In Spring 2020, Clark University’s Higgins School of Humanities will launch the second half of its symposium on bodies. This semester’s programming explores art (dance, photography, film), unexpected pairings (arithmetic and abortifacients, musical criticism and disgust), and fresh ways of thinking how bodies signify (plastic surgery, linguistic embodiment).
All events listed below will be held on the Clark University campus. Admission is free and open to the public.
Language and the Future of Bodies
Lecture
Wednesday, February 12 at 4:30 p.m.
Higgins Lounge at Dana Commons
What are bodies? Elena Clare Cuffari, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Worcester State University, outlines a theory of bodies and an intersectional and dialectical approach to managing tensions that emerge from the entanglement of diverse bodies. This new account explains humans, language, and mind in terms of continuity with all life. Humans are literally billions of different bodies. Living in language is a constant, open-ended negotiation of past, present, and future; of other bodies’ perspectives; of habit and freedom. In this talk, Cuffari will ask whether a more accurate and humane ontology of bodies could aid humans in living benevolently with the world at large. She will discuss the recent enactive proposal of linguistic bodies that arises from a methodological commitment, unique in the cognitive sciences, to stay open to bodies in their inherent multiplicity, concreteness, difference, and unfinishedness. By reflecting on linguistic habits—particularly regarding the environment and technology—Cuffari will consider how communities may realize (or short-circuit) the dynamic potentiality in which we collectively abide each day.
This event is co-sponsored by the Higgins School of Humanities and the Department of Philosophy at Clark University.
Declarations of Disgust: Reflections on an Ideological Dimension of Music Criticism, ca. 1900
Higgins Faculty Series Lecture
Tuesday, February 25 at 4:30 p.m.
Higgins Lounge at Dana Commons
Classical music criticism was a remarkably vibrant genre of journalism at the end of the 19th century. In this talk, Benjamin Korstvedt, Professor of Music at Clark University, will consider how the language of criticism engaged with the turbulent cultural politics of German-speaking Europe at that time. He will examine ways in which critics evoked experiences of physical distress and even disgust to delegitimize music that threatened established aesthetic preferences. This kind of rhetoric—surprisingly common even among liberal critics—is hard to reconcile with the notion that criticism should encourage listeners to form well-reasoned judgments of their own. Korstvedt will demonstrate that, in fact, declarations of disgust were used by critics to induce listeners to experience certain modes of musical expression as disagreeable rather than alluring. In doing so, they played on fraught collective anxieties about the body as social text.
This event is co-sponsored by the Higgins School of Humanities and the Music Program at Clark University.
With Dad
Artist Talk, Screening, and Reception
Thursday, February 27 at 4:30 p.m.
Higgins Lounge at Dana Commons
In his recently released photographic journal, With Dad, Clark University’s Stephen DiRado chronicles his father Gene’s decline into Alzheimer’s through a series of images captured over twenty-plus years. Poignant and unflinching, the book illustrates the complex impact of the disease on the entire DiRado family—Stephen, his brother Chris, sister Gina, and mother Rose—as they take on different roles caring for Gene through his illness. In addition to the black-and-white images, DiRado also compiled hours of video footage, now being developed into a documentary by friend, filmmaker, and Clark colleague Soren Sorensen. Together, these artists tell a story—at once personal and universal—of deep loss, profound love, and the resilience of family.
Join us for an artist talk by Stephen DiRado and a screening of Soren Sorensen’s forthcoming short film. Refreshments will be offered.
This event is co-sponsored by the Higgins School of Humanities; the Department of Visual and Performing Arts; Media, Culture, and the Arts; the Screen Studies Program; and the Studio Art Program at Clark University.
