News

Susan Wegner, associate professor of art history, and Nathaniel Wheelwright, professor of natural sciences, lead an interdisciplinary discussion of select works in The Object Show: Discoveries in Bowdoin Collections. Third in a series of three gallery talks during the Spring 2014 semester.

RSVPs are kindly requested, but not required. Contact Christine Piontek: cpiontek@bowdoin.edu.

During Brazil's First Republic (1889-1930) and into the early Vargas era (1930-1937) in the capital city of Rio de Janeiro, police were involved in poor women's reproductive lives. Scholars studying women's reproductive practices in Brazil during that time period have conducted narrow examinations of legal documents pertaining to abortion, infanticide, and child abandonment. On the contrary, Cassia Roth ('08) will demonstrate that police investigations conflated fertility control practices such as abortion and infanticide with non-criminal occurrences like miscarriage and stillbirth. She will delineate the expansion of a de facto criminality surrounding practices related to and often confused with fertility control under the 1890 Penal Code (1890-1940) and contend that the police investigated the unfortunate but common occurrences of stillbirths as possible infanticides. Drawing on police investigations of infanticide, stillbirths, and birth-related infant deaths in Rio de Janeiro, Cassia argues that the state's incursion into poor women's reproductive lives transformed events like a difficult delivery or a stillbirth into potential crimes.

Join us for this lecture
Thursday, April 17, 4:15 pm
Edward Pols House Seminar Room

Cassia Roth '08 is a Ph.D. Candidate in History, UCLA

Free and open to the public. Sponsored by the Latin American Studies Program, Gender and Women's Studies Program, and the History Department.

Paul M. Forlano, Brooklyn College, Department of Biology

Using fish as model systems, Forlano's lab employs a combination of evolutionary/systems neuroscience with a molecular and cellular approach in order to identify the mechanisms underlying steroid-induced neural plasticity and sex differences in brain and behavior. These studies focus on vocal, auditory and neuroendocrine circuits that are conserved across vertebrates.

Susan A. Kaplan, Director of the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum and Arctic Studies Center, will give an illustrated talk titled, "What is in Your Cabinet of Curiosities?" on April 17, 2014 at 4 p.m. in Kresge Auditorium, Visual Arts Center.

The talk is in conjunction with the opening of a new exhibit at the Arctic Museum titled, Cape Dorset and Beyond: Inuit Art from the Marcia and Robert Ellis Collection.

A reception and chance to view the new exhibit will take place in Hubbard Hall following the talk.

For information call 725-3062. Free.

The Spear and Shield of Knowledge: Scientific Transference and Cultural Obstruction Between China and the West

Keynote speaker Don J. Wyatt is John M. McCardell, Jr. Distinguished Professor at Middlebury College. His most recent book is The Blacks of Premodern China (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). Among his forthcoming publications is the "China" chapter essay in the volume The Image of the Black in African and Asian Art in the renowned series The Image of the Black in Western Art, edited by David Bindman, Suzanne Blier, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., which is scheduled to appear in 2015.

Open to the public free of charge. For more information and the completeschedule of events, go to: 2014 Kemp Symposium or call the Department of History at 207-725-3291.

Sponsored by the Robert J. Kemp Lectureship Fund, Departments of History,Asian Studies, Religion, Chemistry, and Earth and Oceanographic Science.

Elizabeth Strout will read from her recent novel, The Burgess Boys (2013).

Strout is the author of numerous short stories and three novels, including Amy and Isabelle, which was shortlisted for the 2000 Orange Prize and nominated for the 2000 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction, and Olive Kitteridge, a collection of connected short stories about a woman and her family and friends on the coast of Maine, for which Strout won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009.

Strout also has been a professor at Colgate University and on the faculty of the MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte.

Open to the public free of charge. Call the English Department at 725-3552 for more information.

Sponsored by the Blythe Bickel Edwards Fund and the English Department.

What can computers reveal about images that even the best-trained connoisseurs, art historians and artist cannot? How much more powerful and revealing will these methods become? In short, how is the "hard humanities" field of computer image and analysis of art changing our understanding of paintings and drawings?

Professor Carmen Moreno Nuño, University of Kentucky, focuses on the memory of the Spanish Civil War, which has become a central topic in Spain in the twenty-first century, generating a very heated public debate. Taking as a point of departure a new concept of memory that conceives of it as a contested site, she develops an analysis of the press (440 articles) released around the failed opening of poet Federico García Lorca's grave in 2009-10. García Lorca's death, which epitomizes the horror of Fascism, is one of the most intriguing mysteries of the twentieth century. The failed opening of his alleged grave illustrates how memory has become a site of contestation, as the meaning of the missing corpse and its emblematic status is displaced by a new discourse that turns the opening of the grave into a spectacle, constraining and encapsulating the elusive myriad of meanings that surround Lorca's dead body into a simplified (and politically non-threatening) discursive construction.

