version of Aug. 4 ST 197 Human/Nature Lab Public Events Schedule Most events at 7:00 p.m. Tuesdays in Lovejoy 100, with exceptions noted Series convened by Jim Fleming and Gianluca Rizzo 9/15 7:00 Human/Nature in the Anthropocene, with Jim Fleming (STS, Colby) 9/22 7:00 Mimesis, with Veronique Plesch (Art, Colby) 9/29 Double Header! 7:00 “The Artificial Cryosphere and Public Appreciation of “Aeroir,” with Nicola Twilley, Edible Geography and Gastropod 8:00 “Landscape Futures,” with a discussion of artificial replacements for natural phenomena, with Geoff Manaugh, BLDGBLOG 9/30 12:00 Wednesday in the Colby Museum of Art , lunchtime panel discussion with Nicola Twilley and Geoff Manaugh on living art and curation. 10/6 1:00 in DIAM 242, War and Wounds with Ana Carden-Coyne (History, University of Manchester), via Skype 7:00 Futurism, War, and the Re-Making of the World, with Gianluca Rizzo (French and Italian, Colby) 10/20 7:00 Landscape and Memory, with Charles A. Traub (Photography, New York School of Visual Arts) 10/27 7:00 Classical Literature and Magic, with Kerill O’Neill (Classics, Colby) 10/30 4:00 Friday, Family Weekend in Lovejoy 100, "Big Dams, Big Damage? Why Big States Destroy Nature and
Transcript
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ST 197 Human/Nature Lab Public Events Schedule
Most events at 7:00 p.m. Tuesdays in Lovejoy 100, with exceptions noted
Series convened by Jim Fleming and Gianluca Rizzo
9/15 7:00 Human/Nature in the Anthropocene, with Jim Fleming (STS, Colby)
9/22 7:00 Mimesis, with Veronique Plesch (Art, Colby)
9/29 Double Header! 7:00 “The Artificial Cryosphere and Public Appreciation of “Aeroir,” with Nicola Twilley, Edible Geography and Gastropod 8:00 “Landscape Futures,” with a discussion of artificial replacements for natural phenomena, with Geoff Manaugh, BLDGBLOG
9/30 12:00 Wednesday in the Colby Museum of Art, lunchtime panel discussion with Nicola Twilley and Geoff Manaugh on living art and curation.
10/6 1:00 in DIAM 242, War and Wounds with Ana Carden-Coyne (History, University of Manchester), via Skype
7:00 Futurism, War, and the Re-Making of the World, with Gianluca Rizzo (French and Italian, Colby)
10/20 7:00 Landscape and Memory, with Charles A. Traub (Photography, New York School of Visual Arts)
10/27 7:00 Classical Literature and Magic, with Kerill O’Neill (Classics, Colby)
10/30 4:00 Friday, Family Weekend in Lovejoy 100, "Big Dams, Big Damage? Why Big States Destroy Nature and Move Millions of People in the Name of Progress," with Paul Josephson (History, Colby)
11/3 7:00 Re-writing the World: Italian Poetry in the 1960s and 1970s, with Beppe Cavatorta (Italian, University of Arizona)
11/10 7:00 Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives on the Environment, with Keith Peterson (Philosophy, Colby)
11/17 7:00 Extreme Makeovers: The Visual Culture of Plastic Surgery, with Tanya Sheehan (Art, Colby)
12/1 7:00 Humans in Space, with Roger Launius (Smithsonian Institution).
12/8 7:00 Poster session and wrap-up: Student presentations with refreshments
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Announcements with images, abstracts, and speaker bios
September 15 at 7:00 in Lovejoy 100
“Human/Nature in the Anthropocene,” with Jim Fleming (STS, Colby)
Terraformation
The neologism Anthropocene (or age of humans), coined by ecologist Eugene Stoermer and popularized by geochemist and Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen, has recently struck a cultural nerve, pointing as it does to what may be the decisive epoch of our planet. What does it mean for humanity to be moving from the age geologists call the Holocene—where the historical records originated, to the Anthropocene—where it seems we may meet our demise? Are humanists and social scientists wise to appropriate this term, and what can we say about the history and cultural implications of what are apparently multiple Anthropocenes? What is the influence of this concept on us?
Jim Fleming is Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Colby College. He has written extensively on the social, cultural, and intellectual history of weather, climate, technology, and the environment. He holds visiting appointments at Columbia University and the Smithsonian Institution and is a frequent contributor to public policy debates.
