VISITING SPEAKING SERIES

Replicated Afterlives: Reviving a Ruined Imperial Garden as Theme Park in Post-Mao China
Dr. Patricia J. Yu, Assistant Professor of Art History, Scripps College

Replicated Afterlives: Reviving a Ruined Imperial Garden as Theme Park in Post-Mao China The Yuanming Yuan (Garden of Perfect Brightness) currently stands as ruins on the outskirts of Beijing. Constructed in the eighteenth century as a garden-palace of the Qing emperors, it was infamously looted and burned by the Anglo-French in 1860 at the close of the Second Opium War. In the post-Mao era of the 1980s and 1990s, a fierce debate arose over whether to preserve its form as ruins or to reconstruct the imperial garden. In the meantime, developers seized upon the Yuanming Yuan as a model to replicate in theme park environments. This talk examines the off-site reproduction and displacement of the Yuanming Yuan as theme park reconstructions. I argue that the original Yuanming Yuan’s function as a Qing imperial microcosm is precisely what makes it an ideal model for replicating as theme parks that serve as national microcosms. I ask how the theme parks situate the Yuanming Yuan in historical time through the choice of its architectural replications; I also argue that the performances within the parks displace the Yuanming Yuan into a nebulous imperial past while simultaneously projecting it into an imagined national future.

Monday, May 11 at 4:00pm
Arts Screening Room 335

Sponsored by the Asian Studies Program and the Department of the History of Art

2026 Brink Carrott Forster-Hahn Lecture Series
Thursday, April 30 at 5:30 in Arts 333

Emily Citino, 2025 Barbara B. Brink Travel Award
Taking Care: Anna Maria Maiolino in Archives Across São Paulo
PhD student Emily Citino will discuss her research trip to São Paulo to view archival materials on the Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino (b. 1942) housed at four institutions across the city. In her talk, Emily will provide a brief overview of her dissertation, Anna Maria Maiolino: Art, Gender, Displacement (1960s–2020s), which is the first monographic study, in any language, of the artist. Although Maiolino emerged during the authoritarianism of the 1960s and 1970s, Emily’s project shifts focus from the country’s military dictatorship’s (1964–1985) to the entrenched male chauvinism of Brazil’s Catholic, conservative society, tracing the artist’s dynamic experimentation across new and traditional media, from performance and video to drawing and sculpture, and situating Maiolino’s practice alongside the expansion of women’s rights in Brazil. Throughout her talk, Emily will discuss how the financial support of the Barbara B. Brink Travel Award launched her dissertation research, providing access to essential, non-digitized archival materials.

Xinqian Zhang, 2025 Richard G. Carrott Travel Award
Heaven’s Craft in the Making of Things: Revisit Jingdezhen’s Porcelain
This presentation reflects on my recent research trip to Beijing and Jingdezhen in China, where I explored porcelain from both museum collections and production sites. While I initially approached porcelain as an object of circulation and representation, closely tied to imperial power and global exchange, my experience in Jingdezhen began to shift this perspective. Encountering kiln sites, workshop environments, and local materials, I began to see porcelain not just as a delicate finished object, but as a process shaped by the interaction of earth, water, fire, human labor, and living experience in the ecology and cosmotechinics of early modern China. Drawing on Tiangong Kaiwu, a seventeenth-century text on craft and technology that informs the title of this talk, I consider how porcelain production reflects a broader cosmological and material understanding of making, and the embodied experience with porcelain in tea culture as a mental and physical healing related to the medical humanities. By moving between institutional spaces and lived environments, this talk highlights how travel-based research can transform the way we understand material culture, bridging objects, processes, and ecological contexts.

Rebecca Allen, 2025 Françoise Forster-Hahn Travel Award
Alchemical Secrecy in Manuscript and Print: Das Buch der heiligen Dreifaltigkeit and Pandora
This talk examines the transition from manuscript to print in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century European alchemical texts through a case study of two works: the early fifteenth-century manuscript Das Buch der heiligen Dreifaltigkeit (1410–1419) and the later printed book Pandora, das ist, die edelste Gab Gottes (1582). Drawing on research conducted for my M.A. thesis, it is grounded in firsthand study of materials at the Kupferstichkabinett, Herzog August Bibliothek, and Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, supported by the Françoise Forster-Hahn Travel Award. Special attention is given to Cod. 78 A 11 at the Kupferstichkabinett, widely understood as the earliest extant copy of Heilige Dreifaltigkeit. Because this manuscript is not digitized, direct examination was essential to my analysis of its images and text. By comparing it with later manuscript copies and printed adaptations, the talk considers how material form and image-text relationships structure the transmission of alchemical knowledge.

