September
Thursday, September 27, 4:30 pm
Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT)
Fung House – 48 Professors Row
*Q&A and Reception to follow
The Tolstoy Family Story Contest
Michael Katz
Leo Tolstoy’s short story “The Kreutzer Sonata” aroused a storm of controversy and created a tremendous scandal when it was published in 1889. A tale of sexual jealousy, adultery, and murder, it was rejected many times by the Russian censor, revised by the author, and then copied over by his faithful wife, Sofiya Andreevna. Meanwhile she wrote two “counter-stories” of her own in which she dared disagree with the views of her eminent husband. Her stories were sequestered in her archive for over 100 years and were recently published in Russian. Michael Katz is retranslating “The Kreutzer Sonata,” translating his wife’s stories into English for the first time, as well another “counter-story” by their son Lev Lvovich in which he disagrees with both of his parents, thus resulting in an extraordinary Tolstoy family “story contest.”
Michael Katz is the author of The Literary Ballad in Early Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature and Dreams and the Unconscious in Nineteenth-Century Russian Fiction. He has translated and edited the Norton Critical Editions of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Children. He has also translated, among other works, Dostoevsky’s Devils, Alexander Herzen’s Who Is to Blame?, and N. G. Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?.
October
Thursday, October 18, 4:30 pm
Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT)
Fung House – 48 Professors Row
*Q&A and Reception to follow
CENTENNIAL OF A JOURNEY: Two Western Feminists in Africa and Asia, 1911-12
Harriet Feinberg
One hundred years ago United States suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt and Dutch Jewish physician, suffrage leader, and peace activist Aletta Jacobs traveled in Africa and Asia, looking into the condition of women and encouraging them to organize on their own behalf. The two realized that the struggle for women’s empowerment could not be limited to white Western women but needed to be worldwide. The ‘travel letters’ Jacobs wrote regularly for a Dutch newspaper, together with Catt’s diary and her reports to several feminist publications, provide a window into their bold venture as well as a perspective on today’s struggles.
Harriet Feinberg edited the English translation of Aletta Jacobs’s autobiography MEMORIES: MY LIFE AS AN INTERNATIONAL LEADER IN HEALTH, SUFFRAGE, AND PEACE (The Feminist Press, 1996). She formerly taught English at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. She holds an Ed.D. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Wednesday, October 31, 4:30 pm
Coolidge Room, Ballou Hall
*Q&A and Reception to follow
*To be rescheduled – details will be posted soon
Poetry Reading and Book Signing
Tracy K. Smith
Tracy K. Smith is the author of numerous works, including Life on Mars (2011), which won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Duende, winner of the James Laughlin Award and the Essence Literary Award; and The Body’s Question, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She is also the recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and a Whiting Writers’ Award, and was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work. Smith is currently a member of the Creative Writing Faculty at Princeton University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
November
Wednesday, November 28, 5:00 pm
Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT)
Fung House -48 Professors Row
*Q&A and Reception to follow
The Critical Archive: Materials, Models and Methods
Moderated by Noit Banai, Lecturer, Modern and Contemporary Art, Visual and Critical Studies Department, Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Co-sponsored by CHAT and the Department of Visual and Critical Studies, Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
A multidisciplinary exploration of the function, definition, and role of the ‘archive’ as an apparatus through which individual and collective histories, memories, and identities are mediated in the 20th and 21st centuries.
If one of the defining characteristics of the traditional archive is its existence as a physical repository of knowledge, many other models and methods have reinvented the system through which verbal, visual, and aural materials are conceptualized, categorized and catalogued. This active questioning of what constitutes the archive — and how the archive constitutes ‘the commons’ — has been accompanied by a recognition of its role as an ‘authority’ governing relations of power. This symposium asks whether we can define what a ‘critical archive’ might be by examining practices from different disciplines, cultural contexts, and time periods.
Program
5pm-5:15pm: Welcome and Introductory Remarks
5:15-5:35pm: What is an Archive?
Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Faculty Director, metaLAB(at)Harvard
Professor of Romance Languages & Literature / Graduate School of Design, Harvard University
Faculty co-director, Berkman Center for Internet and Society
5:35-5:55pm: Beyond History, Beyond Memory? The Novel as Archive in the New Century
Richard J. Golsan
University Distinguished Professor and Director of the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research and the France/TAMU Institute (Centre Pluridisciplinaire) at Texas A & M University
5:55-6:15pm: Trauma’s Archive: Photography, Amnesia and the Failure to Document
Eric Rosenberg, Associate Professor, Department of Art and Art History, Tufts University
6:15-6:35pm: Unhinged Time in the Digital Archive
Tina Wasserman, Lecturer, Visual and Critical Studies Department, Tufts University/The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
6:35-6:55pm: Memory Hack: Taking Archives into One’s Own Hands
Gediminas Urbonas, Associate Professor in Visual Arts, Mitsui Career Development Chair, MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology
6:55-7:30pm: Roundtable discussion and Q&A
7:30-8:00pm: Public Reception
