Join the Haffenreffer Museum as student curators present new research on the Emma Shaw Colcleugh collection. Colcleugh was a Providence-based journalist who traveled the world on her own in the late 19^th century. Students will contextualize items she purchased from African and Pacific people and evaluate Colcleugh’s popular representations of race, gender, and imperialism.

Free and open to the public. Light refreshments to be served.

The Department of Comparative Literature cordially invites you to join us for the 2024 Honors Thesis Forum. This year, six CompLit@Brown seniors will present their honors theses. After the presentations, Comp Lit DUS, Prof. Elias Muhanna, will moderate a roundtable discussion.

If you are an undergraduate student interested in Comp Lit, a current Comp Lit concentrator considering pursuing honors, or have an interest in Comparative Literature, feel free to stop by!

You will find us in Friedman Hall, room 108 on Thursday, May 2 at 5:30 pm. Refreshments will be served and all are welcome. We look forward to seeing you there!

The Comparative Literature Department cordially invites you to join us for this year’s Andrea Rosenthal Memorial Lecture, Bad Mothers: Niobe and Petrified Grief, presented Rebecca Comay from the University of Toronto. This event will take place Thursday, April 25, at 5:30 PM at the Brown Faculty Club.

Rebecca Comay is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, where she is also an associate member of the Centre for Jewish Studies, the Program in Literature and Critical Theory, and the Dept of German. She has published widely in various areas, including German philosophy (mainly Hegel and the Marxist/Frankfurt School tradition), contemporary critical theory, psychoanalysis, and contemporary art. Her books include Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (Stanford, 2011) and The Dash - The Other Side of Absolute Knowing (co-authored with Frank Ruda, MIT, 2017). She is currently working on two book projects – Deadlines (Literally) and Dramaturgies of the Dialectic – as well as an essay collection with the title On Persistence.

As always, this event is free and open to the public and a reception will follow. We hope to see you there!

Making Muzhiming: Collaboration and the Production of the Chinese Entombed Epitaph, 600-900

At every stage of its production, from conception and composition through revision and manufacture, the late medieval Chinese entombed epitaph (muzhiming 墓誌銘) was the product of collaboration. During these collaborations, details could be added or removed, contexts and timelines refined, content tuned for more positive audience response, or material form shaped to achieve specific ends. In this paper, I explore examples of collaboration occurring at four stages of production—pre-writing, composition, editing, and inscription—and highlight how approaching muzhiming as products of collaborative remembering can help us better interpret these textual artifacts as well as provide insight into medieval commemorative practices more broadly.

Daiana Rivas-Tello, a doctoral candidate in Brown University’s Department of Anthropology, will discuss her research in an informal talk, titled “Relocating Crafting Communities: Inka Imperialism and the Huancas Mitmaqkuna in Amazonas, Peru”

For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit our blog: sites.brown.edu/archaeology/

Georgia Andreou, a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Southampton, will lead a discussion on Zoom around the current state of archaeology in Gaza and the impact of the war, entitled, “In the Name of ‘Heritage’: Gazan Archaeology before and after October 2023”. The discussion will begin on Monday, April 22nd at noon, and is open to the public. Preregistration is required: https://tinyurl.com/5n6zmcv4 

Dr. Andreou is a research associate at the Maritime Endangered Archaeology Project (MarEA), the aim of which is the rapid and comprehensive documentation and assessment of endangered maritime archaeological sites. At MarEA she has used HER expertise in GIS and remote sensing to produce a record of endangered sites in Eastern Mediterranean and the Arabian Peninsula. She has also developed two separate sub-projects. The first examines the impact of tropical cyclones on coastal archaeological sites in Oman. The second project contextualises maritime archaeology in the broader ecological and humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip.

Dr. Andreou’s research examines how traditional perceptions of the ancient environment affect the way we collect archaeological data and produce broader historical narratives. Her most recently funded project establishes a baseline for the study of maritime cultural heritage in the Gaza strip through a combination of remote sensing and in situ documentation of vulnerable sites dating between the Neolithic and the Iron Age. She is also one of the co-directors of the Kalavasos and Maroni Built Environment Project, an international, interdisciplinary project excavating two Late Bronze Age sites on the island of Cyprus.

Margaret Graves, Adrienne Minassian Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture in Brown University’s Department of History of Art and Architecture, will discuss her research in an informal talk titled, “Extraction and Liquidation, from Rayy to Russia: Iranian Ceramics in a Global Art Market”

For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit our blog: sites.brown.edu/archaeology/