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2010 Working Group Activities


Funded Corridor Activities by Cluster

PHILOSOPHY [PHI]

PHI3: Upstate NY Early Modern Workshop and Speaker Series
March 6, 2010: Descartes Day: A Cartesian Colloquium (Organizers: Kara Richardson, Philosophy, SU and Andrew Chignell, Philosophy, CU).
‘A Cartesian Colloquium’ focused on recent work on Descartes’ metaphysics and philosophy of mind. It featured a keynote address by Raffaella De Rosa of Rutgers University, as well as papers by Shoshana Brassfield, Colin McLear of Cornell University, and Kurt Smith of Bloomsburg University. Benjamin Hill of the University of Western Ontario, Kris McDaniel of Syracuse University, Sydney Penner of Cornell University and Kimberly Blessing of Buffalo State were the commentators. The event attracted about twenty-five participants from the upstate/central region.

LINGUISTICS [LIN]

LIN 4: State of the Art Workshop
April 23-24, 2010 (Organizer: Jaklin Kornfilt, Linguistics, SU) Syracuse University.
The two-day workshop focused on the interfaces between syntax, morphology, and phonology. Visiting scholars and local faculty in the three corridor institutions served as discussants.

INTERFACE OF HUMANITIES AND SCIENCES/TECHNOLOGY [HST]

HST2: Mellon CNY Digital Humanities Corridor Series
March 17, 2010 Lecture, Designing Culture: Digital Humanities and Technological Innovation by Anne Balsamo, University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, part of the Mellon CNY Digital Humanities Corridor Series (Organizers: Timothy Murray, Society for the Humanities/Comparative Literature, CU, Tom DiPiero Gregg Lambert, Humanities, SU), Cornell University.
Balsamo is Professor of Interactive Media in the School of Cinematic Arts, and of Communications in the Annenberg School of Communications. From 2004-7 she served as the Director of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. Her work focuses on the relationship between culture and technology.

April 4, 2010 Lecture, Close and Distant Readings: Archives, Visualization, and Other Matters, by Laura Mandell, Professor of English and Armstrong Interactive Media Studies at Miami University of Ohio, part of the Mellon CNY Digital Humanities Corridor Series (Organizers: Timothy Murray, Society for the Humanities/Comparative Literature, CU, Gregg Lambert, Humanities, SU), Cornell University.
Mandell is a leading figure in the fast-developing world of the digital humanities. Associate Director of NINES (Nineteenth-Century Scholarship online), Co-Director of 18th Connect, and Technical Editor for Romantic circles, Laura Mandell participates in creating and encoding the digital archive.

April 14, 2010: Lecture, Choreography as Mobile Architecture by Erin Manning, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec (Organizers: Timothy Murray, Romance Studies, CU, Thomas DiPiero, Art and Art History, UR, Gregg Lambert, Humanities, SU), Cornell University.
Manning holds a Research Chair at Concordia, where she explores the intersections between art practice and philosophy through the matrix of the sensing body in movement.

HST 3: October 1, 2010: Digital Witness: A Symposium on Human Rights in the Era of Media Convergence (Organized by Roger Hallas and Tula Goenka), Syracuse University
This symposium will bring three internationally recognized experts in the field of human rights media to Syracuse to discuss the ongoing innovations and futures implications of this increasing turn to new media by human rights activism and extend the Human Rights Film Festival into vital new areas of human rights media. The participants are Mallika Dutt (Breakthrough), Sam Gregory (WITNESS), and Fred Ritchin (NYU) who are both media professionals and scholars.

VISUAL ARTS AND CULTURES [VAC]

VAC 7: Graduate Student Forum Imagining America (IA) SU Humanities Center Graduate Student Forum on Publicly Engaged Scholarship (Organizer: Kevin Bott, SU-Imagining America)
Organized in partnership with Imagining America and The SU Graduate School, a graduate student conference on publicly engaged scholarship will take place on SU campus end of spring semester 2010 and will include participation of graduate students and faculty from the CNY Humanities Corridor institutions.

