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On Seeing Series Launches with “Mortevivum”
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Join Brown University Library as we host a cross-disciplinary panel discussion centered on Kimberly Juanita Brown’s Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual (Paperback from MIT Press, February 2024. Open access digital edition by Brown University Digital Publications; full digital release June 2024). Speakers include the author, Kimberly Juanita Brown, Associate Professor, Department of English and Creative Writing and Director of the Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life at Dartmouth College; Kim Gallon, Brown University Associate Professor of Africana Studies; Juliet Hooker, Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in Political Science; Kevin Quashie, Brown University Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in English; and Avery Willis Hoffman, Artistic Director of the Brown Arts Institute and Professor of the Practice of Arts and Classics.
- Date: Wednesday, April 3, 2024
- Location: Willis Reading Room at the John Hay Library, 20 Prospect St, Providence
- Program:
- 5 – 5:25 p.m.: Book sale and author signing
- 5:30 p.m.: Welcome remarks
- 5:45 p.m.: Reading by author Kimberly Juanita Brown
- 6 p.m.: Panel conversation
- 6:45 p.m.: Audience Q&A
- 7 p.m.: Reception
Free and open to the public.
Sponsored by Brown University Library, Africana Studies, Brown Arts Institute, Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, Cogut Institute for the Humanities, Comparative Literature, History of Art and Architecture, Modern Culture and Media, and Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.
On Seeing
Mortevivum is the inaugural title of On Seeing, a new multimodal book series published by The MIT Press and Brown University Digital Publications. Devoted to visual literacy, publications foreground the political agency, critical insight, and social impact inscribed in visuality and representation. Centering underrepresented perspectives and understudied questions, books in the series articulate complex ideas about how we see, comprehend, and participate in the visual world.
Mortevivum
Mortevivum is a powerful examination of the unsettling history of photography and its fraught relationship to global antiblackness. Since photography’s invention, black life has been presented as fraught, short, agonizingly filled with violence, and indifferent to intervention: living death—mortevivum—in a series of still frames that refuse a complex humanity. In Mortevivum, Kimberly Juanita Brown shows us how the visual logic of documentary photography and the cultural legacy of empire have come together to produce the understanding that blackness and suffering—and death—are inextricable. Brown traces this idea from the earliest images of the enslaved to the latest newspaper photographs of black bodies, from the United States and South Africa to Haiti and Rwanda, documenting the enduring, pernicious connection between photography and a global history of antiblackness.
Speakers
Kimberly Juanita Brown
Kimberly Juanita Brown is the inaugural director of the Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life at Dartmouth College where she is also an Associate Professor of English and creative writing. Her research and teaching gather at the intersection of African American/African diaspora literature and visual culture studies. She is particularly interested in the relationship between visuality and black subjectivity. Her first book, The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the Contemporary (Duke University Press, 2015) examines slavery’s profound ocular construction and the presence and absence of seeing in relation to the plantation space. Her current book project, Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual, was released by MIT Press in February 2024, with a full digital edition from Brown University Digital Publications slated for June 2024. Mortevivum explores the relationship between photography and histories of antiblackness on the cusp of the twenty-first century.
The URL for Mortevivum is https://on-seeing-mortevivum.org/.
Kim Gallon
Kim Gallon is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University. Her work investigates the cultural dimensions of the Black Press in the early twentieth century. Her first book, Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press (University of Illinois Press, 2020) argues that African American newspapers fostered Black sexual expression, agency, and identity in the first half of the twentieth century.
Gallon is also the author of the field defining article, “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities.”
Her more recent work focuses on the spatial relationship between reading and residential segregation in Baltimore in the twentieth century. She is aso working on a book project on race, digital technology, and health equity.
Gallon is the founder and director of two black digital humanities projects, The Black Press Research Collective and COVID Black.
Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, Social Science Research Council and Spencer Foundation.
Juliet Hooker
Juliet Hooker is Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in Political Science. She is a political theorist specializing in racial justice, Black political thought, Latin American political thought, democratic theory, and contemporary political theory. She has also written on racism and Afro-descendant and indigenous politics in Latin America. Before coming to Brown, she was a faculty member at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss (Princeton University Press, 2023), Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos (Oxford, 2017), Race and the Politics of Solidarity (Oxford, 2009), and editor of Black and Indigenous Resistance in the Americas: From Multiculturalism to Racist Backlash (Lexington Books, 2020). Theorizing Race in the Americas was awarded the American Political Science Association’s 2018 Ralph Bunche Book Award for the best work in ethnic and cultural pluralism and the 2018 Best Book Award of the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. Prof. Hooker served as co-Chair of the American Political Science Association’s Presidential Task Force on Racial and Social Class Inequalities in the Americas (2014-2015), and as Associate Director of the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin (2009-2014). She has been the recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the DuBois Institute for African American Research at Harvard, and the Advanced Research Collaborative at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Kevin Quashie
Kevin E. Quashie is Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in English at Brown University. He teaches black cultural and literary studies and is a professor in the department of English. Primarily, he focuses on black feminism, queer studies, and aesthetics, especially poetics. He is the author or editor of four books, most recently The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (2012) and Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being (2021). Black Aliveness has been awarded two prizes: the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association (2022) and the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism from the Poetry Foundation (2022). Currently, he is thinking about literary criticism as a form of estrangement and consolation or, said another way, he is thinking about the workings and potency of black sentences.
