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Mortevivum

Holiday Shapiro | January 26, 2024

Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual

by Kimberly Juanita Brown, Associate Professor, Department of English and Creative Writing, Dartmouth College

The inaugural title in the On Seeing Series is Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual, a powerful examination of the unsettling history of photography and its fraught relationship to global antiblackness.

Since photography’s invention, black life has been presented as fraught, short, agonizingly filled with violence, and indifferent to intervention. In Mortevivum, author Kimberly Juanita Brown demonstrates how the visual logic of documentary photography and the cultural legacy of empire have come together to produce the understanding that blackness and suffering—and death—are inextricable. Brown traces this idea from the earliest images of the enslaved to the latest newspaper photographs of black bodies, from the United States and South Africa to Haiti and Rwanda, documenting the enduring, pernicious connection between photography and a global history of antiblackness.

This is the book I have been waiting for.

Christina Sharpe Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities, York University, Toronto; author of Ordinary Notes

Standing Still Moving

Holiday Shapiro | November 7, 2021

Standing Still Moving: Arts of Gesture in Lateral Time

by Rebecca Schneider, Professor of Modern Culture and Media

a woman in a long black dress, her back to the camera, on stone stairs — *Carrie Mae Weems, Roaming, 2006*

Standing Still Moving: Arts of Gesture in Lateral Time offers a theory of gesture, antiphony and interval in the arts. As time-based arts are essentially arts of the interval, the book explores betweenness, besideness, and amongness in cross-temporal works that reverberate antiphonally. Approaching artworks as gestures in differing temporal registers (geologic time, human time, digital time), the book draws on Black feminist thought, critical theory, and decolonial methodologies. The digital design promotes nonlinear thought and asks: When cross-temporal artistic gestures involve more-than-human participants, what kind of call and response is possible? Standing Still Moving can be accessed as Moving Still Standing, and chapters are conceived as fugal constellations in a playfield designed for myriad routes of access while building a cohesive argument.

Learn about the author.

Conceiving of this book project as digital literally opened portals of possibility for thought in ways I could not have foreseen before beginning on this journey. New connections have arisen among the artworks I am writing about, but also among the philosophies, critical theories, and disciplinary perspectives I am engaging in debate.

Rebecca Schneider Professor of Modern Culture and Media

Supported by the Mellon Foundation

The Sensory Monastery

Holiday Shapiro | November 6, 2021

The Sensory Monastery

by Sheila Bonde, Professor of History of Art and Architecture, and Clark Maines, Professor of Art History Emeritus at Wesleyan University

aerial view of the abbey of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes

Focusing on the abbey of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes in northern France, founded in the eleventh century, The Sensory Monastery offers a single site as a case study to consider the phenomenology of architecture. The project investigates the sensory in architecture by exploring the visual, auditory, gustatory, olfactory, haptic, and spiritual aspects of the site at three distinct periods in its history. Understanding sensory experiences as individual and changing, the project includes seven historically informed narratives of characters in the archaeological record of Saint-Jean. Together with long-form scholarly interpretation, these narratives complement and animate extensive 3D CAD reconstructions of the monastery. The project also includes assets that revive voices and provide readers with additional points of entry, such as searchable site plans, encoded primary texts, and immersive soundscapes.

Learn more about the author.

Monasteries have interested historians and art historians of religion for centuries. While documents, architecture, and art continue to occupy scholars’ interest, little attention has been given to the sensory experiences of the monks and nuns themselves—to what they heard, smelled, tasted, touched or saw across the centuries of a monastery’s existence. Digital modes of representation have allowed us to re-create the three-dimensional contours of lost abbey spaces, as these changed over time, and to re-present lost phenomenological aspects of medieval monastic experience.

