Session 2

Guided tour of Shadi Habib Allah: Palestinian artist Shadi Habib Allah works across film, drawing, sculpture, and installation, often drawing on a process of deep research and on-the-ground physical engagement in specific locales. Richly varied in form and focus, his recent projects run the gamut from traveling along illicit trade routes with Bedouin smugglers to documenting labor and banter between mechanics in a Miami body shop.

Guided tour of Candice Lin: A Hard White Body, a Porous Slip: Los-Angeles-based artist Candice Lin creates sculptural environments that breathe, seep, ferment, and decay. Working with an arsenal of sculptural forms that include finely crafted objects; organisms such as plants, insects, and bacteria; and natural compounds, Lin interrogates the ways in which histories of power and marginality are inscribed into bodies and into the natural world.

**2 places are available for this tour.**

What exactly goes into composing an opera? From the initial concept to opening night, what does it takes to bring an opera to the stage? This talk discusses the processes of the writer, the composer, and the performing artists in their mission to create a contemporary work in an age-old genre.

**This presentation is full.**

This presentation will be a lecture and demonstration focusing on how actors learn to fill in the given circumstances in a text’s environment, being aware that different playwrights provide varying degrees of information. Actors also learn how to create their character’s backstory. The goal is develop specific details that will help to create a unique character onstage. 

**This presentation is full.**

In recent years, many writers and artists have begun to address climate change and ecological crisis in their work. Can the arts help us confront problems that often seem politically and scientifically intractable? And, more specifically, how do different media—installations, novels, sound art, or film—afford different perspectives on our relationship with nature? This talk will discuss recent works that address the effects of climate change, and reflect on the role of the arts on a warming planet.

**This presentation is full.**

This presentation takes Julie Dash’s 1991 film Daughters ​of the Dust as itself the theory that might offer insights into selected issues raised by selected subsequent films, including Eve’s Bayou (dir. Kasi Lemmons, 1997) and Mississippi Damned (dir. Tina Mabry, 2009). It has two foci. The first is in how time and temporality participate in a cinematic project having to do with blackness, violence, and gender that these films share. Related to the first, the second addresses the ways that these films forge the concept “Black woman” cinematically.

Women in Ancient Egypt, A Sourcebook, will appear in the “Writings from the Ancient World” series published by the Society of Biblical Literature. It is a collection of translations of ancient Egyptian texts written by, for, or about women; it is aimed at the general interested public and will require no special training in ancient studies. It will have sections on women and marriage, the family, the economy, law, religion (including music), and health. It will end with a short discussion of the question of female literacy.

This panel will consider the uses of personal and historical archives for creative practices (narrative, poetic, or visual).  What are the objects and situations by which we constitute our lives in writing?

The value of freedom of speech has recently been called into question. Speakers on college campuses and elsewhere have been subjected to the “heckler's veto,” and the legitimacy of this veto has been explicitly defended by many commentators. This turn of events is an opportunity to revisit the question: what is the point and value of free speech—especially when the speech at issue is morally offensive or dangerous? In this talk, the presenter explores this question and offers a candidate answer.

**This presentation is full.**