Vanderbilt University History of Art Blog

Three VU Professors Receive SEC Visiting Faculty Travel Grant

Betsey Robinson, associate professor of history of art, Robin Jensen, Luce Chancellor’s Professor of the History of Christian Art and Worship, and David Michelson, assistant professor of early Christianity at the Divinity School, received a grant from the Southeastern Conference (SEC) Visiting Faculty Travel Grant Program to participate in a regional workshop on Cultures of the Late Antique Mediterranean. The workshop will be held at the host institution, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, on October 31-November 1. Participants will present current research, plan future workshops, and discuss possibilities for collaboration in teaching and research.

Robinson, also affiliated with the department of classical studies, will address “The Culture of Water in Late Antique Corinth: Recent Work and Future Currents.” Since 1997 she has conducted research at the Corinth Excavations of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, focusing on water supply, architecture, and works of art in context. Her book, Histories of Peirene: A Corinthian Fountain in Three Millennia (Princeton: ASCSA 2011), won the 2011 PROSE Prize for Archaeology and Anthropology. Jensen, also professor of history of art, will present “The Visual Turn in Patristic Scholarship: Past Missteps and New Promise.” Most of her research and publication focuses on the interpretation of early Christian art and architecture in light of its theological significance, ritual performance, and cultural context.

Michelson’s topic is “New Models for Collaborative Research on Late Antiquity: The Digital Humanities Tools of Syriaca.org.” Michelson, also affiliated with the department of classical studies, is investigating how neglected historical sources in Syriac (a dialect of Aramaic) offer new perspectives on the history of Christianity. To make the history of Syriac sources and culture better known, Michelson is directing the creation of an online reference project, The Syriac Reference Portal.

“Hopefully the workshop will be just the first of a number of new opportunities for scholars from the Southeast and South who work on any aspect of Late Antiquity—art and architecture, literature and languages, history, and religion,” said Robinson. “We hope to build on work already done in the UT Seminar in Late Antiquity sponsored by the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.”

The Southeastern Conference (SEC) Visiting Faculty Travel Grant Program is intended to enhance faculty collaboration that stimulates scholarly initiatives between SEC member universities. It gives faculty from one SEC institution the opportunity to travel to another SEC campus to exchange ideas, develop grant proposals, conduct research, consult with faculty and/or students, offer lectures or symposia, or engage in whatever activities are agreeable to the visitor and host unit.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on October 28, 2013 in Events, HART, VRC

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Bonna Wescoat to Lecture on Parthenon Ionic Frieze on October 22

Bonna Wescoat, professor of classical art and archaeology at Emory University, will give the first Archaeological Institute of America lecture of the academic year on Tuesday, October 22, at 7 pm at the Nashville Parthenon in Centennial Park. Her lecture is titled “Seeing is Believing: Nashville Parthenon Sheds New Light on the Visibility of the Parthenon Frieze.”

Her presentation is based on an experiment she conducted with Emory graduate students to test the visibility of the Parthenon Ionic frieze by recreating and installing part of the west frieze, in particular, the northwest corner, on the Nashville Parthenon. Using painted canvas panels, Wescoat and her students tested the visibility with both photography and surveys of passersby in Centennial Park in November 2012. They addressed the longstanding question: Why was such an ornate frieze located in a seemingly obscure position high on the outside wall of the Parthenon?

A video documenting this experiment was produced in conjunction with her graduate seminar on ancient Greek architectural decoration. “The results will amaze and delight you, giving you the chance to see a portion of our Parthenon that was never completed,” said Barbara Tsakirgis, professor of classical studies and secretary of the Nashville Archaeological Institute of America.

Wescoat holds degrees from Oxford University (D.Phil., M.Phil.), the Institute of Archaeology, University of London (M.A.), and Smith College (A.B.). Her research interests are ancient Greek art and architecture, particularly sacred architecture, and digital modeling to investigate the interaction of landscape, architecture, and ritual experience.

