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In her performance piece, On t'appelle Venus, choreographer and dancer Chantal Loial pays tribute to Sawtche (1789-1819), known as the Black Venus, who had been brought to France in the nineteenth century by a "tamer" who prostituted her and exploited her as a circus freak. Swatche's body, deemed abnormal, fascinated the European imagination. After she died, scientists dissected her body and displayed it at the Musee de l'Homme in Paris, all in the name of scientific and anthropological progress. Through this artistic expression of her body, Chantal Loial invites us to think of feminine body and the norms we use to draw laws about both the body and beauty.

Loial created her dance company in 1994. She began dancing her native Afro-Guadeloupean traditional dances at age seven and went on to become a professional choreographer and dancer, earning her diploma in contemporary dance at the National Dance Centre of Pantin, France in 2008. She reinterprets traditional Caribbean and African dances that she mixes with European ballet and other forms of dance. In 2014, Loïal received the highest French Order, the National Order of the Legion of Honor for her work in the Arts (Knight of the Legion of Honor).

Open to the public free of charge.

For more information, contact Hanétha Vété-Congolo at mvete@bowdoin.edu.

Sponsored by the Andrew Mellon Foundation (Mellon Humanities Initiative).

Thucydides was an Athenian historian, philosopher, author, and general. He has been dubbed the father of "scientific history" because of his strict standards of evidence-gathering and analysis of cause and effect without reference to intervention by the gods. He has also been called the father of the school of political realism, which views the relations between nations as based on might rather than right. He showed an interest in developing an understanding of human nature to explain behaviour in such crises as plague, massacres, and civil war.

Ryan Balot, professor of political science and classics at the University of Toronto, will examine the political philosophies of Thucydides through this presentation. Balot is author of Greed and Injustice in Classical Athens (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) and Courage in the Democratic Polis: Ideology and Critique in Classical Athens (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), among other books. He specializes in early modern and classical political thought, and he received his doctorate in Classics at Princeton University.

Before moving to Political Science at Toronto, Balot taught for nearly a decade in the Classics departments at Union College and Washington University in St. Louis, as both a Greek historian and a classical philologist. His research has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Teagle Foundation of New York. His essays and reviews have appeared in such venues as Political Theory, Ancient Philosophy, Social Research, and The Journal of Hellenic Studies. His current projects include work on Machiavelli’s republicanism, Aristotle and the mixed regime, and Plato’s Laws.

Professor Balot’s talk is co-sponsored by Bowdoin’s departments of Classics and Government and Legal Studies with support from the John C. Donovan Lecture Fund. The fund was established at Bowdoin College in 1990 by family members, professional colleagues and friends of John C. Donovan, who served as Bowdoin’s DeAlva Stanwood Alexander Professor of Government from 1965 until his death in 1984. Established through the leadership of Shepard Lee, Bowdoin Class of 1947, this fund is used to support lectures in the field of political science.

Free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.

Narratives of polar voyages enjoyed wide circulation in Anglo-American cultural and political spheres during the long nineteenth century. Yet the familiar travel accounts of adventurous voyage and their fictional counterparts were not the only forms of literary production generated by Arctic and Antarctic exploration. Many expeditions brought a surprising piece of equipment aboard ship: a printing press. With such presses, polar-voyaging sailors wrote and printed newspapers, broadsides, plays, and other reading matter beyond the Arctic and Antarctic Circles; these publications were produced almost exclusively for a reading audience comprised of the expedition’s crew members. 

In this presentation, Hester Blum, associate professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, will examine the first printed polar newspapers. What does this drive toward what she calls “extreme printing” tell us about the state of print culture and coterie publication in the nineteenth century Anglo-American world? Her talk will be attentive to the rhetorical distance between mass-published voyage accounts, and the coterie publications produced and circulated aboard ship. 'Polar Imprints' is attuned to the tension between the global ambitions of polar voyages, and the remarkably circumscribed conditions of their practice.

Corruption in political life, falsification of historical facts, personal loss, and thirst for power are all dealt with remarkable lucidity and conviction in Algerian filmmaker Lyes Salem's The Man From Oran (L'Oranais), a haunting political drama laced with the agony and angst of men and women who lived through the Algerian Revolution. 

