The 2024 Pembroke Seminar Research Roundtable was organized by postdoctoral fellows Sareh Afshar, Amira Lundy-Harris, and Emily Mitamura.

Featured speakers:

Mimi Thi Nguyen (University of Illinois Urbana-Champain)
“Introduction: Small Art and Love and Beauty,” The Promise of Beauty

Golnar Nikpour (Dartmouth College)
“Introduction: On the Significance of the Iranian Prison” and “Chapter 4: The Iranian Prison Goes Global,” The Incarcerated Modern: Prisons and Public Life in Iran  

Alexander Weheliye (Brown University)
“Track 8.0: ‘Scream My Name Like a Protest’: R&B Music as BlackFem Technology of Humanity in the Age of #Blacklivesmatter,” “Track 9.0: 808s and Heartbreak,” Feenin: R&B Music and the Materiality of BlackFem Voices and Technology

The 2023 event was organized as a symposium by Postdoctoral Fellows Melanie Abeygunawardana, Megan Finch, and Marianna Hovhannisyan. 

University (and) Ruin

The university is the protagonist and antagonists of several competing narratives about the state of the world and its ruin or revitalization. Building upon this year's Pembroke Seminar topic, "In the Afterlives and Aftermaths of Ruin,” this symposium sought to enable conversations across levels of the university and with the incredibly generative work and presences of CUNY Graduate Center Professors Amber Jamilla Musser and Kandice Chuh about the university as potentially, in both positive and negative ways, ruined as well as ruinous. Moreover, the symposium asked participants to actively think and publicly engaged with  their own structural and affective relationships to the university and their own, potentially ruinous, desires within and for it.

The 2022 Pembroke Center Research Roundtable, "Color Crossings: Race, Affect, Aesthetics," considered color’s metaphorical, linguistic, philosophical, historical, perceptual and practical resonances at the crossroads of critical race theory and color theory.

In drawing together these distinct but overlapping discourses, we ask how global histories of race, gender, sex and class are connected to structures of knowledge and power that are ordered by color. To begin to answer these questions, we turn to the work of artists, writers and other creators of color and explore how their art engages color’s aesthetic and affective affordances. We see color as a transgressive means of expression when employed by people of color, one with the potential to challenge the fixity of racial hierarchies and subvert hegemonic structures.

This roundtable, led by Postdoctoral Fellows Erica Kanesaka, Bernabe Mendoza, and Allison Puglisi, and Visiting Assistant Professor of Gender Studies Maria De Simone, represented the culmination of the year-long Pembroke Center research seminar, “Color,” convened by Professor Leslie Bostrom (Art) and Professor Evelyn Lincoln (Art History).

Friday, April 22, 2022

5:00-7:00 p.m. Keynote Artist/Scholar Talk

Kareem Khubchandani, Tufts University

"The Auntology of the Senses: More Ways to be an Aunty"

Saturday, April 23, 2022 

10:00-11:00 a.m.

Tina Post, University of Chicago

“On Blackness as Race and Hue”

Moderator: Maria De Simone
 

11:15 a.m.-12:15 p.m.

Vanatta Ford, Williams College

“Color Coded: Analyzing Colorist Rhetoric in Hip Hop Music”

Moderator: Bernabe Mendoza
 

1:30-2:30 p.m.

Anna Storti, Duke University

“Aesthetic Motives: The Femme Alter Ego and Her Retribution”

Moderator: Erica Kanesaka
 

2:45-3:45 p.m. 

Tao Leigh Goffe, Cornell University

“Choreography in the Dark”

Moderator: Allison Puglisi
 

3:45-4:15 p.m. 

Open discussion and closing remarks

Event Program