Ellen Harlizius-Klück and Annapurna Mamidipudi
PENELOPE project

The PENELOPE project was conducted by an interdisciplinary and international research team whose aim was to integrate ancient weaving into the histories of science and technology. As that project now comes to a close, two team members—Annapurna Mamidipudi and Ellen Harlizius-Klück (PI)—are visiting BGC to share their research and explore future possibilities for their collaboration. Join us for this informal lunchtime talk as they demystify the process of building a research team and identifying funding possibilities.

Ellen Harlizius-Klück is the principal investigator of the project PENELOPE: A Study of Weaving as technical mode of existence. Harlizius-Klück won a European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator grant in 2015 to support the project, which is hosted by the Research Institute for the History of Technology and Science at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany. Based on her studies in mathematics, art, and philosophy, Harlizius-Klück has a specific way to look at textiles as a product of mathematical as well as aesthetic considerations that lead to a philosophical understanding of weaving as a way to structure elements in a balanced order. Several grants have allowed her to pursue this unusual topic since her 2004 PhD thesis on Weaving as episteme. 

Annapurna Mamidipudi, a postdoctoral fellow with the PENELOPE project in 2019 and 2020, is currently conducting a research project on Epistemologies of Craft, funded by the German Research Foundation at the Technical University Berlin, Germany. Her research interests include the study of how craftspeople innovate their material practices and how they make knowledge claims to build recognition in contemporary society. Together with Dagmar Schäfer at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, she is co-editing a volume on the Ownership of Knowledge that looks at knowledge ownership beyond IP frameworks, to be published in the MIT Press Inside Technology series.

Tuesday, November 1, 12:15 pm
38 West 86th Street, Lecture Hall

Lunch will be served starting at noon. Registration required.