Djaffar, the main character and “man from Oran,” has no interest in the liberation movement until he finds himself involved with his friend Hamid in the murder of a French farmer. By the time they manage to run away, Djaffar's beloved wife has been raped by the farmer’s son as a vendetta. She will give birth to a son of her own and die in despair. 

All of this is kept in secret from Djaffar until after the war when he returns home a hero. He accepts the boy as his own, but asks everybody to act as if the rape never occurred and Hamid--now a minister in the new government--helps him rewrite his story. But year after year they grow apart and their deliberate falsification of history has terrible consequences for them, their friends and families, and for the country. The movie enumerates through Djaffar's life how tragic separations, breakdown of families, small sacrifices and strong selfish desires change the tone and tenor of a society.

While not discounting geo-strategic and ideological confrontation between the Ottoman and Russian Empires, Andrew Robarts "Merchants, Migrants and Microbes: Ottoman-Russian Relations in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries" will show that in response to outbreaks of epidemic diseases and corresponding spikes in population movements, Ottoman and Russian officials -- at the imperial, provincial, and local levels -- communicated about, cooperated on, and coordinated efforts to control migration and check the spread of epidemic diseases (plague and cholera) across their mutual Black Sea and Balkan borderland. 

In his presentation, Robarts will re-conceptualize the nature of Ottoman-Russian relations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by exploring the complexity and depth of trans-imperial engagement in the Black Sea region. As such, he provides the “backstory” for the re-emergence of a Russian-Turkish condominium over political and economic affairs in the Black Sea region in the post-Cold War period.

Andrew Robarts is visiting assistant professor in Middle Eastern history at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). He has previously taught Middle Eastern and Ottoman history at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) and Central Connecticut State University (CCSU). His research specialization is the comparative history of the Ottoman and Russian Empires with a particular focus on disease, public health, quarantines, and anti-disease legislation. He is currently developing a project on environment, space, and human mobility in the early-modern Ottoman Empire.

This event is free and open to the public.

In her presentation, Ido Misato explores the meaning of spaces defined by gilded folding screens. A gilded folding screen is a screen for which gold is used as the background, and on which in many cases flowers and/or birds with seasonal landscape are depicted. It was regarded as an important gift and export from Japan to China and Korea; although the form of the folding screen itself originated in China, the gold background was unique to Japan.

Unlike pictures on room partitions, which are architecturally fixed, folding screens are generally portable, which enabled them to create a temporary space as the occasion demanded. Folding screens functioned as borders between interior and exterior spaces and in ritual spaces. Above all, the glittering and gorgeous surface of the gilded screens was suitable for and, indeed, could create extraordinary spaces for religious rituals. The space enclosed by the gold screens could be transformed into an ideal space, if just for a passing moment.

Sponsored by: The Annie Talbot Cole Fund, the Asian Studies Program, and the Art History Department

Misato is the project assistant professor at the Institute of Advanced Study of Asia at the University of Tokyo. She is currently a visiting fellow in the department of East Asian studies at Princeton University.

A leading Swiss industrialist on a business trip to Tunisia is invited to spend the week with the daughter of a local gangster. He accompanies her to the wedding of two London city traders at a desert luxury resort and, with the wedding party in full swing and the bride riding up the aisle on a camel, the global financial system stands on the brink of collapse. The British pound has depreciated tenfold, and their world begins to crumble around them. 

Swiss-German author Jonas Lüscher, a major emerging voice in European fiction, reads and discusses the English translation of his award-winning novella Barbarian Spring, a beautifully written account of the financial crisis in its global dimensions, and a powerful alternative to the dominating discourses of economics and politics. 

Born in Switzerland, Lüscher lives in Munich. After training as a primary school teacher in Bern and a few years in the German film industry, he studied at the School of Philosophy in Munich. He is currently a PhD student at the Department of Philosophy at the ETH Zurich.

David Bruce was a recipient of the Thomas J. Watson fellowship during the 2012 through 2013 academic year. The exhibition Cities at Sea is the visual journal of drawings, paintings, and sketches that document his fellowship experience, during which he traveled to the Netherlands, Argentina, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Singapore to investigate what densely populated coastal cities are doing to adapt to the water-related threats of climate change. 

