Assistant Professor Julia Walker will be presenting a paper this Friday, April 26, as part of the panel Agora to RiverFire: Landscapes Histories of the Public Realm at the annual meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians in Providence, RI.
Parades, Conventions, Rallies: Public Space and the Politics of Suffrage in New York State
In the United States, the turn of the twentieth century witnessed significant changes in the status of women in public space. Specific concern in this paper is the way in which women active in the suffrage movement in New York State made canny use of public space, using their new visibility in innovative ways specific both to their cause and to their time. By appearing en masse outside the private sphere, and by harnessing the power of new visual technologies like photography and film, these women inverted traditional regimes of surveillance and spatial control. Suffragists thus enacted what Jacques Rancière defines as “politics”—when “the natural order of domination is interrupted by the institution of a part of those who have no part.” For Rancière, politics is opposed to governance or rule, which he describes as “policing.” Instead, politics creates a state of indeterminacy that productively destabilizes authority. With its public squares, its streets and street walls, and its emphasis on community meeting places, I argue that the American city itself enabled this indeterminacy.
Drawing on work by scholars of gender and urbanism, this paper examines this new politics of public space. It also makes use of primary sources that have been discovered in conjunction with celebrations of the New York State suffrage centennial. Together with local and state organizations, architectural historians have been working to reveal this important history. Recent events include the city of Binghamton’s reenactment of its own significant suffrage parade and the landmarking of new sites on the “Suffrage Trail,” including the Centenary Methodist Church in Binghamton, where the state held its annual suffrage convention in 1913, and the Old Village Hall in the township of Lisle, where Florence Chauncey cast the first vote by a woman in New York State on January 5, 1918.
Photograph by Jonathan Cohen (cropped)
Professor Pam Smart has been selected for the 2018-2019 Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Faculty Service. This honor recognizes outstanding service to the Binghamton University community.
Associate Professor Andrew Walkling’s new book English Dramatick Opera, 1661–1706 has been published by Routledge. Walkling’s book is the first comprehensive examination of the distinctively English form known as “dramatick opera”, which appeared on the London stage in the mid-1670s and lasted until its displacement by Italian through-composed opera in the first decade of the eighteenth century. He argues that, while the musical elements of this form are crucial to its definition and history, the origins of the genre lie principally in a tradition of spectacular stagecraft that first manifested itself in England in the mid-1660s as part of a hitherto unidentified dramatic sub-genre to which Walkling gives the name “spectacle-tragedy”. Armed with this new understanding, the book explores a number of historical and interpretive issues, including the physical and rhetorical configurations of performative spectacle, the administrative maneuverings of the two “patent” theatre companies, the construction and deployment of the technologically advanced Dorset Garden Theatre in 1670–71, the critical response to generic, technical, and ideological developments in Restoration drama, and the shifting balance between machine spectacle and song-and-dance entertainment throughout the later decades of the seventeenth century, including in the dramatick operas of Henry Purcell. For more information, go to https://www.routledge.com/9781138696549.
The Department of Art History is pleased to announce that on Friday May 3, 2019, at 10:30 a.m.
in the Art History Commons, FA 218, Rotem Rozental (BA, Tel Aviv University, 2007; MA, Tel Aviv University, 2012) and candidate for the doctoral degree in art history will defend her dissertation PHOTOGRAPHIC ARCHIVES, NATIONALISM AND THE FOUNDATION OF THE JEWISH STATE, 1903–1948 before a committee composed of Professors John Tagg (Chair), Kevin Hatch, Tom McDonough, Pamela Smart and Randy Friedman (Department of Judaic Studies and the Center for Israel Studies), Outside Examiner.
Dissertation defenses in the Department of Art History are important moments in our academic life and are by definition public events, open to all. We look forward to a lively, instructive and informative discussion and invite you all to attend.
On Friday, April 5, PhD candidate Jason Joonsoo Park presented his paper “Preserving the Environment: Alan Sonfist’s Time Landscape” at the IFA/Frick Symposium on the History of Art. Every year, the department receives an invitation to send a speaker to the annual symposium, held jointly at the Frick Collection and the Institute of Fine Arts in New York. Fourteen graduate programs in Art History in the region send a nominee to the event. The symposium offers each participant the opportunity to represent his or her graduate program at a prestigious event, gain valuable experience in constructing and delivering a major paper, and meet students, faculty, and museum professionals from leading regional institutions.
Binghamton Art History 