Tag: The University of Melbourne

Lecture | C. W. Marshal – Books, Dreams and Stories: How Sandman Comics Help Us Understand Ovid

Books, Dreams and Stories: How Sandman Comics Help Us Understand Ovid C. W. Marshal, Professor of Greek, University of British Columbia This illustrated talk examines the structure of Ovid’s epic poem Metamorphoses (c. 8 CE) and Neil Gaiman’s comic series The Sandman (1989-96 CE). The comparison illuminates both works and demonstrates the reading strategies used by classicists and comics fans when approaching a complex, wide-ranging, allusive masterpiece. It will also consider how stories work, the place of comics in classical reception studies, and the true nature of ravens. C. W. Marshall is Professor of Greek in the Department of Classical, Near Eastern, and Religious Studies, and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the Peter Wall Institute at The University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. He is the author of The Stagecraft and Performance of Roman Comedy (CUP, 2006) and The Structure and Performance of Euripides’ Helen(CUP, forthcoming). He is…

Symposium | Iconoclasm | University of Melbourne, September 6th

ICONOCLASM – A Symposium Symposium to be chaired by Dr Gerard Vaughan, Gerry Higgins Professorial Fellow Conveners: Dr F Harley-McGowan, Gerry Higgins Lecturer in Medieval Art History  Dr Justin Clemens, Senior Lecturer, English School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne The history of images is inseparable from the history of the hostility towards images. In its most extreme expressions, this hostility can become an injunction to the breaking of all images: iconoclasm. Sometimes certain images or kinds of image have been banned from being made, circulated, or exhibited; sometimes all images are held to be available for destruction; sometimes images themselves incorporate various kinds of auto-hostility; sometimes images are made only to be broken; sometimes images that should be broken never are. Justifications for iconoclasm can likewise be of many kinds: religious, economic, social, aesthetic, philosophical. This symposium takes…

Art History Seminars at Melbourne University | Semester 2

The program for art history seminars at the University of Melbourne for semester 2  is below. All seminars are held in The Linkway, John Medley Building, 4th floor (running between the East and West Towers), between 1-2 pm. All welcome. August 7              Anthony White | University of Melbourne Folk Machine: Fortunato Depero’s Cloth Pictures 1920-1925   August 21            Susanne Meurer | University of Western Australia Johann Neudörffer’s “Nachrichten” (1547): calligraphy and historiography in early modern Nuremberg   September 11   Gerard Vaughan | Professorial Fellow, University of Melbourne Museum Culture Today: Possibilities and Inhibitions   September 25   Toshio Watanabe | The University of the Arts, London Forgotten Japonisme: taste for Japanese art in Britain and North America 1910s – 1960s   October 9            Penelope Woods |  Centre for Emotions, University of Western Australia The Intentionality of Spectatorship: Emotions in…

Melbourne Winter Masterclasses by Melbourne Uni and NGV | Making Sense of Monet

Making Sense of Monet The University of Melbourne in partnership with the NGV International The Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne is delighted to present masterclasses in Art History, Philosophy, Classics, Screen Studies, Creative Writing, History and Archaeology, with some our most celebrated teachers and public intellectuals. Making Sense of Monet (July 13 – 14, 2013) The Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne in partnership with the National Gallery of Victoria is delighted to present Making Sense of Monet, a weekend of masterclass exploring Monet and his time, with acclaimed historian Peter McPhee AM, philosopher Dr Anya Daly, expert in French Impressionism Sylvia Sagona, and curators from the NGV International. For details, see: http://arts.unimelb.edu.au/masterclasses/making-sense-monet For other Masterclasses, see: http://arts.unimelb.edu.au/masterclasses

Lecture | Art and Intimacy in 15th Century Italy, Professor Adrian Randolph

Art and Intimacy in 15th Century Italy Professor Adrian Randolph, Leon E. Williams Professor of Art History at Dartmouth College The word ‘intimacy’ is attractive partly because it summons up a set of interrelated and evocative meanings that speak directly to certain types of objects we tend to call art. Intimacy suggests proximity and closeness, and is tinged with sensual and perhaps sexual possibility, and, when applied to apparel, getting right next to the skin. This epidermal intimacy is matched by a form of interiority lodged etymologically in the word itself: The Latin word, moreover, when metaphorically appended to individuals, suggests an emotional as well as spatial proximity-an intimate acquaintance, someone close to you. These meanings, and others are suggestive. The word intimate points to something essential in reactions to certain types of objects, and to modes of beholding and…

