Meet our Fall ’23 Writing Tutors

Although the Arts and Science College Learning Center has offered subject-specific assistance in the past and continues to do so in biology, chemistry, math, languages and the like, in recent years our own Department has taken the lead in providing art history-specific tutoring to its undergraduates. The program kicked off in October 2008 and, according to our students’ feedback, has proven to be a great success.

A tutor is available via Zoom on Mondays through Fridays from 12.30 pm to 2:00 pm. In-person tutoring can also be arranged. Contact cjr482@nyu.edu to schedule an appointment.

Laura Bergemann is a M.A./M.S. student at the Institute of Fine Arts, focusing on the conservation of objects. Originally from Boston, MA, Laura completed her BS in Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2019. Prior to starting her studies, Laura worked at The Museum of Fine Arts Boston and The Rijksmuseum among other institutions. Laura is available on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 12:30 pm – 2:00 pm. 

Nicole Kitsberg is an M.A. student at the Institute of Fine Arts, focusing on object-led curatorial approaches to memory, and arts of the Islamic world. Originally from London, Nicole graduated from the University of Oxford with First Class Honors in History of Art. Prior to moving to New York City, she worked at The Royal Academy of Arts, The Ashmolean Museum and Christie’s. Nicole is available on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 12:30pm – 2:00pm.

A STONE THAT BREATHES: MOSQUES, MATERIAL CULTURE,AND SENSORY LIFE IN SOUTH INDIA

Harini Kumar, Princeton University 
Wednesday, October 4th, 6:30pm EDT
Silsila Fall 2023 Program

Mosques in the southeastern coast of India are built in a distinctive style, rooted in local architectural idioms with respect to the design and materials used. Such mosques are an integral part of the Tamil sacred landscape, indexing the region’s longstanding Muslim presence as well as histories of maritime trade and mobility.  This talk traces how the architecture and materiality of mosques mediate Tamil Muslims’ connection to the past, and how such sites are reimagined as spaces of heritage, historical consciousness, and cultural value for coastal communities. This is especially pertinent in the current political moment where the Islamic built environment in India is under tremendous strain.  Harini Kumar (Ph.D. University of Chicago) is a postdoctoral research associate at the M.S. Chadha Center for Global India and the Department of History at Princeton University. She is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research focuses on Islam and Muslim societies in contemporary South India, with further regional interests in Southeast Asia and the Americas. Her scholarship lies at the intersection of lived religion, the built environment, kinship, gender, and mobility. Her current book manuscript is titled Formations of Tamil Islam: Belonging, Place, and Historical Consciousness in South India. Dr. Kumar’s research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the American Institute of Indian Studies. Date: Wednesday, October 4th Time: 6:30-8:30pm Location: Online and In Person, Room 222, 20 Cooper Square, NY, 10003 This event will be held in person at NYU in room 222, 20 Cooper Square, NY 10003. In accordance with university regulations, visitors must show a valid government-issued photo ID (children under 18 can provide non-government identification). Please use the following link to rsvp as an in-person attendee: https://forms.gle/3fA3fEFHcy5XCoMx8This event will also take place as a live Webinar at 6:30pm EDT (New York time). To register as an attendee, please use the following link: https://nyu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_2y-VG2TZQjyPGmm2q_JewA  Only registered attendees will be able to join 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:  http://as.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/as/research-centers/silsila.htmlCopyright © 2023 NYU Silsila, All rights reserved. Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.

Fighting Fascism in the Archive

October 10, 2023 5:30-6:30PM

Room 251 on the 2nd Floor of Bobst Library

Followed by a tour

RSVP here:

Register on Eventbrite

Miriam Basilio, Associate Professor of Art History and Museum Studies, Danielle Nista, Assistant University Archivist, and Alexia Arrizurieta, Curatorial Assistant, El Museo del Barrio discuss their collaboration as curators of Fighting Fascism: Visual Culture of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) From New York University Special Collections, Tamiment-Wagner Collections, Abraham Lincoln Archive. The exhibition, on view through October 10th at NYU’s Kimmel Windows (566 LaGuardia Place and West 3rd Streets), features posters, postcards, letters, and other items from the archive that was created by veterans and family members of American volunteers who fought to defend the Second Spanish Republic against a fascist military coup led by Francisco Franco. The exhibition was organized during a 2019 undergraduate art history seminar co-taught by Basilio and Nista, who collaborated with students to curate the exhibition based on their own archival research. Join us for a conversation about how archives, curation, and public art can be a catalyst for reflection about the dangers of efforts to overturn democratic elections, and the rise of fascism and dictatorships today.