Sheila Bonde Professor of History of Art and Architecture, and co-author, with Clark Maines, Professor of Art History Emeritus at Wesleyan University, of The Sensory Monastery

Supported by the Mellon Foundation and, at Brown University, the Office of the Vice President for Research and the Brown Arts Institute

Poet Sagawa Chika: Late Gathering

Holiday Shapiro | November 5, 2021

Poet Sagawa Chika: Late Gathering

by Sawako Nakayasu, Assistant Professor of Literary Arts

seated portrait of the poet Chika Sagawa

Poet Sagawa Chika: Late Gathering brings together American and Japanese scholars and artists to reexamine the legacy of one of Japan’s most influential poets, Sagawa Chika (1911–1936), largely ignored by critics and known within the Japanese poetry community as “everyone’s favorite unknown poet.” The first extensive study of any female modernist poet in Japan, Poet Sagawa Chika: Late Gathering widens and deepens our understanding of literary developments in Japan in the 1920s. The importance and impact of this project, however, extends beyond a re-presentation of Japanese literature through the lens of global modernism. This cross-disciplinary, multimodal digital publication forges connections between contemporary arts communities (poets, visual artists, and sound artists) that are actively engaged with Sagawa’s poetry.

Learn about the author.

Literature arises from, and exists in, a thick web of human activity that consists of so much more than the literary artifacts themselves. Digital publishing gives us new tools with which to plumb the nuances and effects of poetry, and to examine varying interpretations. It can create an entirely new dimension to how we might discuss poetry in translation, in varying contexts. Especially with regards to the works of writers from distant geographies, languages, and periods of time — here is an opportunity to have access to what used to be highly specialized knowledge, to enliven and deepen a literary engagement, to bridge the distances more mightily and heartily, to read anew.

Sawako Nakayasu Assistant Professor of Literary Arts and editor of Poet Sagawa Chika: Late Gathering

Supported by the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and, at Brown University, the Office of the Vice President for Research and the Brown Arts Institute

Travels in Search of the Slave Past

Kerri Hicks | November 4, 2021

The Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Travels in Search of the Slave Past: Monuments, Memorials, Sites of Slavery

by Renée Ater, Provost’s Visiting Professor of Africana Studies

The Slavery Memorial at Brown University — Martin Puryear’s *Slave Memorial* at Brown University

Travels in Search of the Slave Past: Monuments, Memorials, Sites of Slavery is about the search for the visualized presence of the slave past in the United States through monument building and memorialization. This project grounds my travels through digital mapping, and it visualizes the monuments, memorials, and sites of slavery through photography and video. Through audio interviews, it includes artists’ reflections on the role of monument building in their practice and the function of representation in their sculpture. Travels in Search of the Slave Past highlights my travels as a form of secular pilgrimage and tourism, explores the role of representation and embodiment in relation to slavery and the black body, and considers the memory work that these objects both accomplish and fail to engage.

Learn more about the author.

My scholarship on contemporary monuments to the slave past lives at the intersection of so many different disciplines: history, art, politics, public humanities, Africana studies. My subject is equally multi-layered and complex. I couldn’t imagine telling a story about sites of slavery within the two-dimensional spaces of a conventional book. Thanks to interactive maps and other digital tools, I’ve been able to see more fully both local concerns and larger networks of visual and cartographic connections around remembering the slave past.

Renée Ater Provost's Visiting Professor of Africana Studies and author of Travels in Search of the Slave Past

Imperial Unsettling

Holiday Shapiro | November 3, 2021

Imperial Unsettling: Indigenous and Immigrant Activism towards Collective Liberation

by Kevin Escudero, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies

marching students holding a sign for the Political Science Student Association, featured image for the publication Imperial Unsettling.

Imperial Unsettling: Indigenous and Immigrant Activism towards Collective Liberation examines the relationship between Indigenous CHamoru activists and Asian immigrant community members in Guåhan (Guam). Contending that kinship ties within and among Indigenous CHamoru and Asian settler communities allow for the emergence of what he terms “kinship solidarity,” Escudero centers these Indigenous and racial/ethnic communities’ lived experiences and relationships as part of their participation in Guåhan’s contemporary movement for decolonization. Developing Imperial Unsettling as a born-digital publication will allow Escudero to create an immersive experience for the reader by integrating the book’s long-form narrative with oral histories of Guåhan decolonization activists, archival documents related to key historical moments in the decolonization movement, and lesson plans on the movement for use by teachers on and off the island.

