Events Calendar

Cogut Center Events

September 23
"Butte, America"
Film screening and discussion with the filmmakers
Smith-Buonanno Hall 106
7:00 - 9:00pm

This documentary, narrated by Gabriel Byrne, reveals the social and environmental costs of mining in Butte, Montana. First in the 2009-10 series, “Nature and Legacy: Humanists, Scientists and the Environment,” the film chronicles industrial exploitation and its effects on the people and the land. It is the New England film premiere.

The film screening will be followed by discussion with producer/director Pamela Roberts and co-producer/co-writer Edwin Dobb.

For more information on the entire “Nature and Legacy” series, click here.

To see a copy of the event poster, click here.

October 7
"Re-inscribing the Colonial Dilemma in a Conscript of Global Modernity: CLR James and Moby-Dick"
Lecture
Pembroke Hall 305
5:30 - 7:00pm

Donald Pease, Professor of English and Avalon Foundation Chair of the Humanities at Dartmouth College is an authority on nineteenth and twentieth-century American literature and literary theory. Prof. Pease's lecture will lift C.L.R. James's Mariners Renegades and Castaways out of the field of superseded historiographical and ideological concerns in which it has been contextualized, and to address a different set of questions to this untimely work. In writing about Moby-Dick while interned on Ellis Island, James fashioned himself as a colonial conscript rather than an agent of global modernity. Prof. Pease hopes to bring to the fore the tragic colonial dilemma that James inscribed in Melville's classic modern text so as to demonstrate the ways in which Mariners Renegades and Castaways addresses concerns of the postcolonial present.

This lecture is part of a series sponsored by the Critical Global Humanities Initiative, a collaboration of the Cogut Center for the Humanities, Africana Studies, the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, and International Affairs.

To see a copy of the event poster, click here.

October 8
"Dreaming in Russian: Recalling the Soviet Era in Contemporary Cuban Arts"
Lecture
Watson Institute, McKinney Conference Room
5:30pm

Jacqueline Loss, Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Connecticut, will speak.

This talk is co-sponsored by the Cogut Center, Comparative Literature, and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

October 19-November 6
"Let us imagine a straight line..."
Interactive sound-and-motion installation
Pembroke Hall 003

Opening Reception
October 16
5:00pm

Gallery Hours
Monday - Friday
1:00 - 5:00pm

"Let us imagine a straight line," by Butch Rovan, is an interactive work about movement. It takes inspiration from two great minds of late 19th-century France—Etienne-Jules Marey and Henri Bergson—and their respective visions of motion and time. Marey’s efforts to measure a beating heart and to capture birds in flight produced the technologies that led to the modern cinema. Bergson’s reflections on matter and memory produced a philosophy that re-imagined the relation of mind to body.

The installation invites participants to experience this scientific and humanistic legacy through a series of interactive pieces that explores the idea, and the beauty, of a single human body in motion.

Featuring dancer Ami Shulman.

To see a copy of the event poster, click here.

To see photos from the exhibit opening, click here.

October 21
"Autumn Gem"
Film screening and discussion with the filmmakers
Wilson Hall, Room 102
Main Green
4:00 - 6:00pm

"Autumn Gem" is a film documentary on China's first feminist. It explores the extraordinary life of the Chinese revolutionary heroine and women’s rights activist Qiu Jin (1875 – 1907). During the reign of the last dynasty in China, Qiu Jin boldly challenged traditional gender roles and demanded equal rights and opportunities for women. At a time when women’s lives were often marked by repressive practices such as footbinding, arranged marriages, and denial of education, she envisioned a future where women would free themselves from the confines of tradition and emerge as strong and active citizens of a new and modern nation.

Co-sponsored by the Cogut Center, East Asian Studies, the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Pembroke Center.

To see a copy of the poster, click here.

November 5
"Climate Change"
Lectures and panel discussion
Pembroke Hall 305
4:00 - 6:00pm

Speakers: Elijah Huge ( Wesleyan), Timmons Roberts ( Brown),
Hugh Ducklow (Brown/Marine Biological Lab, Woods Hole). A noted architect, sociologist and scientist share their views of climate change.

For more information on the entire “Nature and Legacy” series, or abstracts of the talks, click here.

November 12
“The Charms of Assumption”
Sarah Cutts Frerichs Lecture in Victorian Studies
Pembroke Hall 305
5:00 - 6:30pm

Speaker Andrew Miller, Director of the Victorian Studies Program at Indiana University will present a paper based on a larger project titled “On Not Being Someone Else.” It studies the distinctly modern moral psychology of counterfactual narratives in literature, taking as its point of departure Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. In studying these counterfactuals, the paper raises questions about both aesthetic form and literary-critical method.

