Wolf Humanities Center “Stuff” Symposium

WOLF HUMANITIES CENTER "STUFF" SYMPOSIUM

“Stuff: Anxieties and Aspirations of the Material World” asks us to reconsider our relationship with stuff - the materials and matter that surround us on a daily basis. Stuff speaks both to the promises and perils entangled in things. Through the lens of aspiration and anxiety, the program will reflect on the creation, use, preservation, discarding and collection of stuff across geographic and temporal contexts. In doing so, the symposium brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to examine these themes and to probe the ethics, promise, and recalcitrance of human engagement with the material world.

PROGRAM

• WHC Fellow, moderator
• Zara Anishanslin, Assistant Professor of History and Art History, University of Delaware
• Sarah Scaturro, Head Conservator, Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

• WHC Fellow, moderator
• Sophia Roosth, Frederick S. Danziger Associate Professor in the History of Science,  Harvard University
• Tianna Uchacz, Postdoctoral Scholar, Making and Knowing Project, Columbia University

• WHC Fellow, moderator
• Andrea G. Bohlman, Assistant Professor of Music, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• Psyche Williams-Forson, Associate Professor and Chair of American Studies, University of Maryland

• WHC Fellow, moderator
• Julie Nelson Davis, WHC Topic Director, Forum on Stuff  and Professor of History of Art, University of Pennsylvania
• Michelle Millar Fisher, The Louis C. Madeira IV Assistant Curator of European Decorative Arts and Design. Philadelphia Museum of Art
• Jacob Rivkin, Artist-in-Residence, Penn Program in the Environmental Humanities
• Sarah Wasserman, WHC Regional Fellow, Forum on Stuff and Assistant Professor of English, University of Delaware

CLOSING REMARKS
Karen Redrobe, Director, Wolf Humanities Center and Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Professor of Cinema and Modern Media and Chair of History of Art, University of Pennsylvania

5 - 6pm
RECEPTION

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of History of Art, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, Department of History, Department of History and Sociology of Science, Department of Anthropology, The McNeill Center for Early American Studies, Department of Music, and the Penn Program in the Environmental Humanities.