Learn about the author.

As a scholar-activist, centering activist narratives and voices is at the very core of my work. Digital publishing elevates and amplifies those voices, and makes my research accessible and engaging for multiple academic and non-academic audiences, from scholars to movement activists to policy makers.

Kevin Escudero Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies, and author of Imperial Unsettling

Supported by the Mellon Foundation

Slavery and Justice Report

Holiday Shapiro | September 21, 2021

cover image for Brown University's Slavery & Justice Report

Brown University’s Slavery and Justice Report with Commentary on Context and Impact

digital cover of the 2021 Slavery and Justice Report

In 2006, Brown released its groundbreaking Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, confronting and publicly documenting the University’s complex history with the transatlantic slave trade. The Report, commissioned under the leadership of then-President Ruth J. Simmons, set a high standard for unflinching analysis and became a national model for responsible scholarship, sparking a national conversation. Brown was among the first institutions of higher education in the United States to publicly catalogue its ties to racial slavery. Fifteen years later, under the leadership of President Christina H. Paxson, the University now releases a second edition of the Report, offering insights into the document’s persisting impact, both on Brown’s campus and across the nation and the world.

Read Brown University’s Slavery and Justice Report with Commentary on Context and Impact.

‘Race &’ in America

Holiday Shapiro | September 21, 2021

poster that reads, 'We Demand an End to Police Brutality Now'

‘Race &’ in America

anti-racism rally, with a banner that reads, 'Racism Is a Pandemic.' — Photograph of a Corie Mattie banner at the All Black Lives Matter march, June 14, 2020. Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Gift of Tommy and Codie Oliver
© Tommy Oliver.

Race & in America, a panel discussion series sponsored by the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown, in partnership with the Office of the Provost, undertakes a systematic investigation of the enduring contemporary effects of anti-Black racism in America. Drawing on the expertise of Brown scholars from a range of fields and perspectives, the webinar series, which began in fall 2020 and continues through the 2021–2022 academic year, generates critical engagements with society’s most fundamental and urgent questions around race. The Race & in America digital publication series amplifies the impact and extends the reach of these penetrating discussions through expanded content and resources presented in an interactive, multimodal format.

Explore the series.

Nicholas Brown and the Roman Revolution

Holiday Shapiro | September 21, 2021

official correspondence from the Ministero Commercio e Lavori Pubblici Repubblica Romana

Nicholas Brown and the Roman Revolution

Edited by David Kertzer, Paul R. Dupee, Jr. University Professor of Social Science, Professor of Anthropology, Professor of Italian Studies

Professor David Kertzer and other scholars standing and inspecting documents, featured image for the digital publication Nicholas Brown and the Roman Revolution

Nicholas Brown and the Roman Revolution revolves around a trove of the titular American diplomat’s recently rediscovered correspondence—one of the most important collections of original manuscripts linked to the Roman Revolution found outside of Italy (Brown was U.S. consul when Pope Pius IX fled Rome). The interactive publication permits a deeper understanding of the historical significance of the Nicholas Brown papers, housed at the John Hay Library.

Learn more about the author.

Read Nicholas Brown and the Roman Revolution.

Art, Secrecy, and Invisibility in Ancient Egypt

Holiday Shapiro | May 5, 2021

view of an artifact through a narrow opening

Art, Secrecy, and Invisibility in Ancient Egypt

by Laurel Bestock, Associate Professor of Archaeology and the Ancient World & Egyptology and Assyriology

museum display of Egyptian artifacts — Mastaba Tomb of Perneb. Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Gift of Edward S. Harkness, 1913.

Art, Secrecy, and Invisibility in Ancient Egypt argues that partial, periodic, or total invisibility of art was precisely that quality that allowed images to be personal and to engage in social relationships, not just between living people but also across the divide of death and between the human and the divine. Arguing that over and over again art was used in Egypt in ways that required it to be unseen to achieve its power, the project shows how, often but not always, this quality of being hidden created an unbalanced and deliberately hierarchical relationship, where being invisible enabled the art to see. In looking at the complex life-histories of hidden objects in Egypt, with shifting capabilities and relationships over time, Bestock takes advantage of the digital environment to examine the role of vision in manipulating relationships of knowledge and power both in ancient Egypt and the modern day.

