Academic Affairs

This paper explores the meaning of objects in making families and memories from the perspective of two sisters.  It shows and tells a story of sorting through "stuff" collected by their mother's and father's families from the 19th century to the present.  Two societal transformations shape this early 21st century American story.  The first is demographic.  The second is technological.  The paper tells the story using eight objects selected during the sorting process of moving their mother into assisted living in 2008.  In written dialogue with each other about each of the objects, the sisters reflect on the process of sorting, how their different experiences in the family shaped the sorting process and how the sorting process gave new meanings to their relationship as daughters and sisters.  They conclude by exploring the themes of gender, privilege, and travel that emerged through the telling.  They also consider how the diverging and intersecting paths they have taken as adults have infused their choices of what to do with all this stuff.  More generally they consider the lessons from their story about how objects make family, how families make memories, how choices about keeping or not keeping objects contribute to the production of family histories and legacies, and how the demographic and technological transformations of the late 20th century are shaping families and memories.

This anthology consists of contributions from eleven film scholars and examines the thriving afterlife of horror, a genre whose obituary many critics composed following the events of September 11, 2001.  The essays in Horror after 9/11 examine the allegorical role that the horror film has held in the last ten years.  They analyze metaphorical representations of concrete events like the destruction of the World Trade Center, the Iraq War, and the tortures perpetuated at Abu Ghraib and other detention centers; the rise of new sub-genres, such as "torture porn"; big-budget remakes of classic horror films, as well as the reinvention of traditional monsters including vampires, B-movie creatures, and zombies; and the new awareness of visual technologies as sites of horror in themselves.  Through these various perspectives, the authors hope to provide new models for interpreting the horror filmi as an allegorical genre that transfigures the "real" into the representational.  The book is divided into three sections, each of which analyzes horror's relationship to allegory in distinct ways.

The fourteenth century witnessed a fundamental political and intellectual conflict about the nature of power and society that was expressed through the rituals and institutions of two rival courts.  Rather than understanding the collapse of Japan's first warrior government and the onset of a chaotic period of civil war as the manipulation of rival courts by powerful warrior factions, this study argues that the crucial ideological and intellectual conflict of the fourteenth century was between conservative forces of ritual precedent, and ritual determinists steeped in Shingon Buddhism.  Members of the monastic nobility who came to dominate the court used the language of Buddhist ritual to prosecute their bids for power.  Sacred places that were ritual centers became targets of military capture precisely because they were ritual centers.  Ritual was not simply symbolic; rather ritual becoming the orchestration, or actual dynamic of power in itself.  This study undermines the conventional wisdom that Zen ideals linked to the samurai were responsible for the manner in which power was conceptualized in medieval Japan, and instead argues that Shingon ritual specialists prolonged the conflict, and enforced the new notion that loyal service trumped the merit of those who simply requested compensation for their acts.  Ultimately, Shingon mimetic ideals enhanced warrior power, and enabled Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, rather than the reigning emperor, to assert sovereign authority in Japan.

In this study of Victorian modern-life painting, Fletcher argues Victorian artists registered modernity through the representation of its emotional effects, and that the visual conventions of the genre are linked to this thematic concern, designed to provoke conversation, debate, and gossip.  Victorian modern-life paintings were explicitly literary, designed to evoke emotional responses, immensely popular, and naturalistically detailed.  To modernist eyes trained to value formally innovative paintings that aim to create an autonomous realm of aesthetic experience, these characteristics seems retrogressive, even offensive.  In this history of the Victorian painting of modern life, Fletcher argues that these qualities should be taken seriously as the cornerstones of a modern art aimed at evoking emotional responses, provoking conversations, and challenging viewers to tell stories about the people, places, and discomforts of modern life.  This project analyzes and explains differences rather than taking them as evidence for Victorian provincialism.  Fletcher argues that Victorian artists registered modernity through the representation of its interpersonal and emotional effects, and that the visual conventions of the genre are intimately linked to this thematic concern, designed to engage viewers personally and emotionally.

Posuelocation - In a cluster, near the center of the Coleman Burke Gallery, 59 large bowls painting Las Vegas Gold will be suspended from the ceiling with straps of coffee-stained muslin.  Each bowl, filled with sea salt, will then be filled with water to form a salty slurry.  Over the course of the installation period, the water will evaporate from the bowls.  In the back of the space, a small flatscreen television will display a video of a man in a bathtub engaged in a mimed performance of a high seas struggle in a mighty storm.  The bowls in this case form a sea when viewed collectively.  The title of this work is a conflation of the Spanish word for 'bowl' and the English word 'location'.  The materials and imagery combine to create a play on the word 'vessel' as both carrier of and traveler over water.

Casitas/Mar - A field will be established by arranging 400 house forms in a grid or geometric arrangement on the floor of Nullspace Gallery.  The house forms will be made of sugarcane paper dyed a range of blue shades and their arrangement will consider their shades as a design element.  Descending from above, a storm cloud of coffee-stained muslin will spiral and spill over the floor, covering those parts of the grid that occur beneath it.  A soundtrack will fill the space with an occasional quiet splashing sound like that made by children in a pool.  The use of house forms to create a sea and a landscape at once, and the intrusion of coffee aromas and child sounds, blend to posit an almost surreal situation and environment through which viewers must pass.

