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Post content: In June 2018, Nancy Um will join 15 other participants in the CUNY Digital Humanities Research Institute, a ten-day residential workshop supported by the NEH and focused on expanding communities of digital humanities practice. More information on the CUNY DHRI can be found here: http://dhinstitutes.org/about.html
The ex-voto is an offering to a deity in fulfillment of a vow, a promise made in a moment of despair. Delivered from illness or imprisonment, the votary visits a shrine and publishes her commitment with a gift. Ex-votos—sometimes valuable gifts, sometimes mere evidence—are often misrecognized by scholarship, which confuses them with cult images, miracle-working images, and image-borne pleas for spiritual salvation. In fifteenth-century Italy, votaries began to offer painted panels narrating their own stories. This new class of ex-voto, resembling works of sacred art, only invites more confusion. The talk attempts to distinguish the ex-voto from other devotional images, including artworks, on the basis of the concepts of reference and authorship.
The ex-voto is an offering to a deity in fulfillment of a vow, a promise made in a moment of despair. Delivered from illness or imprisonment, the votary visits a shrine and publishes her commitment with a gift. Ex-votos—sometimes valuable gifts, sometimes mere evidence—are often misrecognized by scholarship, which confuses them with cult images, miracle-working images, and image-borne pleas for spiritual salvation. In fifteenth-century Italy, votaries began to offer painted panels narrating their own stories. This new class of ex-voto, resembling works of sacred art, only invites more confusion. The talk attempts to distinguish the ex-voto from other devotional images, including artworks, on the basis of the concepts of reference and authorship.
For over three decades, the Art History Department has been committed to the cross-cultural, global study of art, visual culture, architecture and the built environment. This has never simply been a decision regarding disciplinary “methodology” but rather, we believe, a profoundly principled commitment to questioning the Eurocentric, patriarchal and class-based biases ingrained in the field and our society at large and to excluding all forms of discrimination and prejudice, regardless of the prevailing political climate.
As a department that welcomes a very international student body and strives to model an inclusive transnational community open to all regardless of nationality, race, gender identification or sexual preference, we reaffirm our commitment to a more egalitarian engagement with world cultures and stand in solidarity with all those struggling to realize that vision in academia and beyond.