In addition to The Temple of Athena at Assos (Oxford 2012), she has recently completed Samothrace: volume 9, The Monuments of the Eastern Hill, which will be published by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Her work now centers on the Sanctuary of the Great Gods on Samothrace, where she first worked as a graduate student years ago.

Free and open to the public, the lecture is sponsored by the Nashville Society of the Archaeological Institute of America and Vanderbilt’s department of classical studies. Those who plan to attend the lecture are encouraged to call the Nashville Parthenon at 615.862.8431 to reserve a seat.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on October 21, 2013 in Events, HART, VRC

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Space 204 Exhibit Celebrates Susan DeMay and Forty Years in Clay

Vanderbilt’s Department of Art welcomes an exhibition celebrating four decades of art by Susan DeMay, senior lecturer in ceramics. Career Highlights: 40 Years in Clay will be on display in Space 204 from Thursday, October 17, through Friday, November 22.

DeMay will present a gallery talk on Thursday, October 17, at 3 pm prior to the opening reception from 4 to 6 pm. Recognized for her distinctive glazes and glazing techniques, DeMay has brought together more than 40 works from public, private, and her own collections, including vessels and wall pieces, sculptural ceramics, and her recent mixed media work.

Also on view will be the burial urns of friend and mentor Sylvia Hyman, an internationally acclaimed ceramicist from Nashville. Hyman, who died late last year, had years ago requested that DeMay create her burial urns, incorporating the ashes from her cremation into the glazes. DeMay, an educator at Vanderbilt since 1985, has conducted workshops and exhibited extensively throughout the region. The author and subject of numerous articles for national and international publications, she is featured in five different Lark Book series. The preface of the latest book, The Best of 500 Ceramics: Celebrating a Decade in Clay, includes this statement: “Sixty-four prominent contemporary ceramic artists served as jurors for this special edition, each selecting what he or she found to be the most technically masterful, stylistically inventive, and historically important pieces featured in the Lark’s 500 Series.”

DeMay is also the owner of a studio production company, Made by deMay, which she started in 1985 after completing her master’s degree in Art at Tennessee Tech’s Appalachian Center for Crafts in Smithville, Tennessee. “The supportive and nurturing environment there helped me realize that I needed to set up my own operation,” said DeMay.

Several lines from Made by deMay have been sold through the Smithsonian Museum stores. Originally from upstate New York, DeMay received her undergraduate degrees in art and education from Eckerd College in Saint Petersburg, Florida, and her MS degree from George Peabody College in Nashville, the last class before the college merged with Vanderbilt in 1985.

Space 204 is the second floor gallery of the E. Bronson Ingram Studio Art Center, 1204 25th Avenue South at Garland Avenue on the Vanderbilt campus. Sponsored by the Department of Art, all Space 204 exhibitions are free and open to the public. Metered parking is available on Garland Avenue, alongside the Ingram Art Center. For more information, call the Department of Art at 615-343-7241.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on October 15, 2013 in Events, HART, VRC

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Rebecca VanDiver to Present Paper at American Art Symposium

Since the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, Africa has played an important role—albeit shifting, contested, and often unseen—in the history of art of the United States. Rebecca VanDiver, senior lecturer in modern and contemporary art history, will present a paper, Routes to Roots: Loïs Mailou Jones’s Engagement with Africa and the African Diaspora, 1938-70, at an October 4-5 symposium at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. This symposium, American Art in Dialogue with Africa and Its Diaspora, will highlight new research on this transatlantic dialogue, from nineteenth-century portraiture to American modernism, from the Harlem Renaissance to the contemporary art world.

In the early 1980s Loïs Mailou Jones (1905-1998), an African American artist and Howard University art professor, compiled a list of her African-themed paintings, which she titled Africa Series. VanDiver’s paper considers Jones’s encounters with Africa and the African diaspora in the thirty-year period (roughly 1938-70) that is absent from her list. First on that list was Les Fétiches, completed during a Parisian sabbatical. This 1938 painting, now in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, has arguably become her signature work.