Logan presented, in poster format, the results of an on-going multi-year collaboration examining the effects of modern-day changes in atmospheric CO₂ concentration and temperature on the growth, physiology and drought tolerance of members of the Eucalyptus genus at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America, the largest gathering of ecologists in North America. Attending the Ecological Society of America annual meeting provided an opportunity to attend the Ecological Research Education Network (EREN) kick-off meeting as well. This NSF sponsored organization generates high-quality, publishable data involving undergrauate students and faculty at primarily undergraduate institutions of which several are of direct relevance to some Bowdoin professors. EREN members who share their data, will respresent the northernmost studies along the Appalacian mountain chain.

Riley will use the Dalian Economic Zone (DEZ) Exhibition Center as a way to analyze how the DEZ is being projected as a modernist project and how that projection mirrors other rhetoric and projects in China more generally.  In the last five to ten years, the area has developed rapidly, and this project seeks to examine how that is happening. The Dalian Exhibition Center (DEC) will serve as the basis of analysis of the construction of modernity in contemporary China. The project will examine how the DEC advertises the DEZ's success as a modernist project and analyze the way it reflects the discourse of modernity within contemporary Chinese society. 

This project is concerned with space, the intimacy of individual somatic experience, and the ephemeral nature of materiality.  It opens in January 2011 in St. Louis as part of Equilibrium, the annual conference in the printmaking field.  This project will be 1,000 square feet, so that the artist can offer an overwhelming paper environment for the viewer to enter.  The installation will blend together three aspects: First, an environment made from tracing paper that has been painted a brilliant saffron color and based on the columns and arcs of cathedrals, mosques, and temples will surround viewers.  Second, the piece will involve a collaborative activity in which community members inflate handmade paper boxes with their breath, which will be hung in clusters from the ceiling, serving as visual representations of ritualized collective breaths.  Third, a 22 foot long intaglio print will span one wall of the gallery, which will blend imagery of religious spaces based on previous drawings, the human heart, and current events.

The structures will be built using Asian fiber paper coated with acrylic and dry pigment which makes the paper structurally stronger and more permanent than previously used materials. In order for the project to be more environmentally sustainable and easier to re-exhibit, the structures will be folded flat and shipped from the Bowdoin College campus to the gallery in St. Louis.

This show is one of four featured invitational solo exhibitions that will be headlined by the national printmaking conference Equilibrium this year.

Sehon's scholarly work has received notably attention among contemporary German philosophers.  Attendance at this four-week intensive German course at the Goethe Institute in Germany will greatly increase Sehon's reading and speaking skills. Furthermore it will increase his ability to interact and collaborate with philosophers who are giving talks, organizing symposia, and publishing in German.

This project is a re-examination of labor in ancient Greece, in which Sobak demonstrates that the democratic city of Athens was marked by a strong culture of social, intellectual, and political exchange within the context of skilled labor and economic production.  Sobak will examine unpublished artifacts at museums in Paris, Berlin, and Athens to complete this overall project.  Labor, Education, and Power: Crafting Citizenship in Archaic and Classical Athens analyzes literary, material, and monographic evidence for the education, activity, and self0identity of laboring citizens in the democratic city of Athens.  It challenged the dominant model of Athenian history, which posits that Athenian political and economic development was driven primarily by Athenian elites.  The project contends that the Athenian democracy was a system propelled "from the bottom up," and that laboring citizens in particular were a driving force in that movement.  The analysis asks readers to reconsider not only the social history of ancient Athens, but the intellectual history of the city as well.

This project is aimed at studying structural mimics of potentially harmful pharmaceutical chemicals detected in U.S. waters.  Sorption of chemicals contained the amine groups onto aluminosilicate clays will be evaluated over a range of chemical concentrations to ascertain the influence of chemical structure on sorption, the nature and extent of non-linearity in sorption phenomena, and secondary interactions mechanisms that contribute to non-linearity. Attention to non-linearity is important to the predicution of contaminant transport. Contaminant transport models that do not account for non-linearity will under or over predict contminant transport and provide ineffective assessmentst. The results of this research will serve to enhance current understanding of structural criteria and mechanism of contaminant sorption to soils. In addition, it will serve to advance predictive capacity for sorption and contaminant fate in the natural environment.

This project is a full-length critical biography which examines the actress's many lives: from Hollywood stardom beginning in silent films to her pioneering work in radio, television, fashion, and theater.  An artist, adoptive single parent, political activist, and natural foods advocate years ahead of her time, Swanson was in the spotlight for more than seven decades.  This book will provide a long overdue close-up of this uniquely modern woman.  It will help historians reassess her contributions to the American and international media industries of the twentieth century.  Beyond shedding new light on familiar events in Swanson's life, Welsch's book illuminates a little-known chapter in American media history: how the powerful women of early Hollywood transformed their remarkable careers after their Hollywood stars dimmed.  It considers how Swanson and other of her generation kept themselves in the limelight, making a living in the media and creating myths about the American film industry's "golden era," even though Hollywood's bright lights were no longer shining on them.