Ink and Image 15 published earlier this year

Copies of Ink and Image 15, the latest number of New York University’s journal of original undergraduate from the Department of Art History, are flying out of their boxes and off of the shelves! Ink and Image publishes original research in the history of art, architecture, and urban design. The articles published in each issue of the journal develop out of term papers and other research conducted by students in Art History and Urban Design and Architecture Studies courses, independent studies, and senior honors theses.

The journal’s Co-Editors-in-Chief for the 2022­–2023 academic year were Adelle Aba (Art History; Chemistry minor ‘24) and Elizabeth Baltusnik (Urban Design and Architecture Studies/Spanish ‘24); Elizabeth also served as Design Editor of the current issue. The editors-in-chief were ably assisted by Editors Rachel Nazar (Art History/Journalism ‘23), Celia Pardillo-Lopez (Art History/French ‘24), and Meghan Watters (Art History; History minor ‘24),as well as Alumni Editor Emilie Meyer (Gallatin ‘23). Elizabeth and Emilie both played key roles in the editing and design of Ink and Image 14. Professor Carol Krinsky did an encore performance as faculty advisor, providing the student editors with invaluable guidance.

Five compelling articles by NYU undergraduates appear in the journal’s fifteenth number. The authors and their essays are as follows:

Ian Beard (Mathematics/Art History ‘24), “Decoding Anachronism in Domenico Ghirlandaio’s Innocenti Altarpiece.”

Dustin Chen (Art History/Classics/Philosophy ‘24), “Between and Beyond Art and Science: Charles Cordier’s Chinese Man and Woman.”

Jacklyn van der Colff (Art History/Anthropology ‘23), “The Artistic Expression of the ‘Others’: Exchange between the Ottoman ‘East’ and Italian ‘West’ During the Renaissance.”

Leonard Zhu (Urban Design and Architecture Studies; Law and Society minor ‘23), “China’s Ghost Cities.”

Lila Pearl Zinner (Art History ‘24), “Redefining Womanhood: Representations of Female Sexuality in Venetian Renaissance Portraiture.”

Ink and Image was founded in 2008–09 by department alumni Malcolm St. Clair (Urban Design and Architecture Studies ‘09) and Alexis Wang (Art History ‘09) with the goal of expanding the community of scholars at NYU by publishing original undergraduate research in the history and theory of art and architecture. College of Arts & Science Dean Matthew Santiroccoand Dean Sally Sanderlinprovided crucial support toward the launch of Ink and Image; the journal enjoys the sustained support of the CAS dean and administration and the Department of Art History. You may read about previous issues of the journal in our earlier posts.

Ink and Image is collected by NYPL, Art Institute of Chicago, and the Library of Congress. It is also distributed to the Getty Research Institute, the Technical University in Dresden, Germany, and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, France.

As Baltusnik and Aba put it in their co-authored “Letter from the Editors,” “Central to the mission of Ink and Image are the ideas of inspiring new research, encouraging creativity, and furthering connections. Happy Reading!”

Many congratulations to the authors and editors on their splendid achievements. Please take the opportunity to read Ink and Image 15.

Coming talk by Professor Dennis Geronimus: “Humanizing Pontormo’s Heavenly Bodies,” Bowdoin College, Sept. 28

https://calendar.bowdoin.edu/event/lecture_on_pontormo_exhibit

Plasticities of the “Eco”: Vernacularizing Nature in Contemporary India

Plasticities of the “Eco”: Vernacularizing Nature in Contemporary India Kajri Jain Professor of Indian Visual Culture and Contemporary Art at the University of Toronto,Mississauga Thursday, October 5th 6:30pm EST The Silver Center for Arts and Science Room 301

The Department of Art History & Urban Design and Architecture Studies invites you to attend our upcoming lecture by Kajri Jain.
Dr. Jain’s talk draws on a work in progress on the burgeoning parks, gardens, and theme parks in contemporary India to ask some basic questions about what figurations of what we call “nature”—other-than-human beings, landforms, water bodies—can mean and do. What happens to such figurations in the encounter between global discourses of ecology or environmentalism and other vernacular logics of presenting and representing nature, particularly where religious images are still efficacious, and the prefix “eco-” may or may not make sense? And how might the plasticities of the “eco” in these places of public nature illuminate and interrogate current approaches to the efficacies of images and religion in the environmental humanities? 
Kajri Jain is an Associate Professor of Indian Visual Culture and Contemporary Art at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. Her work focuses on images at the interface between religion, politics, and vernacular business cultures in India.

Date: Thursday, October 5th
Time: 6:30 PM
Location: The Silver Center for Arts and Science, Room 301

Please use the link below to register. Registration is encouraged, but not required.