VanDiver’s analysis of the paintings Jones produced from 1938 to 1970 “not only reveals the marriage of African and African diasporic themes on her canvases, but also her preoccupation with picturing the various faces of the African diaspora.” An investigation into her pedagogy and research agenda underscores how one can view Jones as “a visual interlocutor who was committed to the visualization of the black diaspora—its objects, its peoples, and its traditions,” VanDiver wrote. She also suggests that Jones’s shift to the medium of collage during this period “speaks to larger cultural debates concerning the multi-faceted nature of blackness and Africa’s role within its construction at mid-century.”

Prior to her appointment at Vanderbilt, VanDiver was a pre-doctoral fellow at the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies. Her research centers on articulations of blackness in twentieth century African American art, African American artistic engagements with Africa, and images of Africa in Western art and visual culture.

The symposium is organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in partnership with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art and the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Part of the Terra Symposia on American Art in a Global Context, it is supported by a generous grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art.

*Loïs Mailou Jones. Les Fétiches, 1938, oil on linen, 25 1/2 x 21 1/4 inches (64.7 x 54.0 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on October 1, 2013 in HART, VRC

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Fine Arts Gallery Announces Latest Exhibit and Opening Reception

The Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery celebrates the opening of their latest exhibit, Difficult Art and the Liberal Arts Imagination, with a reception on Friday, September 27, from 5 to 7 pm in Cohen Hall on the Peabody campus. Martin Rapisarda, associate dean of the College of Arts and Science, who curated the exhibit, will make opening remarks at 6 pm. The reception will be held in conjunction with The Ingram Commons’ Fall for the Arts.

Drawn from the University gallery’s extensive permanent collection, the exhibit seeks to highlight works that confront the viewer with questions about the status of art, its meaning, and its purpose. Inspired by George Steiner’s essay “On Difficulty,” which explores the various ways works of art in their impenetrable opaqueness resist comprehension and immediacy, the exhibition is a selection of works that are “difficult” in that they defy comprehension. Often these works of art do not fit into ready-made categories and test or expand assumptions about what constitutes art. Some of the featured works refer or react to other works that may not be immediately obvious or known to the viewer, arising out of some “other” tradition.

Artists represented in this exhibition whose works dislocate, confront, and goad our experience of their works include Salvador Dalí, Eugène Delacroix, Donna Ferrato, Jean Hélion, Lee Krasner, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, Rembrandt van Rijn, Auguste Rodin, Edward Steichen, and Kara Walker. On view through December 5, Difficult Art and the Liberal Arts Imagination is presented to coincide with the fall 2013 Vanderbilt Commons Reading, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be by Andrew Delbanco. Vanderbilt faculty and staff selected several of the works in the show, and some are presented with commentary explaining why the work was chosen to represent “difficult” art.

Visitors to the gallery are also invited to view a special exhibition of Tapestry Suite by Creighton Michael, MA’76, on display through Sunday, October 6, in the rear gallery space of Cohen Memorial Hall. Seven digital drawings, selected from Michael’s larger Tapestry series, were created by the artist in honor of Milan Mihal, professor of fine arts emeritus, and donated to the Fine Arts Gallery by the artist.

Michael expressed his gratitude to Mihal for introducing him to “the wondrous beauty and serene sensitivity of the Far East.” He also cites his experiences in Mihal’s class as an influence for much of his artistic practice over the past forty years. Michael’s drawings will take on special significance during Vanderbilt’s Homecoming/Reunion Weekend, October 4-6.

Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 11 am to 4 pm, and Saturday and Sunday, 1-5 pm. The gallery will be closed on October 10-13 for fall break and November 23-December 1 for Thanksgiving. Free and open to the public, the Fine Arts Gallery is housed in Cohen Memorial Hall, 1220 21st Avenue South, on the western edge of the Peabody College campus. Parking is available in Lot 95 outside Cohen Hall, off 21st Avenue South on the Peabody campus and across from Medical Center East.