Learn more about the author.

Archaeology is so dynamic. We are discovering new things all the time, adding to a collective body of material on which we base our understanding of past cultures, and this means that interpretations shift as discoveries are made. When other scholars can see side-by-side our arguments and the data on which we based them, and can access and even sort and query that data, then we increase the value of our discoveries immensely. It is increasingly clear that digital publishing on the whole is simply going to be necessary.

Laurel Bestock Associate Professor of Archaeology and the Ancient World & Egyptology and Assyriology, and author of Art, Secrecy, and Invisibility in Ancient Egypt

Supported by the Mellon Foundation

Furnace and Fugue

Kerri Hicks | May 4, 2021

Furnace and Fugue

by Tara Nummedal, Professor of History, and Donna Bilak, Independent Scholar

Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens (1618) with Scholarly Commentary brings to life in digital form an enigmatic seventeenth-century text, Michael Maier’s alchemical emblem book Atalanta fugiens. This intriguing and complex text reinterprets Ovid’s legend of Atalanta as an alchemical allegory in a series of fifty emblems, each of which contains text, image, and a musical score for three voices. Re-rendering Maier’s multimedia masterpiece as an enhanced and interactive digital scholarly work, Furnace and Fugue allows readers to hear, see, manipulate, and investigate Atalanta fugiens in ways that were perhaps imagined when it was composed but were simply impossible to realize in full before now. Whether through interactive visualizations of modern notation or a multifunctional space that allows users to curate, save, and share their own selection and arrangement of Maier’s emblems, Furnace and Fugue makes possible the capabilities implied by this early modern book with digital tools and features that also clarify and/or advance the arguments of the eight scholarly essays included in the work. Furnace and Fugue has been published by University of Virginia Press as part of the distinguished academic series Studies in Early Modern German History.

Winner of the 2022 Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History by the American Historical Association

Learn more about the authors: Tara Nummedal and Donna Bilak.

Read an interview with four of the project’s key collaborators on how they developed and published Furnace and Fugue.

The process of creating Furnace and Fugue felt like an experiment in process and form, which made it both exciting and sometimes also disorienting as we felt our way towards the final project. One of the biggest differences between publishing Furnace and Fugue and a typical print book was the central role from the very outset of editors, technologists, and designers. These experts always play a crucial role in creating academic books, of course, but most authors only work with them at the end, once the book is mostly written and in press. Because Furnace and Fugue was a digital publication, however, much of this team was in place from the very beginning, making their expertise and contributions much more visible to the authors and performers and creating space for real collaboration.

Tara Nummedal Professor of History and co-editor, with Independent Scholar Donna Bilak, of Furnace and Fugue

Supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and, at Brown University, the Office of the Vice President for Research and the Social Science Research Institute

Shadow Plays

Kerri Hicks | May 3, 2021

Shadow Plays: Virtual Realities in an Analog World

by Massimo Riva, Professor of Italian Studies

display of stereographs and books about Italy

Shadow Plays explores popular forms of entertainment used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to transport viewers to a new world, foreshadowing present-day virtual, augmented, and extended reality experiences (VR, AR, and XR). Typically studied as part of the pre-history of cinema or the archaeology of media, analog technologies such as the mondo nuovo or cosmorama, the magic lantern, the moving panorama, and the stereoscope evoked shadow-copies of our world long before the advent of digital technologies and exercised a powerful pull on minds and imaginations. Through six case histories and eight interactive simulations, Massimo Riva explores themes of virtual travel, social surveillance, and utopian imagination, shedding light on illustrious or, in some instances, forgotten figures and inventions from Italy’s past. Arguing for the continuity of experience and imagination, Riva adopts the term virtual realism, an experience marked by the virtualization of the real and the realization of the virtual. At a time when the gap between simulation and reality is getting ever smaller, a cultural-historical exploration of the pre-history of virtual reality can help us better understand the present in light of the past while exploring the past using the tools forged in the present.

Learn about the author.

