Faculty Activities: Nancy Um in “The Journal of Early Modern History”

See Associate Professor Nancy Um‘s article “Order in the ‘Abitrary’: The Distribution, Content, and Temporal Cycles of English Merchant Tribute in Eighteenth-Century Yemen” in the most recent issue of The Journal of Early Modern History: http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.1163/15700658-12342413

Drawing on the documents of the English East India Company, along with comparative material from the Dutch East India Company and sources in Arabic, this article looks closely at the distribution, content, and timing of merchant tribute in relation to the practices of trade in eighteenth-century Yemen. The goal is to uncover the patterns surrounding English commercial gift practices at a time when European merchants were flocking to the southern Arabian Peninsula to procure coffee beans. This study casts gifts as central and regularized parts of the cycle of exchange, rather than as non-transactional or incidental social accessories of the Indian Ocean trade, thereby allocating an important place for gifts within early modern cross-cultural commercial interactions.

Exhibition on Monuments Men at Archives of American Art

Two men standing by racks of paintings inside a salt mine in Altaussee, Austria, circa 1945, unidentified photographer. Andrew Carnduff Ritchie papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Those interested in the history of the Monuments Men may be interested in “Monuments Men: On the Front Line to Save Europe’s Art, 1942–1946,” currently on view at the Archives of American Art in Washington, D.C.

Faculty and Graduate Student Activities: Karen Barzman and Hyeyun Chin at RSA

The Royal Exchange, London.

Associate Professor Karen Barzman and doctoral student Hyeyun Chin will participate in the 60th annual conference of the Renaissance Society of America in New York City this week. Professor Barzman will be chairing a panel titled Negotiating Power and Transforming Urban Space in Early Modern England I. As part of this panel, Hyeyun will present her paper, “A ‘Publick Stage’ for Conflict between Crown and City: The Royal Exchange in Early Modern London.”

Next VizCult: Tanya Sheehan, Colby College, TODAY

 

Graduate Activities: Meet Josh Franco and Angelique Szymanek, winners of the 2014 Graduate Excellence Awards

Congratulations to doctoral students Josh Franco and Angelique Szymanek, both recipients of Binghamton’s Graduate Excellence Awards for 2013-2014. Angelique Szymanek received the Award for Excellence in Teaching, which honors graduate teaching assistants and instructors of record who have demonstrated exceptional service to Binghamton University’s undergraduates. Josh Franco received the Award for Excellence in Research, which honors the important contributions graduate students make to research at the University and the wide variety of approaches they take to the advancement of knowledge. For the profiles of all the award winners for 2014, follow the link.

Los Angeles Graffiti artist Man One to speak today

Image courtesy of http://www.manone.com.

World-renowned artist Man One will take part in a speaking event and forum focused on building community with art at 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 25, in Old Union Hall.

Man One is a nationally recognized artist who transformed downtown Los Angeles into a thriving cultural epicenter through his passion for empowering mankind and the power of mural art. Now he wants to help transform Binghamton and tell its story.

The City of Binghamton is currently in a period of transition, with an incredible amount of hard work and commitment to truly help it find its story: its sense of purpose and vision that will move the community into the future. Man One believes in Binghamton and will share his own inspiring story, meeting with key members of the community and hosting a number of interactive workshops around the city.

GEN10, the student group leading the charge for a stronger, brighter Binghamton, will be joined by the Department of Public Art, Binghamton Fraternity and Sorority Life, the University Art Department, the Design Your Own Park Initiative and a number of other generous partners in hosting the event.

Faculty Activities: Karen-edis Barzman at “Crossing the Boundaries”

Join us for Professor Karen-edis Barzman’s “Crossing the Boundaries” faculty keynote address, titled “Political Topographies and Counter-Practices of Place: A Case Study in Mapping.”

The talk will be held on Saturday, April 5, at 4:30pm (FA 258). For the complete conference schedule, click here.

Karen-edis Barzman is Associate Professor of Art History at Binghamton University. Trained as an early modern Italianist, she has developed a set of critical concerns informed by semiotics and continental philosophy. Discipline Representative for Art History and Architecture at the Renaissance Society of America (RSA), she also serves on the editorial board of the Society’s journal, Renaissance Quarterly.

She is currently working on two books – The Limits of Identity:  Venice, Dalmatia, and the Representation of Difference, which looks at borderlands as thresholds of difference, and Cartography and the Paper Management of the Early Modern State, a genealogy of mapping in the context of the imperial archive.

For more information, visit http://ctbconf.wordpress.com/2014/03/18/faculty-keynote-speaker-barzman/.

VizCult in the Pipe Dream

Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, the curator of African Art at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College speaks about Dak’Art, a biennial festival of contemporary African art that showcases traditional and modern facets of African artistry. The lecture was part of the Harpur College Dean’s Speaker Series in Visual Culture. By Tycho McManus/Pipe Dream Staff Photographer.

Click here to read the Pipe Dream’s coverage of the recent VizCult presentation by curator Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi.

Next VizCult: Tanya Sheehan, Colby College

Graduate Student Activities: Josh Franco

Image courtesy of zingmagazine.com.

Please follow the link to doctoral student Josh Franco’s recent interview with Richard Benari and Lauren Henkin on the subject of their “touching” photographs in zingmagazine‘s zingchats. This year, Josh also continues work on his dissertation, supported by a PAGE Fellowship and a Diversity Fellowship from Ithaca College.

Alumni Activities: Sharon Smith (PhD, 2009) at Qatar University

 

Graduate Student Activities: Jennifer Kennedy at the ACLA

Doctoral student Jennifer Kennedy will present a paper, titled “Revolution Girl Style Now: Magazines and the making of the musulmane française,” at the American Comparative Literature Assocation’s annual conference in New York this weekend. See below for her abstract and visit https://www.acla.org/annual-meeting/meeting-schedule for more information.

Between June and August 1959, El Moudjahid, the French-language organ of the FLN, published the series, “Journal d’une maquisarde,” a diaristic account of life on the frontline of the Algerian War of Independence written from the perspective of a young girl. A radicalized cognate of the new genre of writing by, for, and about young women emerging in France in magazines from L’Express to Elle, “Journal d’une maquisarde,” is entwined with collective anxieties about cultural norms, change, and women’s liberation that were foundational to both pro and antiindependence debates. Here, the malleable, transitional, category of identity “young girl” becomes a cipher for the tension between the mass and the individual that dominated the discourses of decolonization and reconstruction across the Mediterranean, and the girl’s subjective rumination on everyday life is embroiled in material and symbolic transgressions of the gender, cultural, and social boundaries that structured l’Algérie française. This paper considers the relationship between the diaristic form and content of “Journal d’une maquisarde,” to show how, as constructions of young womanhood became an ideological battleground upon which pro and anti-colonial debates over identity, cultural authenticity, and moral integrity were waged, the gendered categories of political representation in France and Algeria were also changed.