Past Events

• 

  May

  12

  6:30pm

  Opening Reception: RE/GENERATE: Re/mixing, Re/making, and Re/imagining the Public Humanities

  Nightingale-Brown House

  Join us at 6:30 pm on May 12, 2023, for the opening reception of RE/GENERATE: Re/mixing, Re/making, and Re/imagining the Public Humanities, the culminating exhibition of six artist-facilitated, participatory workshops. RE/GENERATE was conceived in a period of transition, as the future of Public Humanities at Brown University was murky. Through printmaking, collage, AV remix, and more, these workshops created a space to reflect on endings and envision new beginnings. As RE/GENERATE comes to a close, this exhibition celebrates the friendship, creativity, optimism, and community born during a period of change.
  
  Curators: Bridget Hall, Susana Turbay Botero, Julia Zimring
  
  Artist Facilitators: Priyata Bosamia, Nual Chindamanee, Steven Knapp, Sophia Marina, Jamila Medina Rios, Viraj Mithani, Traci Picard, Rai Terry, Alison Rollins, and Erica Wolencheck

  Opening Reception: RE/GENERATE: Re/mixing, Re/making, and Re/imagining the Public Humanities

  JNBC Exhibitions
• 

  May

  12

  10:00am - 3:00pm

  Exhibition: RE/GENERATE: Re/mixing, Re/making, and Re/imagining the Public Humanities (copy)

  Nightingale-Brown House

  RE/GENERATE: Re/mixing, Re/making, and Re/imagining the Public Humanities is the culminating exhibition of six artist-facilitated, participatory workshops. RE/GENERATE was conceived in a period of transition, as the future of Public Humanities at Brown University was murky. Through printmaking, collage, AV remix, and more, these workshops created a space to reflect on endings and envision new beginnings. As RE/GENERATE comes to a close, this exhibition celebrates the friendship, creativity, optimism, and community born during a period of change.
  
  Curators: Bridget Hall, Susana Turbay Botero, Julia Zimring
  
  Artist Facilitators: Priyata Bosamia, Nual Chindamanee, Steven Knapp, Sophia Marina, Jamila Medina Rios, Viraj Mithani, Traci Picard, Rai Terry, Alison Rollins, and Erica Wolencheck

  Opening Reception: Friday, May 12 at 6:30pm

  The exhibition is open Monday-Friday, 10am-3pm. 

  Closed on weekends, Memorial Day and May 30.

  Exhibition: RE/GENERATE: Re/mixing, Re/making, and Re/imagining the Public Humanities (copy)

  JNBC Exhibitions
• 

  May

  2

  4:30pm

  Banned Book Read-In: The Bluest Eye

  Stephen Robert ’62 Hall, 280 Brook Street, Providence, RI 02912

  In solidarity with students. who have had books banned in their district, the Department of Africana Studies / Rites and Reason Theatre invites you to join us for a reading of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.

  On May 2, 2023, in an act of symbolic protest against rising instances of educational repression, we invite you to volunteer to read, or just stand in solidarity with the twenty-four members of the Brown community who will read the book aloud in its entirety to celebrate Morrison’s groundbreaking text which has been banned in public libraries and school systems in Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Missouri, New York, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, and Virginia.

  As a department, we are committing ourselves to standing for the freedom of expression, the freedom to read, the freedom to imagine and explore artistic universes.

  We invite the campus and surrounding community to join us, to bear witness, to stand with others who can not abide censorship. We shall not remain silent in the face of elementary and high school libraries being picked clean of books on Black, brown, and LGTBQ+ topics, or the aims to demonize queer, trans, radical, women, and Black thinkers. We invite you to join us.

  4:30 PM until the book is read. 

  Banned Book Read-In: The Bluest Eye
• 

  May

  2

  4:00pm - 5:30pm

  Archival Voices | Eric Hemenway: “A Story Has Multiple Voices”

  Pembroke Hall

  Recording of this talk is available here.

  This public lecture by Eric Hemenway, Director of Repatriation, Archives and Records for the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, explores how work in tribal archives helps to expand the historical narrative, from public schools to museums to national parks. This conversation will look at why it’s important to include Native voices in public history and the benefits it has for all.

  Eric Hemenway is an Anishnaabe/Odawa from Cross Village, Michigan. His mother is tribal citizen Peggy Hemenway. Eric is the Director of Repatriation, Archives and Records for the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians. Eric oversees the management, collecting and preservation of historic documents and materials for the tribe. These materials are used to support LTBB government functions, its citizens and educational initiatives, such as; museum exhibits, media, curriculum, publications, historical interpretation, signage, web content and presentations. Collaborations on exhibits have included the National Park Service, state of Michigan, Mackinac State Historic Parks, Emmet County, Welt Museum Wien Vienna, Austria and the Harbor Springs History Museum, as well as other museums. Educational partnerships include: Harbor Springs Public Schools, University of Michigan, Michigan State University, Harvard, Yale and Aquinas College. Eric has also extensive work experience under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

  He currently sits on boards for the Michigan Historical Commission, Central Michigan University Clarke Library and Little Traverse Conservancy. Eric is a former board member of the Michigan Humanities Council, Michigan Historical Society, Emmet County Historical Commission, National NAGRPA Review Committee, Harbor Springs Historical Museum and the Michigan Commission on the Commemoration of the Bicentennial of the War of 1812.

