Humanities Viewpoints

About Humanities Viewpoints

Humanities Viewpoints is a podcast featuring a conversation between host and Wake Forest University Humanities Institute Program Coordinator, Aimee Mepham, and a WFU faculty member working in the humanities. The conversations focus on a timely subject - a current event, holiday, cultural experience - and how this subject connects to the faculty member's field, teaching, and expertise.

Publisher

Aimee Mepham

Category

society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

26 Aug 2014

Latest episode

17 Feb 2020

Latest episodes

21 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   17 Feb 2020

   The Persian Card Room at Graylyn Estate

   Today I’m talking with Dr. Charles Wilkins, Wake Forest Associate Professor of History, Wake Forest Senior Reid Simpson, and Dr. Anke Scharrahs, independent scholar and conservator. Dr. Scharrahs is an internationally recognized conservator specializing in Islamic art and currently living in Germany. She is visiting Wake Forest as a scholar in residence from February 10th through the 20th. The focus of her attention will be a space in Graylyn Manor House known as the Persian Card Room, an early example of an Ottoman residential space dating from the early 18th century. The panels decorating the room were acquired by Reynolds Tobacco Company President Bowman Gray and his wife Natalie Lyons Gray during their tours of the Mediterranean in the 1920s. During her stay, Dr. Scharrahs will personally examine the Persian Card Room. Since early 2019, she has been conducting research on the room remotely by using an online gallery of digital images provided by University photographer Ken Bennett. Her personal examination is intended to verify her initial findings. Dr. Scharrahs will also present two public lectures. The first, “The Persian Card Room at Graylyn Estate – Secrets of a Rare Interior from Damascus Revealed,” will take place at 5:00pm on Tuesday, February 18th in the auditorium of Reynolda House Museum of American Art. The second, “Relatives of the Persian Card Room at the Graylyn Estate: ‘Damascene Rooms’ in Collections Around the World Between 1880 and 2020,” will take place at 5:00pm on Wednesday, February 19th, also in the auditorium of Reynolda House Museum of American Art. Don’t miss these great opportunities, and please visit history.wfu.edu for more information. These events are sponsored by the WFU Center for Global Programs and Studies, the History Department, the Art Department, the Department for the Study of Religions, the Middle East and South Asia Studies Program, and the Humanities Institute, with support made possible by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Dr. Anke Scharrahs is the author of the book Damascene Ajami Interiors: Forgotten Jewels of Interior Design. She is a conservator specializing in polychrome wooden surfaces with a special interest in Islamic art. She has a Ph.D from the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden, Germany and she has been engaged in research and conservation of Syrian-Ottoman interiors for many years, both in museum collections and in historic houses in Germany, New York, and Damascus. Charles Wilkins joined the Wake Forest faculty in 2006 as Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern history. He is the author of Forging Urban Solidarities: Ottoman Aleppo, 1640-1700 (Brill, 2010).  Wilkins’ scholarly work is concerned with the social history of the Ottoman Empire in the Early Modern Period (1500-1800).  His current research focuses on the long-term social and cultural integration of the Arab lands into the Ottoman Empire. Reid Simpson is a senior at Wake Forest University. He plans to enter a graduate program in history after graduation. He has been working with Dr. Wilkins as a research assistant on this project. In this episode we discuss the origins of the panels of the Persian Card Room, the history of art collection in wealthy families like the Grays, and the poets who wrote the inscriptions on the panels. I hope you enjoy our conversation.

2. 

   1 Apr 2019

   The Lynn Book Project and Digital Humanities

   Today on the podcast, I talk with Lynn Book and Carrie Johnston about the Lynn Book Project, an uncommon Digital Humanities pilot project that preserves and reinvents the multimedia creative and scholarly work of Lynn Book at the nexus of the Arts and the Humanities. Since 2017, Book has been developing her archive that spans a framework of interrogations and serves as a pilot for Digital Humanities archiving practices with support from the Humanities Institute and the Digital Scholarship Initiative at Wake Forest University. Lynn Book is a Teaching Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at Wake Forest University with areas of expertise in Performance Art, Interdisciplinary Arts, New Media, and Creativity. Her 40-year history of interdisciplinary, transmedia practice cuts across boundaries between performance art, theater, dance, visual art, humanities, language and new music forms. She is active internationally, creating original, hybrid, experimental projects that have received citations, fellowships, and awards from among others, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and a residency at MacDowell Colony. Carrie Johnston is the Digital Humanities Research Designer in Wake Forest's Z. Smith Reynolds Library. In her role at ZSR, she collaborates with faculty across disciplines to develop scholarly digital projects through humanistic inquiry. Her research considers the ways that technology has historically informed women's literary labor, and her work has appeared in American Quarterly and Studies in the Novel. She holds a PhD in English Literature from Southern Methodist University. Special thanks go to Sophie Hollis, Senior English Major and Humanities Institute Work Study student for editing and transcribing this episode. Well done, Sophie!

3. 

   29 Sept 2017

   The WFU Art Acquisitions Trip and Art in Public Spaces

   My guests for this episode are Professor John Curley and Professor Leigh Ann Hallberg. They have both led the Wake Forest University Art Acquisitions Trip in which a group of six Wake Forest students purchase art from New York galleries to add to the Student Union Collection. Our conversation will touch on a number of topics related to this trip, including the history of the trip itself and how students prepare for it, the role of art in public spaces, what it means to build a collection, and how art can capture and reflect the cultural and political concerns of a particular time and place. The exhibition from the most recent trip, ex postGlobal: New Acquisitions to the WFU Student Union Collection of Contemporary Art, is currently on view through October 15th at the Charlotte and Philip Hanes Art Gallery on the Wake Forest Reynolda campus. For more information, visit hanesgallery.wfu.edu. John Curley is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art in the Department of Art, where he teaches courses in twentieth and twenty-first century art, as well as the history of photography. His research explores the ways that postwar art, primarily in the United States and Europe, intervenes into larger realms of visuality, the mass media, and politics, especially during the period of the Cold War. These concerns are addressed in his award-winning first book: A Conspiracy of Images: Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and the Art of the Cold War (Yale University Press, 2013). He has also published numerous essays in journals and international exhibition catalogs. His current book project Art and the Global Cold War: A History is under contract with Laurence King and should appear in 2018. His research has been supported by the Getty Research Institute, the Yale Center for British Art, the Henry Moore Institute, and the Terra Foundation, among others. At Wake Forest, he received a Teaching Innovation Award in 2012 and co-led the Art Buying Trips in 2009 and 2013. Leigh Ann Hallberg was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1956. She received her BA, Magna Cum Laude, from Mount Union College in 1978 and her MFA from University of Colorado Boulder in 1989. Hallberg has exhibited at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Verge Art Fair NY, the Museo Archeologico Nazionale – Ferrara, Italy, Museo Civico Archeologico, Stellata, Italy, Plymouth Rock Gallery in Zurich, Switzerland and Unterhammer im Karistal, Germany among other venues. Hallberg is a Teaching Professor at Wake Forest University where she has been a Hoak Family Fellow and awarded numerous grants.

Contact Humanities Viewpoints

Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.