Professor Kathryn A. Smith is among the 71 university and college teachers and independent scholars nationwide to be awarded a fellowship by the National Endowment for the Humanities this year.
The grant will support a year of advanced research and writing of her current book project, Scripture Transformed in Late Medieval England: The Religious, Artistic, and Social Worlds of the Welles-Ros Bible.
Professor Smith’s award is one of 213 grants made by the NEH to support individual, group, or public projects in the humanities in its 2020-21 cycle, and one of two fellowships awarded this year to research projects that consider the impact of the Black Death on art. The announcement of awards was made earlier this week.
Professor Smith’s work on her first book, Art, Identity and Devotion in Fourteenth-Century England (London: The British Library, 2003), also was supported by an NEH Fellowship.
As this difficult year draws to a close, we at Silsila hope that you and your loved ones are safe and well. We are immensely grateful to all of you, both speakers and attendees, for making our autumn lecture series such a success. I am also very grateful to Lola Owoseni, our administrative aide, for ensuring the smooth running of the series and planning for next semester, when we hope to see many of you again. Due to the ongoing effects of the pandemic, this will be online. We are grateful to our speakers for agreeing to participate in this format.
The theme for spring 2021 semester is Translations. We are delighted to welcome as co-sponsors for various events in the series a variety of NYU centers and programs, including South Asia NYU, The Center for Global Asia, The Center for Religion and Media, The Hagop Kevorkian for Near Eastern Studies and The Department of Religious Studies.
While last semester our lectures were held on Wednesdays, next semester our programming will consist of both lectures and more extended presentations and discussions. The lectures will continue to take place on Wednesdays 12.30-2.30 ET (New York time), but we will also have some workshop-type events that will take place on Friday afternoons 12.00-2.30 ET (New York time). For details of each event, please consult the schedule below and our website.
Links to register are posted on the relevant web pages for each event (https://as.nyu.edu/silsila/events.html). Once you register, you will then receive a link enabling you to access the event as an attendee. Only registered attendees will be able to access the event.
We wish you a happy holiday season and look forward to welcoming you back to Silsila, virtually, next semester.
With best wishes, Finbarr Barry Flood, director, Silsila: Center for Material Histories
Silsila Spring 2021 Lecture Series, “Translations”Jan 27th (Wed), 12:30-2:30pm “TELLING STORIES: THE ART OF NARRATION IN THE WORK OF KATIA KAMELI”Katia Kameli, Artist; Omar Berrada, Independent Scholar & Finbarr Barry Flood, Silsila/NYU
Feb 3rd (Wed), 12:30-2:30pm “AFRICAN MUSLIMS IN BRAZIL AND LATIN AMERICA: AN ANTERIOR HISTORY” Michael Gomez, NYU & Margarita Rosa, Princeton University
Feb 19th (Fri), 1:00-3:30pm “ISLAM AND THE DEVOTIONAL OBJECT: A DISCUSSION”Richard McGregor, Vanderbilt University; Azfar Moin, UT Austin; Wendy Shaw, Freie Universität, Berlin; Adam Bursi, Utrecht University & Finbarr Barry Flood, Silsila/NYU
Mar 5th (Fri), 12:00-2:30pm “YUSUF AL-NABHANI AND CONSERVATIVE MODERNITY IN THE LATE OTTOMAN PERIOD” Amal Ghazal, Doha Institute for Graduate Studies; Ahmed El Shamsy, University of Chicago; Stephennie Mulder, UT Austin & Finbarr Barry Flood, Silsila/NYU
Mar 10th (Wed), 12:30-2:30pm “CULTURAL CONNECTIONS BETWEEN LOUISIANA AND WEST AFRICA: FROM FOOD TO THE BLUES”Ibrahima Seck, Whitney Plantation Museum/University Cheikh Anta Diop of Dakar
Mar 26th (Fri), 11:00-2:30pm “THE MAQAMAT TRADITION AND THE PRE-MODERN ROOTS OF ARAB MODERNISM” Maurice Pomerantz, NYU Abu Dhabi; Matthew Keegan, Barnard University; Saleem al-Bahloly, UC Santa Barbara; Elizabeth Rauh, University of Illinois at Chicago & Anneka Lenssen, UC Berkeley
Apr 9th (Fri), 12:00-2:30pm “FIRST IMPRESSIONS: PRINT MEDIA IN THE MODERN ISLAMIC WORLD” Mira Schwerda, Harvard University; Hala Auji, American University of Beirut; Yasemin Gencer, Indiana University; Aditi Chandra, University of California-Merced & Elizabeth Rauh, University of Illinois at Chicago
Apr 21st (Wed), 12:30-2:30pm “ARCHITECTURES OF CO-EXISTENCE: BUILDING PLURALISM” Nebahat Avcioğlu, Hunter College; Azra Akšamija, MIT & Maryam Eskandari, MIIM Designs
May 5th (Wed), 12:30-2:30pm “THE SULTANS’ TOMBS OF BANDA ACEH – A HISTORIOGRAPHY OF INDONESIAN ISLAMIC ART” Mirjam Shatanawi, Reinwardt Academy/Amsterdam University of the Arts
Rawson Projects is pleased to announce ThisOnly, a new online exhibition launching today created by ThisOnly, an art collective developed out of the teachings of Dr. Roger Neesh, as expressed through *Pardon My Hindi.
