Common Hour

Friday, February 17
Kresge Auditorium, Visual Arts Center

"Visual Effects in Film - Art, Craft, and (Sometimes) Bad Movies"
Dave Fogler joined Industrial Light + Magic in 1997 as a miniature model maker on Starship Troopers. During his eight years in ILM’s traditional model shop, Dave contributed to eight motion pictures including Star Wars: Episodes I and II, Galaxy Quest, Artificial Intelligence: AI, and Pearl Harbor. In 2005, Dave transitioned to digital modeling and texturing for Star Wars: Episode III and has gone on to supervise the work on all five Transformers films, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Avatar, Pacific Rim, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Currently, Fogler is the Associate Visual Effects Supervisor on Transformers: The Last Knight.

A Maine native, Fogler has a B.A. from Bowdoin College and a Masters of Fine Arts from The University of California at Berkeley.

Friday, February 24
Kresge Auditorium, Visual Arts Center

"Solving the Mystery of Grace Jones: It’s the Holy Ghost"
Professor Casselberry teaches courses on African American women’s religious lives; music and spirituality in popular culture; music and social movements; and issues in Black intellectual thought. Her interest in African American religious and cultural studies, with particular attention to gender, guides her research agenda. Her current ethnography, The Labor of Faith: Gender and Power in Black Apostolic Pentecostalism, employs feminist labor theories to examine the spiritual, material, social, and organizational work of women in a New York-based Pentecostal denomination (Duke University Press, April 2017). She is co-editor with Elizabeth Pritchard of Spirit Goes Where It Listeth: Black Women and Pentecostalism in Diaspora. This collection of essays by leading scholars examines Black women’s engagement with Pentecostalism in Mozambique, Ghana, Nigeria, Brazil, Haiti, Grenada, and the U.S. (forthcoming in Religious Cultures of African and African Diaspora People series with Duke University Press). In addition to research and publishing on organized Pentecostalism, she is working on a project examining the transnational Pentecostal roots of international music icon Grace Jones and their imprint on her performance aesthetics and identity.

Professor Casselberry’s interest in links between lettered and performed scholarship comes from her career as an academic and performer. As a vocalist and guitarist, she performs nationally and internationally with Toshi Reagon and BIGLovely, and has enjoyed a career as an international recording artist with Casselberry-DuPreé and JUCA. She has shared stages with Sweet Honey in the Rock, Odetta, Stevie Wonder, Etta James, and Elvis Costello, among others.

Friday, April 21
Studzinski Recital Hall