Avery Willis Hoffman
A writer, artistic director, creative producer and curator of public programs, Avery Willis Hoffman joined Brown University in 2020 as the inaugural Artistic Director of the Brown Arts Institute and Professor of the Practice of Arts and Classics.
In her recent role as inaugural Program Director at Park Avenue Armory in New York, Avery curated and produced innovative and diverse public programming initiatives, including numerous large- and intimate-scale cultural events: Artist and Curatorial Talks, a Confrontational Comedy Series (2016-2019), the annual Culture in a Changing America Symposium (2017-2020), Carrie Mae Weems: Shape of Things Salon (2017), the United Lenape Nations’s first Manhattan-based Pow Wow (2018), Theaster Gates’s Black Artist Retreat 2019, the multi-partner digital initiative 100 Years | 100 Women, marking the centennial of the 19th Amendment (2020), the 12 episode podcast project, Helga: The Armory Conversations (2021), and Carrie Mae Weems: The Land of Broken Dreams Convening (2021).
Prior to the Armory, Avery was a senior Project Developer at Ralph Appelbaum Associates, a museum planning and design firm, where she conducted research and developed content for a number of special projects. Between 2010-2015, her primary project was the development of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington, D.C. Avery has also held positions at Focus Features, Clinton Global Initiative, and TED.
For nearly two decades, her professional career has included multiple projects with acclaimed director Peter Sellars, including on his international productions of Shakespeare’s Othello, Mozart’s opera Zaide, New Crowned Hope Festival, and Toni Morrison’s Desdemona. From 2016-2020, she produced the international tour of FLEXN, Sellars’s collaboration with choreographer Reggie Gray and the Brooklyn flex community, which premiered at the Armory in March 2015 and has since been presented at the Marseille Festival, Napoli Teatro Festival, Holland Festival, New Zealand Festival, Sao Paolo Brasil Sesc, La Villette Paris, Jacobs Pillow Dance Festival, with residencies at Dartmouth College and Princeton University, and The Kennedy Center.
Brown University Digital Publications — a collaboration between the University Library and the Dean of the Faculty, generously launched with support from the Mellon Foundation with additional support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services — creates exciting new conditions for the production and sharing of knowledge. Widely recognized as accessible, intentional, and inclusive, Brown’s novel, university-based approach to digital content development is helping to set the standards for the future of scholarship in the digital age.
Established in 1962, the MIT Press is one of the largest and most distinguished university presses in the world and a leading publisher of books and journals at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design. MIT Press books and journals are known for their intellectual daring, scholarly standards, interdisciplinary focus, and distinctive design.
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Library Sound Levels
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In response to patron feedback about concerning levels of noise and conversation in Library spaces, the Library is instituting a new sound level system. We ask that all visitors to the Library follow these guidelines to ensure a welcoming and inclusive experience for all members of our community.
See below for sound level descriptions and locations, followed by information about decibel levels and the Brown Code of Conduct and ways to report concerning behavior.
Sound Levels
Absolute Quiet: 0 – 25 decibels
This space is intended for those who need complete quiet for deep, focused work or restorative rest. There should be no conversation with as little noise generated by belongings/devices (on silent) as possible. Covered beverages are allowed*; no food please.
Locations
- Rockefeller Library
- Absolute Quiet Rooms on Level A
- John Hay Library
- Willis Reading Room, 1st floor
- *Gildor Family Special Collections Reading Room (NO FOOD OR BEVERAGES), 1st floor
- Sciences Library
- Absolute Quiet Room on Level 4
- Rooms A04, A6, A8, A9 on Level A
Considerate: 26 – 40 decibels
This is a quiet space best suited for individual or small group study. Hushed, brief conversation is OK. Silence phones, tablets, laptops, noisy headphones, etc. Covered drinks and quick snacks are allowed.*
Locations
- Rockefeller Library
- Sorensen Family Reading Room on Level 1
- Finn Reading Room on Level 1
- Sidney E. Frank Digital Studio on Level 1
- Racial Justice Resource Center on Level 2
- Gardner Room (East Asian Collections) on Level 3
- Stacks
- Stairwells and hallways
- John Hay Library
- *Harriette Hemmasi Exhibition Gallery (NO FOOD OR BEVERAGES), 1st floor
- Rooms 303 and 321, 3rd floor
- Stairwells and hallways
- Sciences Library
- Rooms A01, A01A, A01B, A18, A21, A24 on Level A
- Mezzanine Level
- Stacks
- Stairwells and hallways
- Orwig Music Library
- Reading rooms
- Stacks
- Stairwells and hallways
Conversational: 41 – 60 decibels
This space is intended for teaching, group work, and Library events. Please maintain conversation at a moderate noise level, similar to a coffee shop. Enjoy covered drinks and quick snacks. Please visit the lobby for meals and noisy or fragrant snacks. Events and classes may include catering only with pre-authorization by Library administration and a Facilities Management custodial clean. Email library@brown.edu for more information about hosting events at the Library.