  Archival Voices | Eric Hemenway: “A Story Has Multiple Voices”

  JNBC Lectures
• 

  Apr

  27

  7:30pm - 8:30pm

  RE/GENERATE Workshop | Pulp Fiction / Papermaking

  Nightingale-Brown House
  Engage in the art of papermaking using a range of materials from organic elements to recycled scraps. In this workshop, participants will create individual sheets of paper, as well as work collaboratively on a larger-scale collage – generating new narratives and a collective work of art.

  RE/GENERATE is a creative humanities workshop series that engages with themes of regeneration, creation, and remix. Six participatory workshops/art-making sessions will culminate with an exhibition opening on May 12, 2023. These sessions are a space for thinkers, artists, makers, and dreamers to workshop ideas, build relationships, learn new skills, and engage in a social and creative practice. RE/GENERATE is sponsored by the John Nicholas Brown Center for the Public Humanities. Register Here - https://forms.gle/jGLmtivSJEj3vHgC9
  
  Facilitators:
  Steven Knapp - RISD MA Printmaking ’23
  Nual Chindamanee - RISD MA Printmaking ’23
  Viraj Mithani - RISD MA Painting ’23

  RE/GENERATE Workshop | Pulp Fiction / Papermaking

  JNBC Lectures, JNBC Workshops
• Apr

  27

  7:30pm - 8:30pm

  RE/GENERATE Workshop

  Nightingale-Brown House
  Save the date for the final Re/Generate Workshop.  Details about this workshop are coming soon.

  RE/GENERATE Workshop

  JNBC Lectures, JNBC Workshops
• 

  Apr

  25

  4:00pm - 5:30pm

  Archival Voices | Marianna Hovhannisyan: “Double Assimilations and Empty Fields: Armenian Archival Silences”

  Pembroke Hall

  This talk draws upon my dissertation project titled, “Double Assimilations, Empty Fields, and Orphan Objects: Mapping Armenian Erasures and Displacements Through Archival Metadata and Folk Culture” (UCSD, 2022). It critically engages with Armenian historiography as a modern example subjected to epistemic violence through forced displacement, archival silences, and cultural appropriations. I situate this in relationship to the trans-imperial fragmentations of Eastern, Western Armenians, and Armenians of Artsakh in West Asia as manifested in their historical displacements and erasures as Indigenous, refugee, national, and survivor subjects. Specifically, I argue that these fragmentations should be examined through the contemporary frameworks of archival classification and data structures to demonstrate the cultural mechanisms of erasures which constitute Armenian subjects today. Through studying the politics of archival metadata, folk, and folklore and in alliance with Black feminist studies, Indigenous studies, and Armenian studies, this project imagines new historiographies of subaltern, diasporic, transnational, and trans-indigenous epistemologies.

  Dr. Marianna Hovhannisyan (Ph.D. in Art History, UCSD, 2022) is the 2022-23 Carol G. Lederer Postdoctoral Fellow at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, Brown University, and part of the seminar, “In the Afterlives and Aftermaths of Ruin” led by Prof. Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman. Hovhannisyan works at the intersection of postcolonial and decolonial archival and museum studies, visual culture, critical race theories, with the focus on folk studies, theories of art, artifacts, and metadata, and Armenian/West Asian studies. She is the 2019 recipient of the UC Critical Refugee Studies Collective award and often collaborates with the Center for Information as Evidence (UCLA, Department of Information Studies). As the first EU-funded Hrant Dink Foundation Fellow, she conducted original research in the American Board Archives (Turkey). This resulted in her curatorial exhibition “Empty Fields” (design concept: Fareed Armaly, 2016, SALT, Istanbul), which uncovered a museum collection dispersed due to the 1915 Armenian Genocide.

  Archival Voices | Marianna Hovhannisyan: “Double Assimilations and Empty Fields: Armenian Archival Silences”

  JNBC Lectures
• 

  Apr

  20

  10:00am - 4:00pm

  ARCHIVAL REVIVAL REVENGE

  Nightingale-Brown House

  ARCHIVAL REVIVAL REVENGE is a collection of materials created for and during a series of workshops at the Center for Public Humanities. Together, they make up part of an imaginary library that artist-in-residence Diana Limbach Lempel uses to help her and viewers think about the way we relate to the past: rather than static and pristine, the objects and stories left behind by previous generations are alive, can speak to us, and are altered by every interaction we have with them. In this way, history work becomes a practice of asking questions of the unknown, listening for an answer, and considering our ethical position in relation to the future. Visitors to the exhibition may take home a zine full of prompts and workshop documentation, so that they can continue to experiment with their own archival revival revenge projects. 

  On-view thru Friday, June 2. Open Monday-Friday, 10am-4pm (Closed on weekends and holidays).  

  Opening reception and Gallery Night Providence: Thursday, April 20, 5-8pm.

  Diana Limbach Lempel is the creator of Annsisters, a multidisciplinary, speculative project that asks questions about memory and gender in New England history. Annsisters began in residence at the exhibition Visionary New England at the DeCordova Museum in 2020. Diana has been a Mass Humanities Scholar in Residence with the New Bedford Working Waterfront Festival, the Doing History Curator at History Cambridge, and the Visiting Curator at the Amherst Historical Society Museum. With a background in urban planning and design, Diana founded and ran a teen summer program in public history and design, and from 2016-2019, she founded and co-directed Practice Space, a storefront art and humanities space and retail shop in Cambridge, MA. She offers workshops to professional and community historians, including “Listening is Emotional Labor.” She can be found on Instagram   @the_annsisters, annsisters.com and dianalempel.me.

