Fall Lectures

Dr. Lisa Zunshine,Bush-Holbrook professor of English, University of Kentucky to speak in Science and Art Series

Tuesday, October 14th 4:30PM in room 1008 of Humanities

How To Make Us Think That We Know What Other People Think

Abstract

In our day-to-day social interactions, we take for granted that bodies can betray people’s feelings against their will. Perhaps this is why we love expressive faces and value involuntary displays of emotions. Yet studies in behavioral ecology suggest that facial expressions and body language, even when they are involuntary, don’t necessarily convey true information about people’s thoughts and feelings. So if you want to see a face that truly bespeaks the mind, your best bet is to rent a movie, read a book, or go to a museum. How do movies, novels, and paintings make us think that we know what other people think? What tricks do directors, writers, and artists use to put their characters into situations in which their body language reveals their feelings? Why do some of these tricks work better than others? How far back do they go? Why are we so addicted to these “fictions of transparency”? And if we don’t get our share of them, what will happen to our belief that bodies “leak” feelings? Will it wither and disappear? My talk considers these questions, drawing on research into “Theory of Mind” (i.e., our evolved cognitive ability to explain people’s observable behavior in terms of their invisible mental states: thoughts, beliefs, and desires).

Biography

Lisa Zunshine is a Bush-Holbrook professor of English at the University of Kentucky and currently a visiting scholar in the Mind and Development Lab of the Department of Psychology at Yale University. Her interests include eighteenth-century British literature and culture, narrative theory, and cognitive approaches to literary studies (with a particular emphasis on theory of mind and fiction). She is the author of Bastards and Foundlings: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century England (2005), Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (2006), and Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible: Cognition, Culture, Narrative (2008) and the editor/co-editor of six collections of essays, including Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies (forthcoming). She has won fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Foundation for the Humanities.

Dr. Lynne Segal, Birkbeck College

Wednesday, October 15th 4:30PM in room 1008 of Humanities

An HISB Co-Sponsored Event!

Making Trouble: A Political Memoir Encountering anarchists in her native Australia led Lynne Segal into political activism, beginning with her first arrest for protesting at the age of eighteen. Moving to London, she spent the 1970's combining motherhood with communal living, politiking and free love, eventually moving into academia. Looking back at a live well lived, Making Trouble: Life and Politics examines where that generation of dreamers have ended up.

Dr. Segal is Anniversary Professor of Psychology and Gender Studies at Birbeck, University of London. Her books include Is the Future Female? Troubled Thoughts on Contemporary Feminism; Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men: Straight Sex: The Politics of Pleassure: Why Feminism? Gender, Psychology, Politics. Her latest books include Making Trouble: Life and Politics (2007) and A Times to Speak Out (2008), the latter of which she co-edited. The Sociology Department is hosting Dr. Segal

Dr.Andrew V. Uroskie Department of Art History & Criticism, SUNY Stony Brook

Intermedia Assemblage

Abstract
Robert Breer and Stan VanDerBeek, like so many young artists raised in the shadow of Abstract Expressionism, became frustrated early on with the stasis and finality of the painted canvas. For both, the particular conjunction signaled by the term “motion-picture” remained full of mystery and wonder. How was one to understand, compose and view an art no longer in held in stasis? One whose “movements” were both illusory and real? For both artists, one solution arose through the conjunction of the two-dimensional surface of the modernist canvas with the three-dimensional “deep space” of the photographic image. Destablizing perceptual norms of both painting and film, these animated juxtapositions precipitated a newly hybrid form of aesthetic spectatorship. Going further, each would come to invoke the physical space of projection, bringing a sculptural and performative dimension to the cinematic event and, in so doing, give rise to the new genre of intermedia assemblage.

Bio
Andrew V. Uroskie works on late modern and contemporary art, with a particular interest in the intersection of place, performance and technologies of recording in the art of the 1960s and ‘70s. His first book, Between the Black Box and the White Cube: The Emergence of the Moving Image in Contemporary Art, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. His graduate training within UC Berkeley’s Department of Rhetoric and Film provided him with an interdisciplinary orientation broadly informed by psychoanalysis, phenomenology and post- structuralist theory, and has undergirded his interest in the institutional and discursive construction of aesthetic theories and practices. His essay “La Jetée en Spirale: Robert Smithson’s Stratigraphic Cinema” was published in the MIT press journal Grey Room, and his recent work on the conjunction of cinema and site- specificity has been collected in Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader (Tate Modern and Afterall); The Place of the Moving Image (Minnesota); Screen/Space: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art (Manchester), and Impossible Cinema (Centro Montehermoso). He translated Alenka Zupanic's Ethique du Réel: Kant, Lacan for Verso Press in 1999, and was a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Laboratory’s interdisciplinary “Crowds” project from 2000-2005. His essay, "Far Above the Madding Crowd: On the Spatial Logic of Mass Representation" was published in Jeffrey Schnapp, ed., Crowds (Stanford UP, 2006) and his short essay on the 1964 New York World's Fair was published in the 2008 Encyclopedia of World's Fairs and Expositions by McFarland. He is interested in fostering greater exchange between the history & criticism of contemporary art and the fields of film studies, philosophy, music, new media, and performance with which it is engaged.