Congratulations to our graduates!

Frank Lloyd Wright, playroom of Wright house and studio in Oak Park, IL.

Congratulations to our 2011-2012 graduating students!

BA in Art History, Architectural History, Pre-Architecture, & Art History certificate:

Ercan Akturk, Devra Alper, Kevin Cheng, Emily Clarke, Amanda Grannis, Takane Kobayashi, Maureen Larimore, William Oliver, Samantha Prag, Maria Salva, William Shieh, Erin van der Have, Rebecca Austin, Dana Wellesly-Stein, Leisy Blanco, Tara Brisson, Ashley Dixon, Lily Freedman, Marianna Zajac

MA in Art History:

Helen Goldenberg, “Reinventing Play: the Kindergarten, Women, and the Prairie Style Playrooms of Frank Lloyd Wright”

Eva Kelly, “Representing the Unrepresentable in Anselm Kiefer’s Sulamith“

PhD in Art History:

Shriya Sridharan, “Srirangam’s New Antiquity – Negotiating the Hindu Temple’s Divine and Historic Pasts in a Global Present”

Jeremy Culler, “From Television Signal To Magnetic Strip: An Archaeology Of Experimental Television And Video Knowledge”

See Nancy Um’s article in “Northeast African Studies”

See Associate Professor Nancy Um‘s article ”Reflections on the Red Sea Style: Beyond the Surface of Coastal Architecture” in the most recent issue of Northeast African Studies (click “View this issue” on the bottom left of the screen): http://msupress.msu.edu/journals/neas/index.php?Page=contents

In 1953, a British architect named Derek H. Matthews introduced the idea of “The Red Sea Style” in print, in a modest article with that title. Although brief and focused on a single site, this article proposed that the architecture around the rim of the Red Sea could be conceived of as a coherent and unified building category. Since then, those who have written about Red Sea port cities have generally accepted Matthews’s suggestion of a shared architectural culture. Indeed, the houses of the region’s major ports, such as Suakin in modern-day Sudan, Massawa in Eritrea, Jidda and Yanbuc al-Baḥr in Saudi Arabia, and Mocha, al-Ḥudayda, and al-Luḥayya in Yemen, share a number of visual similarities that support this cross-regional designation. Although many are in ruins, these coastal buildings appear to have more in common with each other than with their inland counterparts in their locality. The present article delves into the perceived coherence of Red Sea architecture, but it moves beyond the obvious common dimensions of material and decoration to turn attention to the transhistorical aspects of these port cities, along with their specificities and implicit differences. As a nonmonumental building tradition that emerged at the southern edge of the Ottoman world in the sixteenth century and continued into the twentieth, the Red Sea style represents a tangible case of sustained cross-cultural contact across a linked maritime region and thus moves beyond the conventional modern limits of continent and nation.

Dissertation Defense: Deniz Karakas

Please join us on Monday, May 14 for Deniz Karakas‘s dissertation defense. Her dissertation is entitled, “CLAY PIPES, MARBLE SURFACES: THE TOPOGRAPHIES OF WATER SUPPLY IN LATE SEVENTEENTH- AND EARLY-EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY OTTOMAN ISTANBUL.” Chaired by Nancy Um, the committee also includes Professors Barbara Abou-el-Haj, Rifa’at Abou-el-Haj, and Heather DeHaan (outside examiner). The defense is open to the public and will take place from 2:00-4:00 p.m. in FA 218.

Call for Papers: Interdisciplinary Panels for Renaissance Society of America, 2013

Associate Professor Karen Barzman is organizing a number of interdisciplinary panels for next year’s meeting of the Renaissance Society of America. See below for details.

The Renaissance Society of America will be organizing panels on the following interdisciplinary topics for the RSA meeting in San Diego, April 4-6, 2013.  If there is sufficient interest, there will be more than one panel on each topic.  All inquiries welcome (kbarzman@binghamton.edu).  Please circulate broadly.

(Re)Situating the Philippines:  Interdisciplinary and Cross-Cultural Perspectives

With RSA 2013 in a venue on the Pacific, this series of panels acknowledges and draws on Philippine Studies as a rapidly expanding field of interdisciplinary research, with important contributions from a variety of specialisms.  Participation is open to scholars from around the world, irrespective of their current status with regard to RSA membership.  Papers may focus on political structures, social and religious practices, and/or cultural production in the archipelago between the introduction of Islam and Christianity (c. 1350 – 1565). Additionally, work is sought that contributes to the radical re-thinking currently underway concerning   1) the place of the islands in a Southeast Asian economy both before and after the arrival of the Spanish in the sixteenth century (only beginning with the current discoveries of undersea archaeology),  2) the complexities surrounding power-relations and the consolidation of corporate identity  in early modern “Las Filipinas” and, within that context, 3) matters of transculturation viewed through the lens of various media (material, visual, textual, performed).  Papers may move into the eighteenth century and may also address the effects of Spanish colonial rule and/or practices of resistance at the level of the local or micro historical.   Send a one-page abstract and CV to Karen-edis Barzman (kbarzman@binghamton.edu) by May 25th, using the subject heading “RSA Philippine Studies.”