  ARCHIVAL REVIVAL REVENGE

  JNBC Exhibitions
• 

  Apr

  20

  10:00am - 4:00pm

  Brown Community Portrait Project

  Nightingale-Brown House

  The Brown Community Portrait Project is an exhibition of photographic portraits of people who support Brown students and faculty in all different ways. The goal is to recognize some of the manyworkers who are not always front and center, and to say THANK YOU!

  Portraits are taken in the John Nicholas Brown Center’s dining room, a space with a long and complicated history. The message is one of belonging and community.

  Curated by Traci Picard (MA’23)

  Open Monday-Friday, 10am-4pm (closed on weekends and holidays)

  Opening Reception and Gallery Night Providence on Thursday, April 20, 5-8pm.

  Brown Community Portrait Project

  JNBC Exhibitions
• Apr

  20

  10:00am - 4:00pm

  in -s-e-a-m-s- and -s-c-e-n-e-s-

  Nightingale-Brown House

  Nostalgic. Romantic. Idyllic. 

  These are some of the words describing the 19th century wallpaper Les Vues d’Amérique du Nord (The Views of North America) by Jean-Julien Deltil for  the company Zuber & Cie. Yet the images in this work contain histories of colonialism, genocide, slavery, and oppression, resulting in liberated Black folk depicted as appalling spectacles and Indigenous peoples as humorous entertainment. The presence of this wallpaper is one of the many ways in which we carry our histories with us, material traces of a spiritual problem that runs deep into the fabric of our society. in -s-e-a-m-s- and -s-c-e-n-e-s- asks us to wrestle with this fabric, as no matter what we try to cover it up with—like the wallpaper itself—it remains. Sitting. Lingering. Waiting. It seeps through the edges of our efforts. Just like these histories, however, we must remain: to advocate for others, examine ourselves, learn about it, from it, with it, poke it, prod it, teach it, preach it, and hopefully, most importantly, change it.

  Artist: Asya Gipson 

  Open Monday-Friday, 10am-4pm (closed on weekends and holidays)

  Opening reception and Gallery Night Providence: Thursday, April 20, 5-8pm

  in -s-e-a-m-s- and -s-c-e-n-e-s-

  JNBC Exhibitions
• 

  Apr

  20

  10:00am - 4:00pm

  A Seat at the Table

  Nightingale-Brown House

  Here at this table we honor the workers. Those who served in the house, and those whose labor made this all possible. Through art, their names are brought into the story, and into our memory.

  This installation was curated by Traci Picard (MA’23); Design by Priyata Bosamia (RISD, Mdes’23).

  Open Monday-Friday, 10am-4pm (closed on weekends and holidays)

  Opening reception and Gallery Night Providence: Thursday, April 20, 5-8pm

  A Seat at the Table

  JNBC Exhibitions
• 

  Apr

  20

  10:00am - 4:00pm

  Rest, Leisure, and the Brown Family in the 20th Century

  Nightingale-Brown House

  Every home has a space where people come together at the end of the long day to relax. For generations of the Brown family, the parlor of the Nightingale-Brown house was this space. Enter and explore the exceptional (and ordinary) ways that this remarkable family spent their free time.

  The scrapbook research and curation: Béatrice Duchastel de Montrouge (BA’23); Design: Priyata Bosamia (RISD, Mdes’23).

  Open Monday-Friday, 10am-4pm (closed on weekends and holidays)

  Opening reception and Gallery Night Providence: Thursday, April 20, 5-8pm

  Rest, Leisure, and the Brown Family in the 20th Century

  JNBC Exhibitions
• 

  Apr

  20

  10:00am - 4:00pm

  Exhibition: Fractals of Fabulation

  Nightingale-Brown House

  Gallery is open Monday-Friday, 10am-4pm (closed on weekends and holidays)

  The studio is a space separated from reality in which the artist creates a hypothetical fantasy, imposing how they see the world through their artwork. This material expression is their signature.

  Creating a balance between idealism and reality are ongoing questions. Reality is a caustic environment and it is the responsibility of the artist to provide a fantasy. What are these worlds that we as artists fabulate? As we imbue a spirit or soul into an inanimate object, we add something to generate a new reality. As we deconstruct to make a design more abstract, we take away. What is the new lifecycle that is imagined through animism, abstraction and alternative vantage points? How does the artist try to reveal the cosmological principle of complex structures in forms and units of nature?

  In what ways do we reenact and reimagine the process of creation? In a body of artists, our works fractalize as hypotheses stemming from designs that came before us and the work of creators we have observed. As we build our worlds, the framework of how we view the world is exposed. Are we reacting to or commenting on the status quo or are we representing underlying realities? How is this rupture structured? On what themes do we dwell? What elements persist? On what frameworks do we drape the fabric of our stories?

