[Cas-allemps] Mark your calendar: April 29 CAS Interdisciplinary Research Talk with Michael Allan

[CAS Dean]

Dear colleagues,

I’m writing to invite you to the next presentation in the 2020-21 CAS Interdisciplinary Research Talk series. The CAS IR talks are approximately 35-45 minutes followed by a Q&A session. Since much of our teaching and research in the liberal arts is multidisciplinary and collaborative, the talks are meant to encourage conversation, interest, and understanding across divisional lines in the college. Please join us.

Sovereign Images? Envisioning Statecraft in Early Cinema
Michael Allan, Associate Professor, Comparative Literature
Thursday, April 29, 3:30-5:00
Zoom meeting: click here<https://uoregon.zoom.us/s/98572706683#success> to join

Michael Allan, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature is also program faculty in Cinema Studies, Arabic, and Middle East Studies. He is the author of In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt (Co-Winner of the MLA Prize for a First Book) and is the editor of Comparative Literature. His research has been supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2017-2018), and he has been a EUME Fellow at the Forum for Transregional Studies in Berlin (2011-12), a member of the Society of Fellows at Columbia University in New York City (2008-9), and a fellow at the Townsend Center for the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley (2006-7). He served as the site director for CLS Tangier in Morocco (2016-2017) and as a Presidential Intern at the Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies at the American University of Cairo in Egypt (2000-1).

Talk abstract: In July 1896, the Lumière Brothers’ film company commissioned Alexandre Promio to travel the world with the newly invented cinematograph. Many of his short films are renowned for their depiction of everyday scenes—streets of Cairo, the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem, or parks in London. And yet, a number of others depict heads of state—monarchs, presidents, and prime ministers in Algeria, England, Sweden, and Tunisia. Often seen as a global repertoire of early cinema, how might these early films consolidate fantasies of sovereign state power? At issue is not only their role in the visual imagination of statecraft, but their participation in a globalized media network trafficking images across the world. What is the role of a foreign camera operator in the service of national sovereignty? Who commands the image of the head of state? What does it mean to see the sovereign cinematically? Looking anew at these early films reveals the critical possibilities connecting aesthetics and politics, global media and nation states—with the emergence of world cinema.

This promises to be a fascinating talk and discussion. I hope you will join us on April 29 and mark your calendars for the final talk of the series on May 20 listed below.

Best regards,

Bruce

Bruce Blonigen
Tykeson Dean

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CAS Interdisciplinary Research Talks
2020-2021
All talks are 3:30 - 5:00

FALL
October 14      Erin Beck, Associate Professor of Political Science
                        Insiders’ Accounts of Guatemala’s Specialized Violence Against Women Courts
                        View recorded talk<https://uoregon-my.sharepoint.com/:v:/g/personal/lisa_uoregon_edu/ET_BminzCTJHrdyuPbF04LUBnuQdGd8ViN_bNOYJbDCYhA?e=qg5aeN>

WINTER
February 4       Maria Fernanda Escallón, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
                        Heritage and the Trap of Visibility

March 3           Brendan Bohannan, Professor of Environmental Studies and Biology
                        Interdisciplinary Explorations of the Microbial World
                        View recorded talk<https://uoregon-my.sharepoint.com/personal/lisa_uoregon_edu/_layouts/15/onedrive.aspx?id=%2Fpersonal%2Flisa%5Fuoregon%5Fedu%2FDocuments%2FIR%20Talks%2FBohannan%20talk%2Emp4&parent=%2Fpersonal%2Flisa%5Fuoregon%5Fedu%2FDocuments%2FIR%20Talks&originalPath=aHR0cHM6Ly91b3JlZ29uLW15LnNoYXJlcG9pbnQuY29tLzp2Oi9nL3BlcnNvbmFsL2xpc2FfdW9yZWdvbl9lZHUvRVk5REI5ZkstSXRFZ2lTN3RHc3FjemdCcUZTT0g5Wm5RVHg4TG9XM2RrYWg3UT9ydGltZT1uVmY3aUxINjJFZw>

SPRING
April 29            Michael Allan, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature
Sovereign Images? Envisioning Statecraft in Early Cinema
                        Zoom link<https://uoregon.zoom.us/s/98572706683#success>

May 20            Thanh Nguyen, Assistant Professor of Computer and Information Science
                        Title tba
                        Zoom presentation

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