Winter 2022
January 27
2021-2022 Student Speaker Series: January Session
Jessica Fontaine
The Face of the Division: Popular Feminism and The Real in the Pro Wrestling Industry
Olivia Woodruff
Casting the ‘Sick Role’: The Visual Iconography of Illness in Victorian England
Mitra Kazemi
“They Bless with Their Mouths, But Curse You in Their Hearts”: Carceral Aesthetics at an Inquisitorial Prison in Palermo
The Spring 2022 Student Speaker Series is an opportunity for graduate students in the department to present their research. The series is organized into three sessions of three presentations each, followed by a discussion period.
Zoom Link:
February 24
2021-2022 Student Speaker Series: February Session
Kristian Guttormson
"Your Disobliged and Grumbling Servant": Satire, Anxiety & C. H. Bennett's "The Origin of Species"
Nina Morena
Young with Metastatic Breast Cancer: Health Literacies and Information Practices on YouTube
Karen Ren
Detention: Recreating the Atrocious Isolation and Remembering the History
The Spring 2022 Student Speaker Series is an opportunity for graduate students in the department to present their research. The series is organized into three sessions of three presentations each, followed by a discussion period.
Zoom Link:
March 17
2021-2022 Student Speaker Series: March Session
Allyson Rogers
The Sounds of Government Realism: Political Dimensions of the National Film Board of Canada's Postwar Film Music
Reina Yuan
Queer Counterpublic and the Rise of Alternative Clubs in Chengdu, China
Torbjörn Rolandsson
Formatting the Format: An Ethnographic Study of Swedish Public Radios Transition From Analogue to Digital News Production
The Spring 2022 Student Speaker Series is an opportunity for graduate students in the department to present their research. The series is organized into three sessions of three presentations each, followed by a discussion period.
This session will be held in a hybrid format in Arts 260 and on Zoom.
Zoom Link:
Call for abstracts: AHCS Student Speaker Series 2021-2022
This year, the Art Histroy and Communication Studies Graduate Student Association is excited to announce the second edition of the Student Speaker Series. We are forgoing a traditional symposium and opting instead to offer in-person and virtual presentations from student members of the AHCS community. We hope that this will allow us to reinstate a sense of community within the department and to offer ample space for students and faculty to keep in touch and discuss their work.
The AHCS Student Speaker Series invites both current students and recent graduates to present their research. Presentations can be based on any project (e.g., seminar papers, theses, articles, elements of a dissertation) and should last approximately 20 minutes. After each talk, there will be a 30-minute question-and-answer period, followed by general discussion. Sessions will be offered in hybrid-format, meaning that they will take place both in-person and via live stream through Zoom.
The Student Speaker Series will take place once per month in January, February, and March. Scheduling of each session will be coordinated with individual speakers. If you are interested in presenting your work, please submit a 200-word abstract of your proposed presentation to ahcs.studentseries [at] gmail.com. Abstracts are due Friday, December 10th, 2021 at 11:59PM. Please include your name, program, year, and preference for an in-person or virtual presentation. Note that each speaker will receive a small honorarium, via cheque, for their participation.
Volunteers
We are also recruiting volunteers to join our organizing team. These roles will involve support before and during the events (promotion, set up, Q&A moderation, etc.). Experience with Zoom is a plus, but not necessary! Please email us at ahcs.studentseries [at] gmail.com with a short bio if you are interested.
We look forward to your participation!
Potentials of Ecocriticism - February 8-9, 2019
Braddock and Irmscher (2009) define ecocriticism as a critical approach that “emphasizes issues of environmental interconnectedness, sustainability, and justice” in order to inflect the existing vocabularies, tropes, and epistemologies of cultural interpretation.
As such, ecocritical analyses often engage with the material forms and discursive constructions of media infrastructures. Parks and Starosielski (2015) note that media infrastructures have been and continue to be used “to claim and reorganize territories and temporal relations.” Their material dependence on and interconnectedness with the environment imbricate media infrastructures within issues of resource development, urban planning, Indigenous and national sovereignties, surveillance, labour, etc.
