The Rutgers Department of Art History is hosting its 9th Annual Graduate Student Symposium:
Visualizing Difference: The Art and Architecture of Alterity
Friday, April 19, 2019, 9:00 AM – 4:00 PM
Alexander Library, Pane Room
169 College Ave, New Brunswick, NJ 08901
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Adrienne Childs
“Otherness is a fundamental category of human thought. Thus it is that no group ever sets itself up as the One without at once setting up the Other over against itself.” – Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949
What is alterity and how do we represent it? How do we, as human beings, craft personal and communal identities, and achieve a sense of social belonging? To what extent do we rely on inherited biases about class, gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity when fashioning our self-image? As the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir observed in her well-known feminist manifesto, the concept of Otherness occupies a central place in human consciousness. Social identities are inherently relational, and people often define themselves in terms of what they are not. This comparative impulse manifests itself in complex ways in the history of art and architecture. Given the global upswing in nationalist sentiment and nativist movements built on hardened definitions of Otherness, we feel that such dialogue is more important than ever.
The Rutgers University Art History Graduate Student Organization seeks proposals that address any of the above-mentioned questions. Abstracts are welcome from all historical periods, geographical areas, and cultural, theoretical, and methodological perspectives. Submissions within the fields of art and architectural history, archaeology, history, visual and material culture, media studies, and gender studies will be considered for 20-minute presentations in English. After the symposium, one paper will be selected for possible publication in Volume 36 of the Rutgers Art Review, a peer-reviewed, open-access journal produced by graduate students in the Department of Art History.
Schedule:
8:30-9:00 | Registration and Breakfast
9:00-10:20 | Session One: Otherness in Service of Nationalism
Karin E. Christiaens, PhD Candidate, Columbia University, “From Barbarians to Provinces: Representing the ‘Other’ in the Roman Empire”
Cynthia Kok, PhD Student, Yale University, “The Familiar Exotic and the European Other in George Psalmanazar’s An historical and geographical description of Formosa”
Maria Mendoza Camba, MA Candidate, University of Toronto, “Aping the Filipino Image: Probing the Conception of the Filipino Global Identity through Early American Print Culture”
10:20-10:40 | Coffee Break
10:40-12:00 | Session Two: Otherness on Display
Laura Tibi, MA Student, University of Toronto, “Revisiting La Rue du Caire: Orientalism at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair”
Joseph Henry, PhD Candidate, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, “The Circus Comes to Dresden”
Monica Kinsey, MA Student, Virginia Commonwealth University, “Reclaiming Presence: Sally Hemings in Contemporary Art Installations”
12:00-1:00 | Lunch
1:00-2:20 | Session Three: Domestic Otherness
Carmen Rosenberg-Miller, PhD Candidate, Princeton University, “Representing Difference: Painting and Performance in the Art of Raffaëlli and His Circle”
Ryuichi Nakayama, PhD Student, University of New Mexico, “Alfonso Roybal’s Counter-Ethnographic Action: Appropriating Colonial Representations of Pueblo Pottery-Making”
Dana Ostrander, PhD Candidate, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign “Native / American: Locating Indigeneity in Marsden Hartley’s Madawaska – Acadian Light-Heavy”
2:20-2:40 | Coffee Break
2:40-4:00 | Keynote Address
Dr. Adrienne Childs, Independent scholar, art historian, and curator
“Ornamental Blackness: Seeing the Black Body in European Luxury Arts”