Winner of the 2023 Prose Award by the Association of American Publishers

Finalist for the 2024 American Council of Learned Societies Open Access Book Prize

The digital format was ideal for my project, which traces a genealogy of virtual reality through case studies of analog optical devices that foreshadow our contemporary digital tools. The 3D models and interactive simulations of the analog artifacts we designed and built helped me make my argument and the reader’s experience much more compelling. I look forward to adopting my digital monograph in my team-taught course on immersive experiences, analog and digital.

Massimo Riva Professor of Italian Studies, and author of Shadow Plays: Virtual Realities in an Analog World

Supported by the Mellon Foundation and, at Brown University, the Office of the Vice President for Research

A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures

Kerri Hicks | May 2, 2021

manuscript page, possibly featuring a zodiac, featured image for Islamic Pasts & Futures

A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures

by Shahzad Bashir, Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Humanities, Professor of History

This groundbreaking, born-digital work invites readers to imagine Islam anew. Moving beyond conventional theological, nativist, and orientalist approaches, A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures decenters Islam from a geographical identification with the Middle East, an articulation through men’s authority alone, and the assumption that premodern expressions are more authentically Islamic than modern ones. Focusing on time as a human construct, the book interprets stories and images, paying attention to evidence and methods of interpretation. Islam, in Bashir’s telling, is a vast net of interconnected traces that appear to be different depending on the vantage from which they are seen. Complementing narrative with extensive visual evidence, the multimodal digital form enacts the multiplicity of the project’s analyses and perspectives, conferring a shape-shifting quality that bridges the gap between sensing Islam and understanding it, between feeling it as a powerful presence and analyzing it through intellectual means. The book’s layered digital interface—readers enter Islam through a diverse set of doorways, each leading to different time periods across different parts of the world—allows for an exploration of and engagement with a rich set of visual material and multimedia evidence not possible in a printed volume.

Shortlisted for the Royal Institute of Philosophy’s 2023 Nayef Al-Rodhan International Book Prize in Transdisciplinary Philosophy.

Learn more about the author, Shahzad Bashir.

Read Bashir’s article, “Composing History for the Web,” which discusses the process of creating the digital book.

Digital tools for conceptualizing and narrating topics in the humanities go far beyond databases and visual mapping. The experience of creating a digital monograph has utterly transformed the way I think about academic writing.

Shahzad Bashir Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Humanities, Professor of History, and author of A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures

Supported by the Mellon Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York

Trojan Women in Performance

Holiday Shapiro | May 1, 2021

Trojan Women in Performance

By Avery Willis Hoffman, Inaugural Artistic Director, Brown Arts Institute, Professor of the Practice of Arts and Classics

Hecuba and the Trojan women murdering Polymestor

As the classics and the Western Canon endure a new round of decolonization and dismantling efforts, along with the scrutiny of those wishing to make space for a diversity of storytelling and more widely representational literature, ancient works such as Euripides’s Trojan Women (415 BC) offer a veritable platform for interpretation, for splicing and re-imagining, for the insertion of new voices and texts, and for the insistence on fresh perspectives. Trojan Women in Performance engages audiences and readers in new and dynamic ways, and will underscore the continued relevance of the play, especially today. This interactive examination of a selection of significant productions, across the 20th and 21st centuries, investigates the ways in which the play provides a unique and effective forum for debating issues of human responsibility in times of war—a central theme in the play and a considerable preoccupation during more than a century of armed conflict. Featuring a flexible format that invites users to explore the content in ways that suit their own learning styles or academic interests, whether chronologically or thematically, Trojan Women in Performance opens up new directions of exploration for scholarly and artistic communities.

Learn more about the author.

Digital publishing opens up the widest possibilities for us to share a rich set of resources to demonstrate how practitioners have championed Euripides’s play Trojan Women as an innovative, non-conventional canvas of exploration and a searing criticism of war-waging, one of the most important societal issues of our time. Bringing scholars and artists into conversation with each other through these interactive means will highlight further the power of theatre and the arts to make space for difficult conversations and for new possibilities to emerge.

