The Ballroom scene (at times synonymized with the performance art form of “vogue”) began in the Black and Brown queer club scene of late 1970s New York, and has since flourished as an increasingly globalized space for building personal identity and community. Please join us for this workshop on the vogue dance form, produced by writer and Ballroom historian Sydney Baloue and the House of FUBU, which will consider performance as both a contemporary art form and a historical practice. Attendees will serve as an audience to a roll call that presents different voguing styles and competitive categories commonly walked…
Conference organized by Joseph Bristow, University of California, Los Angeles Oscar Wilde, Sexuality, and the State will consider both the fin-de-siècle contexts and the worldwide consequences of the three trials involving Oscar Wilde that took place at the Central Criminal Court (Old Bailey) from 3 April 1895 to 25 May 1895. These trials arguably constitute the most famous criminal proceedings relating to the state prohibition of male homosexuality. The conference takes the occasion of Wilde’s courtroom ordeal as a starting-point for understanding not only the growing awareness of queer subcultures during the 1880s and 1890s but also the long shadow…
-Lecture by John Sullivan, Ph.D. Student in History, Northwestern University. Recipient of the 2023–24 Kenneth Karmiole Endowed Graduate Research Between 1788 and 1793, the Frenchman Louis-Benjamin Fleuriau de Bellevue (1761–1852) trekked the length of Italy and climbed its Alpine peaks, a long sojourn that capped his years of training as a geologist and natural historian. Toward the end of his journeys, he passed through Sicily and Calabria, in the peninsula’s far south, to observe the devastating aftermath of a series of earthquakes that had rocked the region in 1783. In this talk, John Sullivan will incorporate Bellevue’s travel notebooks into…
The Clark Library preserves and provides access to over 130,000 books, manuscripts, and artworks dating from the 15th century to the present. But there is a library of living things on the five acres of green space outside the library’s building, too. This event will bring together both our indoor and outdoor collections, as we explore nature’s histories – and its present! All ages are welcome to attend. Participants will learn about bees and beekeeping, go on bird walks, make their own field notebooks, plant seeds to take home from our heirloom seed library, learn how people in the past…
Conference organized by Anna Chen, Rebecca Fenning Marschall, and Bronwen Wilson, University of California, Los Angeles The early modern period was a hothouse for the study of physical things in the natural world, and for the collection and assembly of them in human-made physical spaces. In other periods, botanical samples were preserved by diarists in their journals, such as the Clark Library’s Pressed specimens of butterflies and moths (1905), compiled by Yasushi Nawa (1857–1926). Nawa’s lepidochromic book showcases the technique of “printing butterflies,” or fixing the scales of their wings onto paper. Specimens of all sorts were admired for their variegated colors,…
-Organized by Kristopher W. Kersey, University of California, Los Angeles To this day, many mistake Japan for a culturally homogenous society, yet this nationalistic myth is far from the truth. In an effort to underscore the diversity of early modern Japan, this conference will direct attention to two groups who are often marginalized if not absent in narratives of early modern Japanese art. To the south are the Ryūkyūans. To the north are the Ainu. Recent anniversaries—the 150th anniversary of settler colonialism in Hokkaidō and the fiftieth anniversary of the reversion of the Ryūkyūs from the USA to Japan—have brought…
Gryphon Trio is firmly established as one of the world’s preeminent piano trios. For more than 25 years, it has earned acclaim for and impressed international audiences with its highly refined, dynamic, and memorable performances. The Trio’s repertoire ranges from traditional to contemporary, and from European classicism to modern-day multimedia. It is committed to redefining chamber music for the 21st century.
Named one of the greatest string quartets of the last 100 years by BBC Music Magazine, the two-time GRAMMY-nominated Dover Quartet is one of the world’s most in-demand chamber ensembles. The Dover Quartet is the Penelope P. Watkins Ensemble in Residence at the Curtis Institute of Music and holds additional residencies at the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University and the Walton Arts Center’s Artosphere festival. The group’s awards include a stunning sweep of all prizes at the 2013 Banff International String Quartet Competition, grand and first prizes at the Fischoff Chamber Music Competition, and prizes at the Wigmore Hall…
Talk by Professor Arthur L. Little, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles This talk, which begins with Ben Jonson’s reading of Shakespeare in the First Folio and ends with the promotion of the iconic image of Lawrence Olivier as Hamlet in that play’s graveyard scene, focuses in between on the citation of a racialized Blackness circulating throughout Shakespeare’s plays. By “citation,” this talk means the act of gesturing towards a Black presence, for example, the jewel in an Ethiop’s ear in Romeo and Juliet, without the possibility of the Black figure being so conjured having any interlocutory or subjective possibilities. In the…
-Conference organized by Clorinda Donato, California State University, Long Beach, and Sabrina Ferri, Independent Scholar Co-sponsored by the Clorinda Donato Center for Global Romance Languages and Translation Studies, California State University, Long Beach Conference will be Livestreamed on the Center’s YouTube Channel Born out of an extraordinary confluence of talent in the socio-political context of Habsburg Lombardy, Il Caffè (1764–66) was a short-lived but wide-ranging periodical, which would prove to be one of the most original and influential intellectual products of the Italian Enlightenment. The journal, which owed its title to English coffee houses and to the invigorating virtues of…