*Eugène Delacroix (French, 1798-1863). Méphistophélès dans les airs (Mephistopheles in the Air), from Faust, Tragédie de M. de Goethe, 1828. Lithograph, 10 3/4 x 9 inches. Vanderbilt Art Association Acquisition Fund Purchase, 1983.004.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on September 23, 2013 in Events, Fine Arts Gallery, HART, VRC

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Four HART Professors Celebrate Service Anniversaries

The History of Art Department recognizes four professors who are celebrating service anniversaries this year. Robin Jensen, the Luce Chancellor’s Professor of the History of Christian Art and Worship, and Christopher Johns, the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Professor of Art, have each taught at Vanderbilt for ten years. Mireille Lee, assistant professor of history of art, and Betsey Robinson, associate professor of history of art, are both celebrating their fifth year of teaching at the university.

Robin Jensen teaches courses in our department and at the Divinity School. Most of her research and publications focus on the interpretation of early Christian art and architecture in light of its theological significance, ritual performance, and cultural context. Her most recent books are Living Water: Images, Symbols, and Settings of Early Christian Baptism (Brill Publishers, 2011), and Baptismal Imagery in Early Christianity (Baker Academic Press, 2012). She has co-authored a book with her husband, Patout Burns, The Practice of Christianity in Roman Africa (Eerdmans, early 2014), and is completing a monograph on early Christian iconography titled The Epiphanic Character of Early Christian Art.

Her courses include introductions to Jewish and Christian pictorial hermeneutics; visual representations of God, the Trinity, Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the saints; the religious art of late antiquity; and the art of the early Roman Empire. She also teaches an introduction to liturgy and regularly offers courses on sacred time and space. This semester Jensen is teaching Art of the Empire from Constantine to Justinian, an interdisciplinary study of the art and architecture in the Roman Empire (fourth through sixth centuries) in the context of political and religious transformations during that era.

Fascinated by the relationship between art and politics, particularly in the context of art patronage, Christopher Johns attempts to explain the public motivations for commissioning works of art in early modern Europe. He has published books and articles on the relationship between art and politics, the history of art academies and patronage, cultural exchanges between Europe and East Asia in the eighteenth century, and on the role of religion in art. His book Visual Culture of Catholic Enlightenment: Papal Art in Eighteenth-Century Rome is under contract at Penn State University Press, and China and the Church: Chinoiserie in Global Context is to be published by the University of Washington Press.

His broader research interests include the development of museums, and art, travel and the global commodities exchange in the eighteenth century, above all the trade in porcelain. This semester he is teaching a seminar, Romanticism and the British National Landscape, 1800-1850, that explores the Romantic landscape tradition in Britain from its origins in the last decades of the eighteenth century until its last flowering in the art of Joseph Mallord William Turner.

Mireille Lee, also an assistant professor of classical studies, teaches courses on the art and archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean, including Egypt. Lee is on leave for the academic year 2013-2014. A specialist in Greek art and archaeology, she has a particular interest in the construction of gender in ancient visual and material culture.

She has published widely on the social functions of dress in ancient Greece as they can be reconstructed from the visual, archaeological, and textual sources. Her first monograph, Bodies, Dress, and Identity in Ancient Greece, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2014. She is also a co-editor of Bodies and Boundaries in Graeco-Roman Antiquity (De Gruyter, 2009).

Betsey Robinson, also an associate professor of classical studies, recently received the Chancellor’s Award for Research. Chancellor Nicholas S. Zeppos recognized Robinson for her groundbreaking research in classical archaeology and art history, citing her monograph, Histories of Peirene: A Corinthian Fountain in Three Millennia (American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 2011), which won the prestigious PROSE Award for Archaeology and Anthropology by the Professional Scholarly Publishing division of the Association of American Publishers.

