Symposium: Revisiting Discourses of Love, Sex, and Desire in Modern Iran and Diaspora

Persian Studies Program at UNC-Chapel Hill Presents
March 28, 2020 Revisiting Discourses of Love, Sex, and Desire in Modern Iran and Diaspora

Including an exhibition of work by MFA Candidate in Studio Art, Minoo Emami, titled “Dystopia”

FedEx Global Education Center
Room 1005
UNC-Chapel Hill

This one-day symposium is an attempt to provide a safe space for public discussions of the nuances around discourses of love and desire in modern Iran, challenging and contributing to the dominant discourses on key topics. From their mundane to their sublime forms, love and desire have played a central role in various discourses in modern Iran. From romantic epics to ghazals, and from arranged marriages to white marriages, and from companionate love to contemporary cohabitations, desire is undoubtedly one of the most important theoretical topics for scholars. This symposium brings together a range of scholars from different disciplines focusing on modern Iran to analyze the wide variety of ways in which love and desire have been represented, imagined, and discursively constructed. Participants will address discourses of love and desire and revisit those discourses considering the implications that they have for larger theoretical debates. Selected papers of the symposium will be published in the book series titled, Sex, Marriage, and family in the Middle East, edited by Janet Afary and Claudia Yaghoobi, published by Bloomsbury. Other selected papers will appear as a special issue in the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies.

Organizer:
Dr. Claudia Yaghoobi, Ph. D – Roshan Institute Assistant Professor in Persian Studies, for information about the symposium contact Dr. Yaghoobi at Yaghoobi@email.unc.edu

Sponsors:

The American Institute of Iranian Studies, UNC Persian Studies Program, UNC Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies, the Department of Asian Studies, College of Arts and Sciences, Associate Provost of Global Affairs, the Department of English and Comparative Literature, the Department of History, the Department of Religious Studies, the Department of Women and Gender Studies, The Department of Geography, The Institute for the Arts and Humanities, UNC-Chapel Hill University Libraries, The Countering Hate Initiative

For more info: https://claudiayaghoobi.com/symposium-revisiting-discourses-of-love-sex-and-desire-in-modern-iran-and-diaspora/

Congratulations to undergraduate studio art major De’Ivyion Drew and MFA candidate Sally Ann McKinsey on receiving UNC Chapel Hill LIbraries’ Arts Incubator Awards!

Jerry Jameel Wilson, Cortland Gilliam and De’Ivyion Drew  are collaborating on a visual arts project that examines representations of blackness within the UNC-Chapel Hill community, and explores the experiences of black students at Carolina from 1955 to the present, with an eye toward the future. The project consists of two complementary components—sculpture and short film that broaden and deepen conversations about the importance of symbols, the impact of art in the public sphere and the meaning of equal access to the benefits of citizenship. The artist hopes to display the sculptures and the short film together in a multimedia exhibit that challenges our understanding of place, time and progress.  

Sally Ann McKinsey’s “The Coffin Is A Table” investigates cultural responses to illness and death in medical and memorial customs in the American South, particularly those that involve corporate labor in giving both medical care and gifts of cards, food and handmade objects to those experiencing illness or loss. Through sculptural installation and printed matter, the project is concerned with medical and social practices that attempt to keep the dying alive, to manage chaos or to control mortality, and the material practices that reveal large, unanswered questions of living, dying and losing. The project explores fiber materials as metaphors for systems of support, examining artistic labor in traditional folk crafts like crochet, embroidery and quilting using medical textiles like operating room sheets and hospital gowns. 

More information about other Arts Incubator awardees can be found at https://library.unc.edu/2020/01/announcing-the-2019-2020-incubator-award-recipients/

DOMESTIC INCANTATIONS
December 13th, 2019
@ private practice, 506 N. Buchanan Blvd.
Durham, NC 27701
6-8 PM

Domestic Incantations will feature work that explores materials and themes borrowed from each respective artist’s background. Through the reproduction of old family recipes, medicinal practices, and treasured artifacts, artists will examine their cultural histories and share them with one another in a household setting. This show will take place at private practice 506 N. Buchanan Blvd in Durham, North Carolina on Friday, December 13th from 6-8 pm and will feature MFA candidates Cassidy Kulhanek, Alena Mehić, Chloé Rager, Krysta Sa, Natalie Strait, Vonnie Quest, and Sheyda Yazdi.

Congratulations to Brantly H. Moore, who has been awarded a Graduate Student Travel Grant to CAA 2020 in Chicago!

Congratulations to alums MJ Sharp, Erin Canady, Chieko Murasugi, Jasper Lee, Sarah Elizabeth Cornejo, and Travis Donovan and current MFA student Chloe Rager, who make up 15% of the artists included in the group show Coined in the South at the Mint Museum in Charlotte. The show will be on view until February 16, 2020.