Avery Willis Hoffman Inaugural Artistic Director, Brown Arts Institute, Professor of the Practice of Arts and Classics

Supported by the Mellon Foundation

Grounds for Reclamation

Holiday Shapiro | May 1, 2021

Grounds for Reclamation: Fascism and Postfascism in the Marshes

by Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian Studies

The Pontine Marshes near Rome, from the digital publication Grounds for Reclamation

Grounds for Reclamation: Fascism and Postfascism in the Marshes focuses on the reclamation of the Pontine Marshes south of Rome during two phases of its existence: first, under the fascist regime; second, in the content of recent populist phenomena in the Italian political and cultural landscape. Through an interdisciplinary lens (critical geography, ecology, landscape architecture, urbanism, architectural history, media studies, literary theory), Stewart-Steinberg considers “grounds” in wide terms, as they are invoked both literally as the making of a physical space and metaphorically as the making of a political or intellectual argument. “Reclamation” as a project and a concept becomes a useful conceptual tool to understand the many ways in which fascism has surfaced and continues to return in Italy today. The digital publication will be organized around the concept of the “grid,” and will feature excerpts from fascist films and documentaries on the region.

Learn about the author.

Forthcoming from Fordham University Press

Supported by the Mellon Foundation

On Seeing Series

Holiday Shapiro | April 30, 2021

On Seeing is a new publication series devoted to visual literacy. Publications foreground the political agency, critical insight, and social impact inscribed in representation. Centering underrepresented perspectives and understudied questions, these books articulate complex ideas about how we see, comprehend, and participate in the visual world.

The MIT Press will publish each On Seeing volume as a print book, ebook, and open access digital edition created by Brown University Digital Publications.

The inaugural title in the On Seeing series is Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual, a powerful examination of the unsettling history of photography and its fraught relationship to global antiblackness.

Black Elegies, the second volume in the On Seeing series, is an unflinching study of black grief as a form of elegy found in visual art, music, literature—everywhere, if you know how to see it.

The Ruin Archive

Holiday Shapiro | April 30, 2021

The Ruin Archive: Art and War at the Ends of Empire

By Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, Associate Professor of History

The Ruin Archive offers a critical examination of the formation of “Indian art” via the nineteenth- and twentieth-century extraction of objects from ancient and war-torn landscapes of the Indo-Afghan borderlands to European collections. Instead of tracking migration itineraries of objects from ruins of war to museums, as much of the object-centered historiography has done so far, this study breaks new ground by staying at the scenes of destruction to give a detailed on-the-ground account of the different kinds of effects such colonial extraction had on the multi-religious landscape of the Indian subcontinent. Colonial and national narratives are disrupted and dismantled via an interactive archive and mapping system that juxtaposes material across geographies and temporalities, such as government records, ethnographic dictionaries, military manuals, war albums, museum catalogues, photographs, colonial films, and contemporary documentation from the author’s own fieldwork on the “frontier.”

Learn more about the author.

Supported by the Mellon Foundation

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Kerri Hicks | April 20, 2021

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Kerri Hicks | April 19, 2021

Welcome to Brown University Library WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Border Assemblages

Holiday Shapiro | April 15, 2021

Border Assemblages: Re-collecting Moria

by Yannis Hamilakis, Joukowsky Family Professor of Archaeology and Professor of Modern Greek Studies

aerial view of the Moria migrant camp — *The Moria migrant camp on Lesvos*

Merging scholarship and activism, this project focuses on the largest migrant-refugee camp in Europe, Moria, located on the island of Lesvos in Greece, in what is effectively a borderline between the Global South and the Global North. Situated within the epistemology and theoretical framework of an archaeology of the present, Border Assemblages: Re-Collecting Moria explores the material construction of confinement, regimentation, and surveillance, and the production of a border spectacle through specific material infrastructures. Also, and perhaps more importantly, the project investigates the reshaping of the camp thanks to the labor, initiative, and inventiveness of migrants themselves: the construction of shelter, the organizing of alternative food provision through a bottom-up regime of affirmative biopolitics, and practices of waiting. Border Assemblages interprets Moria as a phenomenon of the current moment, as a material-social configuration, the careful study of which can help understand global processes of mobility, of bordering, and of transient life.