Her current project, Divine Prospects: Mounts Helicon and Parnassus in Ancient Experience and Imagination, is a book-length manuscript on Hellenistic and Roman perceptions of, and engagement within, Greek landscapes and sanctuaries. Ongoing research considers Roman-era mosaics in Corinth, and the history of archaeological excavation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Robinson teaches courses in the art, architecture, and archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean world. Her primary interests include Greek and Roman architecture and art, ancient cities and sanctuaries, and landscapes—actual, imagined, and as represented in ancient art and literature. This semester she is teaching a course on Roman art and architecture and an advanced seminar on Roman painting and mosaics.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on September 23, 2013 in HART, VRC

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Alumna to Lecture on Modernist Architect Edward Durell Stone

*A video of Mary Anne Hunting’s October 3 lecture is available here.

“Colossus, visionary, giant”—these are just some of the superlatives used to describe modernist architect Edward Durell Stone in his prime in the late 1950s when he emerged as one of the first “celebrity architects,” said architectural historian Mary Anne Hunting in a recent interview about her book, Edward Durell Stone: Modernism’s Populist Architect (W. W. Norton & Company, 2012).

Hunting, a 1980 graduate of Vanderbilt, will present a lecture entitled “Edward Durell Stone, Modernist Architect: From Vanderbilt to Kennedy Center” on Thursday, October 3, at 4 pm in 203 Cohen Hall on the Peabody campus. Her talk will be followed by a book signing in the atrium.

“The diversity and scope of his architecture knew no bounds—from master plans for entire university campuses, urban revitalizations, and foreign government complexes to hospitals, cultural centers, museums, airports, and banks, not to mention extensive residential work,” wrote Hunting. “At his peak, Stone was acknowledged as one of the most distinguished and progressive American architects with a huge and prestigious workload.”

A close friend of Frank Lloyd Wright, Stone was selected by Vanderbilt Chancellor Harvie Branscomb in 1946 to devise a master plan to guide all future development of the university’s 79-acre campus. “Stone’s boldly conceived plan was enthusiastically received and led to his appointment as the university’s consulting and supervising architect for the next ten years, with varying degrees of involvement in site improvements as well as with design and construction, for such buildings as the student union, gymnasium, engineering building, and various dormitories,” wrote Hunting.

Hunting received her doctorate from the City University of New York’s Graduate Center where Kevin Murphy, the new chair of Vanderbilt’s history of art department, was her advisor and “devoted mentor,” said Hunting. She earned a master’s degree in the history of decorative arts and design from the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum/Parsons School of Design. She is now an independent scholar living in New York City.

“First in her dissertation, which was highly praised by readers, and then in her beautifully produced book, Mary Anne Hunting shows how Edward Durell Stone invented himself as one of America’s greatest architects, then fell from grace as his popular brand of modernism fell out of critical favor,” said Murphy. “Her work has helped us appreciate Stone in a new way: as a figure who embodied both the potential and the major issues of his time.”

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on September 20, 2013 in Events, HART, Lectures, Student/Alumni

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Andrew Graciano To Deliver Goldberg Lecture on September 26

Andrew Graciano, associate professor of art history, associate chair and graduate director in the department of art, University of South Carolina, will present the fall 2013 Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Lecture in Art History on Thursday, September 26, at 4:10 p.m. in 203 Cohen Hall. His lecture is titled Joseph Wright’s Academy by Lamplight (1769) In Context.

With a passionate interest in the relationships among art, science, economics and politics in the Age of Enlightenment in Europe, the scope of Graciano’s research extends beyond that of traditional art history and incorporates other histories, especially those of medicine and natural philosophy.

“Andrew Graciano is one of the most promising younger scholars in the field of British art and already speaks with an authoritative voice,” said Christopher Johns, Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Professor of History of Art. “His publications are widely cited and he is an acknowledged authority on the work of the important Enlightenment artist Joseph Wright of Derby.”

