Join us in 2023-24 for the featured scholar series PARIS VISIBLE, exploring the visual culture of France. What iconic images bring Paris to mind? Who were the French and American ex-patriate artists that helped to create this image of the City of Lights? How did hidden and invisible infrastructure transform this city into an early beacon of Modernity? This speaker series will explore these questions and more as we contemplate Paris Visible. All events are free and open to the public.
PARIS VISIBLE 2023-24 Distinguished Lecture Series
Dr. Laura Kalba (Minnesota)
Paris Visible Distinguished Scholars Panel
December 7, 2023; 5:30pm - 6:30pm. Gould Hall 130
Join us for a Distinguished Scholars Panel with Dr. Laura Kalba (Minnesota) and Dr. Todd Porterfield (NYU). In this informal discussion, our distinguished guests will discuss visual culture in France as they have studied it in their own research.
This event is free and the public is warmly welcome.
Dr. Todd Porterfield (NYU)
Marquee Lecture: "Paris Visible: The Photographic Past"
Featuring: Dr. Catherine Clark (MIT)
Feburary 8, 2024; 5:30pm - 6:30pm
Gould Hall 130
Join us for a distinguished lecture by Dr. Catherine Clark, Associate Professor of History and French Studies, and Director of Digital Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Dr. Clark is a cultural historian of modern Europe, who has written widely about the histories of modern France and its visual culture. Clark is the author of Paris and the Cliché of History (Oxford University Press, 2018), a history of Paris’s photographic history that not only sheds new light on the history of the French capital but also offers up methodologies useful to all historians for using photographs as primary sources.
This lecture reflects on Catherine Clark’s longstanding engagement with the photographic history of Paris. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the municipality invested heavily in creating and making accessible large collections of photographs in the hopes that they would serve the needs of future scholars. How have these efforts shaped history as it has been written since? In other words, do photographs make the past visible and, if so, how? The talk will draw on Clark’s research on the history of photographic history and street photography in the French capital as well as her forays into the utility of Artificial Intelligence for rendering the past not just visible but legible.
This lecture is free and the public is welcome.
Paris Visible Marquee Speaker
Dr. Katherine Brion (New College, Florida)
April 18, 2024; 5:30pm - 6:30pm
Gould Hall 130
Join for a distinguished lecture by Dr. Katherine Brion, Associate Professor of Art History and Museum Studies at The New College, Florida. Professor Brion is an expert in modern and contemporary art, especially of Europe and the United States. Her research examines the intersection of aesthetics and politics in key public art forms of Belle Époque (i.e. late 19th- and early 20th-century) France, whether decorative painting, posters, or public school imagery. Issues of race and representation constitute another area of interest. Dr. Brion’s current book project focuses on Belle Époque initiatives to democratize art and provide an aesthetic education to the working classes in collective spaces like the street, the school, and the museum.
