Upcoming Events

 

Apr
7

Book Publishing Lab Webinar:
Thomas Bedenbaugh & Lucas Church
(University of North Carolina Press)

Join us for an online webinar with acquisitions editors Thomas Bedenbaugh and Lucas Church of University of North Carolina Press. Bedenbaugh and Church will discuss the review process for academic books and offer feedback on the developing book project "The Poetics of Profession" by Book Publishing Lab Fellow Dr. Elissa Zellinger (Department of English).

This event is open to all audiences.

Register at https://texastech.zoom.us/meeting/register/al2Y1jitQBysaEtRKmMCDQ.

Apr
8

Faculty Fellow Talk:
Dr. Maia Toteva (School of Art),
"TopSecret as a Case of 'Bad Memory' or Mistaken Identity: Who is Afraid of Subversive Mimicry in the Narrative of Dissident Artists?"

In his book History of the Present, the British historian of Eastern Europe, Timothy Garton Ash, ruminated on, among other subjects, the persistent lapses of memory in the former Soviet Bloc in the 1990s. Comparing these recurrent gaps of remembrance with the collective propensity to forget the collaboration with the Nazis during the Vichy regime, Ash concluded that after “suffering under a repressive dictatorship, people repress the memory of repression.” The psychological phenomenon of suppressed memories of repression, he argued, leads to ruptured historical narratives and unstable cultural paradigms. It raises doubts about the reliance of historical records and questions the ability of the chroniclers of those periods to restore the “constantly shifting patterns” of the past.

Addressing the fraught relations between state and self in the epistemology of repressive regimes, this project investigates the role of “subversive mimicry” in the destabilizing and reconstitution of the “constantly shifting patterns” of the past in the years that followed the fall of the Iron Curtain. Foregrounded as a major theme in contemporary art and culture, “subversive mimicry” is defined as a tactic in which artists and dissident figures imitate the language, symbolism, and structures of power or the state to dismantle its rationalizations, including propaganda, ideology, stereotypes, and other mechanisms that sustain the status quo. The same modus operandi is the subject of an edited volume that Dr. Toteva and her coeditors (Gediminas Gasparavicius and Tom Williams) completed with the assistance of the Humanities Center Faculty Fellowship. Titled Walking with the Enemy: The Art of Subversive Mimicry in the Post-Truth Era, it is due to be released by Manchester University Press later this year.

The book surveys anti-subordination mimetic strategies that have been occasionally examined and variously referred to as “subversive affirmation” and “overidentification” in discussions of Western case studies. Redefining the phenomenon as “subversive mimicry” in relation to contemporary postcolonial theory, Dr. Toteva and her collaborators map the global scope of the practice and trace its roots back to the modernist artistic and literary movements of the early 20th century. Thus, the volume foregrounds art that is inherently subversive yet seemingly conformist, as they showcase work that exposes systemic falsehoods by mirroring or embracing them and feature artists that confront political manipulation by means of imitation or deception.

Focusing on one contentious case of subversive mimicry, this paper revisits Nedko Solakov’s installation Top Secret to interrogate conflicting notions of truth and investigate who controls autonoetic narration in the works of dissident artists. If autobiographical memories define humans as “human” beings and enable individuals to position their lives along a continuum of time and space (Markowitsch and Welzer), what happens when inhabitants of the repressive state lose their autonoetic agency or the ability to center one’s identity in the chronotope of self-narration? How does subversive mimicry destabilize and reclaim the power of the dislocated self to tell the story of the past and why do dissident artists turn to such unstable mimesis in reaction to the politicization of truth in everyday life?

1pm, Room 228, Weeks Hall.

Apr
9

Post-Doctoral Fellow Talk:
Dr. Daryl Meador,
"West Texas Cinema and the Settler Colonial Uncanny"

This talk explores the environmental and political landscapes of cinematic West Texas, especially films adapted from novels by Larry McMurtry. Dr. Meador considers these lonely and melancholy celluloid flatlands alongside colonial histories of dispossession, land corporatization, and environmental devastation. These interconnected historical processes offer crucial context to this oeuvre’s recurrent themes of familial and land-based dislocation and strife. On screen, this place that was once so coveted as home begins to appear uncanny, and even unlivable, indicating the necessity of exploring yet unknown, decolonial futures.

2pm, Room B01, School of Art.

Apr
11

Book Publishing Lab Webinar:
Kristen Elias Rowley
(The Ohio State University Press)

Join us for an online webinar with Kristen Elias Rowley, Editorial Director at The Ohio State University Press. Rowley will discuss the review process for academic books and offer feedback on the developing book project "Modernista Mosaics: Text, Image, and Identity at the Fin de Siglo" by Book Publishing Lab Fellow Dr. Andrew Reynolds (Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures).

This event is open to all audiences.

Register at https://texastech.zoom.us/meeting/register/ZihqWGpCT2qlHSKgUR-EUw.

Apr
22

Book Publishing Lab Workshop Series:
Dr. Nathalie Bouzaglo (Northwestern)

Join us for open workshop on Book Publishing Lab Faculty Fellow Dr. Andrew Reynolds's developing book manuscript, "Modernista Mosaics: Text, Image, and Identity at the Fin de Siglo."

Nathalie Bouzaglo holds a Ph.D. in Latin American literature from New York University. She specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American literature, gender and sexuality studies, and queer theory.

2:00pm-3:30pm, Humanities Building Room 201. 

Apr
23

Scholar-in-Residence Workshop Series
with Dr. Vinodh Venkatesh:
"Affect, Forms, and Critique"

This workshop will consider questions pertaining to the affective turn and the turn within it to form. We will consider definitions of affect and its generation and movement, and problematize how it may be understood today, both within the humanities and in other fields. The workshop will include a discussion on uses and potentials of an affective critique, and what implications it may have in how we understand the world.

To register, and for readings, email humanitiescenter@ttu.edu.

2:00-3:30pm, 228 Weeks Hall.

Apr
25

Book Publishing Lab Workshop Series:
Dr. Michael C. Cohen (UCLA)

Join us for an open workshop on Book Publishing Lab Faculty Fellow Dr. Elissa Zellinger's developing book project, "The Poetics of Profession."

Michael C. Cohen is associate professor of English at UCLA. He specializes in nineteenth-century American literature, poetry and poetics, and the history of reading and education, and is the author of The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America (2015), and the co-editor of The Poetry of Charles Brockden Brown (2019). 

2:00pm-3:30pm, 228 Weeks Hall.

Apr
29

Book Publishing Lab Workshop Series:
Dr. Vanesa Miseres (Notre Dame)

Join us for open workshop on Book Publishing Lab Faculty Fellow Dr. Andrew Reynolds's developing book manuscript, "Modernista Mosaics: Text, Image, and Identity at the Fin de Siglo."

Vanesa Miseres specializes in 19th- and early 20th-century Latin America. Her research spans travel writing, war literature, women writers, gender studies, cultural studies, and food studies. 

1:30pm-3:00pm, Humanities Building Room 201.

Apr
30

Book Publishing Lab Workshop Series:
Dr. Jennifer Putzi (College of William and Mary)

Join us for an open workshop on Book Publishing Lab Faculty Fellow Dr. Elissa Zellinger's developing book project, "The Poetics of Profession."

Jennifer Putzi is the Sara and Jess Cloud Professor of English & Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies at the College of William and Mary. She specializes in American literature to 1900, women writers, and 19th-century American poetry.

2:00pm-3:30pm, Humanities Building Room 201.