UC Riverside Scholar Selected for Elite NHC Summer Residency

Professor Susan Laxton will represent UCR at the National Humanities Center, advancing CHASS’s transformative humanities research on a national stage

March 26, 2026

Dr. Susan Laxton, 2026 Demonstrating a loud and clear commitment to advancing its world-class research enterprise, the University of California, Riverside (UCR) announces that Susan Laxton, Associate Professor of Modernism and the History of Photography and Chair of the Department of the History of Art, has been selected for the esteemed National Humanities Center (NHC) Summer Residency program. Laxton will be one of 40 participants. Costs will be covered by the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, which has been a NHC Institutional Member since 2022.

The NHC Summer Residency Program is an exclusive, four-week fellowship designed to provide exceptional humanities scholars with a highly concentrated period of supported research and intellectual exchange. Held in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park, the program is uniquely tailored to help scholars jump-start or make substantial progress on significant academic projects while fostering synergistic discussions with peers from across the country. Laxton’s project title is “Cut Together: Surrealist Photomontage and the Structure of Dissent.”

“For a historian of surrealism, the chance to think and write alongside colleagues equally absorbed in their work has its own dream logic,” Laxton said. “I am deeply grateful to the Dean, the Center for Ideas and Society, and the National Humanities Center for making it real.”

“Our deliberate investments in National Humanities Center programs lead our research university enterprise,” said Daryle Williams, Professor of History and Dean of the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. “When we commit resources to placing exceptional scholars like Professor Laxton in these competitive residencies, we see direct returns in the form of accelerated, field-defining publications and a magnified UCR presence on the national stage. It is an investment in the intellectual capital that drives the humanities forward.”

Championing Field-Defining Scholarship

Laxton brings a wealth of expertise and a distinguished record of scholarship to the NHC. A Ph.D. graduate of Columbia University, her research explores the alternative art practices of the 20th-century European avant-gardes, with a profound focus on photography, photomontage, and chance-based processes. She is the author of Surrealism at Play (Duke University Press, 2019) and is currently developing a new manuscript titled “Cut Together: Surrealist Photomontage and the Structure of Dissent.” Her field-defining scholarship has already been supported by prestigious fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Hellman Foundation, and the Borchard Foundation. Her work frequently appears in leading academic journals such as October and Critical Inquiry.

Elevating UCR’s Humanities Research

Laxton’s upcoming residency highlights UCR’s aggressive, strategic investment in faculty research and the university’s ongoing commitment to shaping the national conversation in the humanities. By supporting faculty through high-impact initiatives like the NHC Summer Residency, UCR ensures its scholars have the dedicated time, resources, and intellectual community required to produce groundbreaking, field-defining publications.

The Center for Ideas and Society (CIS) at UCR plays a vital role in championing these research endeavors, fostering an environment where humanistic inquiry thrives. Katharine Henshaw, Executive Director of CIS, is an alumna of the NHC humanities center director workshop and understands its importance.

“Professor Laxton’s selection for the NHC Summer Residency is a testament to the high caliber of research emerging from our College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences,” said Jeanette Kohl, Co-Director of the Center for Ideas and Society and Professor of Art History. “An internationally acclaimed art historian of photography and the current chair of her department, Professor Laxton will benefit greatly from the dedicated time the residency provides to focus on her research and writing. This opportunity will accelerate her next publication and bring an important scholarly intervention to the field all the more quickly.”

“Prof. Laxton’s Residency in the National Humanities Center’s summer program reflects a valued colleague’s advancement of the Center for Ideas and Society mission,” added Dylan Rodríguez, Distinguished Professor and Co-Director of the Center for Ideas and Society. “As a signature University of California research center supporting the interdisciplinary humanities at the UCR campus, the work of CIS is strengthened and advanced through Prof. Laxton’s national recognition by the NHC.”