Registration Link

Columbia University Seminar

Columbia University Seminar

Studies in Contemporary Africa 

invites you to our events & seminars for AY 2023-24

Please contact as6151@columbia.edu to RSVP

*** Fall 2023 ***
 

“Grounded Epistemologies”
 

Kusoma Pamoja / Books in Dialogue 


Prita Meier and Tasha Rijke-Epstein in dialogue with Anooradha Iyer Siddiq
 

September 18, 4.30 pm
Faculty House, Morningside Drive
 

In her forthcoming book, The Surface of Things: A History of Photography from the Swahili Coast, Prita Meier presents a new understanding of photographic meaning, one that frames the photograph not as a static image, but as a material artifact constituted by mobility. It focuses on the reception of photography in the main port cities of the Swahili coast, showing how photography was primarily about the tactile pleasure of beautiful objects and the power to make objects—and people—travel great distances. Key to this book’s reassessment of the history of photography is its emphasis on oceanic mobility and the long-distance trajectories of photographs. While the book provides important social and historical contexts, it primarily foregrounds the aesthetic and cultural politics of photography, exploring the circulation of photographs from one context to another and from one port to another. “Swahili” photographs are densely layered things, holding the entangled histories of Africa, South Asia, Middle East and Europe.

Prita Meier is an Africanist art and architectural historian at New York University. Her primary research site is the Swahili coast of eastern Africa and her scholarship focuses on the cultural and aesthetic politics of port cities and border territories. She is the author of Swahili Port Cities: Architecture of Elsewhere and co-editor of World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts Across the Indian Ocean. Her current research focuses on the material technologies and image cultures of travel and transportation in the African Indian Ocean world. Her next monograph is titled Surface of Things: A History of Photography from the Swahili Coast (forthcoming Princeton University Press, August 2024). Meier’s roster of grants and fellowships includes those from the Center for Advanced Study of the Visual Arts, the Clark Art Institute, the Cornell Society for the Humanities, Johns Hopkins University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
 

In Children of the Soil, Tasha Rijke-Epstein offers an urban history of the port city of Mahajanga, Madagascar, before, during, and after colonization. Drawing on archival and ethnographic evidence, she weaves together the lives and afterlives of built spaces to show how city residents negotiated imperial encroachment, colonial rule, and global racial capitalism over two centuries. From Mahajanga’s hilltop palace to the alluvial depths of its cesspools, the city’s spaces were domains for ideological debates between rulers and subjects, French colonizers and indigenous Malagasy peoples, and Comorian migrants and Indian traders. In these spaces, Mahajanga’s residents expressed competing moral theories about power over people and the land. The built world was also where varying populations reckoned with human, ancestral, and ecological pasts and laid present and future claims to urban belonging. Migrants from nearby Comoros harnessed built forms as anticipatory devices through which they sought to build their presence into the landscape and transform themselves from outsiders into “children of the soil” (zanatany). In tracing the centrality of Mahajanga’s architecture to everyday life, Rijke-Epstein offers new ways to understand the relationship between the material world, the more-than-human realm, and the making of urban life.

Tasha Rijke-Epstein is a historian and cultural anthropologist, whose research centers on questions of belonging, materiality, environment and the politics of placemaking in Madagascar and the broader Indian Ocean. Her first book, Children of the Soil: The Power of Built Forms in Urban Madagascar, is forthcoming with Duke University Press (October 2023), and her articles have appeared in a range of journals including Comparative Studies in Society and History, History & Technology, and The Journal of African History. She is currently Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University.

Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi (she/her) is an architectural historian and assistant professor at Barnard College. Her work centers African and South Asian questions of historicity and archives, heritage politics, and feminist and colonial practices. Her book manuscript Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (to be released in Fall 2023 in the Duke University Press series Theory in Forms) analyzes the history, visual rhetoric, and spatial politics of the Dadaab refugee camps in Northeastern Kenya, as an epistemological vantage point in African and Islamic worlds. Drawing from many years of archival, ethnographic, and visual research in East Africa, South Asia, and Europe, it moves beyond ahistorical representations of camps and their inhabitants, finding long migratory and colonial traditions in the architecture, spatial practices, material culture, and iconography of refugees and humanitarians.

THE POLITICS OF ART : DISSENT AND CULTURAL DIPLOMACY IN LEBANON, PALESTINE, AND JORDAN

Hanan Toukan, Bard College Berlin
Wednesday, September 13th, 12:30pm EDT
Silsila Fall 2023 Program