VAC 9: May 2010: Subvention Funding for Sighting Memory: Rhetoric, Remembrance, and Visual Form [summary publication project] (Organizer: Anne Demo)

In October 2008, the Visual Culture Cluster of the Mellon Central New York Humanities Corridor held the Visible Memories Conference, which featured three plenary sessions, a film screening, keynote lecture, graduate seminar, and over twenty-two competitive panels with eighty-two presenters. Based on the conference’s success, Anne Demo and Brad Vivian (conference organizers) put together an edited volume based on the strongest submissions from the interdisciplinary conference. In May 2010they submitted the manuscript to University of Illinois Press, which has requested exclusive review. Because the volume will feature more than 50 images, subvention funding was approved to offset the reproduction costs.

VAC10: Workshop Vision, Power, and Civic Life (Organizer: Kendall Phillips, Communication and Rhetorical Studies, SU)
November 5-6, 2010: Lecture and seminar/workshops for graduate students and faculty with keynote speaker Ariella Azoulay.
Professor Azoulay’s work connects to a number of cross-institutional initiatives including the Syracuse University Public Memory Project [2008] and the year-long Smith Symposium on Conflict. Professor Azoulay teaches visual culture and contemporary philosophy at the Program for Culture and Interpretation, Bar Ilan University. She is the author of The Civil Contract of Photography (2008, Zone Boks), Atto di Stato 1967-2007 (Vruno Mondadori, 2008, in Italian), Once Upon A Time: Photography Following Walter Benjamin(Bar Ilan University Press, in Hebrew, 2006), and Death’s Showcase: The Power of Image in Contemporary Democracy (MIT Press, 2001), which was awarded the 2002 Infinity Award for Writing presented by the International Center for Photography for excellence in the field of photography.

VAC11: Global Aesthetics: Discourse, Practice, Theory (Organizer: Tim Murray, Society for the Humanities, CU)
October 14-16, 2010: Cornell will host an international conference with artists, curators, and theorists from across the globe. The list of international guests includes artists and curators who emphasize the promise of digital platforms in dialogue with more traditional concerns of the arts and humanities. Invited participants include: Guillermo Kuitca, artist, Argentina; Shin-Yi Yang, curator, China; Yao Jui-Chung, artist, Taiwan; Brenda Croft, artist/curator, Australia; Grace Quintinalla, artist and Director, Fundación Pedro Meyer, Mexico; Yukiko Shikata, curator, Japan; Tejumola Olaniyan, critic, Africa/US; Kay Dickinson, critic, UK. Corridor faculty Gregg Lambert (SU) and Sharon Willis (UR) will participate as panelists and conference will feature video-streaming of selected lectures to the Syracuse and Rochester campuses.

VAC 12: Theatrical Workshop: Cry for Peace: Voices from the Congo
December 9-11, 2010: (Organizer: Kyle Bass, Syracuse Stage), created by Ping Chong, Jeannette K. Watson Visiting Collaborator in the SU Humanities Center.
Approximately 200 Congolese, refugees from the genocide in the Congo, now live in Syracuse. Their numbers represent 12 different tribes with a blood-soaked past hanging between them. Although they’ve escaped the conflict in the Congo, while they’ve achieved a delicate unity here, tensions and mistrust remain as justice has not been realized in their homeland. Internationally renowned theatre artist Ping Chong, writer and director of Syracuse Stage’s Tales from the Salt, returns to Syracuse to create a new piece of documentary theatre based on interviews with members of Syracuse’s Congolese community.

MUSICOLOGY/MUSIC HISTORY [MMH]

MMH 4: Brave New Works
January 29, 2010: Brave New Works, Concerts and Master Classes (Organized by Andrew Waggoner, Music, SU and Robert Morris, Music, Eastman)
The ten-member Brave New Works new music ensemble returned to Central New York to present a concert in Ithaca on January 29. Members of the ensemble gave master classes to and performed compositions written by CNY Humanities Corridor students.