ThisOnly’s practice involves applying artistic techniques to the results of archival research to catalog and narrate the layered histories through the media of mundane, everyday objects. The online exhibition, which showcases new work, will feature wearables and zines that explore the aesthetics and socio-political context behind the legendary rapper KRS-One’s experience in New York in the early 1980s and the first Communist government (elected in 1957) in Kerala, India.
*The word “Only” is used in South Asian English to emphasize a statement (e.g. I want this only.)
Ink & Image, the Department of Art History’s journal of original undergraduate scholarship, is currently seeking submissions for its 2021 publication.
This year the student staff of Ink & Image includes Co-Editors-in-Chief Anna Sujin Leckie and Niall Finn Lowrie; Editors Angie Tang, Ann Lukyanova, and Sunnie Zhang; and Layout Designers Clara Reed and Marie Normand.
For articles: Submitted works can be term papers, independent research projects, or abridged final theses. The only criterion is that it must be an original idea based on research. As a guideline, papers should be 10-20 pages long.
We will be reviewing papers on a rolling basis. The last day to submit works is February 3rd, 2021. Should you wish to submit a paper in progress or a term paper for the fall semester, please send an abstract or sought draft at your earliest convenience.
Selected papers will undergo several rounds of edits with the student co-editors as well as Professor Krinsky, the journal’s faculty advisor this academic year.
For cover art: We encourage all students to submit quality pieces to the publication. We will choose two students’ works to feature on the front and back cover of the journal. Please feel free to be creative and think outside of the box. The only requirement we have is that you submit your work as a .jpeg. The deadline for cover art submissions is February 3rd, 2021.
The journal will be published in May, 2021 and will be sent to libraries around the world, which in the past have included the Getty Research Institute Library, the Library of Congress, the NYPL, and the British Library.
This is a rare opportunity for undergraduates to have their work published and circulated. It is also a competitive advantage when applying for graduate programs and jobs. We encourage you to submit and take advantage of this opportunity!
Professor Dennis Geronimus is guest curating a coming exhibition: Grey Matters, set to openat the Nicholas Hall Gallery on E. 76th Street on January 25, 2021. The exhibition introduces a new early painting by Jacopo da Pontormo, a grisaille representing Adam and Evewith Cain and Abel— to be shown inthe context of other contemprary works in a variety of media.
The American Council of Learned Societies is pleased to present “How Do We Get There?: Accelerating Diversity in Slow to Change Humanities Fields,” on Thursday, December 17, 2020, at 4-5:30 PM EST.
This virtual roundtable discussion will offer a candid discourse exploring the history, current state, and solutions addressing humanities fields that remain largely homogeneous.This roundtable will be recorded and posted on the ACLS website.
Sharing their experiences and perspectives in this discussion will be:Anita L. Allen, Henry R. Silverman Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania Law SchoolPhilip Ewell, Associate Professor of Music Theory, Hunter College of the City University of New YorkCord Whitaker, Associate Professor of English, Wellesley CollegeThe discussion will be moderated by Pauline Saliga, Executive Director of the Society of Architectural Historians, who is leading the SAH Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Accountability, and Sustainability (IDEAS) Initiative, which supports diverse voices for discussion, debate, publication, programming, and sharing of cutting-edge scholarship about underrepresented groups and the history of the built environment.
Formed in 1919, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is a nonprofit federation of 75 scholarly organizations. As the preeminent representative of American scholarship in the humanities and related social sciences, ACLS holds a core belief that knowledge is a public good. As such, ACLS strives to promote the circulation of humanistic knowledge throughout society. In addition to stewarding and representing its member organizations, ACLS employs its $140 million endowment and $35 million annual operating budget to support scholarship in the humanities and social sciences and to advocate for the centrality of the humanities in the modern world.
Boris Groys Berlin, 1947 Boris Groys is a philosopher, essayist, art critic, media theorist, and an internationally renowned expert on Soviet-era art and literature, especially the Russian avant-garde. He is a Global Distinguished Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University, a Senior Research Fellow at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe, and a professor of philosophy at the European Graduate School (EGS). His work engages radically different traditions, from French post-structuralism to modern Russian philosophy, yet is firmly situated at the juncture of aesthetics and politics.
Fields of Vision 