Lectures, Lunch Lectures, News
Julia Polyck-O’Neill (Brock University, Canada)
June 19, 2018, 12-2 p.m., 02.102 (Philo II)
The idea that artistic practice, after the massive shifts initiated by conceptual art, takes into account, and is accountable to, the material reality of human relations suggests a radical reconceptualization of art’s social, cultural, economic, and political position and role. According to this reading, I consider how conceptualist photography has the capacity to contribute to such considerations to an even greater degree, by means of the visual-cognitive dynamics inherent to the photographic encounter. With its unique epistemological and ontological bearing, such an encounter has the potential to proffer a significant phenomenological intervention: one that uses both evidential and abstract-conceptual information to simultaneously promote deep reflection and propose new perceptions of the world in relation to the self. In comparatively analyzing Canadian artist Jeff Wall’s primary strategies in staging photographic images, I uncover how historic and more recent theoretical and philosophical discussions and material practices in photography emerge from and import specific but variable sets of relations that effectively participate in the construction of subjectivity according to both individual and collective scales.
Julia Polyck-O‘Neill is an artist, curator, critic, and writer, and is a doctoral candidate in the Interdisciplinary Humanities program (Culture and Aesthetics) at Brock University (St Catharines, Ontario, Canada) and Visiting Lecturer in the Obama Institute at JGU Mainz.
You can download the poster for this talk here.
Lectures, News
Owen Clayton (University of Lincoln, UK)
June 19, 2018, 10 a.m.-12 noon, P 102 (Philosophicum)
Dr. Owen Clayton is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Lincoln, UK. His research interests include transatlantic visual culture and working–class studies. His first monograph, Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850-1915, came out with Palgrave MacMillan in 2015. He has published articles on photography and class in the work of William Dean Howells and Jack London, and recently edited a special issue of the journal History of Photography. His current monograph project is on transient workers (‘hobos’) in American literature.
Events, Lectures, News
Prof. Michael Boyden (Uppsala University)
June 18, 2018, 12-2 p.m., P 5 (Philosophicum)
Environmental humanists routinely take their departure from the romantic ecology of the mid-
nineteenth century, dismissing earlier climate theories as racist, unscientific, or overly impressionistic. Drawing on a number of salient examples, this lecture revalues the pre-1850 period as one of intense climatic sensibility in American literary culture. It argues that early climate theories fused science and sentiment, culture and climate in ways that citizen science, public health, epigenetics, and new materialist philosophy are aspiring to do at the present juncture. Moreover, unlike modern climate science, with its reliance on statistics, remote sensing, and performance indexes, these climate theories – often anachronistically understood as environmental determinism – eschewed philosophical speculation and prioritized experiential, sensory knowledge as a crucial interface between the emotions, thought, and the natural world. The oft-lamented dualism of Western philosophy, which has been taken as the root of our troubled relation to the environment, was less pronounced in the climatic doctrines that we tend to consign to a naïve, predisciplinary phase in the history of climate awareness than in current debates on global warming. The lecture thus offers a plea for more historical awareness in the climate debate and warns against overly monolithic narratives of ecological modernization.
Michael Boyden is Associate Professor of American Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden. He is the author of Predicting the Past: The Paradoxes of American Literary History (Leuven UP, 2009). He has a new book project underway entitled Climate and Sensibility in American Literature, 1780-1850.
You can find the event poster here.
Events, Lectures, News
Prof. Christopher Breu (Illinois State University)
June 12, 2018, 6-8 p.m., P 103 (Philosophicum)
This talk draws upon biopolitical theory and Marxist theory to reinvigorate an economic, social, technological, and ecological conception of infrastructure. Given the recent material turn in critical theory, it is high time to reconsider the Marxist distinction between infrastructure and superstructure. If, during the cultural turn, the superstructure was privileged to the point of an almost complete effacement of the infrastructure (or base), in our own moment of proliferating infrastructures, biopolitical production, and ecological crisis, the concept of the infrastructure needs to be both affirmed and retheorized. This talk begins this work.
Christopher Breu is Professor of English at Illinois State University, USA.
You can find the event poster here.
Events, News
Steven Meyers, M.A.
(PR Coordinator, CNN International)
June 5, 2018, 6-8 p.m., P 103 (Philosophicum)
Steven Meyers graduated from JGU with an M.A. in American Studies in 2015. In his talk, he will discuss his work as PR coordinator at an international news channel as well as career options for graduates in American Studies. In addition, the event will offer ample time for Q&A.
