Kate Flint Visual Culture Events: April 16 and 17
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| Kate Flint presents a cultural history of flash photography and race (April 16) |
Interested in the relationship between words and images? Artsy or literary? Think of yourself as both?
Thanks to a generous gift by Sharyn Rosenblum to the English Department, as well as to the generosity of the Department of Fine Arts & Art History, as well as the Visiting Artist and Scholars Committee, we are delighted to announce two upcoming events designed specifically for you!
“Light Skinned: Flash Photography and the Representation of Race.”
*A talk by Kate Flint (Thursday, April 16, 6.15 pm; Smith Hall, Room 114)
AND
“Dickens and the intersection of literary and visual culture.”
*A seminar with Kate Flint (Friday, April 17, 10am; Rome Hall, 771)
Kate Flint is Provost Professor of English and Art History at the University of Southern California, where she is currently Chair of the Department of Art History. Prior to this, she taught at Bristol, Oxford, and Rutgers. Her research spans the C19th and C20th, and is both interdisciplinary and transatlantic.
Professor Flint’s areas of specialization include Victorian and early twentieth-century cultural and literary history, visual culture, women’s writing, gender studies, and transatlantic studies. Most recently, she has published The Transatlantic Indian 1776-1930 (Princeton University Press, 2008), which looks at the two-way relations between Native Americans and the British in the long C19th, and explores the intersections of modernity, nationhood, performance, and popular culture. Her previous works include The Victorians and The Visual Imagination(Cambridge University Press, 2000) and The Woman Reader, 1837-1914 (Oxford University Press, 1993), both of which won the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay prize, as well as Dickens (Harvester, 1985). She is General Editor of the Cambridge History of Victorian Literature(2012) and has co-edited Culture, Landscape and the Environment (Oxford University Press, 2000), and edited Victorian Love Stories (Oxford University Press, 1996) as well as a number of works by Dickens, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence and Anthony Trollope for Penguin Classics and OUP World’s Classics.
Professor Flint’s talk at GW will be from her current book-in-progress, Flash! Photography, Writing, and Surprising Illumination. According to Professor Flint, “This is a cultural history of flash photography, and is about technology, change, and what it means to make something – or someone – visible. I discuss paparazzi, documentary and news photographers and sleazy, violent, invasive uses of flash, and balance these with examples of wonder, beauty, and aesthetic experimentation. I ask questions about duration – how long is that “flash” in which something happens? I show, too, how poets and novelists borrow flash’s associations – not least, as the words and images I’ll talk about demonstrate – when dealing with the sudden illumination of black skin.”
Following Thursday’s talk, on Friday morning, April 17th, at 10am in Rome 771, Professor Flint will teach a seminar open to undergraduate and graduate students, as well as interested faculty, on the intersection of literary history and visual culture. She’ll do this through discussion of Dickens’s “Somebody’s Luggage.” Here’s a Project Gutenberg link to that document: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1414/1414-h/1414-h.htm.
Anyone interested in connections between written and visual works is encouraged to attend this event. Students–and faculty–who work outside their own disciplinary boundaries will be able to ask Professor Flint about the trajectory of her own career in English and Art History departments.
Coffee and muffins will be served at the morning seminar. Please come!
