Community Calendar

Saint Louis University's Department of English will host memoirist Deborah Jackson Taffa on Oct. 2-3, 2024. During her visit she will meet and workshop with undergraduate and graduate students.

Taffa will host a nonfiction craft discussion on Thursday, Oct. 3, at 4 p.m. The event will be held in Adorjan Hall, room 142. All are welcome to attend; admission is free.

Laura Evers, PhD candidate in the Department of English in Arts & Sciences, discusses a selection of late nineteenth-century etchings and engravings made by French, British, and American printmakers. Pastoral and Gothic motifs dominate these college-town prints of Oxford and Cambridge (i.e., Oxbridge). Evers considers how some scenes depict communal, varied uses of space, while other scenes suggest a closed-off intellectual environment. This contrast also underpins dark academia, a term first coined on the internet by artistic communities to describe moody campus aesthetics. From nineteenth-century printmaking to twenty-first-century digital self-fashioning, this talk asks: how have artists shaped our understanding of who and what university spaces are for? A question as relevant today as it was centuries ago.

Free and open to the public.

The Civil Society Initiative at Washington University in St. Louis will host a public lecture (with brunch) featuring Thomas Kelly, Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University and author of Bias: A Philosophical Study (Oxford University Press, 2022) and numerous articles on disagreement and polarization. Professor Kelly will speak on “Why Political Polarization Will Get Worse If People Are Reasonable." An abstract is below.

All are welcome; please RSVP if you plan to attend:

https://philosophy.wustl.edu/events/civil-society-brunch-%E2%80%9Cwhy-political-polarization-will-get-worse-if-people-are-reasonable?d=2024-10-18

Abstract: On the eve of Trump vs. Harris, Americans seem more polarized than ever. In fact, political scientists report that by some measures Americans are more polarized now than at any time since the Civil War. Why is this happening? In this talk, I apply some of the historical insights and contemporary tools of philosophy to try to gain a better understanding of what we see around us. I conclude by offering some speculations about where we might be headed in the future. A natural idea is that political polarization will get better if people think and act reasonably. Against this, I defend a pessimistic hypothesis: that if people are reasonable, we should expect polarization to get worse rather than better.

The Civil Society Initiative is sponsored by the Frick Initiative and the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy.

About the Program:
The Field House Museum is pleased to virtually welcome Sarah Lirley, author of Sudden Deaths in St. Louis: Coroner Bias in the Gilded Age, on Friday, October 18 at 1:00 pm.
The scene of myriad grisly deaths, late nineteenth-century St. Louis was a hotbed for homicide, suicide, alcoholism, abortion, and workplace accidents. In her new book, Sarah Lirley shines a light on the Gilded Age coroners who investigated the causes of these deaths, finding their rulings varied drastically depending on who conducted them. The book’s fascinating case studies explore the lives of the deceased, as well as their families, communities, press coverage of the events, and the coroners themselves.
This virtual program is free with limited seats for the in-person watch party and limited availability on Zoom. Reservations must be made in advance at https://fieldhousemuseum.org/events/programs/, by calling the Museum at 314-421-4689, or by emailing info@fieldhousemuseum.org.

About the Speaker:
Sarah Lirley is a historian who specializes in the history of women and gender, nineteenth century history, and the history of death and death investigations. Lirley is an assistant professor of history at Columbia College (Columbia, Missouri). She has published articles in the Missouri Historical Review and has written peer-reviewed blog articles, encyclopedia entries, and book reviews in a variety of historical journals. She has presented her research at more than twenty professional conferences. This is her first book.

Join us Tuesday, October 22, at 5:30 p.m., for a free public lecture from artist Stacy Lynn Waddell.

A recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, Waddell considers the authorship and idealism of art historical narratives and how they correspond to the economic and political structures of their time while highlighting contemporary issues related to visibility, desire, and power.

This event is part of the Sam Fox School’s Public Lecture Series and is free and open to the public. The lecture will take place in Steinberg Hall.

Free parking is available in the East End Garage beginning at 5:00 p.m. Enter the garage from Forsyth Boulevard or Forest Park Parkway.

