VMW Hosts Teaching Art History with AI Workshop
On January 26, 2024, Alison Langmead and the Visual Media Workshop welcomed participants to Pittsburgh for a hands-on workshop focused on the dangers and opportunities presented by computational image generators. To learn more about the NEH-funded project, visit the Teaching Art History with AI website.
Nygren to Give Talk at Miami University Humanities Center
Chris Nygren will give the talk, “Materials, Labor and Time: Toward an Ecology of Early Modern Art,” at Miami University on Monday, February 12, 2024. Rather than focus on artists, this paper will trace the history of materials and their extraction from the earth to narrate a more humane and inclusive history of Renaissance painting. Read more on the Humanities Center website.
Larson Publishes New Essay in Afterimage Collection
Graduate Ellen Larson (PhD 2022) has published the essay, “The Concrete Flux Of Cao Fei's 'Cosplayers,'” in a new volume of essays and archival materials organized as part of the 2023 exhibition, “Afterimage: New Media Art in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan” held at Arts West Gallery, University of Melbourne. Read the essay here.
Giordano Reports on Screening of John Sayles's Lone Star (1996) in LA
Ph.D. Candidate Rebecca Giordano covered the release of the 4K restoration of John Sayles' 1996 western film "Lone Star" for Short Takes, the Los Angeles Review of Books' new series of reviews of live events. Her essay covers the film and the subsequent Q-and-A with the prominent director. Linked to PhD research on 20th-century race and national identity in the Americas, Giordano considers how Sayles uses techniques drawn from the Golden Age of Hollywood to rethink the genre of the Western in the age of NAFTA and its racial politics.
Vuković Presents at Yale University
Vuk Vuković delivered a paper at the Biennial Graduate Student Sohbat-Yaji-Gathering: On the Frontier of Asian Arts at Yale University. His paper, "Global Signals: The Satellite Networks of Nam June Paik,” examined the global satellite signals employed by the Korean-born artist Nam June Paik to connect the West and the East using satellite networks to open cross-cultural exchange across national borders. Read more here.
Villela Balderrama Presents on Pitt's 2024 Diversity Forum
Graduate student Marisol Villela Balderrama will co-facilitate the workshop "Beyond Language Access: Creating Multilingual Spaces Through Language Justice" during Pitt’s Diversity Forum 2024: Amplifying Our Voices Through Active Listening and Constructive Dialogue, on January 22, at 10 am ET.
Hosseini to Give Humanities Center Talk
Sahar Hosseini will be giving a talk as faculty fellow of the University of Pittsburgh Humanities Center on Thursday, January 25, 2024. Hosseini’s talk considers the centrality of the Zayanderud river to the Safavid capital Isfahan’s collective memory. This event will be hybrid. Learn more on the Humanities Center website.
Castillo Maldonado Named Humanities Center Fellow
HAA, Museum Studies, and Latin American Studies major Irene Sofía Castillo Maldonado was announced as one of the 2024 Humanities Center Undergraduate Fellows. Castillo Maldonado will receive research support and guidance from the Humanities Center to further develop her project on colonial systems in the United States. Read more on the Humanities Center website.
Gretchen Bender and Mark Collins Win Humanities Center Co-Teaching Fellowship
Working with the Humanities Center's AY2025 theme of "Method?," Bender and Collins will be developing a new course, "What to Do? Environmental Crisis and Reparative Artistic Practices." Generations of scientists, writers, artists, and activists have worked to bring about change, only to confront denial and complacency. What can one person do? This course addresses these global issues by focusing on the local (Pittsburgh and the tri-state region) and the personal, and by bridging disciplinary modes too often cast as opposites: science and art.
Emily Mazzola Appointed Curator of Fitchburg Art Museum
Recent graduate Emily Mazzola (PhD 2023) has been appointed Curator of the Fitchburg Art Museum in Massachusetts. Mazzola will bring her research expertise in gender, material culture and museology of American art to the museum’s collections and exhibition program.
Vuković Publishes in JCS
Vuk Vuković recently published an article in the Journal of Curatorial Studies. His article, “The Institutionalization of Video Art at the Museum of Modern Art,” examines key video art projects and exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, and argues that the museum’s first study grant obtained from the Rockefeller Foundation not only expanded the exhibition and collection of video work but also laid the foundation for its institutionalization, which in turn exerted decisive effects on the subsequent history of video art.
Langmead Contributes to New Digital Humanities Volume
Alison Langmead recently published in the new University of Minnesota Press volume, What We Teach When We Teach DH: Digital Humanities in the Classroom. In her chapter with Annette Vee, Langmead questions what can be gained by integrating DH into general education requirements for undergraduates. Read more about the book on the UMP website.
Tyquiengco Featured on Fanachu Podcast
Marina Tyquiengco (PhD 2021) recently appeared on a live episode of the Fanachu podcast to discuss her work in the museum world. Tyquiengco presently serves as the Ellen McColgan Associate Curator of Native American Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. View the livestream recording on the Fanachu Facebook page.
McCoy Presents at China Westward Conference
Michelle McCoy delivered a paper at the China Westward conference at Harvard University in October.
Hosseini Publishes in JSAH
Sahar Hosseini recently published an article in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. Her article, “The Invisible Lake of Sa’ādat-ābād and the Safavid Architecture of Affect,” examines the role of bodies of water in a royal complex in premodern Isfahan, where the river became a site of architectural imagination.