His book, Joseph Wright, Esq: Painter and Gentleman (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), reevaluates Wright’s career and social status and demonstrates how the artist’s later landscapes, portraits and historical paintings are connected to a broader historical context, including contemporary science, industry, economics and the history of ideas. Graciano reinforces the idea that Wright was an intellectual painter, very much engaged with current ideas in these realms, as well as a gentleman of means beyond his artistic income, which gave him a social standing often ignored by previous scholars.

Graciano is finishing an edited volume for Ashgate Publishing, Exhibiting outside the Academy, Salon and Biennial, 1775-1999: Alternative Venues for Display (forthcoming 2014-15). His annotated edition of Benjamin Wilson’s autobiographical memoir appears as a chapter in the 74th Volume of the Walpole Society (2012) as “The Memoir of Benjamin Wilson, FRS (1721-1788): Painter and Electrical Scientist.” It also highlights a pervasive interconnectedness among the arts and sciences in eighteenth-century England and Ireland.

In recent years he has edited Visualising the Unseen, Imagining the Unknown, Perfecting the Natural: Art and Science in the 18th and 19th Centuries (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), an anthology that brings together recent scholarship in the field by several contributing authors. Graciano continues to pursue his interest in early Creole nationalism and the Catholic Enlightenment in the religious art of eighteenth-century Puerto Rican painter José Campeche (1751-1809).

Sponsored by the Department of History of Art, Graciano’s lecture is free and open to the public, and parking is available in Lot 95 outside Cohen Hall, off 21st Avenue South on the Peabody campus and across from Medical Center East.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on September 3, 2013 in Events, HART, Lectures, VRC

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Fine Arts Gallery Features Hans Hinterreiter Through September 12

Paintings of the Swiss abstractionist Hans Hinterreiter are on view through Thursday, September 12, in the Fine Arts Gallery located in Cohen Memorial Hall on the Peabody campus. The exhibition, titled Hans Hinterreiter: A Theory of Form and Color, covers almost fifty years of Hinterreiter’s artistic career.

The earliest works in the exhibition are tempera gouaches that range in date from 1931, only a year after Hinterreiter began his theoretical approach to art, until 1940, the year after Hinterreiter returned permanently to the island of Ibiza. Many of these paintings also feature handwritten notations by the artist, giving a rare glimpse into the artist’s working method. The later group of works, prints ranging in date from 1967 to 1977, reflect Hinterreiter’s growth and consistency as an artist as he moved into this more mature phase of his career. Additionally, the exhibition features a collection of the artist’s writings about his theory of forms published in 1978 under the title Die Kunst der reinen Form (The Art of Pure Form).

In 1929, at the age of 27, Hinterreiter gave up his budding career in architecture to pursue painting. In his work he hoped to combine art and science, creating visual art using scientific and mathematic principles. The young artist found his muse in 1930 when he discovered the color theory of Wilhelm Ostwald, which in turn inspired Hinterreiter to develop his own theory of form. The results were complex networks of repeating colors and geometric shapes. The viewer may not grasp Hinterreiter’s logic, even after repeated viewings, but in each work, the artist’s complicated systems provide undeniable order and beauty.

Hinterreiter preferred to work in seclusion, spending most of his life on the Spanish Balearic island of Ibiza, where he met Vanderbilt alumnus Carl van der Voort, BA’53, a gallerist and publisher who took a keen interest in Hinterreiter’s work. Van der Voort hosted multiple exhibitions of Hinterreiter’s work at his gallery and published many of Hinterreiter’s later prints through his graphic workshop, Taller Ibograf, including many in this exhibition. Through the generosity of van der Voort, the Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery was able to acquire these works, making our collection one of the largest repositories of Hinterreiter’s work in the United States.

