The Arts and Letters Powerful Visions Lecture Series was launched in 2004. Through the generous support of the Huntington Library Research Department, the lectures are held in the month of February in the Overseers’ Room usually at mid-day. Each year the event has been “standing room only” with representative members of the California State University Los Angeles (CSULA) campus—faculty, staff, and students along with a generous mix of folks from the local community, as well as members and friends of the Huntington Library.
The Series began in 2004 with a very simple premise: to provide an occasion and opportunity for faculty, staff and students within the College of Arts and Letters at CSULA to gather in a refined and serene environment to share cutting edge research in a manner that opens spaces of critical thought, engage meaningful intellectual and social exchange, and project powerful visions for academic work, social activism and critical aesthetics. Each year, those who have attended have been challenged by creatively constructed and intellectually astute presentations. Undergraduate and graduate students are particularly encouraged to attend and special attention is given to foregrounding their voice in the scholarly conversation.
February 25, 2011
Studies of Embodiment and Transformation through Dance, Literature, Music and Philosophy
Presenters:
Maria Karafilis
Professor, Department of English
"Trauma, Race, and Democratic Ethics in Early American Literature."
Sara Graef
Associate Professor, Department of Music
"Creating Our Own Myth: Embracing Trauma and Transformation through Art."
Michael Shim
Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy
"Heidegger on Being-towards-Death"
Seonagh Odhiambo
Assistant Professor, Department of Theatre Arts and Dance
"Fragments and Possibilities: Choreographing an Intervention in Dance History"
2010 Studies on the Limits of Cultural Representations: Visual Art, Language Emergence, Performance Activism, and Political Violence.
Mohammed Abed
Assistant Professor - Philosophy
“Terrorism, Representation, and the Limits of Philosophical Analysis.”
Elizabeth Bryant
Professor - Art
"Framing Nature: Looking, Seeing, Knowing?"
Namhee Lee
Assistant Professor - Department of Modern Languages and Literature
“Emergence of Symbolic Representation and Symbolosphere”
Carole Frances Lung
Assistant Professor - Art
“18 Cents an Hour: Reenactments of Humanity at Work.”
2009 Studies in Critical Aesthetics:
Four Examinations of Beauty and Storytelling as Intellectual Endeavor and Cultural Work
Pablo Baler
Assistant Professor, Spanish, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures
“Powerful Glimpses: The Bionic Man, The Blind Poet, and The Utopia of Absolute Representation.”
Suzanne Regan
Professor, Television and Film, Department of Communication Studies
“Cultural Memory: Historic Mapping of Pasadena”
Hae-Kyung Lee
Professor, Dance, Department of Theatre Arts and Dance
“Beauty of True Moments”
José Cruz González
Professor, Playwriting and Directing, Department of Theatre Arts and Dance
“Walking through the Landscape of Beauty: Study and Reflection on the Past and Present for Guidance Towards The Future”
2008 Studies in/of Narrative:
Four Critical Essays on Social Facsimiles and Fractured Images of Everyday Life.
Michael Calabrese
Professor of English
"Editing Piers Plowman and Teaching the Medieval Past"
Kristiina Hackel
Assistant Professor of Television, Film and Media Studies
“The Cinematic Mask: Charlie Chaplin as a Modern Primitive.”
Jim Ovelmen
Assistant Professor, Animation, Department of Art
"Looks Like Animation: Facsimiles of Animation Practice into Contemporary Fine Art (Fractured Expectations and Side-Tripping)"
Hema Chari
Professor of English
“Raking the Ashes of Memory: Fragmented Silences and Trauma in Kazuo
Ishiguro’s A Pale View of the Hills"
2007 Studies in Epistemology:
Knowing through/in Literature, Philosophy, Music and Language
Paola Marin
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures
“In Praise of Multiplicity: The Centrality of Humanities in Education”
Andrew Knighton
Department of English
"Thoughts on Thinking, Composed in the Intervals of More Hurried Academic Labor"
Susan Kane
Department of Music
“ . . . The Rest of the Story”
Joseph Prabhu
Department of Philosophy
“Engaging the World Critically”
2006 Studies in Cultural Diversions:
Four Critical Examinations of Cultural Performance and Racial Encounter
Manual Aguilar-Moreno
Department of Art
“Ulama: The Survival of the Pre-Columbian Ballgame in Northern Mexico”
Victor Viesca
Department of Liberal Studies
“Mural or Graffiti?” Chicana/o Aersol Art in Nuevo La”
Michael Willard
Department of Liberal Studies
“Collecting Visions: The Politics of Popular Culture and Interracial Exchange in 1940s Los Angeles”
Michelle Hawley
Department of English
“(Re)Placing Children’s Literature: Urban Spaces in Latina/o Picture Books”
2005 Studies in Politics and Poiesis:
Four Critical Examinations of Cultural Production and Social Life
Susan Mason
Department of Theatre Arts and Dance
“Guerilla Theatre: Performance, Poiesis, and Stealth”
Patrick Sharp
Department of Liberal Studies
“ ‘A Very Pleasant Way to Die’: Race and the Official Representation of Hiroshima”
SanSan Kwan
Department of Theatre Arts and Dance
“Shanghai Refracted: Chinese Postmodernity”
Robert DeChaine
Department of Liberal Studies
“Mobilizing Global Rhetorical Culture: The International Campaign to Ban Landmines and the Crafting of Humanity."
2004 Studies in Race and Representations:
Four Critical Examinations of Race and Visibility
Gregory Fried
Department of Philosophy
“Seeing the Past and Future in Early American Photography”
Bryant Alexander
Department of Communication Studies
“Raced Bodies and the Erasure of Identity in the Classroom”
Micol Seigel
Department of Liberal Studies
“The Evidence of Appearance; Race and Visibility in the US and Brazil”
Steve Classen
Department of Communication Studies, Media and Film
“Re-viewing TV and Jim Crow: A Case Study Past and Present ”
For more information: contact the Associate Dean, College of Arts and Letters 323.343.5626.
The Huntington, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens is located at 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, California 91109 626.405.2135