Global Capital and the Interconnecting Seas

That maritime trade led to the emergence of a global economy in the transition from the middle ages to early modernity is now a commonplace.  More recently interest has turned to conceptions of the sea that emerged as a result, when technology and imagination came together to produce notions of vast, interconnected expanses of water between and around continental land-masses, permitting the global circulation of bodies and goods, culture and capital.  Papers (intended for a series of panels) are invited across the disciplines to contribute to a genealogy of this epistemological sea-change. Topics may include mapping and the new hydrography; technological developments in ship-building and nautical science making transit possible across large bodies of water; the rise of new financial and social institutions facilitating the commodification of goods from around the world and/or the globalization of capital, with particular focus on a maritime context; practices of excess and promiscuity in this early stage of the global economy, both on land and at sea; literary and artistic treatment of these new technologies, institutions, and practices and of the emerging world view, from various situated perspectives.   A wide range of methodologies and critical approaches is welcome.  The goal is to draw together scholars who typically speak in separate RSA panels or affiliate with completely different professional organizations, to promote an inter-disciplinary exchange around the globalization of capital and the seas.  Please email a one-page abstract and CV to Karen-edis Barzman, Binghamton University (kbarzman@binghamton.edu) by May 25th, using the subject heading “RSA Interconnecting Seas.”

Bordering States/Imagining Frontiers

What constitutes a border or the confines of a state? That borders shift over time serves an index of their contingent nature; yet practices affirming their presence or marking a state’s reach often impart the sense of an essential and enduring character.  These panels will address a range of operations in the formation and geopolitics of early modern states. The purpose is to examine methods (material, visual, textual, performed) used to establish the limits of states or the closing of frontiers – zones of uncertainty and danger held to be radically different from and incommensurate with what was confined or captured by sovereignty.  Papers may address practices that established borders or, conversely, that violated, refused, or undid them, in urban centers as well as territories at the edges or limits of inhabited space.  In addition to representational practices (from painting and cartography to travelogues and diplomatic negotiations around borders and frontiers) they may take up material and performed practices (including the building of walls or, conversely, bridges; the exchange of gifts in negotiating borders and the management of frontiers; state warfare or civilian skirmishes across such spaces; the implementation of customs laws or, conversely, the trafficking of goods and other forms of contact and exchange outlawed by states at the limits of their authority).  Please mail a one-page abstract and CV to Karen-edis Barzman, Binghamton University (kbarzman@binghamton.edu) by May 25th, using the subject heading “RSA Borders/Frontiers.”

Views from the Sea:  Maritime Perspectives on Venice and the Stato da Mar

Papers are invited that address situated views of Venice and its maritime territories from the diverse perspectives of those engaged in seafaring culture.  Proprietary claims to the sea on the part of early modern states, including Venice itself with regard to the Adriatic (“il golfo di Venezia”), make clear that waters did not remain outside the territorializing of sovereignty.   That notwithstanding, the status of land and that of the sea were categorically different.  A liminal space of passage to those whose maritime experiences were ephemeral (pilgrims and other travelers), the waters were home to others whose lives played out in that fluid realm without borders. This panel will highlight competing views of Venice and its coastal empire, expressed by or attributed to those who inhabited the sea. From the Venetian admiralty to galley slaves, from licensed merchants to Ottoman and Barbary pirates, historical voices representing diverse orientations and points of reference are welcome in work from a range of disciplines.  Please send a one-page abstract and CV to Karen-edis Barzman (kbarzman@binghamton.edu) by May 25th, using the subject heading “RSA Views from the Sea.”

Graduate student activities: Yuri Chang in Toronto and Rotem Rozental in London

Nam June Paik, The More the Better, 1988.

Doctoral student Rotem Rozental will participate in the symposium Beyond Representation: Photography, Humans & Computers, held at the Centre for Media & Culture Research at London South Bank University in association with the journal Philosophy of Photography this coming May. Rotem’s talk is titled “Silence of the Lost Object.”

Doctoral student Yuri Chang presented a paper at Deception, the 12th Annual East Asian Studies Graduate Student Conference at the University of Toronto in March. Her talk, “Olympic and Nam June Paik: The Imagined Future of Korea as the Spectacle of Deception,” addressed a section of her ongoing dissertation research.

Call for Papers: Society of Architectural Historians, 2013–Modern Architecture and the Book

Assistant Professor Julia Walker will be co-chairing a panel at the annual meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians in Buffalo next year. Please see below for the call for papers. Full submission information can be found here.

Modern Architecture and the Book

Describing Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc’s Dictionary of French Architecture from the 11th to the 16th Century, Frank Lloyd Wright wrote, “That book was enough to keep, in spite of architects, one’s faith alive in architecture.” Yet what was the nature of the architectural books produced in Wright’s own time, when faiths of all kinds were put to the test and when conventional media were under assault? How did architects and theorists reconcile the traditions of architectural literature with what they perceived as a wholly new social landscape, demanding both innovative built forms and novel modes of communication? What visual experience did they believe inhered in the form of the book that made it indispensable to the development of the new architecture?

This panel will investigate the use of the book to document, describe, promote, and critique modern architecture from its inception at the end of the nineteenth century to its alleged death in the late twentieth century. Despite the apparent conflict between modern design and the conservative traditions of bookmaking, publications from Antonio Sant’Elia’s Futurist Architecture to Nicolas Pevsner’s Pioneers of the Modern Movement to the Bauhausbücher sought to capture the dynamism of the modern visual experience. Making use of incipient visual technologies—in particular, photography—and new principles of typography and graphic design, these books not only taught their readers what counted as modern architecture, but also instructed them in how to look at it. Papers may address the ways in which authors transform the book format; how such publications experiment with the visual and cognitive processes of viewing a book; or the nature of the audiences they sought to reach.

Please send proposals/abstracts to:

Julia Walker, Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, Binghamton University; walkerj@binghamton.edu; and Pepper Stetler, Assistant Professor, Department of Art, Miami University; stetlep@muohio.edu.

Proposals for papers due to session chairs by June 1, 2012.

Scenes from “Crossing the Boundaries XX: Icons”

Thanks to all who made last weekend’s conference a success! Click below to link to the gallery.

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