  Kobe Jackson (they them) is a transdisciplinary artist and curator living and working in Providence, Rhode Island. Jackson draws on their experience living outside of the mainstream to create work that calls conventions into question. Born to a multilingual family, Kobe has long inhabited the in-between spaces that produce fruitful questions in art making. Their status as ‘foreigner’ allows them to render the familiar new, to place standard tropes in italics. Relying on the strength of a visual over a spoken language, Jackson practices looking as a kind of intentional study. Their work interrogates traditional subjects—flowers, seascapes, portraits—through a queer, non-binary, biracial lens, exploring how these tropes can warp and change through new eyes.

  Exhibition: Fractals of Fabulation

  JNBC Exhibitions
• 

  Apr

  18

  4:30pm - 6:30pm

  Rethinking Catharsis: Virtual Narratives and the “Empathy Machine.” Day Two.

  Rockefeller Library
  By redefining the possibilities of mimetic identification, the development of Virtual, Augmented, and Extended Reality (AR/XR) applications, ranging from the performative to the therapeutic and socio-political realms, urge us to investigate whether “catharsis” is still conceivable, and what forms can it take in hybrid or entirely immersive environments.

  Webinar link for both days: https://brown.zoom.us/j/98902842053

  Speaker: Mattia Casalegno (Pratt Institute/RISD), “Aerobanquets RMX – An Immersive Gastronomic Experience.” Loosely based on the Futurist Cookbook, the (in)famous Italian book of surreal dinners and recipes first published in 1932, Aerobanquets RMX are veritable multi-sensory journey encompassing all the senses: sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch.

  Panel discussion. Moderator: Steven Lubar (JNBC)

  Participants:

  Fulvio Domini (Brown)

  Emanuela Patti (University of Edinburgh), “What If? Catharsis, VR, and the power of changing (hi)stories.” How can virtual reality and catharsis be used to experience past events and ultimately change their endings, for example by saving innocent victims? 

  Federica Pedriali (University of Edinburgh), “On Making Worlds from Containers: After McLuhan’s Medium/Message/Massage.” How does a world come to be? What McLuhan calls media are but empty containers that carry no message yet perform all the massaging. Is the cathartic effect but one form of social mediatization?

  Massimo Riva (Brown University), “Metaverse as Shadowland and the Cybernetic Unconscious.”  Are VR and AGI transferring Catharsis to a New Collective Unconscious?  

  Luca Viganò (King’s College London), “Cybersecurity Ever After: The Cybersecurity of Fairy Tales.” Can fairy tales help us learn the key lessons of cybersecurity and ensure that we and our devices will live happily ever after?

  Dhanraj Viswanath (St. Andrews), “Transformational Aesthetic Experiences and Artistic Media.” Is the viability of virtual or augmented reality in engendering transformational aesthetic experiences dependent on the artistic medium?

  Rethinking Catharsis: Virtual Narratives and the “Empathy Machine.” Day Two.
• 

  Apr

  18

  4:00pm - 5:30pm

  Archival Voices | Ricky Punzalan: “Reciprocity, Repatriation, and Reparation: Decolonizing Philippine Archives in the U.S”

  Stephen Robert ’62 Campus Center

  Recording of this talk is available here.

  Ricky Punzalan, Associate Professor of Information at the University of Michigan, will speak about his work with ‘ ReConnect/ReCollect: Reparative Connections to Philippine Collections at the University of Michigan.’ He will describe the project’s reparative frameworks and practices for the University’s Philippine collections, which were acquired during the U.S. colonial period.

  Ricky Punzalan holds a Ph.D. in Information as well as graduate certificates in Science, Technology, and Society (STS) and Museum Studies from the University of Michigan (UM). He earned a Bachelor of Library Science and Master of Library and Information Science (archives and museum studies concentration) from the University of the Philippines Diliman. He has previously taught on the faculty of the University of the Philippines School of Library and Information Studies (2000 to 2006) and the University of Maryland College of Information Studies (2013 to 2019). Ricky has worked on a variety of archival projects in the Philippines, which include establishing the archives of a former leprosarium and curating a museum exhibit for the centennial of its founding as a segregation facility. From 2018 to 2021 he served on the Council of the Society of American Archivists, the organization’s highest governing body. Ricky currently serves on the steering committee of the University of Michigan’s Museum Studies Program.

  Archival Voices | Ricky Punzalan: “Reciprocity, Repatriation, and Reparation: Decolonizing Philippine Archives in the U.S”

  JNBC Lectures
• 

  Apr

  17

  3:00pm - 5:30pm

  Rethinking Catharsis: Virtual Narratives and the “Empathy Machine.” Day One

  Rockefeller Library
  Rethinking Catharsis: Virtual Narratives and the “Empathy Machine.” Day One.  By redefining the possibilities of mimetic identification, the development of Virtual, Augmented, and Extended Reality (AR/XR) applications, ranging from the performative to the therapeutic and socio-political realms, urge us to investigate whether “catharsis” is still conceivable, and what forms can it take in hybrid or entirely immersive environments.

  Speakers: Roderick Coover, “Catharsis Or Terror, Empathy Or Annihilation? Innervation at the Portals of the Anthropocene.” Can emerging media arts enable comprehension of the rapidly accelerating drive toward climate catastrophe before collapse, put words to the unspeakable and contribute to acts of transformation?