Locations
- Rockefeller Library
- Circulation area
- Lobby and café area
- Closed group study spaces
- Classrooms (as directed by instructor)
- Spaces hosting events or while the building is closed
- John Hay Library
- Research Services area
- Student lounge
- Sciences Library
- Lobby
- Circulation area on Level A
- Rooms A17, A17A, A22, A23, A25, A26, A27, A28, A29 (reservable study rooms) on Level A
- Map Collection area on Level 11
- Rooms 1218, 1220, 1221 on Level 12
Decibel Levels
You may have seen decibel level guides displayed in Friedman Study Center at the Sciences Library, which are meant to denote the level of acceptable noise in each zone, moving from conversational around the reader services desk, to absolute quiet in the back of the room.
Examples of sounds with corresponding decibel levels:
- 20 rustling leaves
- 30 whispering
- 40 quiet office, hum of a computer, light rain
- 50 light traffic, a quiet office
- 60 hum of an air conditioner or refrigerator, normal conversation, moderate rain
- 70 a noisy restaurant (too loud for any library space)
- 80 alarm clock (beginning of hearing damage range)
Code of Conduct and Reporting Concerns
If you have concerns about behavior in violation of the Student Code of Conduct, please email student-conduct@brown.edu. Violations of the University Code of Conduct can be reported through the Anonymous Reporting Hotline by phone at 877-318-9184 or online.
For safety concerns, contact DPS immediately at 4111 (campus phone) or 401-863-4111 or 911. Calls to 911 will be directed to the DPS call center.
- Rockefeller Library
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New Directions in Digital Scholarship Lecture Series
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Join the Brown University Library’s Center for Digital Scholarship as we host a three-part lecture series on new directions in digital scholarship.
Free and open to the public.
Archipelagos of Marronage: Black Femme Freedom
– Jessica Marie JohnsonTuesday, February 4, 2024 at 4 p.m.
Churchill House Living Room, 155 Angell StreetThis talk is sponsored by the Center for Digital Scholarship and the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice.
Jessica Marie Johnson
Jessica Marie Johnson is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the Johns Hopkins University and Director of LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure. Johnson is a historian of Atlantic slavery and the Atlantic African diaspora. She is the author of “Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World” (University of Pennsylvania Press, August 2020). The book is a winner of the 2021 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize of the American Studies Association, the 2021 Wesley-Logan Prize form the American Historical Association, the 2021 Rosalyn Terborg-Penn Prize for Outstanding Original Scholarship on Gender and Sexuality in the African Diaspora from the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora, the 2021 Frank L. and Harriet C. Owsley Award for Best Book in Southern History from the Southern Historical Association, the 2020 Kemper and Leila Williams Prize for Louisiana History, the 2020 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians First Book Prize, the 2020 Rebel Women Lit Caribbean Readers’ Award for Best Non-Fiction Book, an Honorable Mention for the 2021 Pauli Murray Book Award from the African American Intellectual History Society, and a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize from the Gilder-Lehrman Institute.
Johnson is an internationally recognized digital humanist. Johnson is the Director of LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure and Senior Research Associate with the Center for the Digital Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. Johnson is PI of Black Beyond Data, a Black studies computational and social sciences lab, with co-PIs Kim Gallon and Alexandre White. Alongside Dr. Yomaira C. Figueroa, Johnson also co-directs the Diaspora Solidarities Lab, a Mellon-funded multi-university initiative applying Black feminist methodologies to collaborative scholarship. Johnson’s essay, “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads” is widely recognized as a ground-breaking intervention in the fields of Black studies, digital humanities and data science. Johnson is co-editor with Lauren Tilton and David Mimno of Debates in the Digital Humanities: Computational Humanities. She was guest editor of Slavery in the Machine, a special issue of archipelagos journal (2019) and co-editor with Dr. Mark Anthony Neal (Duke University) of Black Code: A Special Issue of the Black Scholar (2017).
