Calendar of Events

Calendar of Events

Fall 2009

Monday, November 16, 2009
4:30 pm, VAC-Beam Classroom
Reception to follow
Open to the public

"BeJoseph A. Booneautiful Boys, Sodomy, Hammams, and other Tropes"

Joseph A. Boone is Professor of English, Gender Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California and is currently a research fellow at the National Humanities Center in Durham, NC. He is the author of four books, including Queer Frontiers: Millennial Geographies, Genders, Go West and Generations, Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism, and Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism. Professor Boone is currently researching representations of Homosexuality in the Middle East.
 
Tuesday November 17th at 4 pm Professor Boone is conducting a seminar, but this is not open to the public.
 
Sponsored by Lectures and Concerts, Art Museum/Art History, the English Department, Gay and Lesbian Studies, and Africana Studies

Saturday, November 14, 2009
Art History Bus Trip to Cambridge, MA
Leaves College Street: 8am
Departs Harvard Square: 5pm
$10.00 Reserves your space
Pay to Elizabeth Palmer, Academic Coordinator, Room 207, Visual Arts Center
All Harvard Museums are free on Saturdays if you arrive before noon

Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Professor Nina Rowe, Fordham UniversityProfessor Nina Rowe, Fordham University
Keeping the Jews in Their Place: Images of 'Synagoga' in the High Middle Ages
 In the early thirteenth century the motif of Ecclesia and Synagoga – paired female personifications of Church and Synagogue – suddenly started to be included as hinge elements within sculpted decorative programs on cathedral façades across northern Europe. Typically Ecclesia is shown crowned and holding a battle standard; Synagoga is blindfolded and she bears a broken staff. In the simplest terms these paired figures convey the Christian notion of the triumph of Christianity over Judaism or celebrate the advent of the age of grace and the passing of the era of the law. But the early thirteenth century monumental versions of this theme tend to be linked with images of ideal Christian kingship, suggesting a political resonance for the figures as well.

Professor Nina Rowe, Fordham University Keeping the Jews in Their Place: Images of 'Synagoga' in the High Middle AgesIn this lecture, Prof. Rowe will argue that sculpted figures of Synagoga installed in urban centers served to convey an ideal of a docile Judaism that was part of the Christian system but was weakened within it. She will demonstrate this by exploring traditional (Augustinian) notions of the functions of the Jew within Christian history, describing how such ideals were challenged as Jews moved in increasing numbers to the cities of northern Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The Jews of Aschkenaz were intellectually creative, spiritually and financially strong and often mocked the beliefs and practices of their Christian hosts. She will discuss the celebrated Cloisters Cross (England or Germany, twelfth century) to analyze ways in which the figure of Synagoga was used to vilify Jews using the same terms Jews used to denounce Christians. Her lecture will conclude with a discussion of monumental cathedral sculpture depicting Ecclesia and Synagoga, exploring ways that of the Church triumphant and Judaism defeated conveyed a fantasy of Jewish docility in a correctly ordered Christian domain - an ideal at odds with local realities.
7 PM, Beam Classroom, Visual Arts Center
Free and open to the public

Friday, September 25, 2009
Robert Storr , Critic, Artist, Curator, and Dean of the Yale School of Art
 Common Hour Talk:  "Arts Self Sufficiency in a Boom/Bust Artworld"
Robert StorrRobert Robert Storr is a painter, art historian and critic, and prodigious writer about the theory and practice of art. He earned a B.A. at Swarthmore College in 1972 and an M.F.A. at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1978. He was named dean of the Yale School of Art for a five-year period beginning July 2006 and was the director of the Venice Biennial in 2007, the first American invited to assume that position. From 1990 to 2002 Storr was curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). He also organized a number of reinstallations of MoMA's permanent collection, covering such topics as abstraction and the modern grotesque. He has been described as a "vital link between the museum world and academia" and a gifted writer. His regular column, "View from the Bridge," appears in frieze magazine.
Kresge Auditorium, Visual Arts Center