Congratulations to PhD Candidate Miranda Elston, who was recently awarded the Cerae: An Australasian Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies Essay Prize for best essay in Volume 5: Representations and the Recollection of Empire, for her essay “‘Holy Things:’ Dürer’s ‘Feast of the Rosary’ in the Rudolfine Court.”

PhD candidate Carlee Forbes was recently appointed as the Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Fowler Museum at UCLA. This multi-year collaborative project will bring together curatorial, conservation, and archival research to explore the museum’s collection of objects donated by the Wellcome Trust in 1965. Sir Henry Wellcome was an American-born British pharmaceutical entrepreneur who used his vast fortune to collect objects from all over the world. When he died, his trust dispersed more than a million objects to various museum collections. The objects now held at the Folwer museum cover a range of provenances, materials, and styles. You can follow Carlee’s progress via weekly #WellcomeWednesdays and #FridayFinds posts to the Fowler’s Instagram (@FowlerMuseum)

Congratulations to PhD Candidate Jennifer Wu, who was awarded a grant to attend the Summer Institute for Technical Studies in Art (SITSA) at the Harvard Art Museums. Along with a cohort of doctoral students in art history, she received object-based training on conservation and technical analyses as well as hands-on experiences with various artistic materials and techniques. The two-week program emphasized interdisciplinary collaboration with conservators, curators, scientists, artists, and art historians in discussions on art-technical history.

Fulfilling Chancellor Folt’s expansive vision for the arts, and in partnership with our wonderful colleagues in Arts Everywhere and Carolina Housing, we hatched our pilot “intramural” arts studio last week. Thank you so much for the various ways you have supported the Morrison Art Studio so far. We have heard incredible excitement from the UNC community regarding the 24/7 access and the no-cost supplies, and only anticipate those numbers to continue growing.

Over the course of the past week alone, we:

• welcomed nearly 500 unique students and campus community members to the studio for a visit;
• signed up nearly 350 unique students and campus community members to our studio listserv;
• led 14 group orientation sessions;
• trained and provided 24/7 access through Housing to 160 students and campus community members!!
• and we are busy planning more sessions and gatherings to continue to bring this opportunity to more and more students and campus community members.

Approximately half of those who have been oriented live in Morrison dorm, with additional usage by students living in most South Campus dorms.

Thanks again to Assistant Professor Lien Truong and Department Chair Carol Magee in Art and Art History, to Allan Blattner and his entire team in Carolina Housing, and to UNC facilities for their leadership, efforts, and enthusiasm. The Morrison Art Studio is the perfect example of strategic partnership at work.

Please feel free to stop by.  We are continuing the studio’s “open door” policy over the next week.  The studio will be during the staffed hours below either by our Artist-in-Residence, first-year MFA studio art student Natalie Strait or two work-study students hired by the Art and Art History department who will be serving as Assistant Studio Managers. Their names are Eden Teichman and Meghan Mcguire, sophomore and first-year students respectively who are already doing a wonderful job of giving orientations and learning the ropes of studio management!

Monday 4 – 9 pm

Tuesday 5:30 – 10 pm

Wednesday 5:30 – 10 pm

Thursday 5:30 – 10 pm

Huge thanks to Haley Smyser who singlehandedly managed the launch event with grace and skill!

Congratulations to PhD candidate Ashley Bruckbauer, whose essay “Ambassadors à la turque: Assimilation and Dissimulation in Eighteenth-Century Images of French-Ottoman Diplomacy” was recently published in Tara Zanardi and Lynda Klich, eds., Visual Typologies from the Early Modern to the Contemporary: Local Contexts and Global Practices (New York: Routledge, 2019).

Abstract:

Fashion played an essential role in the performance of cultural and political identities in eighteenth-century France. This was especially true in diplomatic exchanges and depictions of diplomatic figures, who represented their king and country abroad. Cultural cross-dressing, or the assumption of foreign attire, complicated this function of costume, however. While art historians have examined cultural cross-dressing in eighteenth-century aristocratic portraiture and representations of masked balls, the ambassador has remained a peripheral figure in studies of the popular phenomenon. This essay situates diplomacy at the center of an analysis of French dressing à la turque, examining paintings of French and Ottoman ambassadors adopting the dress, customs, and accoutrements of their hosts. I analyze how these representations of French-Ottoman diplomacy engage with eighteenth-century diplomatic practices and theories as well as popular conceptions of the ambassador as a social type. Contemporary treatises advised diplomats to act as protean characters, assimilating the manners of their foreign hosts. Simultaneously, critiques of the profession characterized the ambassador’s shape-shifting abilities as signs of his duplicitous nature. I argue that images of diplomacy featuring cultural cross-dressing manifest these contested notions of the ambassador, casting the figure as both a sensitive intermediary and a deceptive performer.