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September 22 at 7:00 in Lovejoy 100“Mimesis: Reality in Renaissance Art,” with Veronique Plesch (Art, Colby)
Albrecht Dürer, Large Piece of Turf, 1503. Watercolor, pen and ink. Vienna: Albertina
The period we call the Renaissance is traditionally conceived of as a rebirth of Ancient ideas and ideals; but it could be argued that Renaissance artists were fundamentally concerned with the creation of a convincing depiction of reality. This lecture will explore the means at the service of such agenda (for instance linear perspective and oil painting), the motivations for such an interest and the functions it fulfilled, while also considering the differences between Italian and Northern Renaissance Art in this quest for mimetic illusionism. Given this year’s Humanities theme, special attention will be paid to depictions of nature.
Born in Argentina and raised in Switzerland, Professor of Art Véronique Plesch holds advanced degrees from the University of Geneva in Art History and Medieval French Literature and from Princeton University, where she received her Ph.D. in Art History in 1994, the year she joined Colby faculty. Plesch is the author and editor of eight books and has published over forty articles in Europe and the U.S. in English, French, and Italian on subjects ranging from late medieval and Renaissance iconography to Alpine art, and from Passion plays to early modern graffiti, with forays into contemporary art. Plesch has curated several exhibitions, for instance on medieval liturgical objects and on Grand Tour souvenirs and is the current President of the International Association of Word and Image Studies.
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Sept. 29 at 7:00 and 8:00 in Lovejoy 100, Double Header!
7:00 “The Artificial Cryosphere and Public Appreciation of “Aeroir,” with Nicola Twilley, Edible Geography and Gastropod
Nicola Twilley will be exploring two atmospheric conditions that exemplify Human/Nature by presenting two ongoing projects: an exhibition and book exploring the artificial cryosphere and an artist project to develop new experiences that enhance the public appreciation of “aeroir.” For the past four years, Twilley has been exploring the largely invisible thermal infrastructure of refrigeration—a vast, distributed winter that has reconfigured both the contents of our plates and the shapes of our cities. In addition to sharing some of her research in this area, Twilley will also discuss her more recent, ongoing collaboration with the Center for Genomic Gastronomy to develop a multi-sensory array of devices, installations, and experiences that aim to make the aesthetics and politics of urban air pollution sense-able as an artifact. From smog meringues to street food-air quality pairings, the project aims to create a series of poetic intermediaries between humans and our collective atmospheric emissions.
Nicola Twilley is author of the blog Edible Geography, co-host of the Gastropod podcast, and a contributing writer for The New Yorker. She is deeply obsessed with refrigeration, and is currently writing a book on the topic. Her writing has been published in The New York Times Magazine, Cabinet, Aeon, Popular Science, Modern Farmer, Dwell, and the Harvard Design Magazine, among others. In summer 2013, Twilley curated an exhibition exploring North America’s spaces of artificial refrigeration with the Center for Land Use Interpretation; in 2010, with Geoff Manaugh, she co-curated the exhibition Landscapes of Quarantine, an ARTFORUM Editor’s Pick, at Storefront for Art and Architecture. In May 2015, she partnered with the Center for Genomic Gastronomy to present a smog-tasting installation at the WHO’s 67th World Health Assembly in Geneva, as well as at the New Museum's second annual Ideas City Festival in NYC. From 2011 to 2013, Twilley was a Research Fellow at the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art, as part of which she collaborated with Geoff Manaugh on “Venue,” a pop-up interview studio and mobile media rig that traveled around North America documenting abandoned NASA training sites, underground health mines, the world’s largest collection of wild yeasts, and more.
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Sept. 29 at 8:00 in Lovejoy 100, Game Two
8:00 “Landscape Futures,” with a discussion of artificial replacements for natural phenomena, with Geoff Manaugh, BLDGBLOG
Geoff Manaugh will explain the curatorial vision behind Landscape Futures, a 2012 exhibition at the Nevada Museum of Art that foregrounded the instruments and devices through which the planetary sciences and landscape design are performed. By centralizing these mechanisms, the exhibition’s goal was to reveal how humans have become deeply dependent upon machines and other technical intermediaries for interpreting the landscapes around them. Manaugh will also present his ongoing research into the world of artificial replacements for natural phenomena, including legal patents registered for new forms of artificial snow, artificial trees, and even new forms of artificial geology. Discussing these in the context of several site visits performed by Manaugh and Twilley as part of their “Venue” project—including a landscape tour of the nation’s largest active landfill and a trip to the AstroTurf® factory northwest of Atlanta—will show the often-unexpected side-effects of replicating nature.