For more information on the Sarah Cutts Frerichs Lecture, click here.

To see the event poster, click here.

November 20
Critical Thought and the Humanities Today
Two Lectures
Pembroke Hall 305
4:00 - 6:00pm

“Airing Dirty Laundry: African-American Critique and Natal Community"
Hortense J. Spillers
Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor, Department of English, Vanderbilt University

Prof. Spillers examines the claim that “analysis is paralysis” and the general view that to be critical of the black life world is dubiously valuable. Prof. Spillers is a leading scholar in literary criticism and theory. She has written about psychoanalysis and race, how linguistics have failed black women, and crucial essays on authors including Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Walker, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks and William Faulkner.

and

“From Negro to African and Back, on the Way to Radical Humanism”
Ronald A.T. Judy
Professor, Department of English, University of Pittsburgh

Prof. Judy teaches literary and cultural theory. His current work involves exploring the ways in which particular "popular cultural movements" engage in thinking about the problems of authenticity and sovereignty in relation to an emerging global economy. This work focuses specifically on Islamist projects of communal identity in North America, Europe, and Africa, as well as the globalization of Hip Hop science.

These lectures are part of a series sponsored by the Critical Global Humanities Initiative, a collaboration of the Cogut Center for the Humanities, Africana Studies, the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, and International Affairs.

To see the event poster, click here.

December 2
"Let us imagine a straight line..."
Panel discussion
Pembroke Hall 003
5:45pm

Jimena Canales, Associate Professor of the History of Science, Harvard University, will participate in an informal panel to discuss the groundbreaking installation "Let us imagine a straight line..." by Butch Rovan, located in Pembroke Hall.

Joining Prof. Canales will be Brown faculty Réda Bensmaia, French Studies; Mary Ann Doane, Modern Culture and Media; Butch Rovan, Music/MEME; and Michael Steinberg, Cogut Center.

December 3-5
"Animating Archives: Making New Media Matter"
Conference
Pembroke Hall 305

This three-day conference will critically interrogate the ways in which new media has affected traditional archives, as well as generated new vernacular archives, in order to foster ground-breaking scholarship that deploys new media in its own critique. Thirty scholars from Brown and around the world will convene to discuss modern media.

Co-sponsored by the Cogut Center and the Malcolm S. Forbes Center for Research in Culture and Media Studies.

For registration and complete conference schedule, click here.

February 26
"Future Foucault: On the Anniversary of Bodies and Pleasures"
Conference
Pembroke Hall 305

It has been twenty-five years since the death of Michel Foucault, one of the last century's most crucial philosophers, as well as twenty-five years since the publication of the final two volumes of Histoire de la Sexualité. Since then, an extraordinary body of interdisciplinary scholarship has emerged around the work of Foucault, with much attention recently being focussed on his writings on ethics, governmentality, biopolitics, and war.

This one-day conference brings together scholars from the US and Canada to present papers on the continuing impact of Foucault.

For complete conference schedule, click here.

Co-Sponsored Events

October 7
"The Art of Literary Memoir and Biography"
Lecture
Smith-Buonanno Hall 106
Pembroke Green
6:30 - 8:00pm

Biographer, memoirist and teacher Susan Cheever '65 will speak. Ms. Cheever, daughter of author John Cheever, teaches with the MFA program at Bennington College and the New School. She is the author of American Bloomsbury, My Name is Bill and Home Before Dark.

Part of the Great Brown Nonfiction Writers Lecture Series 2009-10.

November 11
"Literary Investigative Journalism"
Lecture
David Shenk, speaker
Smith-Buonanno Hall 106
Pembroke Green
6:30 - 8:00pm

David Shenk '88 is an award-winning author and a contributor to National Geographic, Slate, The New York Times, Harper's, NPR and PBS. He has written about pandemics, music, technology, chess, politics, bioethics, the brain, corporate malfeasance and kids' toys. He frequently lectures on health, education and technology. Mr. Shenk is author of The Immortal Game, The Forgetting and Data Smog.

Part of the Great Brown Nonfiction Writers Lecture Series 2009-10.

November 12
"Writing the Biography of Clarice Lispector: Why This World"
Lecture
Benjamin Moser '98, speaker
Watson Institute, Joukowsky Forum
111 Thayer Street
12:00noon

Moser has written a pioneering biography of Brazilian writer, diplomatic wife and character in her own right, Clarice Lispector (1920–1977).