Lecture | Michael Fried on Thomas Demand’s ‘Pacific Sun’

Dean’s Lecture | Thomas Demand’s Pacific Sun Professor Michael Fried, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore In 2011 the German artist Thomas Demand made a two-minute stop-motion film called “Pacific Sun.” Michael Fried will show this film and analyse it in detail, with a view to explaining what he regards as its particular significance in and for the present situation in the visual arts. Michael Fried is a poet, art historian, art critic and literary critic. He is Professor, J. R. Herbert Boone Chair in the Humanities (secondary appointment: Department of the History of Art) at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. He has written extensively about an array of subjects, spanning abstract painting and sculpture since World War II to French painting and art criticism from the mid-eighteenth century to the advent of Edouard Manet (and beyond). He has also written about writers…

Symposium | Colonial Art Exhibitions: Past, Present Future

Colonial Art Exhibitions: Past, Present Future The last decade has witnessed a resurgence of interest in Australian colonial art, with an unprecedented number of important exhibitions being held in our major art galleries (national, state and regional) and libraries. This symposium brings together many of Australia’s leading directors, senior librarians, curators, conservators and academics to discuss the past, present and future interpretation of colonial art in this country. Speakers include John McPhee, Julie Gough, Gordon Morrison, Jane Hylton, David Hansen, Ruth Pullin, Richard Neville, John Jones, Lisa Slade, Simon Gregg, Alisa Bunbury, Chris McAuliffe, and many others. Full program is available here (pdf) Date: Friday, 23  (9am-8pm) – Saturday 24th (1oam-4:15pm) November 2012 Venues: Session 1 – 23rd Nov, 9.00am – 5.15pm, Sunderland Theatre, Medicine (Building 181), The University of Melbourne Session 2 – 23rd Nov, 6.15 – 8.00 pm, Theatre A,…

Symposium | A Body of Knowledge, Melbourne University

A Body of Knowledge Symposium The University of Melbourne Medical Science is much more than a single discipline, it intersects with art, technology philosophy and history. This symposium will consider the medical body from a number of perspectives. The morning sessions explore forensic and scientific innovations as well as considering the social and cultural history of the Melbourne Medical School. The afternoon sessions probe what happens when artists investigate the boundaries of anatomy, historically through models and images, and in the future, where technological evolution challenges our ideas of what it is to be human. See full details of the art history papers below. Session One 11.00 – 11.30 | The Demon in the Body Professor Mark Cook Chair of Medicine, St Vincent’s Hospital 11.30 – 12.00 | The sick man thesis: bodies and disease in the nineteenth century Dr James…

Lecture | The Gift of Tears: Gender and Emotion in the Art of Rembrandt and his Contemporaries Stephanie S. Dickey

The Gift of Tears: Gender and Emotion in the Art of Rembrandt and his Contemporaries Stephanie S. Dickey, Bader Chair in Northern Baroque Art Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada Literary responses to paintings and prints by Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) and other artists of the early modern Netherlands show that art theorists and connoisseurs appreciated the artist’s ability to capture the emotional nuances of a subject. This lecture explores one fundamental aspect of emotional display, the shedding of tears, as represented in historical subjects and portraits. Visual and literary sources reveal patterns in the social significance of emotion, and specifically of sorrow, as related to gender and circumstance. The depiction of tearful emotion constituted a key element in the representation of human, especially female, subjectivity and prompted complex responses in contemporary viewers. Lecture presented by the ARC Centre of Excellence…

Lectures | Revealing the Collections of Melbourne University

Revealing the Collections This program of lectures will showcase some of the rich but little known collections of art and visual culture held at the University of Melbourne. In addition to one of the largest art collections in Victoria, the University houses collections in such diverse areas as classics and archaeology, international Indigenous cultural material, decorative arts, 20th century poster designs, decorative arts, public sculpture and artists’ archives. Come and listen to a series of lectures by art historians, educators and students, who give their insights into the history and significance of their favourite collections.This program of lectures is hosted by the Art History Program in the School of Culture and Communication. Venue: Elisabeth Murdoch Lecture Theatre A, Melbourne University, Parkville. Date: Sunday 29 July 2012, 10.30am–12.00noon; 2.00pm–4.00pm Free Event. All Welcome. No Bookings required. Program 10.30am–10.35am Welcome – Speaker: Assoc Prof Alison Inglis,…

