Select Fridays at 4pm

 Muse Restaurant,

 Albright Knox Art Gallery

 1285 Elmwood Avenue

 Free and open to the public

 Limited seating

 Scholars at Muse continues through

 April 2009.

Select Fridays between now and April 2009 the Muse Restaurant of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery becomes an intellectual salon. That's when Riverrun and the UB Humanities Institute run the second semester of "Scholars at Muse"—the second four of eight unusual, award winning lectures in the humanities, presented in the social setting of the restaurant and its bar.

“This will be a lot of fun," said Patrick Martin, President of Riverrun. "There is a Buffalo intellectual tradition, reflected in these lectures, that is perfect for this setting. It's the reason the UB Departments of English and Comparative Literature, for example, are famous and have drawn such great talent over the years. It's an avant-garde tradition, rigorous and off-kilter, that likes to make things hard for itself—to find the profound in the popular and the compelling in the obscure. It's a tradition that is very entertaining, surprising, and challenging. If you haven't experienced it, you're missing something exhilarating. The social setting of Muse, the opportunity to continue the discussion with old and new friends, wherever it goes, over wine, over dinner, is perfert. There's nothing quite like it in Buffalo at the moment."

All eight lectures are by UB Humanities Institute Research Fellows and take advantage of the restaurant's newly renovated digital resources. Tim Dean, professor in the UB Department of English and director of the Humanities Institute, noted, "The 2008-2009 Fellows were selected from a record number of applicants and a great range of disciplines. They form an outstanding group of interdisciplinary scholars who will contribute to the intellectual life of the entire community. An important part of the mission of the Humanities Institute is to create a vibrant intellectual community among UB students, faculty and citizens of the greater Buffalo area and Scholars at Muse is helping us achieve that. We are delighted to join with dynamic partners like the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and Riverrun in this series."

All lectures are free and open to the public.

Click here to listen to a recent WBFO Interview with Carrie Bramen and Sarah Bay-Cheng

Friday, September 5, 2008

Ana Mariella Bacigalupo

Associate Professor of Anthropology

"Forgetting and Willful Transfromation of Memory: The Death and Rebirth of a Mapuche Shamen in Chile"

Living History through Spirits: Memory, Forgetting and Shamanic Historical Consciousness in a Mapuche Community in Chile

Ana Mariella Bacigalupo interweaves the spiritual and reflexive dimensions of personal and collective memory to show how Chile’s indigenous Mapuche integrate narrative, textual, and embodied modes of remembering to create their own history of changing interethnic politics over time. She explores the role of spirits in the historical narratives and practices of memory employed by Francisca Colipi, a Mapuche mestiza Catholic shaman, and her community in southern Chile, where Dr. Bacigalupo served as Francisca’s ritual assistant as well as an ethnographer. Central to her project and to its significance for Anthropology and the Humanities more generally are her efforts to explore critically how historical continuity as provided by spirits and the reshaping of history in ritual as Francisca practiced it, as well as the way her community remembered, forgot, and re-remembered her and her spirit worked at different moments in their conflicted collective political history vis-à-vis the Chilean state.

Ana Mariella Bacigalupo teaches and publishes in the areas of Religion, ritual and healing, shamanism, gender and sexuality, discourses and practices of power, tradition and modernity, identity politics, local intersections with nationalism, transnationalism and global culture, social memory and alternative histories, performance, indigenous highland South America, Chile, Mapuche. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from UCLA.

Friday, October 10, 2008

Erik Seeman

Associate Professor of History

"Death in the New World: Cross-Cultural Encounters, 1492-1800"

Death in the New World: Cross-Cultural Encounters, 1492-1800

Europeans, Africans, and American Indians engaged in intense cross-cultural encounters in the wake of Christopher Columbus.  Death was at the center of these New World interactions.  The mortality rates for all three groups were extremely high, due to a combination of new diseases, exploitative labor practices, and warfare.  Moreover, all groups understood their experiences through the lens of death.  The religious systems of those involved in colonial encounters were organized around explaining death and the afterlife.  And when people encountered unfamiliar Others, they were struck by the similarities between their own deathways and those of the strangers.  All groups distinguished between good and bad deaths, all expected respectful treatment of corpses, all believed that some non-corporeal element (spirit or soul) went to an afterlife, and all mourned the dead.  These similarities facilitated cross-cultural communication, yet that knowledge was, ironically, also used toward exploitative ends.

