Next Monday, March 29 (5-6pm), Professor Dennis Geronimus is presenting the final talk of this year’s NYU Scholars Lecture Series, titled “Hidden in Plain Sight: Black Africans in Renaissance Visual Culture.”
For anyone interested in attending, please visit the Scholars Lecture website and complete a short form (link at right) to receive the Zoom link to the event: https://cas.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/cas/scholarslectures.html (scroll down to the bottom of the page for a brief description).
Professor Prita Meier is part of a team of art historians, heritage experts, and museum professionals who are launchingIndian Ocean Exchanges this summer. Organized by Professor Nancy Um (Binghamton University), this Getty Foundation-funded initiative is a research, fellowship, and travel program that aims to build a robust network of international scholars and professionals who are committed to advancing Indian Ocean art histories. The program posits the collective experiences of cross-cultural travel, exchange, and community formation as the foundation to cultivate this sub-field in formation, with the goal of widening and amplifying the expertise that develops in any single regional (and landed) context.
The program will host a cohort of 15 international fellows, mainly emerging scholars, providing opportunities for connection along shared intellectual affinities. Indian Ocean Exchanges will be launched through a series of virtual meetings that will begin in Summer 2021. In 2022, the cohort will embark, as a group, on three international study trips, to be held on the Arabian Peninsula (2022), in Southeast Asia (2022), and on the coast of East Africa (2023).
This talk addresses the transformation of the basilica as an architectural form and its subsequent impact on architecture in the eastern Mediterranean. Justinian’s Hagia Sophia represents a critical moment in architectural history in terms of form, meaning, and aesthetics. Zoom Webinar Link:https://nyu.zoom.us/j/96613352688
Please join Works in Progress via Zoom on Friday, April 2 at 6:00 PM EST for our second talk of the semester. IFA Doctoral Candidate Christopher T. Richards will present “Signs, Sodomy, and Narcissus.”
Roman de la Rose (Paris, 1365-1375). National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, MS 50165D, fol. 11v.
This Works In Progress talk presents a portion of Christopher T. Richards’s dissertation on the metamorphosis of the vernacular manuscript from textual repository to visual artifact during the fourteenth century. Recognizing the sudden change in the medium prompts many questions: what purpose do miniatures serve in a manuscript of French poems? How were they understood by their readers and makers? This talk will examine perhaps the single most common image in 14th-century vernacular books, Narcissus and his entrancing image, in order to excavate picture theoretical observations current at the royal court of Paris. Christopher will demonstrate the centrality of queer desire to gothic picture theory and reconstruct a curious literary milieu, in which the image’s semiosis could be analogized as sodomy.
The Works in Progress speaker series was launched in 2013 to create a collegial forum where faculty and advanced doctoral students can present current and ongoing research to facilitate conversations beyond the classroom about methodologies, processes, and the field at large. These casual gatherings consist of one individual presenting their work, followed by a discussion among attendees. This, of course, means that Works in Progress will not ‘work’ without you! Please consider lending your voice to these discussions.
Should you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact Shannah Rose (smr690@nyu.edu).
Join the Urban Design and Architecture Society and NYU Professor & Architect Miriam Kelly for a talk on adaptive reuse and the poetics of old walls. She will lecture on her profession, her projects, and the importance of historic preservation. Zoom Meeting ID: 976 3552 7389 Zoom Link: https://nyu.zoom.us/j/97635527389
The website contains the event’s full schedule along with the 98 speakers’ abstracts and photographs. Talks will be given during twelve sessions held over three days, from April 9th to 11th.
To watch any session, simply click on the “Full Schedule” tab at the top of the homepage. A few days before the start of the Symposium, you will see next to each session in the schedule is a blue and orange “Webex Link” button, which you can simply click on to join the session. Please note that no prior registration is necessary to access all sessions. If you feel uncertain about navigating the website or joining a Webex meeting, simply click on the “Join Us!” tab at the top of the Symposium’s homepage for assistance. Please note that all session times are EDT.
If you cannot attend but would like to watch the talks, we plan to record all sessions and make them available after the Symposium has concluded.
It isn’t often within the academy that you have the opportunity to teach with your best friend. And it’s even less frequent to teach a course that has been nearly twenty-five years in the making. That is what we are lucky enough to do this semester, which is the third time we are teaching “History of Spanish Art 1890s to the Present” together, and the first time we are teaching it remote. Especially now, with all the challenges of this past year, it is a wonderful opportunity to teach together once again and share our experiences with the students this semester. While Professor Basilio teaches from her apartment in Brooklyn and Professor Mendelson from her apartment in Manhattan, they are both frequented by “assistants” in their virtual classrooms: Professor Basilio’s cat Lyla, and Professor Mendelson’s son. Both seem to have opinions about Spanish art and show it in different ways: Lyla sometimes Zoom bombs, and Professor Mendelson’s son can be heard knocking outside her office/bedroom door from time to time.