Learn more about the author.

This project is an assemblage of sorts – not in the sense of accumulation but rather in the Deleuzian sense of agancement, a gathering together and curating of heterogeneous components that will cohere and co-function within the digital realm. It is also a sensorial assemblage, a gathering that aims at engendering affective connections across various borders, including the border between maker/curator and user. Thus, I think of Border Assemblages as an interactive digital installation, supported by photography, video, and recorded interviews that foreground the materiality and human experiences of Moria.

Yannis Hamilakis Joukowsky Family Professor of Archaeology and Professor of Modern Greek Studies

Supported by the Mellon Foundation

Going through the Motions

Holiday Shapiro | April 12, 2021

Going through the Motions: Animations of Black Being in the Breaks

by Rebecca Louise Carter, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies

mixed media artwork, from the digital publication Going through the Motions

Going through the Motions: Animations of Black Being in the Breaks is a meditation on Black death and its transformation, exploring the shift to Black aliveness in both scholarly work and everyday practice. A project of Black Study inspired by ethnohistoric and ethnographic fieldwork in New Orleans, this short-form digital publication will consist of several connected essays accompanied by a series of visual and moving portraits of Black people who grapple with conditions of precarity and death but also find ways to conceptualize and embody Black aliveness as an aesthetic, orientation, or other mode of being. The animated scenes are crafted from interview recordings, archival materials, photographs, and sound, set in motion through new drawing, painting, collage, and stop motion photography. Together with the essays, the book presents a narrative arc and multimodal experience through which readers/viewers/listeners can witness and follow Black ways of being, knowing, and doing.

Learn about the author.

Supported by the Mellon Foundation

In Networked and Programmable Media

Holiday Shapiro | April 10, 2021

work table with several reading lamps, each trained on a piece of paper

In Networked and Programmable Media: Language Art with Personal Computation

by John Cayley, Professor of Literary Arts

reading lamps trained on pieces of paper featuring text

In Networked and Programmable Media: Language Art with Personal Computation will feature over fifty of the pioneering author’s works in “language art with computation,” dating from the late 1970s — when personal computing began to be possible — down to the present time. More than just a digital anthology, the project will be integrated with an original theoretically informed commentary, offering critical, discursive pathways around and about the selections themselves. The constituent works will be published digitally, as far as possible in the manner that they were conceived to be read. Saying as much will further establish this publication as another first because Cayley’s writing, his language art work, was composed to be dynamic and time-based, sometimes generative and self-modifying, not necessarily the same “text” each time the work is encountered. In Networked and Programmable Media will bring early and recent programmed language art to what are now both crucial and everyday real-world networks for both readers and scholars.

Learn about the author.

Supported by the Mellon Foundation

The Chisolm Massacre

Holiday Shapiro | April 9, 2021

The Chisolm Massacre: Reconstruction and the Politics of Violence

by Christopher Grasso, Professor of History

a group of men point their guns at a man and woman; a man lies dead or dying on the ground

The Chisolm Massacre: Reconstruction and the Politics of Violence is a case study at a hinge moment in American history: 1877, when the nation backed away from its first great experiment in racial justice. In a small town in Kemper County, Mississippi in the spring of that year, a political mob murdered five people, including Republican Judge William Wallace Chisolm, former state senator J.P. Gilmer, and two of Chisolm’s children. To ask why the “Chisolm Massacre” occurred is to plunge into a complex web of local, regional, and national causes and effects, motives, and consequences. National press coverage and two quickly produced books demonstrated that the meaning of the event was and is embedded in the larger moral history of Reconstruction. Politics was violent and violence was political in ways that linked this small place to the nation. Grasso’s historical narrative is based in part on an extensive private archive of Chisolm family papers. The digital publication will feature thematic document clusters, enabling readers to explore a variety of primary sources, surfacing epistemological issues and the practice of historical interpretation.

Learn about the author.