Erik R. Seeman, Associate Professor of History, is the author of Pious Persuasions:  Laity and Clergy in Eighteenth-Century New England (Johns Hopkins, 1999), and co-editor, with Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, of The Atlantic in Global History, 1500-2000 (Prentice-Hall, 2007).  He has received National Endowment for the Humanities and Fulbright fellowships to research “Death in the New World.”

Friday, November 7, 2008

Theresa Runstedtler

Assistant Professor of American Studies

"Journeymen: Race, Boxing, and the Transnational World of Jack Johnson"

Theresa Runstedtler will give a talk based on her current book project, Journeyman: Race, Boxing and the Transnational World of Jack Johnson. In a nutshell, her book uses boxing culture and the foreign travels of African-American prizefighters like Jack Johnson (the first black World Heavyweight Champion, 1908-1915) to examine popular ideas about racial difference, Western imperialism, masculinity, and physical fitness in a global perspective. African-American boxers who left the United States to get away from Jim Crow segregation often provoked intense, public debates over the color line in places as far-flung as London, Paris, Cape Town, Havana, and Mexico City. Runstedtler’s talk will focus on Johnson’s early travels to Australia, most notably the controversy surrounding his 1908 World Championship victory over the white Canadian Tommy Burns in Sydney.

Theresa Runstedtler is a former professional dancer/actress from Canada who chose to shift her passion for popular culture from the stage to the classroom. She received her B.A. in History and English Literature from York University, Toronto and her Ph.D. in African American Studies and History from Yale University.

Dr. Runstedtler's articles appear in Canadian Issues (Fall 2005), In the Game: Race, Identity, and Sports in the Twentieth Century (Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), and the Encyclopedia of World History.  Her broader research and teaching interests include the intersection of race, gender, and resistance in popular culture; transnational Black history encompassing English, French, and Spanish destinations; multiracial and multicultural histories; the history of empire and globalization; European race relations; and Black Canada.

Friday, December 5, 2008

Carole Emberton

Associate Professor of History

"Between the Law and the Lash: Race, Violence, and American Citizenship in the Age of Slave Emancipation"

Carole Emberton's book project, Between the Law and the Lash: Race, Violence, and American Citizenship After Slave Emancipation, explores how the experience of widespread violence, both during the Civil War and after during Reconstruction in the South, gave rise to a legal and political revolution premised around the idea that the federal government bore an obligation to protect its citizens, particularly African-Americans. The book traces the rise and lamentable fall of this idea, exploring among other issues the origins of national hate crime legislation, the advent of gun control legislation and debates about the meaning of the Second Amendment for freedpeople, and challenges to Reconstruction from white supremacists based on racialized notions of crime, law, and order. This expansive study offers an historical perspective on American violence that should be of interest to anyone interested in law, politics, and race relations generally.

Carole Emberton teaches and publishes in the areas of Civil War and Reconstruction, the Old South, and Race, Gender, and the Law. She received her B.A. with honors from the University of Chicago in 1997 and her Ph.D. from Northwestern University.

Friday, January 30, 2009

Tony Conrad

Professor of Media Studies

"Realigning Alberti: Projection and Perspective"

Tony Conrad is an American avant-garde video artist, experimental filmmaker, musician/composer, sound artist, teacher and writer.

