Na’ama Klorman Eraqi (PhD 2013) has published her most recent essay, “Acting Out for the Camera: Performing Mizrachi Masculinity and the Politicization of the Jerusalem Neighborhood of Katamon Tet,” in the March 2023 issue of the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies. The essay analyses photographs taken by Yàakov Shofar in 1978 showing teenage boys from Katamon Tet, an impoverished Mizrahi neighborhood of Jerusalem, performing for the camera. It argues that the images, first published in Shofar’s photo books Finding a Way Out (1981) and Born in Israel (1984), speak to the politicization of the Mizrahi youths as a result of social and political tensions in Katamon Tet. Reacting to Shofar as a socially-privileged outsider, the gestures of those pictured confront the hegemonic gaze of Shofar’s camera in an effort to theatricalize and thus undo mainstream stereotypes of Mizrahi masculinity.
Rotem Rozental’s book, Pre-State Photographic Archives and the Zionist Movement, will be published by Routledge on March 24, 2023, as part of the “Routledge History of Photography” series. The book, based on Rotem’s 2019 dissertation, argues that the Zionist movement made particular use of the machinery of the photographic archive, aiming to constitute the boundaries of Palestine as the territory of a Jewish state, claiming ownership over the land and announcing internationally the success of its enterprise––thus substantiating the image it sought to embed as the “reality” of the land. The Jewish National Fund archive did not stand alone but functioned in relation to a vast, complicated network of organizational systems and technologies in the Middle East and across the world. Crucially, this system operated as a national archive in future tense for a nation-state that was not yet in existence, seeking to establish its regional authority and shape a cultural repository that would define the parameters for inclusion and exclusion from the civic space it sought to construct.
Beijing Inside–Out Museum is currently showing a major new survey exhibition, “Infinite Realism: Humanism in Chinese Photography from the 1920s to the 1980s,” co-curated by Carol Yinghua Lu and Dengyan Zhou (PhD 2016). The exhibition, which continues until December, traces the emergence of alternative realist practices that challenge the formula of socialist realism, foregrounding individual photographers’ humanistic vision as observers and recorders of momentous social upheavals through the camera lens.
Dengyan Zhou teaches the history of photography at Beijing Film Academy. Her research has been published in Literature and Art Studies, Theory and Criticism of Literature and Art, the Chinese Journal of Art Studies, Contemporary Cinema, Trans–Asia Photography Review, Photographies, OSMOS and Chinese Photography.
Hye-ri Oh’s five-year project, “Korean photography as ‘Contact Zone’ and Global Network in the Modern Cultural Formation,” has been selected from a highly competitive field for funding by the National Research Foundation of Korea. Oh’s research will be funded from July 2022 to June 2027. The National Research Foundation of Korea (https://www.nrf.re.kr/eng/index) supports academic research in the humanities and social sciences, focusing particularly on national research projects in the field of strategic technologies and new industries.
Hye-ri is currently Research Professor in the Research Institute for the Visual Language of Korea at Myongji University in Seoul, Korea.
The Binghamton University Art History Department extends heartfelt congratulations to Dr. Hala Auji as she steps into the prestigious position of Hamad bin Khalifa Endowed Chair for Islamic Art at Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of the Arts (VCUarts), beginning August 16, 2022. Her position includes teaching, scholarly research and collaboration with VCUarts Qatar.
Dr. Hala Auji, 2022
Dr. Auji has been serving as Associate Professor of Art History at the Amercican University of Beirut (AUB). Earlier, she taught at the University of California, Los Angeles and Binghamton University (SUNY) as a lecturer in Islamic art and art history respectively. Her book, Printing Arab Modernity: Book Culture and the American Press in Nineteenth-Century Beirut, was published in 2016.
Auji earned her PhD in art history from Binghamton University, the State University of New York (SUNY), in 2013, working under the direction of Dr. Nancy Um. She also holds an MA in criticism and theory from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California, and a BA degree in graphic design from AUB, Lebanon.
Photo-historian, writer and curator Rotem Rozental (PhD 2019) is leaving her position as Chief Curator and Senior Director of Arts and Creative Programming at American Jewish University, where she also served as Assistant Dean of the Whizin Center for Continuing Education and the Director of The Institute for Jewish Creativity, in order to take up a new role as the Executive Director of the LA Center for Photography. Congratulations to Rotem! Her book, Pre State Photographic Archives and the Zionist Movement, is also in press with Routledge.
Designing, researching, and educating, alumnus Jesse McCormick is literally building an impressive career as an architect on a foundation that was laid at Binghamton University. He initially started his undergraduate career studying English Literature, but eventually added a second major in Art History with a concentration in Architecture and Urban Studies. While he always had an interest in architecture, this passion was further fostered by coursework taken in the Art History department.
McCormick also cites his advisor, Professor Julia Walker, with helping him achieve his goal to eventually go on and work in the field as well as continue his education at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. After receiving a Master’s degree in architecture from Columbia in 2018, McCormick has taught in various schools of architecture around New York and is currently an instructor at Syracuse University. His work and research have been recognized at the Istanbul Design Biennale, the Museum of Modern Art’s Young Architects Program, and the Oslo Architecture Triennale.
While already having accomplished so much, McCormick feels that his favorite moments after graduating from Binghamton University were not the occasions in which he received awards or when his projects are completed, but instead are the instances in which he collaboratively solves a problem with others, either in an academic or professional setting. Problems are plenty in the field of architecture, and one pressing issue he seeks to address is the growing moral dissonance that architects endure throughout their careers. He hopes that in his teaching he can give his students the tools and opportunities to think in certain ways that will empower them not to make the compromises that the field currently demands.
Many years after his undergraduate career, Binghamton always has a place in McCormick’s mind. He believes that the area could benefit from a community land trust or from following the guidance of groups such as Binghamton Tenants United. Collectives and cooperatives seeking to uphold and expand tenants’ rights could further serve Binghamton University students and more adequately meet students’ varied spatial needs in a deindustrialized city filled with single-family homes.
Binghamton Art History 