Geoff Manaugh is a freelance writer and curator. His work has appeared in The New York Times, New Scientist, Popular Science, Domus, newyorker.com, and many other publications, including multiple books, exhibition catalogs, and artist monographs. He lectures regularly on topics related to architecture and landscape at venues around the world, including the Australian National Architecture Conference, Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and the Bauhaus Universität in Weimar. He is also the author of BLDGBLOG (http://bldgblog.blogspot.com), a long-running online catalog of spatial ideas and innovations at various scales and in many genres. In 2010, in collaboration with Nicola Twilley, Manaugh curated an exhibition exploring the spatial implications of quarantine for New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture. In 2012, he curated Landscape Futures, a 2,000-square foot exhibition exploring the intersection of digital technology and landscape design, for the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno. Manaugh is former director of Studio-X NYC at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. His newest book, investigating the relationship between burglary and architecture, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in October 2015.
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October 6, Tuesday at 1:00 in DIAM 242
“War and Wounds,” with Ana Carden-Coyne (University of Manchester), via Skype
Ana Carden-Coyne will be discussing her recent book, The Politics of Wounds (Oxford University Press, 2014), which explores military patients' experiences of frontline medical evacuation, war surgery, and the social world of military hospitals during the First World War. The proximity of the front and the colossal numbers of wounded created greater public awareness of the impact of the war than had been seen in previous conflicts, with serious political consequences. She will also present images from “The Sensory War, 1914-2014,” an art exhibit on the experience and imagining of war for the WW1 centenary, at the Manchester Art Gallery and Whitworth Art Gallery, http://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/article/?id=12966
Dr. Carden-Coyne is co-Director of the Centre for the Cultural History of War at the University of Manchester, UK and a specialist on the impact of war on gender roles in the past and present. Her monograph, Reconstructing the Body: Classicism, Modernism and the First World War (Oxford University Press, 2009), examines the impact of war on culture and society, and the powerful political and personal forces that motivated reconstruction between 1918 and 1933 in Britain, the United States, Australia, and Europe. Carden-Coyne has edited a volume on Gender and Conflict Since 1914: Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Palgrave, 2012), which brings scholars from the humanities and social sciences together to consider the impact of war on gender roles in the past and present. She has acted as acted as consultant for the Wellcome Trust's War and Medicine exhibition and made other contributions to international events such as the Sydney Festival and the Sydney Mardi Gras, and has published a commemorative booklet with the Guardian newspaper on “Wounded Visionaries.”
Gianluca Rizzo is Paganucci Assistant Professor of Italian at Colby College, His interests include renaissance and contemporary Italian poetry, late medieval and early modern culture, the historical avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde, aesthetics and semiotics, e lingua, purezza e traduzione.
Charles A. Traub. A native of Louisville Kentucky, was educated at the University of Illinois, where he studied with Aaron Siskind and Garry Winogrand. Between 1971 and 1978, he developed the Photography Program and became chair of the Department at Columbia College, in Chicago. During that period he also created the Chicago Center for Contemporary Photography. In 1978 he moved to New York where he directed the prestigious Light Gallery. Major exhibitions of his work have been held at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Fogg Art Museum, the Hudson River Museum, Camerawork and the Light Gallery, among others. He has authored and edited numerous books, most recently In the Still life, In the Realm of the Circuit, Education of a Photographer and Dolce via: Italy in the 1980s. For the past two decades, while continuing to work as a photographer, Traub has been chair of the MFA Photography Video and Related Media Department at the School of Visual Arts in New York.
Kerill O’Neill is Julian D. Taylor Associate Professor of Classics at Colby College and Director of the Humanities Center. He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled "Songs of the Magic Muse: Erotic Magic and the Discourse of Latin Love Elegy."
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Oct. 30, Friday at 4:00 , Family Weekend in Lovejoy 100
"Big Dams, Big Damage? Why Big States Destroy Nature and Move Millions of People in the Name of Progress," Paul Josephson (History, Colby)
We will conquer drought!
Over the last 100 years national powers have focused tremendous resources on such big projects as dams (Hoover, Tucurui, Three Gorges), canals (Panama and Suez), and other extensive earth-moving operations. These projects have had tremendous human and environmental costs as we learn more and more. Less well known is why governments as different as Russia, Brazil and the US continue to support them -- from Amazonia, to the Tennessee Valley, to Washington State, and to the Arctic and Siberia.