  Samantha Gorman, “Liveness in Virtual Worlds: Case Study: ‘The Under Presents’ an Immersive Theater VR Experience.” This talk provides a behind the scenes perspective in the design methodology of The Under Presents, a virtual reality immersive theater experience that combined multiplayer gameplay with live actor performances. 

  Webinar link for both days: https://brown.zoom.us/j/98902842053

  To register,

  Rethinking Catharsis: Virtual Narratives and the “Empathy Machine.” Day One
• 

  Apr

  13

  7:30pm - 8:30pm

  RE/GENERATE Workshop | Drawing the Line: Composing Lived Experience

  Nightingale-Brown House
  In this workshop, led by Alison Rollins, MFA, we will reimagine the timelines of our lives through the medium of a single-line drawing. Our drawings will then be circulated to each of the other participants who will respond to guided prompts to “read” and creatively “translate” the drawings into written words/language and then gestures and/or sounds.

  Sign-up is required. RSVP: https://forms.gle/K4se2tmg2uf3YwWn7

  RE/GENERATE Workshop | Drawing the Line: Composing Lived Experience

  JNBC Lectures, JNBC Workshops
• 

  Apr

  5

  4:00pm - 5:30pm

  Archival Voices | Yveline Alexis: “Haitian Voices and Multilingual Sources”

  Stephen Robert ’62 Campus Center

  Yveline Alexis, Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Comparative American Studies at Oberlin College, will speak about the importance of Caribbean archives and multilingual sources. She will explore how drawing on Haitian archives and voices significantly changes historical narratives about the Haitian resistance against U.S. imperialism.

  Yveline Alexis is Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Comparative American Studies at Oberlin College. In her first book, Haiti Fights Back: The Life & Legacy of Charlemagne Péralte, she explores Haitian resistance to the U.S. occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934. Relying on international archives and multilingual sources, she studies the life of the politician and guerrilla fighter Charlemagne Péralte and locates Haitian women and men who also protested against U.S. imperialism in intellectual, artistic, and religious ways. For Haiti Fights Back, Professor Alexis received the 2021 Haitian Studies Association Book Prize. More broadly, her research and teaching interests include the history of the Caribbean, the Americas, and the African diaspora, memory studies, and oral history.

  Archival Voices | Yveline Alexis: “Haitian Voices and Multilingual Sources”

  JNBC Lectures
• 

  Apr

  3

  4:00pm - 5:30pm

  Deepa Kumar ─ Terrorcraft: Why Racial Control Regimes Persist

  Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs

  Even though the War on Terror is officially over, policies and practices put into place to keep Americans “safe” from the racialized terrorist threat persist. What began as a means to control the “Islamic terrorist” has been widened to incorporate a range of threats to the status quo from the “eco-terrorist” and Occupy Wall Street activists to Black Lives Matter and Native American activists. In this talk, Professor Kumar places the terrorist threat within the larger history of racialized securitization in the US to unpack how threats to empire are managed and contained. This is part of a new book project she is working on titled Terrorcraft: Race, Security and Empire which examines how “terrorcraft,” a taken-for-granted regime of racial control focused on the Muslim threat, has been useful for strengthening the policing powers of the national security state in US. Terrorcraft, she argues, is a malleable regime of social control that has endured past its moment of inception and even deracialized to incorporate other threats. It thus bears similarity to previous racial regimes in US history such as slave patrols, which were precursors to the modern police, and which survived well past the institution of slavery. Terrorcraft as a set of practices and ideologies served to normalize modes of social control that go well beyond the brown terrorist.

  Presented by the Costs of War Project.

  Dr. Deepa Kumar is an award-winning scholar and activist. She is Professor of Media Studies at Rutgers University. She is the author of more than 80 publications including books, journal articles, book chapters, and articles in independent and mainstream media.

  Her first book, Outside the Box: Corporate Media, Globalization and the UPS Strike (University of Illinois Press, 2007), is about the power of the U.S. working class in effectively challenging the priorities of neoliberalism. In her second book, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire (Haymarket Books, 2012) she turns her attention to race and the politics of empire during the War on Terror era. The book was translated into five languages and has been widely read around the world. The second and fully revised edition of Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire: 20 Years Since 9/11 (Verso, 2021) updates the book to the end of the Trump presidency.

  She is currently working on a third book, tentatively titled Terrorcraft: Empire, Race, and Security, about the political and cultural production of the terrorist threat in the era of neoliberalism.

  She is recognized as a leading scholar on Islamophobia both nationally and internationally. She has been sought out by the media for her expertise in numerous media outlets such as the BBC, The New York Times, NPR, USA Today, Philadelphia Inquirer, Danish Broadcasting Corporation, Telesur (Venezuela), Hurriyat Daily News (Turkey), Al Jazeera and other national and international news media outlets.

  Cosponsored by the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, the Department of American Studies, and the Department of Modern Culture and Media.