Of the 48 Hinterreiter works held by the Fine Arts Gallery, 39 are on display in this exhibition, which was curated by Joseph Mella, gallery director, and made possible, in part, by a generous gift from Leslie Cecil and Creighton Michael, MA’76.

Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 11 am to 4 pm, and Saturday and Sunday, 1-5 pm. Free and open to the public, the Fine Arts Gallery is housed in Cohen Memorial Hall, 1220 21st Avenue South, on the western edge of the Peabody College campus.

*Hans Hinterreiter, Swiss, 1902–1989
Untitled, from Hans Hinterreiter: Litografias
Volumen I, 1967
Lithograph
11 3/4 x 9 3/8 inches
Gift of Carl van der Voort, BA’53
1997.081b
© 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ProLitteris

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on August 30, 2013 in Events, Fine Arts Gallery, HART, Student/Alumni, VRC

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Sacred Ecology Symposium Organized by History of Art, Anthropology Professors

Sacred Ecology: Landscape Transformations for Ritual Practice, an all-day symposium organized by Betsey Robinson, associate professor of history of art and classical studies, Tracy Miller, associate professor of history of art and Asian studies, and John Janusek, associate professor of anthropology, will be held on Friday, August 30, at the Sarratt Student Center.

Hosted by the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, the symposium, which begins at 8:45 a.m. in Sarratt/Rand 189, represents the culmination of the 2011-2012 Warren Center Fellows Program that was co-directed by Robinson, Miller, and Janusek.

The Sacred Ecology Fellows Program explored the diverse experiences of complex ritual sites around the world and across all periods of history. The investigation of landscape setting, nature, and monuments offered a chance to revisit sacred places and to see them in a new light. “‘Ecology’ implies a kind of multivariate system in which the environment is a significant force in shaping human institutions and experiences, and we wanted to bring the sacred into that,” said Robinson during a 2011 interview published in the Warren Center newsletter, Letters.

“The transformation of the landscape actually works to help identify where these sacred places are located,” Miller noted during that same interview. “Rituals and ceremonies require certain configurations of the environment, so it is often changed in order to accommodate the human interaction needed to facilitate ceremonies.” Often there are sites that are considered sacred places of pilgrimage, noted Janusek. “The reoccurrence of ritual activities over time is what renders such sites sacred. By ‘landscape,’ we of course mean the earth, but also the sky and the cosmos more generally.”

The symposium will feature Veronica Della Dora, with the Geography Department at Royal Holloway, University of London, who will address “Mountains and Vision: From Mount of Temptation to Mount Blanc.” Della Dora will explore famous and less famous mountain encounters “from above” which have characterized ways of looking at the world at different moments in western history. James Robson, from the East Asian Languages and Civilizations Department, Harvard University, will present “Confined in the Locus of the Sacred: From Sacred Sites to Insane Asylums in East Asia,” where he will explore the intersections between Buddhist monasteries, sacred sites, and mental institutions in China, Taiwan, and Japan. He will show the significant role played by Buddhist temples at sacred sites in providing ritual therapies, magical cures, and day-to-day care for the mentally ill.

In “Constructed Landscapes: Sumerian Temples and the Natural World,” Deena Ragavan will focus on the literary image of early Mesopotamian temples and their position in relation to the natural and urban environment. Finally, Lindsay Jones, Department of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University, will discuss “A Southern Mexican ‘Cross of Miracles’: The Irony of an Anti-Tourist Site’s Debt to Tourism.” His presentation will track the intriguing and ongoing history of a simple stone cross, about ten feet high, which was erected about 100 years ago amid the maguey cactuses outside the famous Zapotec village and archaeological/tourist site of Mitla in Oaxaca.

The symposium will conclude at 4:30 p.m. followed by a reception at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities. For more information, contact the Warren Center at 615.343.6060 or rpw.center@vanderbilt.edu.

*Image: Distant view of the Temple of Apollo at Corinth

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Posted by vrcvanderbilt on August 27, 2013 in Events, HART, VRC

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