The Hansford M. Epes Lecture - Living Memorials and Monuments to Feeling:Â Reparative Encounters on Campus
Living Memorials and Monuments to Feeling: Reparative Encounters on Campus
This talk invites attendees to consider how different collegiate settings choose to stage encounters for repair for students, faculty, staff, and community members through artistic media. The vast majority of higher education institutions in the United States have been supported through enslavement, settler colonialism, or both. These are "histories that hurt" and that ripple into the present in a variety of ways. Over the last 10-15 years, several colleges and universities have commissioned artworks as one way to repair the harm these institutions have historically caused. This talk explores the potentialities and limits of the arts' capacity to materialize cultural memory, to "make real" how we might see, hear, and move through the past into new futures.
About the Lecturer
Ariel Nereson, PhD is Associate Professor of Dance Studies at the University at Buffalo – SUNY. She is the author of the award-winning book Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past (University of Michigan Press, 2022); coeditor of the forthcoming collection Critical University Studies and Performance (Vanderbilt University Press); and currently at work on a book about institutions, the arts, and reparations. Her research has most recently been recognized with the Sally Banes Prize from the American Society for Theatre Research. Ariel is Editor of Theatre Journal and a practicing choreographer and dramaturg.