We met about twenty-five years ago when we were both enrolled in Professor Robert Lubar’s graduate seminar on Surrealism in Spain at the Institute of Fine Arts, where Basilio was a student. Professor Mendelson was a graduate student at Yale and came into the city once a week for the class. Over the course of that semester and many summers following, we met at libraries and archives, both in Spain and here in New York City, doing research for our dissertations and later research for articles, books, and exhibitions. Following graduate school, we each pursued our careers in different locations: Professor Basilio at The Museum of Modern Art, Professor Mendelson at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. By 2007, we both found ourselves teaching at NYU; Professor Basilio in the DAH, Professor Mendelson in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. We joined research groups together, collaborated in our work in support of the King Juan Carlos I Center on campus, sat on committees together, and visited each other’s classes to guest lecture. But it was only in spring 2016 that we decided to teach “History of Spanish Art 1890s to the Present” together.
Since teaching the class together, we have been able to draw on our complimentary strengths and interests, bringing to the class our combined knowledge of art, literature, history and culture. Both of us have published widely on Spanish art, and we are very interested in how works of art function in the world, in relation to politics and to broader social and historical contexts. Our interest in the presence of art not only in museums but also in archives and libraries has informed the way that we encourage students to look closely and read carefully and we model both through a variety of assignments that touch upon poetry, painting, and film. We both have experience curating exhibitions and place the study of objects at the center of our research. Although many students are not able to go to museums this semester, we are incorporating digital resources and inviting guest speakers. For example, Special Collections Reference Associate Danielle Nista, will share with students objects from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive, such as posters and postcards brought home by volunteers that fought to defend the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War.
One of the most exciting aspects of teaching together is learning from each other, while we also learn from each and every one of our students. Students from Art History, Spanish and Portuguese, and other departments enroll in this class, which makes for a lively discussion. This semester presents challenges, of course, but we have also found ways to stay connected, get to know our students, and hopefully share with them the excitement we still find in teaching together the history of Spanish art.
Taking a break from research at Madrid’s Biblioteca Nacional, late 1990sMeeting in Brooklyn to plan the course, December 2020
Maurice Pomerantz, NYU Abu Dhabi Matthew Keegan, Barnard College Saleem Al-Bahloly, Independent Scholar Elizabeth Rauh, American University in Cairo Anneka Lenssen, UC Berkeley
Friday, March 26th, 11:00am
PLEASE NOTE: The US has already adopted summer daylight saving time in advance of other regions. As a result, for this one event the time differences from New York vary slightly. This event begins at 11am New York time (15h London, 16h Lagos/Berlin, 17h Cairo/Beirut, 18h Addis/Istanbul, 20.00 Islamabad, 20.30 Delhi)
[Online] Silsila Spring 2021 Lecture Series, Translations
One of the most popular texts chosen for illustration in the medieval Islamic world was the Maqamat (Assemblies) of Al-Hariri of Basra (d. 1122). The text combines linguistic pyrotechnics with morally ambiguous tales of a roguish protagonist who beguiles and charms through verbal dexterity. The accompanying images are among the most engaging ever produced in the medieval Arab world. The most celebrated illustrated copy of the manuscript, famed for the conceptual sophistication, scale and quality of its images, was calligraphed and painted by Yahya al-Wasiti in Iraq (probably Baghdad) in 1237 CE.
The genre of the maqama left a rich legacy to modern literary traditions in the Arab world. Similarly, the images in the 1237 manuscript (now in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris) proved inspirational to a wide range of artists and artistic movements across the modern Arab world from the Maghreb to Iraq. Both phenomena are marked by numerous paradoxes: the idea that the genesis for Arab visual or literary modernisms might be sought in medieval genres and idioms; the reception of figural paintings by modern champions of abstraction; or, the fact that most artists could access the medieval paintings that so inspired them only in reproduction.
The workshop attempts to complicate the temporalities of Arab modernism arising from the continuities and disjunctions that mark these kinds of productive paradoxes, exploring a remarkable series of transtemporal intersections between literary and visual cultures.
11.00-11.15 Introduction, Finbarr Barry Flood, Silsila/NYU
11.15-11.45 Maurice Pomerantz, NYU Abu Dhabi, “’On Sight and Insight in the Maqāmāt“
11.45-12.15 Matthew Keegan, Barnard College of Columbia University, “Islamic Commentaries on al-Hariri’s Maqamat and the Idea of Literature”
12.15-12.45 Saleem Al-Bahloly, Independent Scholar, “The Two Lives of MS. 5847”
12.45-1.15 Elizabeth Rauh, American University in Cairo, “Towards an Active Witnessing: Artistic Experiments with Islamic Heritage in 1960s Iraq”
1.15-1.45 Anneka Lenssen, UC Berkeley, “Linear and Atomistic: Louis Massignon on the Maqamat”
Maurice A. Pomerantz is Associate Professor of Literature at New York University Abu Dhabi. He is author of Licit Magic: The Life and Letters of Ṣāḥib b. ʿAbbād (d. 385/995) (Leiden: Brill, 2017) and a forthcoming study on the Maqāmāt of al-Hamaḏhānī with Bilal Orfali. He is an editor of the Library of Arabic Literature published by New York University Press.