Over the last three decades, a new generation of conceptual artists has come to the fore in the Arab Middle East. As wars, peace treaties, sanctions, and large-scale economic developments have reshaped the region, this cohort of cultural producers has also found themselves at the center of intergenerational debates on the role of art in society. Central to these cultural debates is a steady stream of support from North American and European funding organizations—resources that only increased with the start of the Arab uprisings in the early 2010s. The Politics of Art offers an unprecedented look into the entanglement of art and international politics in Beirut, Ramallah, and Amman to understand the aesthetics of material production within liberal economies. In her book talk, Toukan will outline the political and social functions of transnationally connected and internationally funded arts organizations and initiatives. The book reveals how the production of art within global frameworks can contribute to hegemonic structures even as it is critiquing them—or how it can be counter hegemonic even when it first appears not to be. In this talk, Toukan will propose not only a new way of reading contemporary art practices as they situate themselves globally, but also a new way of reading the domestic politics of the region from the vantage point of art. Hanan Toukan is Associate Professor of Politics and Middle East Studies at Bard College Berlin. Her work broadly is concerned with the political and social roles art and cultural institutions play in our social and political worlds. In particular her research and writing focus on the function(s) of art in global politics; museums and exhibitionary practices; migration of artists and the movement of art objects; the politics of knowledge production in and about memory, displacement, history(ies), and race and racialization. She was previously visiting Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies and History of Art at Brown University and Visiting Professor of Cultural Studies at Bamberg University. Her book The Politics of Art: Dissent and Cultural Diplomacy in Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan was published with Stanford University Press in 2021. Besides her academic work Toukan is also a writer and critic whose work has appeared in various catalogues, art publications and journals.   This event will take place as a live webinar at 12:30pm EDT (New York time). To register as an online attendee, please use the following link: https://nyu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_yTidkR3TQpGzMjeZmEABWg Only registered attendees will be able to access this event via zoom.

Copyright © 2023 NYU Silsila, All rights reserved. Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.

Dean’s Undergraduate Research Fund Grants – Apply now!

Fall 2023 Deadline: Friday, Nov. 1st

Info Session 9/13 from 11AM-12PM

Dean’s Undergraduate Research Fund Grant applications are open for the Fall 2023 semester! Eligible students can apply for funding for early-career training, to present at a conference, or to support an individual or team research project!

Questions? 

• Attend our DURF Info Session, 9/13 from 11AM to 12PM. Click here for more info, and to RSVP
• visit our DURF site 
• Email cas.durf@nyu.edu

Silsila Fall 2023 Program

Sept 13th (Wed), 12:30-2:30pm (Online only)

“THE POLITICS OF ART: DISSENT AND CULTURAL DIPLOMACY IN LEBANON, PALESTINE, AND JORDAN” 
Hanan Toukan, Bard College Berlin

Sept 20th (Wed), 6:30-8:30pm
“REPRESENTATIONS OF PILGRIMS AT THE HOLY SITES OF MECCA AND MEDINA IN FUTUH AL-HARAMAYN MANUSCRIPTS” 
Marika Sardar, Independent Scholar

Sept 29th (Friday), 12:30-3:00pm (Workshop)
“ISLAMIC LAW AND MATERIAL CULTURE – CONVERGING TRAJECTORIES” 
Finbarr Barry Flood – NYU, Corinne Mühlemann – University of Bern, Ruba Kana’an – University of Toronto, and Leor Halevi – Vanderbilt University

Oct 4th (Wed), 6:30-8:30pm
“A STONE THAT BREATHES: MOSQUES, MATERIAL CULTURE, AND SENSORY LIFE IN SOUTH INDIA” 
Harini Kumar, Princeton University

Oct 11th (Wed) 6:30-8:30pm
“COCO-DE-MER KASHKULS, MATERIALITY, AND OCEANIC JOURNEYS” 
Peyvand Firouzeh, Independent Scholar

Oct 18th (Wed) 6:30-8:30pm
“TRACING THE PATHS OF MAGIC: TALISMANIC CHARTS AT THE NATIONAL MUSEUM IN SARAJEVO AS CULTURAL ARTIFACTS” 
Amila Buturović, York University

Oct 25th (Wed) 6:30-8:30pm 
“ISLAMIC CERAMICS AND INVISIBLE HANDS: CRAFT SKILLS IN A COLONIAL MARKETPLACE” 
Margaret S. Graves, Brown University

Nov 1st (Wed) 6:30-8:30pm
“VANMOUR IN AMERICA: THE “DRESSED PICTURES” FROM THE JEROME IRVING SMITH COLLECTION” 
Nebahat Avcıoğlu, Hunter College

Nov 29th (Wed) 6:30-8:30pm
“THE HISTORY OF ISLAMIC COLLECTIONS IN THE GEORGIAN NATIONAL MUSEUM, TBILISI” 
Irina Koshoridze, Tbilisi State University

Dec 8th (Friday) 12:00-3:00pm (Workshop)
“A PALESTINIAN ARCHIVE OF HEALING AND PROTECTION: THE LEGACIES OF TAWFIQ CANAAN” 
Rana Barakat – Birzeit University, Beshara Doumani – Brown University, James Grehan – Portland State University, Khaled Malas – NYU, Salim Tamari – Birzeit University