette. Previous workshops have explored conditions in Varanasi, India; Lima, Peru; Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa; and Caracas, Venezuela.

The workshop and lecture are co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and The Divided City initiative.

Language as a Conveyor of Culture: The Case of Borrowed Vocabulary in Kiswahili

Faculty Book Talk: Heather Berg

“Portrait, number 1 man (day clean ta sun down)” by Sheldon Scott

Artist Talk with Sheldon Scott

Virtual Book Club: The Map Thief

Join us to discuss the October book club selection, The Map Thief by Michael Blanding.

Once considered a respectable antiquarian map dealer, E. Forbes Smiley spent years doubling as a map thief — until he was finally arrested slipping maps out of books in the Yale University library. The Map Thief delves into the true history of this fascinating high-stakes criminal and the inside story of the industry that consumed him.

Virtual Book Club: Medicus

Military doctor Gaius Petrius Ruso just wants to start over after his divorce and his father’s death. A posting with the 20th legion in the remote province of Britannia seems like just the thing — until his rescue of the slave girl Tilla and a series of murders that no one wants to investigate complicates matters.

Artists Deborah Roberts And Adrian Octavius Walker with Adrienne Davis

On Sport for Development: Empowering Individuals and Communities in Africa