Lectures/Talks

Book Talk: Leaving Legacies and the Making of Early Modern South Asia

Book Talk: Leaving Legacies and the Making of Early Modern South Asia

Shayan Rajani, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of History, Michigan State University
Monday, May 5 at 4:00pm, CHASS INTS 1111

Shayan Rajani is an Assistant Professor of History at Michigan State University. He is the author of Leaving Legacies: The Individual in Early Modern South Asia published by Cambridge University Press in 2024. His research interests include early modern South Asia, particularly the region of Sindh, the history of the individual and self-representation, and gender and sexuality.

Co-Sponsored by the Department of History, the Asian Studies Program, and the Middle East and Islamic Studies Program.

 

Yong Soon Min: Reimagining the Inheritances of Empire

Kylie Ching Talk, April 17, 2025

Kylie Ching, Ph.D.
UCR Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow

How does one remember an unending war? Within U.S. history, the Korean War remains the “forgotten war,” overshadowed by World War II and the Vietnam War. For the late artist, activist, and educator Yong Soon Min, this contradiction makes the Korean War an important site to parse through its history and meaning. Rather than focusing on scenes of spectacular militarized violence, she draws attention to how the civil war continues to shape everyday life in Korea and its diaspora. Centering personal and embodied experiences as a form of history, Min repurposes photographs across family and state archives to reimagine alternative kinships that disrupt U.S. Cold War historiographies. This talk will explore two works — a photomontage called Talking Herstory from 1990 and a multi-media installation entitled Mother Load from 1996 that was later remade in 2014. Within these works, Min reveals the visible and invisible inheritances of war, such as memories, physical objects like photographs and clothes, and family relations.

PLEASE NOTE: THIS TALK HAS BEEN RESCHEDUED FOR APRIL 17

In-person
Thursday, April, 17, 2025 at 5:00pm
CHASS Interdisciplinary South, 1111

The Huntington Library hosts

Music in the Early Spanish Americas, Performance Spaces, and Archives

Missale romanum ordinarium

Missale romanum ordinarium (Mexico City: Antonio de Espinosa, 1561). RB 32667. | The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.

Ma huel cenquiza, ma nechicaui
(May they come together, may they assemble)

These opening lines of a Nahuatl garden canticle from the Psalmodia Christiana (Mexico City, 1583) set the stage for a conference focusing on the musical sounds, performance spaces, and sonic traces of the early modern Hispanic world. The Huntington Library is the ideal venue for an interdisciplinary conference that aims to examine the musical sounds that once reverberated across the Spanish Americas. Today, these musical and sonic legacies are preserved at the Huntington Library. To highlight these little-studied collections and encourage their value in pushing musical-humanistic research forward, this conference will bring together interdisciplinary scholars to discuss their current, cutting-edge research on the performances, performance spaces, and archives of this music.

Two-day conference | General: $35, Students and Huntington Fellows: Free | Optional lunch: $20 each day. Register at the Huntington Library website.

Conference registration includes general admission to The Huntington. Lunch reservations will close on March 17 at noon.

Friday, March 21, 2025, 8:30 a.m.–3:30 p.m.
Saturday, March 22, 2025, 9:30 a.m.–3:30 p.m.
Education and Visitor Center, Haaga Hall
Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Rd. San Marino, CA 91108
For questions about this event, please email researchconference@huntington.org or call 626-405-3432.

Join Us for an Alumni Lecture!

The Sacred Enclosure of the Himorogi at Hiroshima

Christopher Mead Talk, 2025Christopher Mead, Ph.D.
Emeritus Regents’ Professor, University of New Mexico

The Hiroshima Peace Memorial was designed and built between 1949 and 1955 as a permanent monument to world peace by the great Japanese modernist, Tange Kenzō. The monument seems so complete and self-evident that few visitors stop to ask an obvious if overlooked question: Why is the Peace Memorial not located at the hypocenter, the elevated site where the atomic bomb Little Boy detonated 1903 feet in the air and annihilated an entire city in less than a second on August 6, 1945? Why is the Peace Memorial in fact located some 1200 feet distant from the hypocenter on another of Hiroshima’s many islands? It is as if we had decided to erect the 9/11 Memorial, not where the World Trade Center Towers stood until September 11, 2001, but elsewhere in New York City, on Wall Street for example. In this talk, I take on this question by locating Tange Kenzō’s design at the intersection of Western paradigms of architecture and planning codified by Le Corbusier with Japanese traditions of cultural space and architecture. These traditions engage both Shintō and Buddhist beliefs and are rooted ultimately in the himorogi — the sacred Shintō enclosure where earth meets sky, and humans gather to welcome spirits called kami. Shaped by a sense of time and space unlike what we in the West assume when speaking of place, the himorogi answers our question in ways that we do not expect.

Wednesday, March 5, 2025 at 5:00pm
The Barbara and Art Culver Screening Room at UCR ARTS
3834 Main Street, Riverside

Graduate Seminar with Dr. Jussi Parikka Followed by Book Talk

Dr. Jussi ParikkaMonday, January 13, 2025 10am to 12:30pm
CHASS Interdisciplinary South 1111

Dr. Parikka is the inaugural International Visiting Professor at UCR’s Center for Ideas and Society, sponsored by the Vice Provost for International Affair’s office and the Center’s Being Human initiative.

This event will be followed by a book conversation at 2:00PM in INTS 1109 with Prof. Gloria Chan Sook Kim and Dr. Parikka about his new book, Living Surfaces: Images, Plants, and Environments of Media (2024)

 

Living Surfaces Book TalkLiving Surfaces examines a range of case studies from eighteenth-century experiments with and observations of vegetal matter, photosynthesis, and plant physiology to twenty-first-century machine vision and AI techniques of calculating agricultural and other landscape surfaces.

Copies of the book will be available for sale and signing at the event.

Parking permits will be provided for non- UCR guests.

Space is limited and registration is required for this event:

https://bit.ly/parikkaseminar

Sponsored by the Being Human Initiative at the Center for Ideas and Society and the UCR English Department.

Operativity and Digital Capture: A Public Symposium
January 11, 2025 | 10am-3pm

Operativity and Digital Capture PosterOperativity and Digital Capture is a public symposium with media archeologist, Dr. Jussi Parikka, the first Visiting Professor at @ideasandsociety . At this event, theorists, artists, scholars and practitioners from Southern California will discuss the operations of machine vision, especially relating to agency, culpability and connection in an image world functioning at a remove from human engagement.

The symposium is presented as a part of Digital Capture: Southern California and the Pixel-Based Image World on view at UCR ARTS California Museum of Photography and Culver Center of the Arts from September 21, 2024 to February 2, 2025.

Registration is free and seats are limited. https://ucrarts.ucr.edu/…/operativity-and-digital-capture/

UCR ARTS
California Museum of Photography
Culver Center of the Arts
3824 + 3834 Main Street
Riverside, CA 92501
ucrarts.ucr.edu

Digital Capture is made possible with leading support from Getty through the @pstinla : Art & Science Collide initiative.

Co-presented by University of California, Riverside’s California Museum of Photography, Center for Ideas and Society, History of Art Department, and Media and Cultural Studies Department. Additional support provided by the English Department at UCR. Support for the Inaugural CIS Visiting Professor is generously funded by UCR’s Office of the Vice Provost for International Affairs, Marko Princeva.