Lectures
Past Lectures
-
Feb612:00pm - 1:00pmLunch Talk: “Traces: Honoring a Neighborhood’s History and Soundscape”
Nightingale-Brown House“Traces” is a collaborative performance project commissioned by Community MusicWorks (CMW), tracing the sonic memory of a place: an empty lot in the West End of Providence that will be the future home of Community MusicWorks. The work will be created by composer Shaw Pong Liu in collaboration with public historian Micah Salkind, neighborhood resident and educator Joanne Ayuso, and the Rhode Island Historical Society, and will present histories and stories of the neighborhood. Following more than two dozen oral history interviews, research, and musical composition, CMW musicians and students will perform a premiere of the piece on the land in May 2020.
Sebastian Ruth, violinist & violist, is CMW’s Founder & Artistic Director. A graduate of Brown University, Sebastian has performed with members of the Borromeo, Muir, Miro, Orion, and Turtle Island String Quartets. Sebastian is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, recognized for his work with CMW, and an honorary doctorate degree from Brown University. Starting in 2013, Sebastian has served as a Visiting Lecturer at the Yale School of Music, where he has designed and taught courses exploring the theoretical foundations of CMW, and has served as an Assistant Professor of the Practice of Music at Brown University.
-
Gerard Aching is Professor of Africana and Romance Studies, a Faculty Fellow at the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, and Co-Principal Investigator of the Rural Humanities Initiative at Cornell University.
In his presentation, Professor Aching will describe how his undergraduate Underground Railroad Seminar led him to contribute to Cornell University’s Rural Humanities Initiative, which the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has funded, and to the initiative’s current Rural Black Lives theme and seminar. Trained as a scholar of 19th-century Caribbean literatures, Aching will also speak about the impact that his public humanities and community-engaged projects has had on his research.
-
Kyera Singleton is the Executive Director of the Royall House and Slave Quarters, a PhD Candidate in the Department of American Culture at the University of Michigan, and a Visiting Fellow in the History Department at Harvard University.
How do sites of slavery reckon with their history today? This presentation will think through how historical sites such as the Royall House and Slave Quarters serve as a permanent marker of the history of Northern slavery, the fight amongst enslaved and free Black women and men to define freedom on their own terms, and the role of museums in the preservation of history and the fight for social justice today.
-
Oct2912:00pm - 1:00pm“Advocating for Architecture in Kampala” Lunch talk by Doreen Adengo
Doreen Adengo, AIA, is Principal of Adengo Architecture, LLC in Kampala.
Doreen Adengo is an architect and the founder of Adengo Architecture in Kampala, Uganda. She has taught studio courses at The New School for Social Research and Pratt Institute, and worked previously for Adjaye Associates. Her firm’s recent work in Uganda includes the design of affordable housing, schools, and a mobile medical clinic that incorporate ecologically sensitive elements such as solar panels and water harvesting capabilities. Adengo is the Conservation Architect on the Uganda Museum, a 1940s modernist building selected for a Getty conservation grant in 2020, and is an expert on modernist architecture in Africa. Adengo’s presentation provides an overview of the firm’s work in Uganda today.
-
Jordan Engel is an independent mapmaker and founder of the Decolonial Atlas, currently based in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn, NY).
The Decolonial Atlas is a counter-mapping collective centering Indigenous perspectives and challenging Western cartography’s colonial roots. This presentation will highlight many of the maps the Atlas has made over the past 6 years to radically revisualize our world, and how others can help.
-
In response to sale of the Johnson Publishing Company archives to various nonprofit and philanthropic organizations, Sixty Inches From Center released “Loss/Capture,” a digital editorial project that investigates the current state of Black collections in Chicago. Under the direction of archivists and guest editors Steven D. Booth and Stacie Williams, Sixty published a series of multimedia articles including essays, photography, illustrations, and video, from a range of contributors who hold experience and expertise in Black collections. Booth will discuss the phases of the project from conception to completion and highlight the personal and communal value of Black collections, the careful work necessary for preservation, and the importance of archives in sustaining social identity using contributions from the project.
Steven D. Booth (he/him) is an archivist, researcher, and co-founder of the Blackivists Collective.
WEBSITES / SOCIAL MEDIA
- Personal Website: http://www.stevendbooth.com/
- Personal Social Media: @misterbooth (Twitter and Instagram)
- Project Website: https://losscaptureproject.cargo.site/
- Project Social Media: @fromthecenter (Twitter); @losscaptureproject (Instagram)