Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program
Distinguished Faculty Lecture
Fall Distinguished Faculty Lecture - November 15, 2024
Aruna D'Souza
The lecture will be held at 513 W 20th Street, New York, NY 10011
Aruna D'Souza writes about modern and contemporary art, intersectional feminisms, and diasporic aesthetics. Her work appears regularly in 4Columns, The New York Times, and in numerous artist’s monographs and exhibition catalogues. Whitewalling: Art, Race, and Protest in 3 Acts was named one of the best art books of 2018 by the New York Times. Recent editorial projects include Linda Nochlin’s Making It Modern: Essays on the Art of the Now and Lorraine O’Grady’s Writing in Space 1973-2018; she co-curated the retrospective “Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And” at the Brooklyn Museum in 2021. She is the recipient of the 2021 Rabkin Prize for art journalism and a 2019 Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant. She was appointed the Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor at the National Gallery of Art in 2022, and the W.W. Corcoran Professor of Social Engagement at the Corcoran School of Art, George Washington University, in 2022-2023. Her most recent book, Imperfect Solidarities was published in 2024.
Spring Distinguished Faculty Lecture - March 8, 2024
Christopher Fynsk
"The Rhythmic Figure: on Heidegger's 'The Origin of the Work of Art"'
The lecture will be held at 513 W 20th Street, New York, NY 10011
Christopher Fynsk has pursued research in the fields of philosophy and literature, and has worked at their margins in areas such as art and psychoanalysis. In his writings, he has also taken up the topic of academic institutions and the role of the humanities. He has published monographs on Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and is also known for his work on authors such as Hoelderlin, Nietzsche. Benjamin, Celan, Lacan, Derrida, Granel, Levinas, and Irigaray. In essays on art, he has addressed the work of Francis Bacon, Salvatore Puglia, and Agnes Denes. Fynsk has devoted an important part of his career to academic administration, and is currently President of the European Graduate School, where he has taught for over two decades. The EGS is a cross-disciplinary institution that assembles a globally distinguished faculty of philosophers, critical theorists, and artists in its Division of Philosophy, Art, and Critical Thought. Fynsk has pursued his interest in the question of what a university can be in the context of this exceptional academic experiment that has unfolded over 25 years.
Spring Distinguished Faculty Lecture - March 31, 2023
Julia Bryan-Wilson
The lecture will be held at 513 W 20th Street, New York, NY 10011
Julia Bryan-Wilson (PhD, UC Berkeley, 2004) is Professor of LGBTQ+ Art History and core faculty in Columbia's Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender. Her research interests include feminist and queer theory, theories of artistic labor, performance and dance, production/fabrication, craft histories, photography, video, visual culture of the nuclear age, and collaborative practices. She is the author of four books: Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (University of California, 2009, named a best book of the year by the New York Times and Artforum); Art in the Making: Artists and Their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing (with Glenn Adamson, Thames & Hudson, 2016); Fray: Art and Textile Politics (University of Chicago, 2017, a New York Times best art book of the year and winner of the Frank Jewett Mather Award, the Robert Motherwell Book Award, and the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize); and Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture: Drag, Color, Join, Face (Yale, 2023). She is the editor of OCTOBER Files: Robert Morris (MIT Press, 2013), and co-editor of three journal special issues ("Amateurism," Third Text, 2020; “Visual Activism,” Journal of Visual Culture, 2016; and “Time Zones: Durational Art in its Contexts,” Representations, 2016).
Fall Distinguished Faculty Lecture - October 28, 2022
Boris Groys
Boris Groys (1947, East Berlin) is a philosopher, essayist and art critic. He is Professor at the New York University and the author of many books, including Art Power, The Communist Postscript, In the Flow, On the New and Philosophy of Care. Prof. Groys’s lecture will focus on the relationship between work and art in the philosophy of Alexandre Kojève.