Paul Josephson, Professor of History at Colby College and affiliated with the STS Program, is a specialist in the history of twentieth century science and technology, Russian and Soviet history, and environmental history. He is working on a history of major nature engineering projects in the former Soviet Union.
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Beppe Cavatorta, University of Arizona. His research interests are varied, with scholarly publications on Machiavelli, Savonarola, and Tasso in the Renaissance period and, Alberto Savinio, Antonio Delfini, Tahar Lamri and Adriano Spatola in the Twentieth Century. Further interests are Italian Futurism, changing canon formations in the "new avant-garde" of the nineteen sixties in Italy, and the Partisan War in literature and film. His essays have appeared in several journals such as Studi Novecenteschi, Anterem, Rivista di studi italiani, Nuova prosa, Il Verri, Carte Italiane, NAE, Italica, Scritture migranti, L'illuminista, Italian Culture, ELQ, and Lectura Dantis Virginiana. His new book on experimental Italian writings in the XX Century (Scrivere Contro, Piacenza, Scritture) was published in 2010; other recent publications include A. SPATOLA, The Position of Things. Collected Poems 1961-1989 (Green Integer, 2008), and the volume of studies on and for Luigi Ballerini, Balleriniana (Montanari, 2010). Prof. Cavatorta also specializes in the theory and practice of translation and cultural interchange. He has co-edited an anthology of contemporary Italian poetry, The Promised Land (Sun & Moon Press, 2000), and he's also the co-editor of a forthcoming major anthology of Italian poetry from Pier Paolo Pasolini to the present, Those Who from afar Look like Flies. (University of Toronto Press). He published his translations of several American poets into Italian in the anthologies, Nuova poesia Americana: San Francisco (Mondadori, 2006) and Nuova poesia Americana: New York (Mondadori, 2009). Recently, he published the translation of the experimental novel The Porthole by Adriano Spatola (Seismicity Editions, 2011).
Keith Peterson is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Colby College. His primary areas of interest include philosophies of nature and environment, value theory, and philosophical anthropology.
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November 17 at 7:00 in Lovejoy 100
Extreme Makeovers: The Visual Culture of Plastic Surgery, with Tanya Sheehan (Art, Colby)
Jenny Saville, Plan, 1993, oil on canvas, 108 x 84 inches
Focusing on the 20th-century and contemporary United States, this lecture explores the relationship between plastic surgery and visual culture. First, it presents plastic surgery as an increasingly popular practice motivated by a subject's concern with being seen in a social environment. Second, it emphasizes the cultural importance of documenting visually, and especially photographically, the changes to the body and self produced through surgical operations. By reading closely images from the popular media and fine arts, Professor Sheehan will shed light on how and why Americans have sought to remake human nature through the visual culture of cosmetic medicine.
Tanya Sheehan is Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of Art at Colby College, where she teaches American and African American art history. She is the author of Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (2011). Her edited books include Photography, History, Difference (2014), Photography and Its Origins (2015), and the forthcoming Grove Guide to Photography.
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December 1 at 7:00 in Lovejoy 100
“Humans in Space,” with Roger Launius (Smithsonian Institution).
Trips to the Moon, humans in Earth orbit, and plans for exploring Mars all dominated thinking in the twentieth century. Even so, as the twenty-first century dawned an expansive vision for human spaceflight has not emerged. The Space Shuttle has been retired without a clear follow-on human spaceflight vehicle in the United States, and efforts to generate public excitement in lunar and Mars exploration have faltered. What does the first half of the twenty-first century hold for humans in space? In this presentation I will survey more fifty years of space exploration, reviewing the major human programs from the first efforts through the successful spaceflight programs of the recent past and offering comments on the possibilities available in the decades to come.
Roger D. Launius is Associate Director for Collections and Curatorial Affairs at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum. He has written or edited more than twenty books on aerospace history. Between 1990 and 2002 he served as chief historian of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. A graduate of Graceland College, he received his Ph.D. from Louisiana State University in 1982. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the International Academy of Astronautics, and the American Astronautical Society. He also served as a consultant to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board in 2003 and presented the prestigious Harmon Memorial Lecture on the history of national security space policy at the United States Air Force Academy in 2006. He is frequently consulted by the electronic and print media for his views on space issues, and has been a guest commentator on National Public Radio and all the major television network news programs.
