Spring 2009 Humanities Forum Lecture Series

2.04      7:00 p.m. University Center Ballroom

Fiction Reading and Booksigning: The Glass Castle

Jeannette Walls, Best Selling Author  

Jeannette Walls will be speaking about and reading from her New York Times best-selling memoir, The Glass Castle.  In this book, chosen for UMBC’s New Student Book Experience, Walls describes growing up in the desert of the American Southwest and then in a West Virginia mining town with her three siblings and the brilliant, unorthodox, irresponsible parents who manage at once to neglect them, love them, and teach them to face their fears. Despite deprivations, the children grow up reading Shakespeare and dreaming of the beautiful glass house they will all one day build.  

SPONSORS:

Division of Student Affairs

Dresher Center for the Humanities

Office of Undergraduate Education 

2.18      7:00 p.m. Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery

Panel Discussion on Transmodernism

James Mahoney, Department of Visual Arts, UMBC

Catherine Pancake, Independent Filmmaker and Musician

Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall, School of Art and Design, University of Illinois, Chicago

Moderated by Preminda Jacob, Department of Visual Arts, UMBC

“Transmodern” is a term that came into use in the early 1990s to denote emerging attitudes, values, and aesthetics that seemed to move past postmodernism's canon of critique into more intriguingly open areas of cultural inquiry and practice.   The rise of the Internet has networked a transmodernity that includes green perspectives and liberation theology, alternative music, multiculturalism in every form, and a re-engagement with the question of symbols in art, etc.  In essence, the transmodern is a proactive recasting of the primal modernist condition, one in which, as Karl Marx said, “All that is solid melts into air.” 

SPONSOR:

Dresher Center for the Humanities

3.11      4:00 p.m. Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery

Women’s History Month Lecture

The Muslim Headscarf in Europe: Veiled Threat or Religious Freedom?

Claudia Koonz, Department of History, Duke University

Even as the European Union promises to create shared cultural values, vehement disagreements about the Muslim headscarf reveal deep divisions within German, French, and British attitudes to immigrants.  Does a woman wearing a headscarf, or hijab, signify subservience to oppression, an identity statement, or religious piety?  Who has the right to decide?  Professor Koonz explores the answers to these questions within three visual cultures as a way of connecting gender, Islam, and human rights.   

SPONSORS:

Department of Gender and Women Studies

Department of History

Dresher Center for the Humanities

UMBC Women’s Center

3.25    4:00 p.m. Albin O. Kuhn Library, 7th Floor

The Daphne Harrison Lecture

Gaining Information, Knowledge, and Power in the 21st Century

Carla Hayden, Director, Enoch Pratt Free Library  

Libraries are changing and dynamic places that offer opportunities and countless resources.  As the information hub for Baltimore, the Enoch Pratt Free Library's mission is to empower and equip citizens with information and educational resources to help shape their future.  Dr. Hayden will describe how she is pursuing this mission for the Pratt Library.  

SPONSOR:

Dresher Center for the Humanities  

4.15      4:00 p.m. Albin O. Kuhn Library, 7th Floor

Elise Levine , Award-winning author Author of the story collection Driving Men Mad and the novel Requests and Dedication

Elise Levine was named by Margaret Atwood as one of Canada’s most important emerging women writers. She is the recipient of a (Canadian) National Magazine Award for fiction as well as numerous awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council. In Last One In, Levine’s forthcoming novel, a woman whose best friend dies while exploring an underwater cave must confront her own history of betrayals and self-betrayals, and explore the nature of the bonds that bind and liberate.

SPONSORS:

Department of English

Dresher Center for the Humanities

4.30      4:00 p.m.  Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery

The 2nd Annual Lipitz Lecture

Poetic Narrative: Non-linear Strategies for Digital Cinema

John Sturgeon Lipitz Professor, Department of Visual Arts, UMBC 

Media artist John Sturgeon will discuss his new artwork and the non-linear narrative potential of multi-stream collage offered by high-definition video and interactive media.  Sturgeon will also discuss the J. Paul Getty Museum’s restoration and archiving of his 1970s video art works.

SPONSORS:

College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences

Department of Visual Arts

Dresher Center for the Humanities