Symposium | Animals in Art and Philosophy Part 3 – Andrew Benjamin keynote

In Flesh and Blood: Animals in Art and Philosophy The third symposium in the series In Flesh and Blood: Animals in Art and Philosophy run by the Centre for Ideas at the Faculty of the Victorian College of the Arts (University of Melbourne) will take place on Friday 11th May. Keynote – Andrew Benjamin. Programme 10.30 am to 1 pm: Responding to Derrida and Animals Elizabeth Presa (CFI), ‘Skin deep’ Starting with Derrida’s discussion, in volume 1 of The Beast and the Sovereign, of a question once posed to Levinas: “Does the Animal have a face?”, I explore through Levinas, Rilke and others, how one might come to understand what a face can be and how such an understanding may contribute to a more imaginative engagement with other beings in the world. Keren Shlezinger (Monash Univ.), ‘The Shame of Being an Animal…

Lecture | The Early Christian-Byzantine Monastery of Aghios Lot in Jordan – Dr Konstantinos D. Politis

The Early Christian-Byzantine Monastery of Aghios Lot in Jordan Dr Konstantinos D. Politis, Chair of the Hellenic Society for Near Eastern Studies The Monastery of Aghios Lot is located at the south-eastern shore of the Dead Sea on a steep mountain slope overlooking the modern town of Safi (biblical Zoara) in Jordan.  It is accurately depicted on the early Byzantine mosaic floor map at Madaba in Jordan.  The monastery was excavated from 1988-2003.  The focal point was a basilica church built around a natural cave which early Christians believed was where Lot and his daughters took refuge after the destruction of Sodom (Genesis 19).  The church is adorned by five mosaic pavements inscribed in early Byzantine-period Greek and dated to A.D. 572/3, 605/7 A.D. and 691 A.D.  Three Greek inscriptions on stone which invoke ‘Aghios Lot’, confirm the identification of the…

EVCS: Mark Shepheard, ‘Pompeo Batoni and his Roman Sitters: Portraits of the Sforza Cesarini’

Mark Shepheard ‘Pompeo Batoni and his Roman Sitters: Portraits of the Sforza Cesarini.’   This paper examines Pompeo Batoni’s two portraits of members of the Sforza Cesarini family: the portrait of Duke Gaetano II in Melbourne and that of a woman traditionally identified as Gaetano’s wife, which hangs today in Birmingham. It readdresses the question of the identity of the sitter in the Birmingham portrait, and explores the social function of portraiture within the Sforza Cesarini’s extensive art collection and the likely place of Batoni’s two portraits within that collection.The paper concludes with a discussion of Batoni’s portraits of Roman sitters and questions the oft-repeated view that the paucity of such portraits was the result of the low esteem in which portraiture was traditionally said to be held in eighteenth-century Italy. This paper is the result of research carried out…

Lecture | Music, Architecture & Acoustics in Renaissance Venice: Recreating Lost Soundscapes – Deborah Howard and Malcolm Longair

Music, Architecture & Acoustics in Renaissance Venice: Recreating Lost Soundscapes  Professor Deborah Howard and Professor Malcolm Longair  During the Renaissance in Venice, composers such as the Gabrieli and Monteverdi created some of their greatest masterpieces for performance in the great churches on festive occasions. But what would the music have sounded like, given the complexity of the music and the long reverberation times of the large churches? These issues have been addressed in an interdisciplinary project involving musicologists, architectural historians, acoustians and physicists. Using the most up-to-date technology, virtual acoustic models have been created for four of the great Venetian churches, including the Basillica of San Marco. The music composed for these churches can then be simulated as it would have been heard on the great festive occasions. Many animations and simulations will be demonstrated showing how modern techniques can address…

Funding | Redmond Barry Fellowship, Melbourne

Redmond Barry Fellowship The Redmond Barry Fellowship for 2012 is now open for applications Applications close 27 April 2012. Redmond Barry Fellowship The Redmond Barry Fellowship is named in honour of Sir Redmond Barry (1813-1880), a founder of the University of Melbourne and the State Library of Victoria. The first Fellowship was awarded in 2004 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of his laying of the foundation stones for both institutions on 3 July 1854. The Fellowship shall be awarded to scholars and writers to facilitate research and the production of works of literature that utilise the superb collections of the State Library of Victoria and the University of Melbourne. Up to $20,000 shall be awarded to assist with travel, living and research expenses. Fellows will be based at the State Library of Victoria for three to six months. During this…