For more information about UCR’s Center for Ideas and Society and its ongoing research initiatives, please visit ideasandsociety.ucr.edu.

Out of Character, Out of Order: Typographic Reforms in Postwar South Korea

Monday, April 13, 2026 at 4:00pm, Arts Screening Room 335

Seungyeon Gabrielle Jung, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Studies, UC Irvine

“Out of Character, Out of Order” shows how typographic design was employed to negotiate shifting colonial, postcolonial, and Cold War geopolitical dynamics between 1945 and the early 1960s. United Nations agencies and Korean linguists regarded the Sino-Korean form of writing as an impediment to promoting literacy and democracy; and the scholars also viewed it as a remnant of the ancient World Order that subjected Korea to Chinese power. Linguists and educators introduced various typographic solutions, including reorienting Hangeul from vertical to horizontal writing and deconstructing syllabic characters into phonemes. These efforts to follow what they assumed to be the “universal standards” resulted in deformed letters that merely imitated the Roman alphabet without improving the writing system’s legibility or readability. This paper demonstrates how the attempt to break from the old order inadvertently led to a departure from the inherent character of Hangeul, culminating in its swift absorption into a new order.

Seungyeon Gabrielle Jung is a design historian and media scholar whose research interrogates the politics and aesthetics of design, with the postwar developing world as a critical site of inquiry. Her first book, Utopia of Problems: Nation-Designing in Postwar South Korea, challenges widely accepted definitions of design as a problem-solving method by analyzing failed state and corporate design projects. Originally trained as a graphic designer, Gabrielle worked in advertising and editorial design before attending graduate school. Currently, she is an assistant professor of Art History and Visual Studies at UC Irvine, where she teaches Korean art and design history, visual culture, and critical theory.

2026 Getty Graduate Symposium

Friday, February 6, 2026, 9:45am-6pm
Museum Lecture Hall and Online

The Getty Research Institute hosts the 8th annual Getty Graduate Symposium, which showcases the work of emerging scholars from art history graduate programs across California. Organized into three sessions, the symposium includes nine individual presentations, moderated panel discussions, and Q&A sessions with the audience.

Participants include our own PhD candidate, Lily Allen

This event is FREE free but advance tickets are required.
To watch online, register via Zoom

Participants:
Anahit Galstyan, University of California, Santa Barbara
Andrea Jung-An Liu, University of California, Berkeley
Bermet Nishanova, University of California, Irvine
Dejan Vasić, Stanford University
Evelyn Char, University of California, Santa Cruz
Johnnie Chatman, University of California, San Diego
Lily Allen, University of California, Riverside
Margot Yale, University of Southern California
Thomas Duncan, University of California, Los Angeles

UC Riverside Retirees’ and Emeriti Associations with additional sponsorship by UCR Osher and UCR’s Office of Gift Planning Present
The Edward A. Dickson Emeritus/a Professorship Lecture Series

Conrad Rudolph, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Medieval Art History
SIGNATURE ROCKS: EMIGRATION AND THE SIGNED LANDSCAPE IN INDIAN COUNTRY: 1830-1860

Signature Rocks is the first systematic study of the surviving “signatures” inscribed by the emigrants, as they called themselves, on both the famous and not so famous rock formations that line the overland trails through Indian Country from the Missouri River to the Pacific from the 1830s to 1869. Once numbering in the hundreds of thousands, only several thousand have survived. Following the overland crossing, we read hese inscriptions — an unrecognized and vanishing American archive — in light of a number of motivations to signing culled from the over two thousand emigrant journals and other accounts that have come down to us. The result is a new understanding of this completely overlooked spect of one of the most iconic episodes in the history of the United States.

Tuesday, October 21, 2025
3:00 – 4:30 p.m. with Reception to follow
In-person at University Extension Building 1101 in the University Village
Livestreamed via Zoom

Replicated Afterlives: Reviving a Ruined Imperial Garden as Theme Park in Post-Mao China Dr. Patricia J. Yu, Assistant Professor of Art History, Scripps College

2026 Brink Carrott Forster-Hahn Lecture Series Thursday, April 30 at 5:30 in Arts 333