A February symposium brings graduates, scholars and art lovers to campus to learn about trends in art history and the accomplishments of Elon University art history alumni. A keynote lecture on Feb. 27, 2015, is free and open to the public.
The two-day event from Feb. 27-28, 2015, features presentations by international art history scholars, as well as Elon alumni who will share their work and ongoing art history research inspired by their undergraduate education.
Though registration for the symposium “Between, Among, and Across: Transhistories of the Visual” is now closed, a keynote address that is free and open to the public takes place Friday, Feb. 27, at 7 p.m.
Professor Jill H. Casid from the University of Wisconsin-Madison will deliver her talk “Art History on the Hyphen” in the LaRose Digital Theatre. No tickets are required.
A historian, theorist and practicing artist, Casid is a professor of visual studies, and she founded and served as the first director of the university’s Center for Visual Cultures.
Her talk builds on scholarship dedicated to developing, both theoretically and historically, how imagination functions as a materializing social and political activity that shapes not just experience of a body, globe, or world but also the very matter that images might seem merely to represent.
The symposium coincides with the 10th anniversary year of Elon University’s art history program. The university formally introduced its art history minor in the 2004-2005 academic catalog, with an art history independent major graduate in 2007 and the first official art history major receiving her degree in 2008.
The art history program has graduated 40 majors over the past decade with dozens more students declaring art history as a minor. Elon alumni participating in the symposium include Erin Day, Caitlin Glosser, Jess Keough, Farley Sanderford, Sarah Simmons and Rachel Zimmerman.
“As we expand the study of art history across regions and periods in an increasingly less Eurocentric and Enlightenment-based model, we strive for better ways to reconsider chronological and geographic approaches to writing and teaching the histories of visual objects–even those that might be European or made in the context of the Enlightenment,” Professor Kirstin Ringelberg, coordinator of the art history program, said of the conference’s “Between, Among, and Across” theme.
For more information on the symposium and Elon University’s art history program, contact Kirstin Ringelberg at kringelberg@elon.edu or (336) 278-5249.