Cities at Sea will run from Monday, March 2 through Sunday, March 29, 2015 in the Edwards Center Main Gallery. There will be a reception and artist talk following opening day in the Edwards Digital Media Lab at 7:00pm on Tuesday, March 3. 

This event is sponsored by the Departments of Visual Art and Environmental Studies and is free and open to the public.

What is it, exactly, that actors do with text in performance? Can their work translate to all kinds of text, even text never meant to be performed? Assistant Professor of Theater Abigail Killeen says yes, and with her talk "Words Made Flesh: How the Art of the Theater Serves the Liberal Arts by Embodying Thought" she exhibits how the actor's process embodies thought in a way that can serve all kinds of fields.

Killeen holds a BFA in Acting from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and an MFA in Acting from Brandeis University’s Professional Actor Training Program. She trained with Master Teachers in the Stella Adler Technique, Suzuki, and Extended Voice with the Roy Hart Theatre in France. Additionally she has studied Eastern European physical theatre with the Double Edge Theater, Gordana Maric from the University of Belgrade and the award-winning Frantic Theatre Company in London. 

She is also an award-winning theater teacher (Outstanding Teaching Award, Brandeis University and a Karofsky Encore Lecture Recipient at Bowdoin College) and currently serves as an Assistant Professor of Theater in the Department of Theater and Dance. She teaches acting, voice and Shakespeare.

A Community Lecture Series performance. Arrive at noon with a bag lunch. Refreshments provided.

Artist in Residence Nancy Blum will present her work during a reception hosted by the Bowdoin College Department of Visual Art. 

Nancy Blum received her MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art and has since been creating and exhibiting extensively in the worlds of printmaking, public art, and drawing.  Her work, which explores the pattern and architecture of nature, has been recognized through such fellowships as the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Peter S. Reed Foundation, and Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation. She has been an artist in residence and guest lecturer at numerous institutions; her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at galleries and institutions across the US, and in collections as far as Brussels and South Korea.

This event is free and open to the public. 

Marine diatoms exhibit astounding levels of diversity; the extent and distribution of this diversity over space and time plays an important role in determining their contribution to ocean productivity and potential to adapt to environmental change. 

Using molecular tools, Kerry Whittaker studies the extent and distribution of diatom diversity across the globe. Diatoms are the most diverse group of algae, with an estimated 100,000 species thought to exist. Yet, the factors of the marine environment driving and supporting this high level of diversity are little understood. Exploring the ways in which diatom populations are connected across large spatial scales, and over time, provides important insight into the interactions between diatoms, their evolution, and the marine environment. 

Kerry Whittaker currently teaches marine science at Coastal Studies for Girls in Freeport, Maine, and is an adjunct professor at Bowdoin this semester where she teaches Evolution. Kerry recently moved to Maine after spending a year as a Knauss Fellow in Washington D.C. working with NOAA on the ESA listing of marine species and the conservation policy behind marine populations. In 2014, she received her PhD in Oceanography from the Graduate School of Oceanography, URI, and is interested in environmental selection, phytoplankton evolution, geneflow in the ocean, and the adaptive potential of marine organisms.

Join us for a night of Music at the Museum, where George Lopez, Beckwith Artist-in-Residence, presents an evening of "Futurist" music and close encounters with the "alien" in the history of musical evolution. 

Presented in conjunction with Past Futures: Science Fiction, Space Travel, and Postwar Art of the Americas, a groundbreaking exhibition that explores the impact of the 'Space Race,' science fiction, and the explosive growth of Cold War-era technological innovation on avant-garde artists of the Americas. 

PLEASE NOTE: SEATING FOR THIS PERFORMANCE IS AT CAPACITY. Limited standing room will be available on a first-come, first-served basis the night of the concert.

Dr. Kimberly Juanita Brown considers the fraught terrain of word and image in the twentieth-century construction of black identity. Marking painful historical moments that both frame and extend the parameters of racialized existence, Brown seeks to reconcile the import and utility of African American art practices heavily dependent on the visual. Using works from Audre Lorde, Michael S. Harper, and Lucille Clifton alongside photographs by Roy DeCarava and Carrie Mae Weems, she will explore the layered contingency of imagery within the arena of black subjectivity.