Benjamin Franklin’s Guide to Arithmetic and Abortifacients
Roots of Everything Series Lecture
Tuesday, March 10 at 4:30 PM
Higgins Lounge at Dana Commons
In 1748, Benjamin Franklin reprinted an introductory arithmetic book from England with his own significant reworking and additions. One of the supplements to The American Instructor, which Franklin described as “better adapted to these American Colonies,” was a medical handbook that included a recipe for abortion. Today, we may not see the combination of abortifacients and arithmetic as basic knowledge every student should have, and yet the odd pairing in this widely-circulating book posits that they are. In this talk, Professor Molly Farrell (The Ohio State University) will ask what it means to use numbers in a distinctly “American” way. What, exactly, are we learning when we learn our numbers? What can the colonial period tell us about the audiences and purposes for what we now call “STEM” education? How might numeracy, like literacy, be culturally specific—making us who we are, and determining what stories we can tell?
Clark University’s Jie Park (Education) will provide commentary.
This event continues the Roots of Everything, a lecture series sponsored by Early Modernists Unite (EMU)—a faculty collaborative bringing together scholars of medieval and early modern Europe and America—in conjunction with the Higgins School of Humanities. The series highlights various aspects of modern existence originating in the early modern world by connecting past and present knowledge.
This event is co-sponsored by Early Modernists Unite; the Higgins School of Humanities; the Department of English, the Department of History; the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science; and the Hiatt Center for Urban Education at Clark University.
American Plastic: Credit Cards, Boob Jobs, and Our Quest for Perfection
Lecture
Thursday, March 12 at 7 p.m.
Higgins Lounge at Dana Commons
Cosmetic surgery is not just about the production of the body, but how the body gets produced within particular systems of power. Most cosmetic surgery in the US is financed through debt, and most people who get cosmetic surgery are not wealthy. They are typically women—mostly white, mostly straight—who imagine a better world is possible if they spend money they don’t have to look younger, sexier, and thinner. In other words, more like what our culture imagines to be feminine and desirable. Laurie Essig is Professor and Director of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Middlebury College. In this talk, she will consider how the cosmetically altered body is a product of a variety of structures—from porn to the deregulation of banking under neoliberalism—and is deeply embedded in gender, race, and class.
This event is co-sponsored by the Higgins School of Humanities; the Department of Economics; the Department of Political Science through the Chester Bland Fund; and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Clark University.
Let’s Talk About Sex
Conversation
Monday, March 16 at 4:30 p.m.
Higgins Lounge at Dana Commons
To say that “sex is everywhere” has long been a truism in critiques of contemporary culture. But what if we push beyond a sense of sex as an individualized, often private form of desire and instead contemplate sexuality as a social construction, always emergent in historical moments. Clark University faculty Nina Kushner (History) and John Palella (Center for Gender, Race, and Area Studies) will come together to share their respective expertise in the history and discourses of sexuality to interrogate commonly held attitudes and assumptions about a topic that need not be taboo. Sex, our historians argue, constitutes power and control, cultural and social scripts, politics and personhood. It is as much a public articulation of the body politic as it is a personal identification of self. Bringing together periods as seemingly diverse as 18th-century France and the 20th-century US, this lively conversation might just convince you that sex is not so much everywhere as it is everything.
This event is co-sponsored by the Higgins School of Humanities; the Center for Gender, Race, and Area Studies; and the Department of History at Clark University.
In the Flesh by Elli Crocker
Ongoing Exhibit
Higgins Lounge at Dana Commons
Mind/body duality. The human place in the natural world. Clark University’s Elli Crocker (Studio Art) will delve into these central motifs with her latest exhibit, In the Flesh, an evocation of the elemental connections that exist between the earth, the cosmos, and all living things.
“Our living bodies are supported by the spirit and matter of all that came before us,” Crocker says. “We stand on layers of life accumulated over millennia, knowing that we too will become part of these strata of spirit, flesh, sand, soil, stone, and stardust.”
Crocker has been actively exhibiting for forty years and has received numerous commissions, awards, and artist residencies. Her art has been featured in various publications, including New American Paintings, Volume 50. Last year, Crocker received a major grant from the Higgins School of Humanities to produce a Catalogue Raissoné, a comprehensive chronicle of her artwork to date.
In the Flesh will be on display in the Higgins Lounge at Dana Commons through May 18. Please contact the Higgins School for hours and availability.
This exhibit is co-sponsored by the Higgins School of Humanities and the Studio Art Program at Clark University.