Fall Distinguished Faculty Lecture - November 5, 2021
Jane Panetta
Jane Panetta is a curator and director of the collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art; she joined the Museum’s curatorial department in 2010. In her new role as director of the collection, Panetta leads the curatorial department’s collection team and manages the museum’s ac quisitions and display of its holdings. She co-directs the museum’s strategic plan for its collection, along with the Whitney’s Emerging Artists Working Group. Most recently at the Whitney, Panetta organized the 2019 Biennial alongside co-curator Rujeko Hockley. Prior to the Biennial, Panetta organized solo presentations of the work of Juan Antonio Olivares (2018), Willa Nasatir (2017) and Njideka Akunyili Crosby (2015–16) and the group exhibition Fast Forward: Painting from the 1980s (2017), in addition to co-curating Mirror Cells (2016) with Christopher Y. Lew at the Museum. She served on the curatorial team for America Is Hard to See (2015, led by Donna De Salvo), the Museum’s inaugural presentation in its downtown location. Panetta collaborated on Signs & Symbols (2012, curated by De Salvo), as well as contributing to Robert Irwin: Scrim Veil—Black Rectangle—Natural Light, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York [1977] (2013, curated by De Salvo). Prior to joining the Whitney, Panetta spent several years in the Museum of Modern Art’s Painting and Sculpture Department, where she worked closely on the exhibitions James Ensor (2009, organized by Anna Swinbourne) and Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years (2007, organized by Kynaston McShine and Lynne Cooke). Panetta is a member of Madison Square Park’s Public Art Consortium.
Spring Distinguished Faculty Lecture - March 26, 2021
(on Zoom)
Kristen Hileman
"Four A’s and a ? (Authority, Autonomy, Affect, Abstraction…and Who Cares?)"
Baltimore-based independent curator Kristen Hileman spent two decades organizing exhibitions and building collections in museums, first as a curator at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC and more recently as the Head of the Contemporary Department at The Baltimore Museum of Art. During spring 2021, Hileman is visiting faculty at University of Maryland Baltimore County; she has previously taught courses on contemporary art and theory at the Corcoran College of Art and Design, George Washington University, and Johns Hopkins University.
Fall Distinguished Faculty Lecture - December 18, 2020
(on Zoom)
Tsitsi Jaji
"In Praise of the Parochial"
Tsitsi Jaji is an associate professor of English at Duke University with expertise in African and African American literary and cultural studies, with special interests in music, poetry, and black feminisms. She previously taught at University of Pennsylvania and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities/Schomburg Center, Mellon Foundation, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, and National Humanities Center. Her book, Africa in Stereo: Music, Modernism and Pan-African Solidarity (Oxford), won the African Literature Association’s First Book Prize, as well as honorable mentions from the American Comparative Literature Association and Society for Ethnomusicology.
Spring Distinguished Faculty Lecture - April 17, 2020
POSTPONED UNTIL IN-PERSON LECTURES RESUME
Gayatri Spivak in conversation with IATP Co-Directors
"Using Art"
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is University Professor at Columbia University. Among her many books are Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), Other Asias (2008) and Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (2012). She has translated Jacques Derrida and Bengali poetry and fiction. She is deeply engaged in rural teacher training and ecological agriculture. She has received many honorary doctorates, the Kyoto Prize, the Padma Bhushan from the President of India, and the Lifetime Scholarly Achievement from the Modern Language Association.
Fall Distinguished Faculty Lecture - November 22nd, 2019
Eva Diaz
"A Hundred Years of Revolutionary Experiments in Visual Art Education"
Eva Díaz is an art historian and critic living in Rockaway Beach, New York. She is an associate professor in the History of Art and Design department at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Her book The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College was released by the University of Chicago Press in 2015. She writes for magazines and journals such as Aperture, The Art Bulletin, Artforum, Art Journal, Art in America, Cabinet, Frieze, Grey Room, Texte zur Kunst, Harvard Design Magazine, and October. She has recently completed the manuscript to her new book After Spaceship Earth, analyzing the influence of R. Buckminster Fuller in contemporary art, a project supported by the Graham Foundation and a Warhol Foundation / Creative Capital Art Writers Grant.
Spring Distinguished Faculty Lecture - March 29th 2019
Lydia Liu
Lydia Liu
"The Color of Moral Thought: A Political History of Humanism"
The lecture will be held at 513 W 20th Street, New York, NY 10011
Lydia H. Liu is a theorist of media and translation living in New York. She is Wun Tsun Tam Professor in the Humanities and the Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. Among her published works are The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious (2010), The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (2004), an edited volume called Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations (1999) and a coedited book of translations titled The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory (2013). As bilingual writer, Liu is the author of The Nesbit Code, a work of fiction in Chinese that won the Hong Kong Book Prize in 2014.
Fall Distinguished Faculty Lecture - October 26th 2018
Souleymane Bachir Diagne
“Ubuntu: becoming human together”
The lecture will be held at 513 W 20th Street, New York, NY 10011
Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Professor and chair of Department of French & Romance Philology at Columbia University, received his academic training in France. An alumnus of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, he took his Ph.D (Doctorat d’État) in philosophy at the Sorbonne (1988) where he also took his BA (1977). His field of research includes Boolean algebra of logic, history of philosophy, Islamic philosophy, African philosophy and literature.