  Deepa Kumar ─ Terrorcraft: Why Racial Control Regimes Persist

  Government, Public & International Affairs, History, Cultural Studies, Languages, Identity, Culture, Inclusion, International, Global Engagement
• 

  Mar

  22

  2:00pm - 3:30pm

  Earth objects: material culture/ecology/aesthetics

  Institute at Brown for Environment & Society (IBES)

  This paper examines the intersections of material culture and ecology, arguing that the aesthetic realm acts as an important link between the two. We understand that ‘things’ are important vehicles for the transmission of cultural knowledge through time. Here I explore especially the environmental dimensions of this knowledge, suggesting that the persistence of certain things and techniques is linked to the persistence of bodies of material-ecological knowledge. Using basketry—an original and near-ubiquitous human technology—as one example, I suggest that ecological knowledge is often most effectively communicated in the aesthetic realm. In this view, the aesthetic realm is not primarily ‘decorative’ or additional to other more substantial concerns, but instead acts as a kind of code indicating essential techniques of life in particular places.

  Daniel Niles is a human-environmental geographer at the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature (RIHN, Japan). His research examines how different forms of environmental knowledge are embedded in and conveyed through material culture, cultural practices and landscapes. Using agricultural heritage zones—places of special cultural and ecological value—as field sites, he is interested especially in how the environmental knowledge on which these places depend remains sensible over generations, and the relevance of these longstanding fields of knowledge and experience to the contemporary challenges of the Anthropocene. He has served as Visiting Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin; Visiting Researcher at the Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley; consultant in agricultural heritage for the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, and Creative Director of Eocene Arts. Recent publications: “Le monde dans un panier” (Techniques & Culture 76 2021), “Sustainable agrifood systems for a post-growth world” (Nature Sustainability 5 2022), Anthropocene and Asia: Investigation, Critique, and Contribution from the Environmental Humanities Perspective (edited with Masahiro Terada, in Japanese, Kyoto University Press, 2021), and “The charcoal forest: sensing the agencies of nature” (in Forms of Experienced Environments, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2020).

  Earth objects: material culture/ecology/aesthetics

  JNBC Lectures
• 

  Mar

  22

  12:00pm - 4:00pm

  Revival Archival Revenge, Week 3 Artist Residency & Workshop

  Nightingale-Brown House
  Week 3, Archiving the Ether: Automatic Writing, Wild Yeast

  [ collaborating to bring wild yeasts from the air together into a community, we will mix a batch of sourdough starter and let the same air guide our hands for drawing and writing. what will the building itself tell us? ]

  12-2pm /  Workshop with the Artist / Spaces are limited; Register to attend HERE (Required); Lunch will be provided. 

  2-4pm / Artist’s Open Studio / Drop-ins are welcome

  What happens when the past that we have preserved needs to change? REVIVAL ARCHIVAL REVENGE is a participatory project by artist-in-residence Diana Limbach Lempel. It will explore how the Colonial Revival, which began in the late 19th century, constrains our possibilities for engaging with the past, while at the same time giving us tools for reimagining the ways we remember and forget. The elite white women who led the Colonial Revival movement considered ghosts and their own intuition as powerful informants. Both inspired by and critical of those women, we will play with texts and artifacts as tools for divination and destruction, and create archival records of our dreams and the air. We will also wonder about our relationship with forgetting, in our time of digital archiving. The project will culminate in an installation in the library and a zine which documents the project and offers prompts for ongoing revival archival revenge in everyday life.

  Diana Limbach Lempel is the creator of Annsisters, a multidisciplinary, speculative project that asks questions about memory and gender in New England history. Annsisters began in residence at the exhibition Visionary New England at the DeCordova Museum in 2020. Diana has been a Mass Humanities Scholar in Residence with the New Bedford Working Waterfront Festival, the Doing History Curator at History Cambridge, and the Visiting Curator at the Amherst Historical Society Museum. With a background in urban planning and design, Diana founded and ran a teen summer program in public history and design, and from 2016-2019, she founded and co-directed Practice Space, a storefront art and humanities space and retail shop in Cambridge, MA. She offers workshops to professional and community historians, including “Listening is Emotional Labor.” She can be found on Instagram   @the_annsisters, annsisters.com and dianalempel.me.

  Revival Archival Revenge, Week 3 Artist Residency & Workshop

  JNBC Workshops
• 

  Mar

  16

  7:30pm - 8:30pm

  RE/GENERATE: Didn’t It Rain Children?: Building an Audiovisual Monument to the Women, Queer and Transgender Activists of Our Past and Present.

  Nightingale-Brown House

  In her rendition of the turn of the 20th-century gospel song “Didn’t It Rain”, mother of modern music Sister Rosetta Tharpe calls out “Didn’t it rain children? Oh, didn’t it rain?” In our contemporary moment we are dealing with a flurry of socio-political attacks, the rights of women, transgender people, indigenous people, immigrants, the right to education and more are being repealed and our lives claimed to be invalid. When it rains, it pours. In this workshop, we will utilize audiovisual mediums that range from archival footage, performance, music, interviews, news reports and more to build a monument to the work of the women, transgender and non-binary activists who have fought, and continue to fight for all of our freedoms. In recycling these A/V materials we give new life, new context and new power to moments of the past in the present.

  This workshop will be lead by Rai Terry (MA’22)

  Registration is required. RSVP here.

  RE/GENERATE: Didn’t It Rain Children?: Building an Audiovisual Monument to the Women, Queer and Transgender Activists of Our Past and Present.