Matthew L. Keegan is the Moinian Assistant Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College of Columbia University. His research focuses on the intersections of Islamic thought, Arabic poetry, and Arabic storytelling traditions. He works on tricksters, commentaries, riddles, anthologies, and Islamic legal writing from the pre-colonial period. He has served as an Assistant Professor at American University of Sharjah and as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Freie Universität Berlin.
Saleem Al-Bahloly is a cultural anthropologist based in California. He is writing a book about how the history of Islam has been re-encountered in the practice of artists in Iraq as an archive of concepts for responding to a modern problem of meaning.
Elizabeth Rauh (PhD, University of Michigan, 2020) is Assistant Professor of Modern Art and Visual Cultures at the American University in Cairo. Specializing in modern arts and visual cultures of Iran, Iraq, and Western Asia, her work examines artist engagements with Islamic heritage, popular image practices and technologies in Shi`i Islam, and arts of the twentieth-century “Shi`i Left.” She also pursues research in ecological art practices in the history of the Persian Gulf, such as in her forthcoming study: “Experiments in Eden: Midcentury Artist Voyages into the Mesopotamian Marshlands” (Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World, Summer 2021). Her research has been funded by The Academic Research Institute in Iraq, the Darat al Funun Center for Modern and Contemporary Arab Art, the Max Weber Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Anneka Lenssen is an Associate Professor of Global Modern Art at UC-Berkeley. She is co-editor (with Nada Shabout and Sarah Rogers) of the anthology Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents (New York: MoMA, 2018), and author of Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020).
Co-sponsored by NYU’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies.Date: Friday, March 26th Time: 11:00am-2:30pm Location: Online
This event will take place as a live Webinar at 11:00am ET (New York time). To register as an attendee, please use the following link: https://nyu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_4Bi4IaqHTGCgZxhXbBc_DQ Only registered attendees will be able to access this event.Silsila: Center for Material Histories is an NYU center dedicated to material histories of the Islamicate world. Each semester we hold a thematic series of lectures and workshops, which are open to the public. Details of the Center can be found at:
Associate Professor of Architectural HistoryDepartment of Architecture, University of Hong Kong
Aftermath of the 1874 Typhoon in Yau Ma Tei, photo by Lai Afong
8:00 p.m. EDT | Tuesday, March 30, 2021Hosted by Y. L. Lucy Wang, Columbia UniversityLive Zoom Webinar: Register Here Meteorology emerged as an important science in late-nineteenth century colonial Hong Kong that deepened imperial knowledge concerning the environmental forces affecting the colony’s economic, political, and social affairs and the region at large. This talk traces the historical study of Hong Kong’s climate through the architecture that enabled it, namely, the design and construction of the Hong Kong Observatory, which was initiated in 1879 at the behest of the London-based Meteorological Society and eventually completed in 1883. Overlooked not only in the architectural history of colonial Hong Kong and Great Britain’s imperial sphere, but in the architectural study of climate more generally, analysis of the observatory and attending controversy surrounding its materialization offers insight into the spaces, systems, and information that gave definition to the colony as an environment and proved critical to Hong Kong’s governance, commercial culture, and physical development over time.
Cole Roskam is associate professor of architectural history in the Department of Architecture at the University of Hong Kong. His research explores architecture’s role in mediating moments of transnational interaction and exchange between China and other parts of the world. His research has been supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), the Fulbright-Hays Program, the Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, and the Research Grants Council, University Grants Committee of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, among others.
His articles and essays have appeared in Architectural History, Grey Room, and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, among others. He is the author of Improvised City: Architecture and Governance in Shanghai, 1843-1937 (University of Washington Press, 2019). His second book, Designing Reform: Architecture in the People’s Republic of China, 1970-1992, will be published in 2021 by Yale University Press. Y. L. Lucy Wang is a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University’s Department of Art History and Archaeology, specializing in modern architecture, with an interest in the Sinosphere of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her research more broadly addresses colonial modernisms and diasporic architecture in the Qing, British, and French empires. As always, Collins/Kaufmann talks are free and open to the public. We hope to see many of you at Prof. Roskam’s lecture on Zoom! Sincerely, Qisen Song Student Coordinator, Collins/Kaufmann Forum for Modern Architectural History Ph.D. Student, Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University
Fields of Vision 