Events

Upcoming

 

February

The Breakthrough: A Talk for Scholars, Artists, and Thinkers with Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams

Wednesday, February 4, 4:30pm | Elliston Poetry Room, 646 Langsam | Register
co-sponsored by the Department of English

This generative talk focuses on astonishment. We will explore what Queneau and his contemporaries called “potential literature.” Using a movement founded by writers and mathematicians as a reference point, the session will demonstrate how to harness potential and how to let it loose. Our rationale is that we routinely run the risk of getting in our own way—of confining ourselves to the concepts and vocabularies with which we set out. So, how do you outfox your own mind? Trick your way into the revelatory and surprise yourself into beauty? We will examine representative texts and experiment with the constraints that can help us discover transformative dimensions and insight. Our goal is to locate the places on the page where, unexpectedly and exquisitely, a boundary may be breached. Rachel Carson said, “The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.”The strategies here may be applied not only across genres but stretched across disciplines. In a world that stultifies and isolates, we—the artists, researchers, and philosophers—are called upon to stay curious, to invent new literatures and realities that startle us into connection. 

The Breath Between Words | Mind the Gap, part 1

Friday, February 13, 10–11:30am | Taft Research Center | Register 

A conversation between artists/scholars Leniqueca Welcome and Audra Wolowiec on the limits of language, the unsaid, and the undone. Drawing inspiration from Welcome’s collages that uncover and play with the “unseen” and Wolowiec’s installations and scores that transform breath, stutter, and pause into spaces of relation, playing with the “unheard,” this discussion will ask:  What does it mean to listen to the unsayable? What are the limits of what can be said or seen? How does the body through sound or writing becomes an instrument of history? 

A World in Fragments, a collaging workshop with Leniqueca Welcome

Friday, February 13, 12:30–2:30pm  | Taft Research Center | Register 

Explore collaging as a poet(h)ical visual research practice. Mimicking Welcome’s ethnographic method, participants will be invited to engage in a short life story listening exercise, after which they will create their own paper collage that reflects their engagement and embraces ambiguity and excess.

Sonic Poetics, a zine workshop with Audra Wolowiec

Friday, February 13, 3–5pm  | Taft Research Center | Register 

Create sound scores and visual poems by mining the writing of others. Through processes of errant editing and close reading, we will locate undercurrents of sound in the spirit of Maggie Nelson’s “Writing With, From, and For Others” and Trinh T. Min-ha’s concept of “speaking nearby.” Examples of sound scores and visual poems will be introduced through Audra's own work and process, and we will learn how to make a simple folded zine through collage and photocopy techniques.

What's the Point? a faculty media training workshop with Chris Hoff & Sam Harnett

 Monday, February 16, 12–2pm | Taft Research Center | Register

For more than 20 years, Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett have been working to translate academic work into media: first as reporters and producers for public radio, and now as independent audio producers. As Sam and Chris visit universities to perform their live audio show, they’re meeting with faculty to help them better communicate their work to the academic community, their administrations, media organizations, and the general public. In this 2-hour, hands-on session they will workshop media strategies tailored to faculty's research, area of expertise, and professional goals.

The World According to Sound

Monday, February 16, 7:30pm | Patricia Corbett Theater, 290 CCM Blvd. | Register
co-sponsored with the College of Arts & Sciences, College–Conservatory of Music, and Institute for Research in Sensing 

Surrounded by an octophonic ring of powerful loudspeakers, you are going to sit in the dark for 70 minutes, wear an eye mask, and be taken on a sonic trip that asks you to rethink the world through your ears instead of your eyes. You’ll hear everything from the vibrations of the Golden Gate Bridge, footsteps of ants, and ancient Latin, to the first piece of musique concrete, recordings of Berlin made in 1930, a sonified essay about the gendering of glial cells, and the theory of how push buttons and Tupperware act as media objects. Through these sound pieces, the show examines how our attention is often directed toward very specific modes of understanding, while other ways of knowing are left out. The performance will be followed by a Q&A with co-producers Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett.

The "Destruction"—and "Reconquest"—of Louisville: Strikes, Militias, and Blue-Gray Reunion in Gilded Age America with Matt Stanley 

Thursday, February 19, 3pm | Taft Research Center | Register
Co-sponsored with the Department of History 

This talk explores how business and political elites in the aftermath of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 leveraged Civil War veteranhood to reassert control over workplaces, boost industrial development, and promote a range of pro-owner, anti-worker ideas.  In Louisville, those direct efforts led to the reformation of the Louisville Legion, an upper crust militia and de facto anti-labor instrument, and culminated in the city's 1895 "Blue-Gray" encampment and the Legion's celebrated role in the Spanish-American War.  Idealized as an institution in which elite Union and Confederate veterans clasped hands in the name of "public order," the Legion came to serve as a powerful symbol of North-South accommodation in a mercurial border region whose civic leaders had long prided themselves on being the nation's political as well as geographic "middle."  The Legion's form and function--its social makeup and synergy with emergent business owners' associations--also underscored the central role of capital organization and anti-labor repression, in the Ohio Valley and beyond, to the broader process of sectional reconciliation.