How can art history and communication studies adopt ecocriticism as an interpretative paradigm in their respective analyses? More specifically, in which ways can they incorporate environmental history and ecology in order to develop what Braddock and Irmscher (2009) describe as “a more earth-conscious mode of analysis”?
Held over February 8th and 9th, the AHCS Graduate Symposium opened with a screening of Anthropocene: The Human Epoch and a discussion with director Jennifer Baichwal. Saturday included paper presentations, a keynote lecture by Brian R. Jacobson (University of Toronto) entitled "French Art in the Age of Oil", and a concluding panel discussion with Brian R. Jacobson, Christine Ross, and Darin Barney.
While No One Was Looking - April 26-May 6, 2017
While No One Was Looking presented an exhibition, magazine (Art/iculation), artist/scholar panel discussion, film screening of The Saver at Le Salon 1861, and satellite exhibit on-campus, that commemorate Montreal as a city of Indigenous peoples, peoples of colour, and immigrants. The project aims to make space for dialogue and encounter around decolonial concepts of place and agency, foreground marginalized experiences and histories, and decenter dominant celebrations of colonialism.
Magic: Between Embodiment and Ontology - February 19-20, 2016
Magic: Between Embodiment and Ontology was a two-day interdisciplinary faculty and emerging scholars symposium. February 19th-20th, 2016. The conference seeks to engage and support graduate scholarship from Canada and abroad.
Keynote Speakers: Professor of Art & Architecture at Hobart & William Smith Colleges, Liliana Leopardi &;Ph.D. Candidate in the Performance Studies Department at New York University, Aliza Shvarts
The aim of this symposium is to examine the ways in which magic, in any incarnation, is used as both a transformative element to inspire civil action as well a communicative channel for intersubjective relations. The symposium seeks to trace magic’s communicative capacities through material culture.
The scope in which magic interacts and/or informs scholarship is broad and we hope for the conference to capture a snapshot of the ways in which magic affects material culture. The symposium will examine the roles in which magic or the mystic has played and generate a productive dialogue around such topics as alchemy, the occult, esoteric, rituals, science, early technology, spiritualism, etc.
Silence!: 鶹AV AHCS Emerging Scholars Conference - April 24, 2015
Silence itself—the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers—is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies. […]There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses. (Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: An Introduction) Silence plays the irreducible role of that which bears and haunts language, outside and against which alone language can emerge. (Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference) What is silence? How is it kept or broken? Silence is often used to describe who and what is repressed and subjugated: “being silenced” and “not having a voice.” This conference aims to explore the relations between silence, the unspeakable and the unheard, as well as the ways in which silence is represented, interpreted, and subverted.
Keynote lecture by Jonathan D. Katz.
Innovations and Its Contestants - April 18, 2014
Fifth Annual Emerging Scholars Conference
Innovation is a buzzword with remarkable contemporary currency, one frequently instrumentalized in the constant search for new technologies, means of production, market adaptations, scientific discoveries and social changes. With its more insidious applications in mind, a number of recent academic discussions – from visual culture studies and the global art history to the history of science and media archaeology – have come to treat the paradigm with caution, even scepticism. Yet at the same time, for better or for worse, it remains implicit within the bulk of humanistic academic production. This one-day interdisciplinary conference thus confronts innovation at a crossroads. It interrogates its place within theory and praxis by asking: How are we best to approach and define innovation in contemporary academic discourses? Is the paradigm purely a means of disarming social pressure for an all-inclusive equalized prosperity; or might it be recuperated to provide a stimulus for sustainable growth? Can we understand innovation in a broader global spectrum without falling into the trap of cultural essentialism; or does this concept perpetuate Western-centric views and mores? Can the concept of innovation be used for the analysis of historical periods; or does it figure too easily in teleological narratives?
Keynote lecture by Dr. Keith Moxey: “Imagining Time: The Temporality of Art’s History”.
The Tangible: A One-Day Graduate Conference - April 26, 2013
Speakers from a diverse range of fields shared their research on the affective, material and phenomenological stakes of tangibility. From the sensory to the technological and the scientific to the emotive, the conference spanned many histories, methods, and meanings of the tangible.
Keynote Lecture by Constance Classen: "The Medium is the Massage: Digital Media, Virtual Tactilites and Sensorial Ideologies".