Image: Stacy Lynn Waddell, light takes time to reach us (installation view), CANDICE MADEY, New York, 2023, various media and dimensions.

As part of the Design Agendas Symposium, join Toni L. Griffin, professor in practice of urban planning at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, for a keynote address that explores how transdisciplinary design projects can address spatial and social injustices embedded within US cities.

Doors open at 5 pm, and the talk starts at 5:30 pm. A reception will follow.

Free and open to the public. Space is limited; registration is required.

Join community leaders, municipal leaders, and scholars in dialogue around topics related to the Design Agendas exhibition. Organized by WashU’s Kemper Art Museum, College of Architecture, and the Office for Socially Engaged Practice, the panels embrace the pluralistic ideas of the exhibition to explore the impact of past and present design agendas through lived, professional, and civic stories, as well as strategies for participatory futures that embed identity, culture, and memory in the built environment.

This event is free and open to the public. Space is limited; registration is required.

The symposium aims to be a space to:

Embrace multiple perspectives including lived, experienced, professional, and civic administrative
Engage the St. Louis community in dialogue on the impact of and vision for the built environment of the St. Louis region
Share the collective depth of research and expertise of the Sam Fox School and community leaders within the St. Louis region

Join community leaders, municipal leaders, and scholars in dialogue around topics related to the Design Agendas exhibition. Organized by WashU’s Kemper Art Museum, College of Architecture, and the Office for Socially Engaged Practice, the panels embrace the pluralistic ideas of the exhibition to explore the impact of past and present design agendas through lived, professional, and civic stories, as well as strategies for participatory futures that embed identity, culture, and memory in the built environment.

This event is free and open to the public. Space is limited; registration is required.

The symposium aims to be a space to:

Embrace multiple perspectives including lived, experienced, professional, and civic administrative
Engage the St. Louis community in dialogue on the impact of and vision for the built environment of the St. Louis region
Share the collective depth of research and expertise of the Sam Fox School and community leaders within the St. Louis region

Join us Monday, October 28, at 5:30 p.m., for a free public lecture from artist Josh Azzarella.

Azzarella’s multidisciplinary practice — which includes videos, objects, and photographs — explores the power of authorship in shaping collective memory. The works address broader postmodern debates on the nature of reality. His research-based practice continually adopts new media methods such as artificial intelligence, while reexamining and adapting historical methods of reproduction, employing such diverse technologies as electromagnetic levitation and custom lathe-cut records.

This event is part of the Sam Fox School’s Public Lecture Series and is free and open to the public. The lecture will take place in Kemp Auditorium in Givens Hall.

Free parking is available in the East End Garage beginning at 5:00 p.m. Enter the garage from Forsyth Boulevard or Forest Park Parkway.

Image: Josh Azzarella, Untitled #176 (Albedo 0.343), installation view, 2015-16. Scale model (1:4:9) of the monolith from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

Join us Thursday, November 7, at 5:30 p.m., for a free public lecture from artist Josephine Halvorson.

Halvorson makes art that foregrounds firsthand experience and observation. She works primarily in painting, and also in sculpture and printmaking.

Her work has been exhibited internationally and is represented by Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, and Peter Freeman, Paris. Selected exhibitions include SECCA, Storm King Art Center, the ICA Boston Foster Prize Exhibition, and Ríos Intermitentes, a group exhibition curated by Magdalena Campos-Pons as part of the Havana Biennial. In 2021, she presented a solo exhibition of site responsive work at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she was the museum’s first artist in residence. This fall, Halvorson presented her work in a solo exhibition in Los Angeles, California, at James Fuentes Gallery.

Halvorson’s work and practice have been written about widely and she is a subject of Art21’s documentary series New York Close Up.

This event is part of the Sam Fox School’s Public Lecture Series and is free and open to the public. The lecture will take place in Steinberg Hall.

Free parking is available in the East End Garage beginning at 5:00 p.m. Enter the garage from Forsyth Boulevard or Forest Park Parkway.