MMH 5:
April 9, 2010 Conference Replay: The Syracuse University Symposium on Sound Sampling (Organizer: Sean Quimby, E.S. Bird Library, SU) Held at Syracuse University’s Lubin House in New York City, the symposium gathered expertson historical recorded sound collections, sampling, and copyright involving recording artists together with industry representatives and academic copyright experts to discuss the theory, legality, and mechanics of musical sampling. The key-note lecture was by senior Copyright Counsel at Google, Inc., William Patry.

MMH8: September 14-15, 2010: Music of Conflict and Reconciliation: Power and Resistance in the Second World War (Organizer: Stephen Meyer, SU)
As part of the larger symposium entitled Music of Conflict and Reconciliation, the musicologists in the Department of Art and Music Histories, in collaboration with the Eastman School of Music and Cornell University, will be hosting a cluster of events on the topic of music in World War II. This two-day symposium will include invited speakers, respondents drawn from the three Mellon Humanities Corridor institutions, a seminar for faculty and graduate students, and musical performances. Speakers: Deborah Wong, Professor of Music, UC Riverside, “Music in Internment Camps.” Pamela Potter, Professor of Musicology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, “Music in Nazi Germany.” Respondents: Sanford Sternlicht, Professor of English, SU and Laurie Marhoefer, Assistant Professor of History SU Concert: Eastend String Quartet, Eastman Conservatory: A concert of works by Shostakovich as part ofMusic of Conflict and Reconciliation: Power and Resistance in World War II.

November 15, 2010: Music of Conflict and Reconciliation: The War in Iraq (Organizer: Amanda Eubanks Winkler, Department of Art and Music Histories, SU)
As part of the larger symposium entitled Music of Conflict and Reconciliation, the musicologists in the Department of Art and Music Histories, in collaboration with the Eastman School of Music and Cornell University, will be hosting a cluster of events on the topic of music and the war in Iraq. This two-day symposium will include invited speakers, respondents drawn from the three Mellon Humanities Corridor institutions, a seminar for faculty and graduate students, and musical performances. Speakers: Jonathan Pieslak, Associate Professor of Music, CUNY, “For Duty, Honor and Country: The Recruiting Music of the US Military and the Islamic State of Iraq.” J. Martin Daughtry, Assistant Professor of Music, NYU, “A Painful and Necessary Noise: Thoughts on the Sonic Dimension of Operation Iraqi Freedom.” Concert: The Society for New Music Presents Simon Shaheen, Arab-American musician/composer. Guest Artist: Simon Shaheen, Arab-American musician/composer (Fantasie for oud & string quartet & a solo improvisation), plus music by Persian born composer Reza Vali (Zand with Simon & string trio & Set No. 11B for string quartet) and Egyptian/Canadian composer Karim Al-Zand Lamentations on the Disasters of War, after the etchings by Goya, 2006. The Society for New Music String Sextet will join with Simon Shaheen on oud with projections of etchings by Goya as a backdrop.

MMH9: Music of Conflict and Reconciliation: The War in Iraq (Organizer: Amanda Eubanks Winkler, Department of Art and Music Histories, SU)
As part of the larger symposium entitled Music of Conflict and Reconciliation, the musicologists in the Department of Art and Music Histories, in collaboration with the Eastman School of Music and Cornell University, will be hosting a cluster of events on the topic of music and the war in Iraq. This two-day symposium will include invited speakers, respondents drawn from the three Mellon Humanities Corridor institutions, a seminar for faculty and graduate students, and musical performances.

CULTURES AND RELIGION [CR]

CR3: Summer, 2010: Conference and book project: Islam & International Humanitarian Law (Organizer: William Banks, SU)
The project has two component parts: (1.) a summer Dialogue and Refinement Session for the Cambridge UP book, The Role of Islam in International Humanitarian Law; and (2.) support for staff and new technology-sharing initiative for interviewing and data collection between INSCT and SU Humanities Center. The Role of Islam in International Humanitarian Law explores from interdisciplinary perspectives the many ways in which Islam, Islamic jurisprudence, and Islamic approaches to warfare affect international humanitarian law (IHL) today—including the challenges posed by asymmetric warfare to traditional norms governing international conflict.