Brown is currently lecturer on Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. Her research and teaching gather at the intersection of critical race theory and visual culture studies. Her book (forthcoming from Duke University Press), The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the Contemporary examines contemporary representations of slavery that emphasize the repetition of black women’s corporeal practices in the aftermath of the event of slavery.  A second project, Their Dead Among Us: Photography, Melancholy, and The Politics of the Visual, will explore the photographic dispossession of the body of the other and patterns of exclusion engendered by these ocular practices. 

Sponsored by the Blythe Bickel Edwards Fund, Departments of Art History and Africana Studies, and Bowdoin College Museum of Art

Filmmaker David Conover will screen his recently-produced eight-minute film created for the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Museum in Oświęcim, Poland.

The Auschwitz Gateway Film is a compelling and heartbreaking introduction to the horrors of the Holocaust at the largest concentration camp of the Nazi era, and will be shown to museum visitors before they walk through the infamous Arbeit Macht Frie ("work makes you free") gateway to enter the camp.

The screening will be followed by a conversation with Conover and Professor of English and Cinema Studies, Aviva Briefel.

Free and open to the public. No tickets required.

Despite the importance of understanding the mechanisms and consequences of mutation, few parameters related to the rate, spectrum, and effects of spontaneous mutation have been estimated. In this talk, Sarah Schaack discusses the dynamics of mutation at small and large scales, within and between lineages, over short and long time periods of time (e.g., empirically-derived estimates of base substitution rates to reports of frequent horizontal transfer among eukaryotes).   

She presents a few short vignettes to highlight the utility of using a variety of study systems and approaches to tackling questions related to understanding the accrual, maintenance, and loss of genotypic and phenotypic mutational variance genome-wide. She also highlights her recent work on the dynamics of mobile DNA (transposable elements and endogenous viruses) which constitute a very significant portion, and in many cases the majority, of the genome in most plants and animals.

Schaack is assistant professor of Biology at Reed College in Portland, Oregon

Gabriel Perez-Barreiro delivers a keynote lecture exploring the ways in which various artists from Latin America used science and space travel as metaphors for expressing present day realities and imagined futures.

Perez-Barreiro is Director of the Coleccin Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, New York. From 2002 to 2008 he was Curator of Latin American Art at the Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin. In 2007, he was chief curator of the Sixth Mercosur Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil. From 2000 to 2002 he was Director of Visual Arts at The Americas Society, New York. Prior to that he was Exhibitions and Programs Coordinator at the Casa de America, Madrid. From 1993 to 1998 he was the founding curator of the University of Essex Collection of Latin American Art. He holds a PhD in Art History and Theory from the University of Essex.

Join us for the Bowdoin College Museum of Art Spring Open House immediately following the lecture at 5:30pm.

RSVPs are requested but not required. You many RSVP here: https://latitude008791.eventbrite.com or contact Christine Piontek at artmuseumevents@bowdoin.edu.

Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Past Futures: Science Fiction, Space Travel, and Postwar Art of the Americas.

Photo: Gabriel Perez Barreiro

Boston University film professor Mary Jane Doherty traveled to Cuba multiple times over a period of years to complete what the Boston Globe called a “lucid, watchful portrait of young ballet dancers desperately trying to plié their way out of poverty and into the Ballet Nacional."

Doherty’s documentary Secundaria follows one high school class on its journey through Cuba’s world famous National Ballet School.  The teenage dancers love to dance…but many of them must dance as the only way to improve the lives of their impoverished families. 

As we follow Doherty’s primary subjects—middle-class Gabriela, poor Mayara, poorer Moises— Secundaria reveals itself through cinematic storytelling (and without a script, staging, or interviews) as being less about competing in dance and more about battling into adulthood.

Post-screening discussion with the filmmaker.

Free and open to the public - no tickets required.

Craig Steven Wilder, professor of history at MIT and a leading historian of race in America, will deliver the annual John Brown Russwurm Lecture in the Main Lounge of Moulton Union. A reception in the Russwurm House Library will precede the lecture at 5:00pm. Both events are free and open to the public. 

