Ph.D. candidate Jennifer Wu has co-authored a peer-reviewed essay with another UNC at Chapel Hill Ph.D. candidate, Allison Gose (Department of History), “The Constructed Body in a Disembodied Platform: Interdisciplinarity and Team Teaching in the Age of COVID-19” which is now posted online in the Sixteenth Century Journal, Early Modern Classroom supplement. The blog postings will be converted into an official supplement to the journal at the end of the year and will be published online and in print as Sixteenth Century Journal 51, no. S1 (2020).

UPDATE: The article on Viking Art is now available here: https://smarthistory.org/viking-art/

Congratulations to PhD candidate Andrea Snow, who was recently awarded funding from the Samual H. Kress Foundation to write an article on Viking Art for Smarthistory. Andrea’s work will be the first to cover medieval Scandinavian art and culture for the site.

Congratulations again to Ph.D. candidate Jennifer Wu, who has received a three-month residential scholar award at the Yale Center for British Art (in addition to the Paul Mellon Centre Junior Fellowship already awarded). she will also be using the museums and library collections at Yale University for her research.

Taylor Hunkins has written an extensive article on Slum-TV in Nairobi, which can be accessed here: https://africanah.org/slum-tv-in-nairobi/. Great work Taylor!

Congratulations to Brantly Moore, who has been awarded the UNC Graduate School’s Werner P. Friederich Off-Campus Dissertation Research Fellowship (for study in the humanities with travel to Switzerland, if possible) and Summer Research Fellowship.

Congratulations to PhD candidate Jennifer Wu, who has just received a three-month Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art Junior Fellowship for Spring 2020.

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.