Writing Collaboratively, Publishing Independently | Mind the Gap, part 2

Friday, February 20, 12–1:30pm | Elliston Poetry Room, 646 Langsam | Register 

A conversation on the (a)symmetries of collaborating and publishing Glossary of Insomnia with anthropologist and co-author Alexandra Dantzer, interlocutor-turned-friend and co-author Aleksandar Kecman, and friend-turned-publisher Micah Weber. Discussing the process of the book’s creation over three years and across two continents, they will share their collaborative writing methods and discuss the broader landscape of independent publishing. 

A Community Agreement | Mind the Gap, part 3 

Friday, February 27, 11am | 5401 Aronoff, DAAP | Register

A conversation between artists/designers Eric Von Haynes and Julia Warner on printmaking as craft and practice of community engagement and community building. Discussing recent projects that center mutual aid, slow media, and attentive listening, they will explore design’s role in creating minor archives and pose questions to the audience and one another about the transformative (and transformed) role artists and designers can play. 

 

Interwoven Spaces: Time, Pattern, and Care, a two-day community printing workshop with Eric Von Haynes and Julia Warner 

Day 1: Friday, February 27, 2–4pm | DAAP Printmaking Lab, 6335 Aronoff | Register
Day 2: Saturday, February 28, 10am–1:30pm | Cereal Box, 1645 Blue Rock Street, Studio 406, Northside | Register

In this two-day workshop, drawing from readings such as “Three Key Elements of Mutual Aid,” participants will interpret a shared space and collaboratively build a layered artwork that embodies a collective agreement and shared purpose. Participants will use patterns, collage, text, and visual marks to create a collaborative wall reflecting Community Care and Collective Power. Each participant will produce a 10×10-inch segment that contributes to a unified grid, collectively forming a wall-scale composition. This workshop emphasizes process as much as outcome, encouraging experimentation, iteration, and collaborative response. Day One focuses on developing and refining designs, while Day Two is dedicated to printing, overprinting, and assembling the final collaborative wall display. Space is limited and registration required. All materials provided. 

Writing to Images, a writing workshop with Tina Campt 

Thursday, March 5, 12–2pm | Taft Research Center | Register

In her workshop, Campt will engage participants in her practice of “writing to images” and the ways in which correspondence can be a generative model for research and writing on art, visual culture and much more.

Afterimages: Grieving in Fractured Time with Tina Campt 

Thursday, March 5, 6pm, The Mercantile Library, 414 Walnut Street, 11th Fl. | Register

Grief fundamentally fractures time. It situates us simultaneously in time and out of it. It is always deeply personal, yet it is also utterly universal. We experience it as individuals, yet it is also the great equalizer that summons us to face the limits of our mortality and the relationships that sustain us. In her talk, Tina Campt will present selections from her forthcoming book, Afterimages: Grieving in Fractured Time, which tells the story of how writing to art became a survival tactic that helped her grapple with intense experiences of personal grief during a period of pervasive social grievance. Focusing on what she describes as the exemplary psychic, temporal, and sensory structure of grief, the afterimage, her talk will explore how Black contemporary artists create artworks that speak beyond what we see and give expression to the absent presences that constitute some of the most palpable manifestations of grief and mourning. 

Writing, Feeling, and the History of Flow with Sarah Mesle 

Wednesday, March 11, 12–2pm | Valentine Overlook, 5280 Clifton Court Hall | Register

This talk puts two problems in dialogue: first, the private misery many academics experience on a given day spent hoping our writing will “flow,” and second, the public challenge of explaining why academic expertise matters now, when so many of higher education’s resources have been blocked. These two problems bridge several perceived divides: individual and social, emotional and rational, psychological and political. Such divides are so familiar we can forget they have histories. But, they do. Indeed, the river city of Cincinnati— with its particular relation to the global flows of water, immigrants, industrial products, and ideas—has played a significant role in those histories. Taking Cincinnati as a case study, and drawing on her recent book Reasons and Feelings: Writing for the Humanities Now, Mesle explores how personal feelings have material, trackable, and transformable connections to our communities. She further proposes that humanists’ skills— such as our ability to historicize seemingly ephemeral experiences, like bad writing feelings— make us uniquely suited to addressing the broader crises of our period. 

 

Openings, Audience, and the Everyday, a writing workshop with Sarah Mesle 

Wednesday, March 11, 4–6pm | Register

This workshop invites participants to share and learn strategies for one of writing’s ongoing challenges: starting. It will take up the joint problems of first finding the time (and motivation, and conviction) to start writing, and then, once we’ve done so, styling the words on the page so they’ll reach the audiences we care about. This workshop will draw on Sarah Mesle’s experiences as a writer, editor, and professor of writing to give practical advice for writers and teachers. Participants are invited to bring a notebook, a calendar, a laptop if they’d like, and a digital version of an opening paragraph(s)—no more than 250 words— of a piece of writing they’re working on, or that they admire, for our collective discussion.