Faculty Friday Book Launch Celebration
Faculty Friday Book Launch Celebration
All are invited to the launch of three new books by UHart faculty members on Friday, Jan. 27, from 2 p.m. – 4 p.m., in the Shaw Center in Hillyer Hall.
Michael Walsh, Associate Professor of Cinema in the College of Arts & Sciences, argues in his new book, Durational Cinema: A Short History of Long Films, for a durational cinema that is distinct from slow cinema, and outlines the history of its three main waves: the New York avant-garde of the 1960s, the European art cinema in the years after 1968, and the international cinema of gallery spaces as well as film festivals since the 1990s. Figures studied include Andy Warhol, Ken Jacobs, Chantal Akerman, Marguerite Duras, Claude Lanzmann, James Benning, Kevin Jerome Everson, Lav Diaz, and Wang Bing. Durational cinema is characteristically representational, and converges on certain topics (the Holocaust, deindustrialization, the experience of the working class and other marginalized people), but has no one meaning, signifying differently at different moments and in different hands.
Nicholas Ealy, Professor English in the College of Arts & Sciences, and Alexandra (Zee) Onuf, Associate Professor of Art History in the Hartford Art School, co-edited Violence, Trauma, and Memory: Responses to War in the Late Medieval and Early Modern World, which brings together eight essays that examine medieval and early modern violence and warfare in France, the Hispanic World, and the Dutch Republic through the lens of trauma studies and memory studies. By focusing on warfare, these essays by historians, literary specialists, and historians of visual culture demonstrate how individuals and groups living with the “ungraspable” outcomes of wartime violence grappled with processing and remembering (both culturally and politically) the trauma of war.
Rachel E. Walker, Assistant Professor of History in the College of Arts & Sciences, proposes a bold new way of understanding the connection between science, politics, and popular culture in early America in Beauty and the Brain. Examining the history of phrenology and physiognomy in the 1770s and 1860s, Professor Walker shows why they must be taken seriously: they were the intellectual tools that a diverse group of Americans used to debate questions of race, gender, and social justice. While prominent intellectuals and political thinkers invoked these sciences to justify hierarchy, marginalized people and progressive activists deployed them for their own political aims, creatively interpreting human minds and bodies as they fought for racial justice and gender equality.
Join us for a short talk by each of the professor-authors, followed by a reception to celebrate the publication of their books.
For more information or to inquire about other faculty events and opportunities, contact T. Stores at: stores@hartford.edu