  JNBC Lectures, JNBC Workshops
• 

  Mar

  15

  12:00pm - 4:00pm

  Revival Archival Revenge, Week 2 of Artist’s Residency & Workshop

  Nightingale-Brown House
  Week 2, Lingua Ignota: Samplers, Secret Messages

  [working with diana’s collection of antique embroidery samplers, we will stitch nonsense symbols, play OUIJA with their letters, and try to deduce the hidden messages left behind for us by girls 200 years ago ]

  12-2pm /  Workshop with the Artist / Spaces are limited; Register to attend HERE (Required); Lunch will be provided. 

  2-4pm / Artist’s Open Studio / Drop-ins are welcome

  What happens when the past that we have preserved needs to change? REVIVAL ARCHIVAL REVENGE is a participatory project by artist-in-residence Diana Limbach Lempel. It will explore how the Colonial Revival, which began in the late 19th century, constrains our possibilities for engaging with the past, while at the same time giving us tools for reimagining the ways we remember and forget. The elite white women who led the Colonial Revival movement considered ghosts and their own intuition as powerful informants. Both inspired by and critical of those women, we will play with texts and artifacts as tools for divination and destruction, and create archival records of our dreams and the air. We will also wonder about our relationship with forgetting, in our time of digital archiving. The project will culminate in an installation in the library and a zine which documents the project and offers prompts for ongoing revival archival revenge in everyday life.

  Diana Limbach Lempel is the creator of Annsisters, a multidisciplinary, speculative project that asks questions about memory and gender in New England history. Annsisters began in residence at the exhibition Visionary New England at the DeCordova Museum in 2020. Diana has been a Mass Humanities Scholar in Residence with the New Bedford Working Waterfront Festival, the Doing History Curator at History Cambridge, and the Visiting Curator at the Amherst Historical Society Museum. With a background in urban planning and design, Diana founded and ran a teen summer program in public history and design, and from 2016-2019, she founded and co-directed Practice Space, a storefront art and humanities space and retail shop in Cambridge, MA. She offers workshops to professional and community historians, including “Listening is Emotional Labor.” She can be found on Instagram   @the_annsisters, annsisters.com and dianalempel.me.

  Revival Archival Revenge, Week 2 of Artist’s Residency & Workshop

  JNBC Workshops
• 

  Mar

  8

  12:00pm - 4:00pm

  Revival Archival Revenge, Week 1 of Artist’s Residency & Workshop

  Nightingale-Brown House
  Week 1, Bibliomancy: Collections, Collages

  [using chance to guide us, we will let the books and magazines in the collection speak, and record their words in collages. participants may take their collages home or contribute them to the installation.]

  12-2pm /  Workshop with the Artist / Spaces are limited; Register to attend HERE (Required); Lunch will be provided. 

  2-4pm / Artist’s Open Studio / Drop-ins are welcome

  What happens when the past that we have preserved needs to change? REVIVAL ARCHIVAL REVENGE is a participatory project by artist-in-residence Diana Limbach Lempel. It will explore how the Colonial Revival, which began in the late 19th century, constrains our possibilities for engaging with the past, while at the same time giving us tools for reimagining the ways we remember and forget. The elite white women who led the Colonial Revival movement considered ghosts and their own intuition as powerful informants. Both inspired by and critical of those women, we will play with texts and artifacts as tools for divination and destruction, and create archival records of our dreams and the air. We will also wonder about our relationship with forgetting, in our time of digital archiving. The project will culminate in an installation in the library and a zine which documents the project and offers prompts for ongoing revival archival revenge in everyday life.

  Diana Limbach Lempel is the creator of Annsisters, a multidisciplinary, speculative project that asks questions about memory and gender in New England history. Annsisters began in residence at the exhibition Visionary New England at the DeCordova Museum in 2020. Diana has been a Mass Humanities Scholar in Residence with the New Bedford Working Waterfront Festival, the Doing History Curator at History Cambridge, and the Visiting Curator at the Amherst Historical Society Museum. With a background in urban planning and design, Diana founded and ran a teen summer program in public history and design, and from 2016-2019, she founded and co-directed Practice Space, a storefront art and humanities space and retail shop in Cambridge, MA. She offers workshops to professional and community historians, including “Listening is Emotional Labor.” She can be found on Instagram   @the_annsisters, annsisters.com and dianalempel.me.

  Revival Archival Revenge, Week 1 of Artist’s Residency & Workshop

  JNBC Workshops
• Mar

  2

  7:30pm - 8:30pm

  RE/GENERATE: Poetry Lost and Found: Poesía Perdida y Encontrada

  Nightingale-Brown House

  In this workshop led by Sophia Marina and Jamila Medina Ríos, we will assemble poems out of the words, phrases, and fragments of text that envelop us daily. Recorriendo ciudades, calles, muros señales del tráfico, librerías y libreros, marquesinas de cine con el dedo. Using generative strategies, poetry reflective of ourselves and our surroundings will emerge. Te invitamos a encontrarte con y en un poema. Bring your own materials: fotos, citas, el blasón de tu apellido, tu graffiti favorito, un volante del camino…

  Sign-up is required (registration form is here). 