Supported by the Mellon Foundation

Articulations: Dancing Across Modernities

Holiday Shapiro | April 8, 2021

Articulations: Dancing Across Modernities

by Michelle Clayton, Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature

Articulations: Dancing Across Modernities, by Michelle Clayton, Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature, explores the place of dance as image and practice in the early twentieth century. Tracing the ways in which painters, poets, filmmakers, and critics turned to dance and the dancer as models for connecting times and places, it emphasizes that the dancer was herself not just a muse, but a creative practitioner, student, and collector. She immersed herself in source materials, Clayton argues, collecting artifacts and ideas on tour, engaging in transregional and interdisciplinary dialogues, and writing her own histories of the artform through essays, interviews, and choreographies. A media-rich project that draws upon a wide array of artifacts including books, press clippings, films, snapshots, artworks, poems, maps, and anecdotes, this digital publication will incorporate a wealth of material to help readers travel with dancers across regions, stages, texts, and languages.

Learn about the author.

Rehearsal Is at Dawn

Holiday Shapiro | April 7, 2021

a bright embroidered design on dark fabric

Rehearsal Is at Dawn

by Eleni Sikelianos, Professor of Literary Arts

Two women in matching draped garments perform a dance. — The second Delphic Festival, Greece, 1930.
Photograph by Maynard Owen Williams.

Rehearsal Is at Dawn, by Eleni Sikelianos, Professor of Literary Arts, is a multivalent, multimodal ancestral encounter that reaches into realms of Sapphic translation, activism, performance of antiquity, queer histories, and utopian politics. In 1901, my great grandmother, Eva Palmer, moved from New York to Paris with her lover, the writer, instigator, and socialite Natalie Barney. The two Americans became the center of a wild tangle of lesbian love affairs and backyard performances that reimagined Sappho’s work and life. They and their circle of friends saw in the ancient past the possibility for sexual and artistic emancipation, especially for lesbian women. Eva became obsessed with draping, first using her hair, then fabricating cloth that mimicked the dresses she saw on ancient pottery, performing the past on her own body. In her second act, she moved to Greece and, with the poet Angelos Sikelianos, staged two boundary-shattering festivals in 1927 and 1930, site-specific installations that revived the Delphic theater and changed the shape of Modern Greek culture. At the juncture between two world wars, the couple believed that the Delphic Idea would bring nations and people together, with artistic practices providing the tools to resist not only mechanized economies but, later, fascism. Their activities were sacred rehearsals for utopia. As a born-digital publication, Rehearsal Is at Dawn, with its dynamic weave of artefacts, archives, and artists, entangles past, present, and future.

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Anticolonial Practice and the Image Archive

Holiday Shapiro | April 6, 2021

display case with a jacket, pair of pants, and a red garment on hangers, alongside a folded blue-striped blanket

Anticolonial Practice and the Image Archive: Notes on the Art of Writing Indian History

By Vazira F-Y Zamindar, Associate Professor of History

a man in traditional attire and turban stands on rocky terrain, holding a rifle. The image is titled "Mahsooli Raider" at the bottom.

How does one consider formations of art and history through a colonial archive that has been systematically organized under the sign of counter-insurgency, an archive that is meant to anticipate, discredit and destroy resistance to colonial power? Can an anticolonial practice reorganize the signs under which the past flows into the future?

Anticolonial Practice and the Image Archive: Notes on the Art of Writing Indian History restitutes Gandhara Art to the insurgent geographies of the Indo-Afghan borderlands to interrogate the complicity of art historical formations in sustaining extraordinary colonial violence and in the partitioning of the Indian past. At once an archival excavation and a meditation on repair, it stays at the scenes of colonial ruin and dispossession to assemble images rarely viewed together. From government records, ethnographic dictionaries, military manuals, war albums, archaeological reports, museum catalogues, colonial films, memoirs, Gandhi biographies, and fieldwork stretched over the last two decades, such an assemblage allows us to consider debates on Buddhist art, military histories of punitive expeditions and aerial bombing, and the nonviolent mobilizations of the Khudai Khidmatgars in relation to each other, and to forge anticolonial practices of experiment and improvisation that can suture a fractured past and its multi-religious cohabitations.

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