Humanities Day 2022 - Session 3

(Virtual Session) How Muslims Disposed of Books

sspatterson — Thu, 04 Aug 2022 15:31:40 +0000

Virtual

Destroying books has a very strong symbolic power. However, sometimes an individual just has to dispose of a text—even a sacred one—so what is one to do in that situation? This presentation provides a window into Muslim practices and debates on the question of what the acceptable ways are by which to retire, recycle, or destroy a sacred text, and trace these practices from the beginning of Islam to today and compare them to similar ones among Jews.

CANCELLED: Music, Race, and Love: The Life and Work of Dr. Mildred Bryant Jones

sspatterson — Mon, 01 Aug 2022 20:18:30 +0000

Session 3

In-Person

This presentation has been cancelled.

This session focuses on the life of Mildred Bryant-Jones, an African American woman who taught music at two South Side high schools from 1920 to 1945. She taught theory, composition, and voice to many young African American students who became historically important performers in several Black music genres such as Von Freeman, Johnny Hartman, and Roberta Martin. Incredibly and, unfortunately, typically. she is another African American woman who has been erased from African American cultural historiography. This presentation reviews Bryant-Jones's manifold contributions to South Side and broader African American culture and explores her personal life, particularly her three-decade friendship and romance with W. E. B. Du Bois.

Monochrome Multitudes: Art Historic, Curator, and Artist Perspectives

sspatterson — Mon, 01 Aug 2022 20:16:56 +0000

Session 3

In-Person

Monochrome Multitudes, an exhibition at the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, September 22, 2022–January 8, 2023, revisits a notoriously hermetic art to reveal its creative possibilities and conceive pedagogical strategies that make abstraction accessible from multiple perspectives. The exhibition aims to expand existing histories of “the monochrome” in three ways: articulating cultural, social, political, racial, or gendered meanings of monochrome art; emphasizing the hermeneutic significance of materials and media; and engaging North American art in a global dialogue. This session reflects on the exhibition through art historical, curatorial, and artistic points of view.

How Muslims Disposed of Books

sspatterson — Mon, 01 Aug 2022 18:55:53 +0000

Session 3

In-Person

Healers, Musicians, and Epic Poets of Central Asia

sspatterson — Mon, 01 Aug 2022 18:54:36 +0000

Session 3

In-Person

Traditional Kazakh culture displays a richness of oral literature and musical performance, all of which is directly linked to the art of the Kazakh baqsy, who were originally pre-Islamic healers, poets, and sound artists. The place of the baqsy (healer) and of their offshoots the zhyrau (epic singer) and the küyshi (sound artist) remains central to Kazakh cultural identity to this day. The presentation covers the origins and role of these figures in Kazakh culture and examines the connections between them in the context of the world view of the ancient Turkic peoples and their modern Kazakh descendants.

The Hellenic Legacy and the Humanities

sspatterson — Mon, 01 Aug 2022 18:48:06 +0000

Session 3

In-Person

In this session, the presenter discusses some central ideas of the Hellenic tradition—such as logos, paideia (or, education), truth, examined life, and the good—with the aim to highlight their diachronic character in shaping humanistic thought. The presenter argues that the way these concepts are understood and studied in Plato and Aristotle offers a useful framework for analyzing contemporary contexts and problems, specifically by acknowledging the universality of reason and the potential of education to improve human life. The lecturer also addresses some apparent challenges in Hellenic Studies in the U.S. and shows them to be based on naive understandings and, to a certain degree misappropriations, of the Hellenic ideas.

Trampling Magic in the Eastern Mediterranean World

sspatterson — Mon, 01 Aug 2022 18:46:55 +0000

Session 3

In-Person

At the start of the 20th century, archaeologists digging in Meröe, the ancient capital due of Nubia discovered a bronze head of Caesar Augustus, which had been hacked off a statue “of heroic or monumental size” and then deliberately buried in a pocket of clear sand under the steps of the temple of Victory, one of the chief buildings of the royal palace. This great hall is decorated with frescos showing the Nubian king and queen in scenes of ceremony and triumph. More than a half millennium later, during the renovations of a synagogue in the northern Galilee, a man named Yose, inscribed a bronze tablet in Hebrew and Aramaic with a plea to Jahweh to “suppress” the inhabitants of the town, and he placed this tablet under the new threshold of the synagogue. How does one explain these two bronze items buried before or under the thresholds of important public buildings and dating roughly 600 years apart? As the presenter explains the answer lies in a centuries old tradition that begins in Pharaonic Egypt and aims at magically surpassing one’s enemies by burying images of them or their names beneath or before a threshold, where the constant foot traffic in and out of the building will trample the effigy or names of the victims and keep them continually underfoot.

Innovative Language Course Design for the 21st Century Learner

sspatterson — Mon, 01 Aug 2022 18:44:47 +0000

Session 3

In-Person

Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP) is a pedagogical approach that addresses immediate needs of learners who use languages in specialized settings related to their education, training, or job. Conducting a domain analysis—a research framework designed to describe the language used in a real-world context, such as a hospital, courtroom, or financial institution—lays the groundwork for assessing language learning, which makes it possible to reverse engineer the course design. This session introduces domain analysis and shows examples of proficiency assessments. Instructors in various languages comment on their experiences with domain analysis, assessment design, and curriculum development.

Jessica Stockholder

sspatterson — Wed, 27 Jul 2022 21:09:26 +0000

Session:

Session 3

Jessica Stockholder works at the intersection of painting and sculpture. Her work sometimes incorporates the architecture in which it has been conceived, blanketing the floor, scaling walls and ceiling, and spilling out of windows, through doors, and into the surrounding landscape. Stockholder has exhibited widely in North America and Europe at such venues as Dia Art Foundation, New York City; Centre Pompidou in Paris; and the Open Air Museum in Belgium. Her work is represented in various collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art. Stockholder is the Raymond W. and Martha Hilpert Gruner Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago.

Christine Mehring

sspatterson — Wed, 27 Jul 2022 21:07:31 +0000

Session:

Session 3

Christine Mehring works on modern and contemporary art. Her research, writing, and teaching focus on abstraction, particularly the ways in which non-mimetic forms, colors, and non-traditional materials come to signify in relation to specific historical contexts; postwar European art, especially the impact of World War II and the transformation from an international art world to a global one; and the cross-overs between art and design. Mehring also analyzes photography and the relations between old and new media, including their convergences with histories and practices of abstract art. She is now at work with Lisa Zaher on an edited volume concerning Wolf Vostell’s use of concrete and the conservation of Concrete Traffic. She is also completing a book with IIT architectural historian Sean Keller on the art and architecture of the Munich Olympics, addressing their multiple significances for West German and North American cultures. Mehring is the Mary L. Block Professor in the Departments of Art History and Visual Arts at the University of Chicago and Adjunct Curator at the Smart Museum of Art.