Center for the Arts and Humanities

Mediums, Media, Mediation: Visual Culture & Haunted Modernities

2010 Mellon Symposium, Organized by Rachel Oberter
March 26—27, 2010

Organized by Haverford's 2008-10 Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow Rachel Oberter, this symposium brings together scholars from the fields of art history, media studies, cultural studies, and literature to consider the terms "medium" and "mediation" in nineteenth- and twentieth-century visual culture. How do particular materials such as paint and glass function as media? What is particularly modern about heightened attention to mediation–that is, the laying bare of the mechanisms of representation? How does a focus on "medium" or "mediation" remake interpretive models in the study of visual culture?

One of the symposium's recurring themes will be the role of the medium in nineteenth-century Spiritualism, a heterodox religious movement based on the perceived ability of individuals to communicate with the dead. How can we understand both the actual impact and metaphoric implications of the medium in art, literature, photography, and film? Did contemporaries perceive the medium as a transparent conduit between heaven and earth? In other words, how did the medium mediate?

A disembodied hand holding a crystal with smoke and light billowing out of the palm

Schedule

Friday, March 26, 2010

4:30—5:00 p.m.

Introductory Remarks, Rachel Oberter
Stokes 102

5—6:30 p.m.

Isobel Armstrong
"Many-Colored Glass: Romantic Poetry, Mediation, and Glass Culture"

David Peters Corbett
"Doubling, Haunting, and Presence: History and the Self in Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth."
Stokes 102

Saturday, March 27, 2010

9:30—10:00 a.m.

Breakfast
Sharpless Auditorium, Koshland Integrated Natural Science Center

10—11:30 a.m.

Jill Galvan
"The Victorian Post-Human: Media, Information, and the Seance."

Tom Gunning
"The Medium and the Message: Spiritualism and the Modern Apparatus"
Sharpless Auditorium, Koshland Integrated Natural Science Center

12—1:15 p.m.

Lunch
CPGC Café

1:30—3:30 a.m.

Dana Luciano
"Rejoicing in the Time to Come: Spiritualism's Spectral Erotics"

Pamela Thurschwell
"Ghost World's Spectral Mediations"
Sharpless Auditorium, Koshland Integrated Natural Science Center

3—3:30 p.m.

Coffee Break
Sharpless Auditorium, Koshland Integrated Natural Science Center

3:30—4:15 p.m.

Concluding Roundtable Discussion
Sharpless Auditorium, Koshland Integrated Natural Science Center


Speakers

Isobel Armstrong
Isobel Armstrong

Isobel Armstrong is an internationally renowned scholar and critic of nineteenth-century poetry, literary theory and women's writing. She is Emeritus Professor of English at Birbeck College, University of London. In addition, she is a Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of English Studies at the University of London and a Fellow of the British Academy. She has taught at Harvard University and Johns Hopkins University, where she was a Hinckley Professor. Her publications include The Radical Aesthetic (2000), Women's Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Gender and Genre (1999) and Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Politics and Poetics (1993). She is also a published poet. Her most recent book, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830-80, won the John Russell Lowell Prize.

Jill Galvan
Jill Galvan
Jill Galvan is an Assistant Professor of English at Ohio State University with a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. She specializes in Victorian literature and culture and twentieth-century British literature. She has written articles and given talks on George Eliot, Marie Corelli, Rudyard Kipling, Henry James, and Philip K. Dick, among others. Her book, The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the Occult, and Communication Technologies, was published by Cornell University Press in January.

Tom Gunning
Tom Gunning

Tom Gunning is a Professor in the Department of Art History and the Department of Cinema & Media Studies, as well as the Chair of the Department of Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Chicago. His numerous published works have concentrated on early cinema (from its invention in 1895 to WW I), as well as on the culture of modernity from which cinema arose. His concept of the "cinema of attractions" has related the development of cinema to forces other than storytelling, such as new experiences of space and time in modernity and an emerging modern visual culture. His books include The Films of Fritz Lang (2000) and D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (1991); he co-edited The Invention of the Devil? Religion and Early Cinema (1992).

Pamela Thurschwell
Pamela Thurschwell

Pamela Thurschwell is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Sussex, where she began teaching in 2007, having previously taught at University College London. She received her Ph.D. in English literature from Cornell University and was a research fellow in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature at Queens' College, Cambridge University. She has published two books: Sigmund Freud (2000) and Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880-1920 (2001). She has also co-edited The Victorian Supernatural (2004) and Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture (2005).

David Peters Corbett
David Peters Corbett

David Peters Corbett is Professor in the Department of History of Art at The University of York in the UK and serves as editor of the journal Art History. During 2008-2010 he is the recipient of a Major Research Fellowship awarded by the Leverhulme Trust for his research project "Landscape, City and Identity in American Painting, 1850-1930" and from November 2009 to May 2010 he is Terra Senior Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution's American Art Museum. Professor Corbett has been a Visiting Professor at Yale and a Visiting Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge. He has written several books including The World in Paint: Modern Art and Visuality in England (2004) and The Modernity of English Art (1997); he has also co-edited The Geographies of Englishness (2002) and English Art 1860-1914 (2000).

Dana Luciano
Dana Luciano

Dana Luciano is an Associate Professor of English and Director of Women's and Gender Studies at Georgetown University, where she has taught since 2004. She previously taught at Hamilton College. She is an expert on nineteenth-century American literature and culture, history of sexuality, LGBT and feminist studies and politics, queer theory, and LGBT film and culture. Her articles have appeared in publications such as GLQ, Arizona Quarterly, and American Literature as well as in numerous edited volumes. In 2008 she received the Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book for Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America.


Organizer

Rachel Oberter

Rachel Oberter is the Center's 2008-10 Mellon Post-Doc Fellow, holding a B.A. with Highest Honors in Art History from Williams College and earning her Ph.D. in History of Art from Yale University in May 2007. Her dissertation is entitled "Channeling Art: Spiritualism and the Visual Imagination in Victorian Britain," and her work has been published in the interdisciplinary journals Victorian Studies and Shofar. Rachel's research focuses on religion, gender, and the intersection of the visual and the verbal in 19th- and early 20th-century European art. She came to Haverford from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was a visiting scholar.

Rachel will teach "Picturing Religion: Spiritual Art in an Age of Materialism" in Fall 2009 for Independent College Programs, cross-listed in Religion; her course for the spring will be "Ocular Anxiety: Visuality in the Nineteenth Century." She will organize a Spring symposium about Visual Culture.