2003-04 Seminar
MONUMENT, DOCUMENT: FROM ARCHIVE TO PERFORMANCE
Click here for year-end symposium, April 19, 2004: "Sexed-Up Documents"
Elizabeth Fenn and Richard Powell, Co-conveners
How is human experience preserved, remembered, recast, represented, and communicated? What do societies preserve, and what do they discard? How do we recover lost or censored art, documents, and experience? How do societies and individuals reinvent themselves through records and representation? What new sources can we seek? And how can we reread the sources already extant?
The 2003–2004 Seminar offers scholars from a wide array of disciplines the opportunity to delve into these questions and more. By choosing “Monument, Document: From Archive to Performance” as our theme, we invite a broad exploration of the social and cultural record.
In the word “monument,” we recognize the way constructed forms embody knowledge and experience. Monuments might include memorials, buildings, planned settings, museums, parks, squares, plazas, and other spatial structures and landscapes dedicated to peoples, events, ideas, & ideals. With the word “document,” we call for a reconsideration of the problems and possibilities presented by accounts, recordings, recollections, and proceedings that capture past events in written, illustrated, photographed, filmed, or videographed forms.
“Archive” and “performance” call our attention to the preservation and enactment of experience, whether conscious or unconscious, selective or inclusive. Are the archives for this structural or historical knowledge invariably bibliotechnologic, systemic and antiquarian in nature, or can they be less institutionalized, employing instead the imagination and vernacular forms of gathering and transmission? Is there a concept of the repository that is transformative, alive, and accessible in the collective mind? Is one of the surest ways of holding onto knowledge performance—the act itself? Are we all in fact performers, reconstructing human experience with pen and paper, mortar and steel, or gongs and marimbas? How do we live out the memory of things via social showmanship or artful silence?
Whether our informants are art, architecture, literature, theater, dance, computer files, natural landscapes, or long-buried ruins, garbage heaps, and fossils, we all face interpretive opportunities and dilemmas that resonate across fields and disciplines. This Seminar will give us the chance to develop new approaches and new solutions to our research and methodological challenges.
Our intent is to build upon breadth. We therefore seek contributions from scholars interested in the ancient as well as the modern world and from scholars working on non-western as well as western topics. We believe in the centrality of the arts and humanities to all academic endeavor and thus encourage interdisciplinary approaches relating to the sciences and social sciences.
About the Co-Conveners
Elizabeth A. Fenn is an assistant professor of history who began teaching at Duke in 2002. Her field of study is early North America, and her research focuses on epidemic disease and social history. She is particularly interested in developing a continent-wide analysis that incorporates Native Americans and African, British, Spanish, French, and Russian colonizers into a new narrative that reflects the demographic and geographic realities of the early contact era. Before she returned to graduate school to write her dissertation in 1996, Fenn spent eight years working as an auto mechanic. Her book, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–82, received the best first book prize of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic in 2002, and an article on early biological warfare has won three separate prizes. She is currently researching two new projects. One examines the experience of the Mandan Indians as the economic and cultural arbiters of the northern plains in the eighteenth century, and the other examines a little-known episode of the American Revolution in which British officials in Virginia promised freedom to slaves willing to fight on the side of the crown.
Richard J. Powell is John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art History who received his Ph.D. from Yale University. His research and teaching interests lie in American art, African American art, and theories of race and representation in the African diaspora. He has gained international recognition for groundbreaking scholarship in the field of African-American art history. He is also interested in the media arts and conceptualizations of the "folk" in world art and culture. His books include Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson and Black Art: A Cultural History. An important contributor to defining and exploring issues of visual representation and identity, Powell is currently doing research in international collections and archives on visualizations of people of African descent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Powell's research, writing and teaching explore historical processes shaping ideas of selfhood, love, gender, friendship, sexuality, politics, and authority to open up the contingency of what now seems "just natural."
2003-04 Fellows
From the Faculty in Arts and Sciences, the new Seminar Fellows will be
Stanley Abe, Art and Art History, who will work on a survey of Chinese
art; Valeria Finucci, Romance Studies, who will study women stage performers
in early modern Italy; Richard Jaffe, Department of Religion, who will
explore transformations in Japanese Buddhism in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries; Anthony Kelly, Music Department, who will examine
ways of capturing the “feel” of spontaneous forms of music
through written notation; and Grant Parker, Department of Classical Studies,
who will look at the use and reuse of Egyptian obelisks as they were moved
about in the Roman world.
The Seminar also traditionally includes a Fellow from the Duke library
system, and given the year’s focus on archives and documents, it
is especially appropriate that Steven Hensen, 
Director of Planning and
Project Development from the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections
Library, will participate. Hensen will focus his work during the year on
broad questions of the politics of information, especially in the context
of the widespread digitization of documents and the imposition of new rules
of access to information in the age of counter-terrorism.
Two postdoctoral fellows will participate in the Seminar. From the University Writing Program comes Douglas Reichert Powell, a Mellon Lecturing Fellow with a Ph.D. in English who is working on a project on the re-emergence of Appalachia in literature and popular culture as a locus of national anxiety. Leigh Raiford, a Yale Ph.D. writing about photographic representation of African-American social movements, will also be a fellow, under sponsorship of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.
Finally, the Seminar will also include two Duke graduate students: Simon Hay, from the English Department, who is writing his dissertation on the use of the image of the ghost to explore temporal relationships in modernist literature; and Gonzalo Lamana, from Cultural Anthropology, whose dissertation focuses on the transition of Peru from center of the Inca empire to Spanish colony.