Her work has appeared in Slavery & Abolition,The Black Scholar, Meridians: Feminism, Race and Transnationalism, American Quarterly, Social Text, The Journal of African American History, the William & Mary Quarterly, Debates in the Digital Humanities, Forum Journal, Bitch Magazine, Black Perspectives (AAIHS), Somatosphere and Post-Colonial Digital Humanities (DHPoco) and her book chapters have appeared in multiple edited collections. Most recently, Johnson signed a two book deal with the Liveright, an imprint of W. W. Norton, to publish a non-fiction monograph examining Black women’s engagement with history of slavery and how that engagement appears and reappears in digital and social media; and a history of Black researchers and the first generation of Black people freed from slavery in the United States. Johnson is represented by McKinnon Literary.
The Revolution Will Not Be Datafied: Dispatches from the Digital Black Atlantic
– Roopika RisamFriday, April 5, 2024 at 4 p.m.
Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab, Rockefeller LibraryRoopika Risam
Roopika Risam is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies and of Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College, where she is part of the Digital Humanities and Social Engagement Cluster.
Formerly, Risam was Chair of Secondary and Higher Education and Associate Professor of Education and English at Salem State University. There, she also served as the Faculty Fellow for Digital Library Initiatives, Co-Director of the Viking OER and Textbook Affordability Initiative, Coordinator of the Graduate Certificate in Digital Studies, and Coordinator of the Combined B.A./M.Ed. in English Education.
Her research interests lie at the intersections of postcolonial and African diaspora studies, humanities knowledge infrastructures, and digital humanities.
Risam’s work has been supported by over $4.3 million in grants from funders including the Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, Institute for Museum and Library Services, Mass Humanities, and the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education.
Her first monograph, New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2018. She is the co-editor of Intersectionality in Digital Humanities (Arc Humanities/Amsterdam University Press, 2019) and South Asian Digital Humanities: Postcolonial Mediations Across Technology’s Cultural Canon (Routledge, 2020). Risam’s latest co-edited collection The Digital Black Atlantic in the Debates in the Digital Humanities series (University of Minnesota Press) was published in 2021. Her current book project, “Insurgent Academics: A Radical Account of Public Humanities,” which traces a new history of public humanities through the emergence of ethnic studies, is under contract with Johns Hopkins University Press.
Her scholarship has appeared in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Debates in the Digital Humanities, First Monday, Popular Communications, College and Undergraduate Libraries, and Native American and Indigenous Studies, among other journals and volumes.
Risam is Principal Investigator of the Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium (DEFCon), which brings together faculty who work at the intersections of ethnic studies and digital humanities. She is currently developing The Global Du Bois, a data visualization project on W.E.B. Du Bois. She also co-directs Reanimate, an intersectional feminist publishing collective that recovers archival writing by women in media industries, and co-hosts Rocking the Academy, a podcast featuring conversations with the very best truth tellers, who are formulating a new vision of higher education. She is also a founding member of The Data-Sitters Club and co-editor of Reviews in Digital Humanities.
Performative Pasts and Speculative Histories: Playing in and with the Digital West in Red Dead Redemption
– Ashlee Hope BirdThursday, April 25, 2024 at 4 p.m.
Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab, Rockefeller LibraryAshlee Hope Bird
Ashlee Hope Bird (Western Abenaki), a Native American game designer and PhD in Native American Studies, is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She originally hails from the Champlain Valley of Vermont. Her dissertation, “Representation and Reclamation: The History and Future of Natives in Gaming,” theorizes digital sovereignty, drawing on Native American studies, media studies, and game studies to address representations of Native American characters in video games. The work analyzes specific colonial methodologies being replicated within game spaces in order to then replace these with decolonial methods of game design being undertaken by herself and fellow Native game designers with a focus on what she terms “synthetic Indigenous identity,” oriented around promoting Indigenous futures. Bird is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled Red Dead Redemption: Finding My Place in the Digital West that explores the complex relationships that different players have with games and undertakes an exploration of the Red Dead Redemption series and what the games have offered (or not offered) to their player bases.
Beyond her academic writing, she has created three artworks, publicly exhibited seven times in group and solo exhibitions, and has curated one show. Among these are two of her original video games, One Small Step and Full of Birds, which have been featured in the InDigital Space at the ImagineNATIVE Film & Media Festival in 2018 and 2019 respectively. She is also a founding member of the UC Davis ModLab, an experimental laboratory for media research and digital humanities. Bird was accepted to and passed the pilot program in Abenaki Language (her heritage language) at the Middlebury College Language School in July of 2020, and then went on to Complete Ndakinna IG A200: Intermediate Guide to Abenaki through the Ndakinna School. She is also working with the Wôbanakik Heritage Center to help develop a digital museum featuring elements of Abenaki history and culture.