WHITNEY HUMANITIES CENTER  •  53 WALL STREET
NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT 06511

CONFERENCE DESCRIPTION

Despite widespread agreement that globalization is a generative cultural condition and despite Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's much discussed book, Empire, little effort has been made among historians of modern art to evaluate contemporary claims regarding globalization in light of historical precedent.  This is indeed remarkable because, virtually from its beginnings, and certainly from the time of its institutionalization in the 19th century, the discipline of art history has proceeded according to a comparative methodology that is almost inherently international.  Moreover, works of art themselves have proven to be among the most mobile of things whose trajectories across periods and cultures have helped to solidify and to represent the international and the global.

"Empire/Globe" will identify and address the challenges of global thinking within a particular discipline in the humanities -- one that lends itself to such thought, but that nonetheless finds itself balkanized into particular national fields.  By bringing together art historians from a variety of specializations, the conference will center on broader questions of knowledge transfer and dissemination through objects and aesthetics.  It is unlikely that the university as a whole can transform its pedagogy without such revisions within individual disciplines.

In order to address these issues the "body" of the conference will include two panels including four scholars, each of whom would give a brief (30 minute) talk followed by lively discussion.  The first panel will consider early modern international networks and the second panel will focus on modern and postmodern versions.  A keynote lecture will open the symposium on the previous evening.

FRIDAY, APRIL 9, 2004

  5:OO PM
KEYNOTE LECTURE  -  WU HUNG, University of Chicago

“The Birth of Ruins: Orientalism, War, Photography, and the Invention of a Modern Visual Culture in China”

SATURDAY, APRIL 10, 2004

  9:45 AM - 12:30 PM

MORNING PANEL:   EMPIRE

CHRISTOPHER WOOD, Yale University
“The Very First World’s Columbian Exposition”

GÜLRU NECIPOGLU, Harvard University
"Reclaiming the Empire in Old and New Rome: Centrally Planned Domed Sanctuaries Commissioned by the Popes and Sultans"

DARCY GRIMALDO GRIGSBY, University of California, Berkeley
“Out of Egypt’s Earth”

MIMI YIENGPRUKSAWAN, Yale University
“Japan and Modernism: A Case Study in Denial”


  2:00 PM - 4:45 PM

AFTERNOON PANEL:   GLOBE

BERT WINTHER-TAMAKI, University of California, Irvine
"Materializing Japanese Bodies in European Oil Paint; The Yôga Nude, 1910-1940"

SERGE GUILBAUT, University of British Columbia
“The Good, the Bad and the Pretty: The Fear of Cultural Globalization in France at the Beginning of the Cold War”

PAMELA M. LEE, Stanford University
"Perpetual Revolution: Thomas Hirschhorn's Sense of the World"

MIWON KWON, University of California, Los Angeles
"Is It a Small World After All?"

Empire/Globe was made possible by the generous support of the Yale University History of Art Department, the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale, the Yale Center for International and Area Studies, the Coca-Cola World Fund at Yale, the Office of the Provost, and the Whitney Humanities Center.

The conference was organized by David Joselit (Professor of History of Art, Yale University) and Mimi Yiengpruksawan (Professor of History of Art and Chair, Council on East Asian Studies, Yale University).

For more information about the conference, please contact David Joselit at david.joselit@yale.edu.

For information regarding local hotel venues and visiting Yale University, please visit http://www.yale.edu/newhaven/visitor.html