Please join us Monday, October 16 from 12-1:30pm for a graduate research colloquium by Patricia Kim (History of Art) and Sarah Watson (English). RSVP below to reserve your lunch.
Patricia Kim (History of Art): "Carceral Heritage and the Gendered Politics of Display in Karia (4th century BCE) to Korea (Present)"
My paper explores how masculinist political forces engender and transform heritage monuments in order to control specific kinds of bodies in public space. I lay out the terms of what I understand as “carceral heritage”—heritage that is physically policed by the confluence of social relations and political forces as an attempt to assert power over a site or object by excising it from collective imaginaries without physically eradicating it. The goal of carceral heritage is to classify, confine, and exclude specific kinds of bodies from social and public life by emphasizing their alterity. The first case study comes from the second book of Vitruvius’ famous treatise De Architectura, which describes a bronze trophy monument that the Karian queen Artemisia constructed on the island of Rhodes to memorialize defeating them in a naval battle in the fourth century BCE; a conflict sparked by Rhodian resentment at being ruled by a woman. I then turn to the recent Korean bronze sculptures, "Statue of Peace," memorializing the hundreds of thousands of girls and young women that were kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial military throughout World War II, and the efforts at absenting their bodies from public space. These cases of heritage reconfiguration enable an interrogation of how systems of oppression, including political violence and incarceration, are rooted in overlapping categories of identity including race, class, and gender.
Sarah Watson (English): "Why Women Read: The Case of Jacquetta of Luxembourg (c. 1415-1472)"
This paper considers the difficulty of determining what texts historical women read and why, a task that is especially challenging for women living as early as the medieval period. I propose a methodology for identifying early women readers and interpreting their reading choices and responses. I proceed to apply this approach to a late-medieval reader named Jacquetta of Luxembourg.