AAANZ Conference: A Masterclass with Professor Griselda Pollock at RMIT

“To create transgenerational democratic space for the continuing virtuality of feminism, we need historical understanding of feminism itself that is different from the currently fracturing caricature of generations at war and waves of novelty” (Pollock 2016, 57).

Griselda Pollock will be presenting a masterclass for interested HDR candidates and early career researchers as part of the AAANZ Annual Conference at RMIT University on Tuesday 4 December 2018. We are seeking applications from postgraduates and early career researchers whose work engages with the themes of trauma, feminism, transgenerational feminism, virtuality and affect.

The masterclass will involve critical responses to two recent texts by Pollock that represent two different directions in her current work. One focusses on the cultural memory of feminism, and is oriented towards the deleterious effects of current narratives. The second one represents continuing feminist work with the concept of the image as pathos formula derived from Aby Warburg, which is in this case explored in relation to work on Marilyn Monroe as a pathosformula in American popular culture in the 1950s.  These seeming diverse projects share a common concern with rethinking concepts of trauma and aesthetic after-affect. A theoretical text and a work of close visual analysis demonstrate different instances of a feminist transdisciplinary research practice.
 
Exploring these two texts will lead onto collective discussions engaging with the implications of these ideas  or related project stemming your own research perspectives. Places will be limited.

The session is open to researchers from a range of disciplines. It might be of most interest to those in Art History, Art, Practice-based research, Cinema Studies, Creative Writing, Curatorial Studies, Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Cultural Studies.

Date and location: 2pm-4:30pm, Tuesday 4 December 2018, RMIT University, Melbourne.

How do I apply?

Applications are due by Monday 1 October 2018 and must include a short description of your research and how it relates to the class themes, a short bio-note and a response to the reading texts.

Applications should be submitted here: https://goo.gl/forms/PqQVYWatA4OqkaGt1

We aim to confirm successful applications in mid-October.

What to provide with your application:

  • a statement on your reasons for applying and how it relates to your own research (200 words)
  • three critical questions responding to one or both of the texts
  • a bio-note and link to a website (150 words).

Readings:

Pollock, Griselda. 2016. “Is Feminism a Trauma, a Bad Memory, or a Virtual Future?” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 27, no. 2: 27-61. DOI:10.1215/10407391-3621697.

Pollock, Griselda. 2017. “Monroe’s gestures between trauma and ecstasy, Nympha and Venus: reading the cinematic gesture ‘Marilyn Monroe’ through Aby Warburg”. In Gesture and Film: Signalling New Critical Perspective, edited by Nicholas Chare and Liz Watkins, 99-131. London: Routledge.

Griselda Pollock

Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director of the transdisciplinary Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (CENTRECATH) at the University of Leeds. Committed to creating and extending an international, postcolonial, queer feminist analysis of the visual arts, visual culture and cultural theory, she researches issues of trauma and the aesthetic in contemporary art expanding her concept of the virtual feminist museum (After-affects I After-images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Museum, Manchester, 2013; Art in the Time-Space of Memory and Migration (Freud Museum & Wild Pansy Press, 2013); both offer a feminist rereading of Aby Warburg’s concept of the pathos formula at the intersection with psychoanalytical aesthetics. Since 2007, she has elaborated the novel concept of concentrationary memory in relation to the Arendtian critique of totalitarianism, in four publications with Max Silverman, Concentrationary Cinema (Berghahn, 2011),Concentrationary Memories: Totalitarian Terror and Cultural Resistance (I B Tauris, 2013), Concentrationary Imaginaries:Tracing Totalitarian Violence in Popular Culture (I B Tauris, 2015), and Concentrationary Art: Jean Cayrol the Lazarean and the Everyday in Post-war Film, Literature, Music and the Visual Arts (Berghahn, 2019). Just published is her monograph: Charlotte Salomon: The Nameless in the Theatre of Memory (Yale, 2018) and forthcoming are Is Feminism a Bad Memory? (Verso, 2019), The Case against “Van Gogh”: Memory, Place and Modernist Disillusionment (Thames & Hudson, 2020) and Monroe’s Mov(i)es: Class, Gender and Nation in the work, image-making and agency of Marilyn Monroe (2020).

 

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