September 2023
Artful maps: exploring the visual culture of cartography
The Oxford Seminars in Cartography Conference: 26 September 2023 Cartography has long been recognised as art and science. This conference explores how art affects cartography’s process, products, and personnel. Ranging over all types of map, all areas of the world, and all time periods, the conference considers the relationship between art and cartography. Themes may include but need not be confined to: Maps in art: maps and globes have long featured in portraits, genre scenes, and other works of art.…
Details »October 2023
Pilgrimages on the Western Front of the 1WW
Three Rude Crosses: The Jerome Family Pilgrimage to France, 1919 For mother of American aviator Gilbert Nelson Jerome, there was no chance that she was going to wait for the United States government, for her parish priest, for her daughter, or for anyone else to tell her when the time was right to go to France to trace her son’s last movements. Less than a year after the Armistice, Elizabeth Maude Jerome was on a steamship to France with her…
Details »November 2023
Material Cultures of Preservation, Transformation, Erasure, and Memorialization
What would it look like for sites of public memory, memorialization, and preservation to act as places of justice, community, and care? What kinds of feelings do these places and things engender? Joy, rage, mourning, exhaustion, hope, love? This session examines the dynamics of public space, acts of preservation, and places and things of memory through the lens of community, examining moments of failure and erasure alongside moments of love and solidarity. Penn State Harrisburg graduate student Jeremy Boorum considers…
Details »Monumental Developments: Contemporary Approaches to Commemorative Public Art
Breaking (Bad) Glass: Remaking Commemoration at Yale University The sound of breaking glass in what was then called Calhoun College at Yale University on June 13, 2016, signaled the death knell for that college’s name and highlighted the university’s reticence in addressing school history and its problematic relationship to the city in which it resides. The city provides the university with much of its service staff, who work across campus—a campus which exists as intertwined with downtown New Haven—in positions…
Details »January 2024
Material Matters: It’s in the Details
Presence and Absence in Pennsylvania: Carved Head of Captain John Carlton by John Fisher, c. 1786 Inside a mid-20th century car dealership-turned-local history museum is the representation of an indigenous man. He is carved from the trees that gave name to “Penn’s Woods.” These were eighteenth century woods inhabited by an intersection of peoples speaking different languages: Algonquian, English, High German, and Low German. They each built their architecture in their own image. Few remnants survive. The architecture of white…
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