Resident Fellows Speaker Series
The Hall Center's Resident Fellows give lunchtime talks about their works-in-progress. These events are public and open to all in the Hall Center's Conference Hall. Lunch is provided, and RSVP is required.
Aristide the Despised Despot or Vilified Victim? Understanding the Governance of Haiti’s First Democratically Elected President
Brigid Enchill (Sias Graduate Fellow, French, Francophone and Italian Studies)
TUE SEP 24, 12:00 PM
Hall Center Conference Hall
RSVP online by Sept. 17
The Haitian nation over the past decades has been fraught with several episodes of political violence, foreign interference and various forms of instability. This situation has marred the institutional development of Haiti. Haiti does indeed bear some responsibility for the issues of violence and uprisings on its streets, mixed with the problem of misgovernance and a history of dictatorship. However, the role of the West under the pretext of foreign policy and foreign aid cannot be ignored. This talk will therefore compare and contrast the works of Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck and Canadian filmmaker Elaine Brière, in their representations of misgovernance and foreign interference in Haiti during the tenure of former Haitian President Jean Bétrand-Aristide, and how a foreign sanctioned and orchestrated coup d’état on a democratically elected president continues to have devastating consequence on the nation. This project also analyzes the various forms of literary devices the filmmakers use to drive home their messages and engage audiences while conveying their frustrations with Haiti’s political, social, and economic systems.
Hyperborea, New Age Spirituality, and the Affirmation of White Masculinity
Christopher E. Forth (Dean’s Professor, History)
TUE OCT 22, 12:00 PM
Hall Center Conference Hall
RSVP online by Oct. 15
This presentation forms part of a larger project exploring the ways in which the Euro-American far right sometimes promotes a regenerated white masculinity by invoking the ancient myth of “Hyperborea,” the primordial homeland of white Europeans, once supposedly located at the North Pole. Its specific focus is on Alpha Affirmations, a YouTube channel that uses “I affirmations” to help white men get in touch with their primordial origins, an aim that is concealed through its use of “New Age” spiritual and wellness imagery and techniques. By attending to this case, this presentation explores the surprising yet often unacknowledged overlap between New Age spiritualities and what is known as “esoteric fascism.”
Clearing the Coal Smoke: Aerial Ecologies and Edgar Degas’ Ironers
Marni Kessler (Professor, Art History)
TUE NOV 12, 12:00 PM
Hall Center Conference Hall
RSVP online by Nov. 5
In his affecting representations of ironers, Edgar Degas focuses on the effortfulness of the women’s labors, capturing the exertion required for smoothing wrinkles and producing rounded cuffs and sharp collars. He also makes plain the exhaustion endemic to the profession, depicting ironers mid yawn and enervated. While scholars have commented on these important aspects of Degas’s laundresses, Kessler will consider a facet of them that has been ignored. His densely layered pigments reveal not just the visible and tangible traces of ironers’ circumstances but also the seemingly immaterial: the sordid air that they breathed. Degas stitches this into the very matrix of his compositions, articulating the ineffable, yet viscerally dense atmospheres in blanchisseries, which were permeated with coal smoke from the stoves that heated the irons and with other toxic chemicals. By foregrounding in our analysis these aerial environments, by acknowledging—as I think Degas acknowledged—the noxious air that ironers breathed as they pressed, and strained, and sweated, and sighed, we can enlarge our understanding of these images and begin to see them, and the fullness of their humanity, anew.
An Ocean of Punch: American Identity and Material Culture in an 18th-century Global Context
Emily Casey (Hall Assistant Professor, Art History)
WED DEC 4, 12:00 PM
Hall Center Conference Hall
RSVP online by Nov. 26
In 1784, the Empress of China set sail on a journey of national significance from New York Harbor. For early national Americans, participation in the transnational trade networks between Europe and Asia was a vital counterpoint to their lack of power on the global stage. Souvenirs from the first U.S. voyage to China, including a porcelain punch bowl depicting the international trading harbor known as Canton, dramatize the scene of encounter between the United States and world powers. As a material object—crafted by Chinese artisans from Chinese materials, transported across the ocean in an American vessel, and subsequently located in a merchant or sea captain’s home to be admired and used—it challenges a simple assertion of U.S. independence by entangling Chinese, European, and American interests.