In collaboration with the IHGC and New Literary History, Christa Robbins, Bruce Holsinger (English), and Rachel Retica (English) are bringing 5 art historians to campus for a symposium called “Reading Visuality.”
Kevin Jerome Everson, Binoculars, 2019, Rubber, 6 x 16.2 x 11.7 cm
Schedule:
9:30AM Coffee
10AM Jack Chen, Introduction
- 10:15 Seeing x Reading - WJT (Tom) Mitchell, Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History, U of Chicago. Long-time editor of Critical Inquiry, works on verbal and visual relations across centuries.
- 11:15 Reading Authenticity - Sonja Drimmer, Associate Professor or Medieval Art and Architecture, UMass-Amherst. A medieval Europeanist who works on illuminated manuscripts and early print culture, with lots of interest in literary-visual relations.
12:15-1:15 lunch
- 1:15 Reading Interiority - Lara Blanchard, Luce Professor of East Asian Art, Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Specializes in medieval pictorial arts, particularly of the Song dynasty.
- 2:15 Reading Charlottesville - Andrea Douglas, Art Historian and Executive Director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center
- 3:15 (Un)reading Coloniality - Nicholas Mirzoeff, Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU. Media theorist, works on visual culture, race and politics.
4:15-5:00 Discussion
5:00 reception
Readings:
Lara C.W. Blanchard, Song Dynasty Figures of Longing and Desire: Gender and Interiority in Chinese Painting and Poetry (2018), chapter 3, “Male Audience and Authorship: Projecting Desire and Longing onto the Female Figure,” and conclusion, “Interiority and the Value of Connection”
Andrea Douglas, project website: Charlottesville Mural Project; PBS film: The Origins of Charlottesville’s Monuments; Erin Thompson, “The Most Controversial Statue in America Surrenders to the Furnace,” New York Times, 27 October 2023.
Sonja Drimmer, “Hildegard von Bingen’s Scivias in Weimar Germany: Media Theory by Hand,”from MLQ (2023); “Art History Is Not a Robot,” from Art in America (2023)
Nicholas Mirzoeff, White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness (2023), chapter 5, “The Anticolonial Way of Seeing,” and chapter 6, “The Cultural Unconscious and the Dispossessed”
W.J.T. Mitchell, “Ekphrasis and the Other,” from Picture Theory (1994); “Image X Text,” from Image Science (2015); "Eyeless in Gaza," from Counterpunch (2023)