With guest participants:
Dr. Suzannah Biernoff
Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Visual Culture
Department of History of Art
Birkbeck, University of London
Suzannah Biernoff is Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture in the Department of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London and co-director of Birkbeck’s Medical Humanities Research Group. Her research has spanned medieval and modern periods: she is the author of Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (Palgrave, 2002), while her recent publications pursue the themes of corporeal history and visual anxiety in the context of First World War Britain. In 2007 she was awarded a Wellcome Trust Research Leave Award for a project on the cultural history of disfigurement. Open access articles from this project have been published in the journals Visual Culture in Britain, Social History of Medicine and Photographies, and an essay on Nina Berman’s Marine Wedding appeared in the edited volume Ugliness: The Non-beautiful in Art and Theory. Her latest book, Portraits of Violence: War and the Aesthetics of Disfigurement, was published by the University of Michigan Press earlier this year in their Corporealities: Discourses of Disability series.
Erika Blumenfeld
Transdisciplinary Artist
Erika Blumenfeld (b. 1971, USA) is a transdisciplinary artist whose practice is motivated by the wonder of natural phenomena and the relationship between nature and culture. Driven by a passion to trace the evidence and stories of connection within the cosmos, her artistic inquiries have led her to examine a range of subjects including astronomy, geology, planetary science, ecology, the environment, anthropogenic climate disruption, natural night sky preservation and light in its many forms. Often working with scientists and research institutions, her non-traditional research-based studio practice has yielded photo and video-based works, installations, paintings, drawings, sculptures and writing, which are the artifacts of her inquiries’ reflections. Blumenfeld has collaborated with science institutions such as the McDonald Observatory; Scripps Institution of Oceanography; South African National Antarctic Program; and NASA. She is the recipient of many awards including the Rauschenberg Residency (2018); NASA ROSES PDART Grant (2016-2019); Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2015); Cape Farewell’s Scottish Islands Expedition Residency (2011); Artist-in-residence at SANAE Research Base, Antarctica (2009); John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2008); and Creative Capital Foundation Grant (2000), among others. She has exhibited widely in the U.S. and abroad, is featured in many books including Art and Ecology Now (Thames & Hudson/UK, 2014) and The Polaroid Book (Taschen eds. 2005 & 2008) and is in the permanent collections of Albright-Knox Art Gallery; Lannan Foundation; Houston MFA; New Mexico MFA; and Scottsdale MCA. Blumenfeld lives and works in Houston, Texas.
Dr. Jairo Moreno
Associate Professor
Department of Music
University of Pennsylvania
Jairo Moreno’s work in music theory addresses the production of knowledge of music and the sonic in modernity from a historic-speculative perspective. He has written a major study of the history of listening in early modern and modern music theory and analysis, Musical Representations, Subjects, and Objects: The Construction of Musical Thought in Zarlino, Descartes, Rameau, and Weber (Indiana University Press, 2004). He also writes at the intersection of aurality, the politics of aesthesis, and Latin-American popular music in the U.S during the long 20th century. His current project is entitled Syncopated Modernities: Musical Latin Americanisms in the U.S., 1978-2008, an archival, critical, and ethnographic study of music’s precarious share in political practices during late capitalism.
Awards include the Society for American Music 2005 Irving Lowens Article Award for Best Article (“Bauzá-Gillespie-Latin Jazz”), Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities (Yale), ACLS Fellowship (2009-2010), and National Humanities Center Fellowship (2012-2013). He received the David and Janet Brooks Distinguished Teaching Award (Duke) and the Golden Dozen Teaching Award (NYU). A former professional musician, he was bassist in five Grammy Award nominated recordings with the late Latin and Jazz percussionist Ray Barretto (Blue Note, EMI-France, Concord, Fania labels – 1989-1997), appeared in numerous other recordings, and performed chamber music with guitarist David Starobin and the Ciompi String Quartet.