  RE/GENERATE: Poetry Lost and Found: Poesía Perdida y Encontrada

  JNBC Lectures, JNBC Workshops
• 

  Mar

  1

  5:30pm - 6:30pm

  Alexandra Ketchum: “Public Scholarship: Benefits, Challenges, and Strategies”

  Nightingale-Brown House
  Public scholarship—sharing research with audiences outside of academic settings—has become increasingly necessary to counter the rise of misinformation, fill gaps from cuts to traditional media, and increase the reach of important scholarship. Engaging in these efforts often comes with the risk of harassment and threats—especially for women, people of color, LGBTQ+ communities, and precariously employed workers. This workshop, based on Ketchum’s book Engage in Public Scholarship provides constructive guidance on how to translate research into inclusive public outreach while ensuring that such efforts are safer and more accessible. The workshop will discuss practices and planning for a range of activities from in-person and online events, to publishing and working with the media, blogging, podcasting, cartoons, and more! This workshop will both address the key challenges and benefits of feminist and accessible public scholarship and provide toolkits for doing this important work.

  Since 2018, Dr. Alex Ketchum has been the Faculty Lecturer of the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies of McGill University. She is the Director of the Just Feminist Tech and Scholarship Lab and the organizer of Disrupting Disruptions: The Feminist and Accessible Publishing, Communications, and Tech Speaker and Workshop Series. Her work integrates food, environmental, technological, and gender history. https://www.alexketchum.ca.

  Alexandra Ketchum: “Public Scholarship: Benefits, Challenges, and Strategies”

  JNBC Lectures
• 

  Feb

  23

  6:00pm

  Curating Across Art and Anthropology

  Manning Hall

  The HMA is honored to welcome distinguished anthropologist Christina Kreps to give our annual Barbara A. and Edward G. Hail Lecture on February 23rd. Professor Kreps will discuss affinities and frictions among the fields of anthropology, art history, and contemporary art practice and how they are playing out in the curation of museum collections and exhibitionary practices. Using examples from her work in museums and heritage at the University of Denver, she will explore increasing convergence of these fields in the hybrid, intercultural spaces of the museum, with particular concern for student experiences and goals of inclusion, equity, and diversity. The audience will be invited to participate in the conversation.

  Christina Kreps is Professor of Anthropology, Director of the Museum of Anthropology and Museum and Heritage Studies Program at the University of Denver. She is also co-editor of the Routledge series Museum Meanings with Richard Sandell, Leicester University. Christina Kreps is author of the recent book Museums and Anthropology in the Age of Engagement (Routledge 2020) and Liberating Culture: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Museums, Curation, and Cultural Heritage Preservation (Routledge 2003). She has conducted research on the coloniality and postcoloniality of museums in the Netherlands, Indonesia, and the US and participated in museum development and training programs in Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and more recently, virtually worldwide.

  Supported by generous donors to the Barbara A. and Edward G. Hail Lecture Series fund.

  Curating Across Art and Anthropology

  Academic Calendar, University Dates & Events, Arts, Performance, History, Cultural Studies, Languages, Humanities, Identity, Culture, Inclusion
• Feb

  23

  2:00pm - 3:30pm

  Informal Conversation with Christina Kreps

  Nightingale-Brown House

  Students are invited to an informal conversation with Christina Kreps. This is a drop-in event - no registration required. Kreps will give a lecture “Curating Across Art and Anthropology” today at 6pm.

  Christina Kreps is Professor of Anthropology, Director of the Museum of Anthropology and Museum and Heritage Studies Program at the University of Denver. She is also co-editor of the Routledge series Museum Meanings with Richard Sandell, Leicester University. Christina Kreps is author of the recent book Museums and Anthropology in the Age of Engagement (Routledge 2020) and Liberating Culture: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Museums, Curation, and Cultural Heritage Preservation (Routledge 2003). She has conducted research on the coloniality and postcoloniality of museums in the Netherlands, Indonesia, and the US and participated in museum development and training programs in Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and more recently, virtually worldwide.

  Light refreshments will be provided.

  Informal Conversation with Christina Kreps
• 

  Feb

  16

  7:30pm - 8:30pm

  RE/GENERATE: Free-Form Fibers

  Nightingale-Brown House

  The workshop will be led by Traci Picard (MA’23) and Erica Wolencheck (MA’23)

  Sign-up is required (registration form is here). Materials will be provided.

  This seminar brings us together to create crocheted florals in the spirit of “free-form crochet.” Each participant will have the choice to create leaves, flowers, or any combination of fiber botanicals, which we’ll attach to an interconnected vine that unites our project into one crocheted “ecosystem.” We welcome people of all crochet experience levels to join us in creating these manifestations of Spring!

  RE/GENERATE: Free-Form Fibers

  JNBC Lectures, JNBC Workshops
• 

  Feb

  2

  7:30pm - 8:30pm

  RE/GENERATE: Priyata Bosamia

  Nightingale-Brown House

  Join RISD MDes Priyata Bosamia in a creative stamp-carving workshop. Around a community table, we will explore what happens when our individual marks come together to build a collective artwork.
  
  This event is a part of RE/GENERATE, a bi-weekly creative humanities workshop series that engages with themes of regeneration, creation, and remix. These sessions offer space for thinkers, artists, makers, and dreamers to build relationships, learn new skills, and engage in creative practice. The series will feature 6 participatory workshops throughout the Spring semester and culminate in a collaborative, accumulating exhibition that will open on May 11, 2023.
  
  Please pre-register here - https://forms.gle/cgd6qKXUa8MKDkBB8

  RE/GENERATE: Priyata Bosamia

  JNBC Lectures, JNBC Workshops