Posted by vrcvanderbilt on Monday, December 4, 2017 in Conferences, Events, HART, Lectures, News, VRC.

Vivien Fryd, professor of history of art, will deliver a lecture addressing “Equal Time in Equal Space: Ending the Silence about Incest” at the University of Paderborn, Germany, on December 7.  Her presentation is part of a two-day interdisciplinary and international conference entitled “Narratives and Mental Health: Fragmentations, Disruptions and Silences.”

The December 7-8 conference, sponsored by the University of Paderborn and the University of Gothenburg, offers a forum for cross- and interdisciplinary debate among scholars and practitioners working in diverse fields: literary and cultural studies, sociology, philosophy, theology, psychoanalysis (or psychology in general), art history (including the history of architecture), film studies, and political theory.

The College Art Association (CAA) recently awarded Fryd a $5000 Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant for her book “Against Our Will”: Sexual Trauma in American Art Since 1970 (Pennsylvania State University Press, forthcoming December 2018). Since 2005 the Wyeth Foundation for American Art has supported the publication of books on American art and visual studies through these publication grants administered by CAA.

Fryd provides the reader with a social history of the larger cultural world surrounding the two traumatic subjects of rape and incest that had been purposefully ignored within academic art history and within the culture at large. In her book she demonstrates that for more than forty years a key group of American artists have insisted upon ending the silence and have contributed to an anti-rape, anti-incest counternarrative, which she discusses as an anti-rape and anti-incest cycle.