Friday, February 27, 2009

Sarah Bay-Cheng

Associate Professor of Theatre and Dance

"From the Avant-Garde to the Avatar: The Performing Body in the 20th Century"

From the Avant-Garde to the Avatar: The Performing Body in the 20th Century

Professor Bay-Cheng's current project considers the intersection of embodied performance and media technology as the fulfillment of modernist theatrical theory. Her research extends prior work on experimental texts and creative projects in digital technology, particularly virtual reality, as a framework to reexamine the role of the theatrical performing body in the early twentieth century as a significant precursor to contemporary intermedia performance. Specifically, she asks: How do the physical and textual experiments of the early twentieth century inform, even determine, the emergence of projected and virtually embodied performances in digital domains? How might we rethink the performance history of modernism in light of recent technology? To what extent are we all adopting the position of puppeteer and performer as we engage with the digital networks of the twenty-first century?

Sarah Bay-Cheng teaches and publishes in the areas of avant-garde theatre and film, modernist literature and performance, sexuality in modern drama, and queer performance. She is currently working on a study of sexuality in avant-garde performance and film. She received her A.B. in Theatre and Film Studies from Wellesley College and her Ph.D. in Theatre from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Friday, March 6, 2009

Joan Copjec

Distinguished Professor of English

"The Imaginal World: Islam, Psychoanalysis, and the Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami"

The Imaginal World: Islam, Psychoanalysis, and the Cinema of Abbas Kiaostami

Iranian cinema is an exotic experience for Western audiences, not only for obvious reasons but because the obvious – everything we see on screen – is structured according to a completely different distribution of the visible and the invisible and an alien logic of the look. In part these differences are attributable to the clerically mandated censorship that forbids any visible transgression of the Islamic system of modesty, or hejab, by which women must be secluded from the sight or touch of unrelated men.

But while the effects of censorship are massive and amount, I claim, to the tabooing of interiority itself, not only in the spatial but also, and more importantly, in the psychoanalytic sense, one cannot do justice to the films without attending to a counter-force that is particularly evident in the films of Abbas Kiarostami, namely: a Persian philosophy and fascination with the image that is powerful and unique. Two concepts, the imaginal world and appearance, hold the key to this theory of the image and to Kiarostami’s extraordinary films.

Joan Copjec teaches and publishes in the areas of psychoanalysis; film theory; feminism; philosophy; art & architectural theory. She received her M.A.in Contemporary Literature from the University of Wisconsin (Madison); a Dipl. In Film Studies from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London; and a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from New York University.

Friday, April 24, 2009

Elizabeth Otto

Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art in the Department of Visual Studies

"Modernist Masculinities: Art, Film, Photomontage and the Iconography of Bodily Fragmentation in Weimar Germany"

Modernist Masculinities: Art, Film, Photomontage and the Iconography of Bodily Fragmentation in Weimar Germany

The book project takes on the troubled, violent, and occasionally redemptive images of disjointed and dismembered male bodies that dominated and even defined Germany’s interwar visual landscape. The four chapters of Modernist Masculinities explore the deployment of fragmentary images of men from popular film and avant-garde art; they are framed by the writings of Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Georg Simmel and by theories of gender as masquerade and performance. This book traces the development of a vocabulary of critical modernism in which modes of cultural critique became embedded within film and photomontage media themselves and imaged violence coexisted with iconographies of renewal and change. Modernist Masculinities is an interdisciplinary study that draws on and will contribute to the diverse fields of feminist and queer theory, film studies, German studies, history and art history.

Elizabeth Otto is assistant professor of Modern and Contemporary Art in the Department of Visual Studies. She teaches courses on the historical avant-garde and critical theory, gender theory, and the history of photography. She has published on diverse topics including constructions of soldierly masculinity in early twentieth-century popular culture, the so-called Visual Turn in the field of history, and lesbian neoclassicism in early twentieth-century Paris. Her 2005 exhibition and the accompanying catalogue, Tempo, Tempo! The Bauhaus Photomontages of Marianne Brandt, provided the first major study of this artist’s work in photomontage.

Otto received her M.A. from Queen’s University in Canada and her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. She has held fellowships from the American Association of University Women, the Deutsche Akademische Austausch Dienst, the Berlin Program for German and European Studies and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, among other institutions.