Sponsored by the Department of Romance Languages.

7 PM - April 24, 2014
Smith Auditorium, Sills Hall

Navarana is an Inughuit elder from the northern district of Greenland.  In the 1860s, her ancestor led a legendary Inuit migration to Greenland.  More than 150 years later,  Navarana connects with distant cousins and explores these two isolated groups.

Free.

Monday, April 28
7:00 - 9:30 p.m.
Sills Hall, Smith Auditorium

Cui Zien is China's first independent queer filmmaker and an outspoken queer activist. Queering Chinese 'Comrades' presents a comprehensive historical account of queer culture in China for the last 30 years. The documentary uses exclusive interviews and original film footage to examine how shifting attitudes in law, media, and education have transformed queer culture from an unspeakable taboo to an accepted social identity.

Sponsored by Lectures and Concerts, Asian Studies Program, Film Studies, and Gay & Lesbian Studies.

Free and open to the public.

A number of distinguished neuroscientists have recently been declaring that their science shows that free will is an illusion. It turns out that what they mean by this is something quite trivial, having almost nothing to do with whether or not we can be morally responsible choosers of our actions--but some of them think otherwise. Exposing the confusions in their thinking is a good job for philosophers.

Please join us for this free lecture
Tuesday, April 29th
4:00 pm
Druckenmiller Hall 016

Sponsored by the Department of Philosophy with support from the Departments of Psychology and Neuroscience.

Richard Kurin, Under Secretary for History, Art, and Culture, at the Smithsonian Institution will discuss objects in the Smithsonian's collections, such as the Star-Spangled Banner, Lincoln's hat, Bell's telephone, Armstrong's trumpet, Warhol's Marilyn Monroe, and even the National Zoo's pandas to weave an engaging history of our nation.

RSVPs are kindly requested, but not required. Contact Christine Piontek: cpiontek@bowdoin.edu.


Illustration: Dr. Richard Kurin

Timothy O'Leary, Post Doctoral Researcher, Volen Center for Complex Systems, Brandeis University

Jonathan Petropoulos is an international authority on Nazi art theft. He is the John V. Croul Professor of European History at Claremont McKenna College and is author of several books, including The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany and the forthcoming Artists Under Hitler: The Power of Seduction and the Fate of Modernism in Nazi Germany.

Petropoulos served as research director for art and cultural property on the Presidential Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States, where he helped draft the report "Restitution and Plunder: The U.S. and Holocaust Victims' Assets" (2001).

He has helped organize art exhibitions, such as Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1991, and has served as a consultant for a number of Holocaust victims and heirs trying to recover lost artworks. He has appeared in more than a dozen documentary films, including the award-winning The Rape of Europa (2007).

Dana Renga, Assistant Professor of Italian at The Ohio State University, will discuss the ways in which the conventions of melodrama shape the mafia movie, focusing in particular on the Italian box-office hit Romanzo criminale (Michele Placido, 2005). Melodramatic narratives, argues Prof. Renga, create sympathy for the mafia film's brooding anti-hero - a sympathy that is increased when these characters are played by the likes of Italian film idols Kim Rossi Stuart and Riccardo Scamarcio. In "Mafia, Masculinity, Melodrama" Prof. Renga examines how such films cause their viewers to forgive the transgressions of their criminal protagonists, and even mourn their deaths.

Prof. Renga works on modern and contemporary Italian cinema and culture, including representations of the Mafia, gender, the holocaust, fascism and terrorism. She has published articles and book chapters on Italian cinema, popular culture, poetry, and literature. She is the author of Unfinished Business: Screening the Italian Mafia in the New Millennium (University of Toronto Press, 2013), the editor of Mafia Movies: A Reader (University of Toronto Press, 2011) and co-edits The Italianist: Film Issue. She is currently at work on a book entitled Italian Women's Cinema and the Wounded Filmic Body (1915-2015).

This lecture is sponsored by the Bowdoin College Department of Romance Languages, Film Studies Program, Department of English, and Gender and Women's Studies Program, with additional funding from the Lectures and Concerts Committee and Blythe Bickel Edwards Fund.

Museum Pieces, a Bowdoin tradition for more than twenty years, will conclude the 2013-2014 Common Hour series. The annual event celebrates the arrival of spring through dance and music provided by the Department of Theater and Dance, class projects, and independent student work.

For more information and to view the full Spring 2014 Common Hour schedule, please visit: Events and Summer Programs: Common Hour