Session 3

In this session, a panel of University of Chicago faculty members from various fields—including Classics, Romance Languages and Literatures, English, and Creative Writing—will discuss George Herbert's poem "Death." In conversation with one another and the audience, this panel will illustrate how interdisciplinary perspectives in the humanities may shed light on a masterpiece of lyric poetry.

This talk takes up dreamtime narratives with original research analysis of narrative structure in three North Australian languages; Jaminjung, MalakMalak, and Kriol. Traditional dreamtime stories are inherently bound to the place and landscape they are located in, and, by default, narrated in-situ. Temporal order of events within the narrative flow may be overridden by spatial ordering, thus placing emphasis on a change of location rather than logical time sequence of events.

My talk studies the ongoing waves of protests, demonstrations, and strikes, organized in Israel by newcomers from Iraq in the early 1950s. During the years 1950–1951 over 120,000 Iraqi Jews arrived in Israel. Many of them had come to Israel with virtually no money, because of legislation passed in 1951 in Iraq that froze most of their assets. Holocaust survivors, Jews from Arab states, and other migrants all flocked to the young Israeli state, which lacked sufficient resources to absorb them.

This presentation will explore several striking examples of film sound and film music. I will demonstrate how filmmakers sometimes deploy the soundtrack in unusual ways to guide viewers in the perception and understanding of what happens on screen.

In the absence of sound, interior listening mediated by imagination, intellect, memory, wonder, desire, and virtually involuntary physical impulses, helps us imagine voices we cannot hear. This talk wonders how these can be deployed in conjunction with hard acoustic and anecdotal evidence in an effort to recover something of the lost voices of castrated male singers, who from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries laid the foundations of Western art singing. How might an acoustic phenomenon made up of exceptional timbre, emission, and resonance be rediscovered in the mind’s ear?

In the penultimate human life of the series which ended with our Buddha, Siddhattha Gotama, Prince Vessantara gives away the state elephant; he is banished from the city and goes to live in a forest with his wife and children. He gives the children away as servants to a vile old beggar, then his wife (to the King of the Gods in disguise). This is often presented as his fulfilling the Perfection of Generosity. What sense can we make of this?

During this slide lecture I will present a sampling of my research-based installations, discuss my research methodology and examine the importance of collaboration in my practice.