Professor Wilder will examine the contrasting figures of "the matriculating Indian" and "the uneducable Negro" to explore the limits on access to higher education in the second half of the 18th century. Looking closely at the experiences of two friends, the Reverend Samson Occom - a member of the Mohegan nation who became a Presbyterian minister, and poet Phillis Wheatley - the first African-American woman to be published, Professor Wilder will demonstrate how illusory were even the modest hopes of education held by Native and enslaved Americans. Though hailed by well-wishers as possessors of exceptional talents, Occum and Wheatley could find no institutional structures that would support them in intellectual, literary, or religious pursuits. 

This lecture stems from Wilder's important and widely reviewed new study, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities, where he argues that many of America's revered colleges and universities were soaked in the sweat, the tears, and sometimes the blood of people of color.

Professor Wilder is a senior fellow at the Bard Prison Initiative, where he has served as a guest lecturer, commencement speaker, academic advisor, and visiting professor. For more than a decade, this innovative program has given hundreds of men and women the opportunity to acquire a college education during their incarcerations in the New York State prison system. 

He has advised and appeared in numerous historical documentaries, including the celebrated Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon film, The Central Park Five; Kelly Anderson's highly praised exploration of gentrification, My Brooklyn; the History Channel's F.D.R.: A Presidency Revealed; and Ric Burn's award-winning PBS series, New York: A Documentary History. 

Named after the first African-American graduate of Bowdoin College (class of 1826), the John Brown Russwurm lecture series explores "the legacy and status of Black Americans". Notable speakers include Robert Levine, Lani Guinier, Carl Stokes, Vernon Jordan, Shirley Chisholm, Bayard Rustin, Benjamin Hooks, and Julian Bond, among others.

The world of climate politics is increasingly no longer confined to the activities of national governments and international negotiations. Critical to this transformation of the politics of climate change has been the emergence of new forms of transnational governance that cut across traditional state-based jurisdictions and operate across public and private divides. 

In this presentation, Stacy Vandeveer will examine the world of climate change governance and the implications for the field of global environmental politics. He is currently professor of political science and chair of the department of political science at the University of New Hampshire. His teaching and research interests include international environmental policymaking and its domestic impacts, comparative environmental politics, connections between environmental and security issues, the roles of expertise in policy making and the global politics of consumption and environmental and humanitarian degradation. 

After Japan surrendered in 1945, ending World War II, Allied forces led by the United States occupied the nation, bringing drastic changes. Japan was disarmed, its empire dissolved, its form of government changed to a democracy, and its economy and education system reorganized and rebuilt. By the 1950s, a former enemy became a Western ally, and parts of American culture became part of the Japanese landscape. This was not, however, an era of unadulterated “influence” from the West, nor a simple abandonment of domestic politics for a new devotion to transnationalism. This was a time that was ambivalent and uncertain, challenging and rousing. To be an avant-garde artist in this context meant that one aimed for lofty ideals: to restructure one’s own sense of place in the world, through art and for art. 

Artist Nakamura Hiroshi's work in this period was influenced by the American military occupation of the Japanese town of Sagawa, and the conflicts between the townspeople and soldiers. His paintings came to represent the genre of Reportage Painting, in which young artists expressed Socialist concerns through their art in a style combining Social Realism and Surrealism. 

Dr. Namiko Kunimoto, assistant professor of art history at Ohio State University, is a specialist in modern and contemporary Japanese art, with research interests in gender, urbanization, photography, performance art, transnationalism, and nation formation. She will examine how Nakamura Hiroshi used representation to interrogate the inter-relationship of artistic status, politics, and selfhood. 

Sponsored by The Blythe Bickel Edwards Fund and the Departments of Art History and Asian Studies.

Most discussions of Malcolm X's life tend to emphasize his politics and downplay the role of religion in his life. Or, if they do address his religion, these examinations often see Islam as something that Malcolm truly embraces only after leaving the Nation of Islam and making his hajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca. This talk examines the ways that religion in general, and Islam in particular, figured very early in Malcolm's life, and provided a passport for his growing internationalist politics.

Zaheer Ali is a PhD candidate in history at Columbia University. Under the direction of the late Manning Marable, he served as one of the project managers and a senior researcher of the Malcolm X Project (MXP), a multi-year research initiative on the life and legacy of Malcolm X.

Free and open to the public.