Edgar Allan Poe on the Furniture of the Universe
October 14 at 12:15 pm
Zoom

This talk draws on John Tresch’s recent book, The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science. It reflects on Poe’s approach to material culture of various kinds, from technologies of print, experiment, and display, to the objects of interior design. Poe’s sensibility was shaped by the explosive rise of mechanical industry and popular culture as well as the unsettled state of science in antebellum America. His attention to the spiritual effects of material compositions resonates with the slippery materialism of his natural philosophy.

Virtual Open House for Prospective Students
October 14 at 7:30 pm
Zoom

Bard Graduate Center Open Houses give prospective students the opportunity to learn much more about our MA and PhD programs. At this remote event, you’ll have the chance to hear from our faculty about their research and teaching, meet students, and see our spaces. The October open house will be hosted by our chair of academic programs, Prof. Deborah Krohn, and will include faculty members Jeffrey Collins, Ivan Gaskell, and Freyja Hartzell.

Next Week:

Cross-Cultural Transformation of Buddhist Talismans from Medieval China to Korea
October 19 at 12:15 pm
Zoom

Based on materials excavated from inside Buddhist statues and tombs, Youn-mi Kim explores Buddhist talismans from medieval Korea. Recently a growing number of scholars have shown an interest in talismans used in Buddhist contexts. Buddhist talismans from medieval Korea, however, remain unknown, to say nothing of their connections to manuscripts discovered from the distant Dunhuang caves in China. Through an exploration of Korean Buddhist talismans, this talk traces a hybrid practice that interweaves Buddhism and Daoism, arguing that such hybrid talisman practices formed part of a large network that spanned western China and the Korean peninsula.

Hyalomania: Early Modern Glass Research between the Disciplines
October 19 at 6 pm
Zoom

As one writer confessed in 1685, he and his peers had fallen prey to hyalomania, or a glass craze. By exploring how hyalomonia integrated varied forms of knowledge, Vera Keller shows how glass became a shared focus of attention spanning varied geographies, communities of expertise, and emergent scientific disciplines. It asks what difference it makes when an object, even an imagined one like unbreakable glass, serves as the subject of inquiry.

Justice, Property, and Punishment: The Role of Montreal Sheriff Edward William Gray in Eighteenth-Century Quebec Slavery
October 21 at 12:15 pm
Zoom

The institution of Transatlantic Slavery was premised upon slave owner control and enacted through systematized violence, surveillance, and prohibitions imposed by slave owners and their surrogates. While white male overseers and slave patrols and black male slave drivers became normal aspects of tropical and semi-tropical plantation slavery, in Canada where cold winters made year-round mono-crop agriculture impossible, male adjuncts to slave owner power took other forms. Charmaine Nelson explores the role of the sheriff in eighteenth-century British slavery in the province of Quebec to understand the significant ways that the work of this British colonial official served to justify, sustain, and support slavery.

Race-ing Whimsy: Black and Asian figures in the Majolica Imaginary
October 21 at 6 pm
Zoom

Majolica’s reputation for ornament, historicism, and lighthearted eclecticism is well understood, and its astonishing breadth of styles and subjects and the explosion of workshops that manufactured the popular ceramic ware are thoroughly chronicled in BGC’s exhibition and accompanying catalogue, Majolica Mania. Curator Susan Weber observed that majolica, more than any other ware of the era, makes visible and tangible the interests, desires, and anxieties of nineteenth-century consumers on both sides of the Atlantic. However, the ways in which majolica incorporated ideas of race into its enduring subjects has remained little discussed. With this in mind, Adrienne L. Childs, Sequoia Miller, and Iris Moon will consider issues of race and representation that were embedded in the majolica fantasmagoria of the nineteenth century.