2010-2011 CVC Brown-Bag Presentations

Fall 2010:

Visiting Scholar Jenni Lauwrens, University of Pretoria, South Africa
A discussion about visual cultures studies and pedagogy, the relationship between art history and visual culture, and the place of visual culture in international academic practice.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010, 12:30-2:00 pm
The Center for Visual Cultures, Room 218 Memorial Library

Visiting Scholar Laura U. Marks, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
An informal conversation with Professor Laura U. Marks.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010, 12:15 to 1:45 pm
Room 313 University Club
In conjunction with Art History GradForum, UW-Madison

Christa Olson, Assistant Professor of Composition and Rhetoric, UW-Madison
"Doubly Damned: The Scope of Visual Rhetoric"
Wednesday, November 17, 2010, 12:00 to 2:00 pm
Memorial Commons (Room 460 Memorial Library)

Description: When I tell people that I study visual rhetoric, there is usually a polite pause before the inevitable question: “What’s that?” I’ve learned from experience that the question needs a two-tiered answer, one defining rhetoric and the other... explaining visual rhetoric. When my interlocutor is an academic, there is sometimes a follow-up question: “What makes what you do different from visual culture studies or cultural studies?” These sorts of disciplinary questions are familiar to most rhetorical scholars. We (like scholars of visual culture) are a field that finds itself in a constant process of self-definition.

This brownbag, then, is yet another effort at definition. Its task will be to articulate the place of visual rhetoric within visual culture and visual studies. It will also take up a challenge articulated recently by several prominent scholars of visual rhetoric. It will move toward a generative theory of visual rhetoric – a theory that defines not what makes something “visual rhetoric” but rather what visual rhetoric does and where it resides in terms of both the visual and the rhetorical.

Spring 2011:

Lauren Kroiz, Assistant Professor of Art History, UW-Madison
"The Sense of Things: Collage, Illustration, and the Assembly of Regionalized American Culture"
Wednesday, February 2, 2011, 12:00 to 2:00 pm
Memorial Commons (Room 460 Memorial Library)

Description: In 1925, well-known abstract painter Arthur Dove arranged a denim shirt, bamboo poles, and oil paint into a composition he shockingly entitled using a well-known racial epithet for African Americans. This ta...lk examines the work, now known as Goin’ Fishin’, closely and contextually, locating it both within the series of assemblages Dove termed his “things” and in period discourses of cultural regionalism. Comparing this “thing” with Dove’s forgotten 1920s commercial illustrations of dialect stories and jokes, my account considers the way American art’s “thingness” as imagined in the 1920s and 1930s might function to interrogate otherness in racial, cultural, and material terms.

Presenting this study, drawn from a chapter of my current book manuscript, in the context of the Center for Visual Culture’s brownbag series, I will sketch my argument and also focus self-reflexively on my attempts to develop an approach in this work that avoids reinscribing dominant binaries between high and low, margin and center.

Ana Gabriela Macedo, Professor in the Department of English and North American Studies at the University of Minho, Portugal.

Graduate Student Workshop
Friday, April 1 at 12:00 noon
The Center for Visual Cultures, Room 218 Memorial Library

An informal discussion with Professor Macedo about her research. Open to graduate students from all departments.

Hanna Rose Shell, assistant professor at MIT in the Program in Science, Technology and Society, and Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.

Friday, April 8, 2011
12:00 pm to 1:00 pm
Memorial Library Commons, Room 460

An informal conversation and short film screening.