Wednesday, Oct. 14
Maceli’s (1031 New Hampshire)
Doors at 7:30, presentations at 8:00
featuring:
Scheherazade’s Clothes: Harem Fashion and Politics in Sudan by Marie Brown
A strict culture of seclusion and limited access to formal education have long given scholars the impression that for much of the twentieth century Sudanese women were politically uninformed and isolated in their homes. But what if we’ve been looking for women’s voices in the wrong places? Why are historians so obsessed with (male-dominated) written documents? When we abandon texts for textiles, we find Sudanese women to be eager storytellers: weaving together tales of local celebrities, global revolution, Broadway plays, and space exploration in their clothes.
Marie Brown is an Assistant Professor of Middle East History at KU. Her book, Khartoum at Night: The Politics and Pleasures of Fashion in Imperial Sudan, argues that northern Sudanese women’s experiences of imperialism were expressed on and through their bodies. Her work on fashion means that she has a reputation to uphold and must always appear smartly dressed at work, parties, the farmers’ market, and even on errands to Cottin’s Hardware. When not buried under books, archival notes, or old photographs, Marie can be found knitting…or kickboxing.
“Another thing that got forgotten was the fact that against all probability movies were once recorded on vinyl discs” by Sean Passmore
The CED movie format from the 1980s was movies recorded on large vinyl discs. This format lost badly to other, better and more popular formats such as VHS & Laserdiscs.
Sean Passmore claims Lawrence as his hometown, despite growing up on a farm in Western Kansas and living in New York City throughout most of the ’00s. Sean was formerly a late night radio personality, under a pseudonym, at 105.9 the Lazer throughout the mid ‘90s, and is currently a car salesperson, collector of obscure information, Downtown Lawrence enthusiast and is good at jokes sometimes.
Of poets and robots. Twitter bots as everyday literature. By Élika Ortega
Twitter, like other social media, have a reputation of being the dark, superfluous doom of culture. Though crucial activist uses of Twitter have been common in social movements like the various versions of Occupy around the world, the microblogging platform still has to be seen as a place where arts ocurr. In this talk, I will talk about of Twitter bots in order to propose them as a radically contemporary literary phenomena that floods our everyday use of the platform.
Don’t know what a Twitter bot is? This talk is for you!
Élika is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Kansas. Before coming to Lawrence, she spent almost a decade in Canada, and before that, she grew up in Mexico City. She is nerdy about literature, computers, and weird books, both old and new.
A self-declared dog person, when she’s not working in the mysterious and wondrous field of Digital Humanities (don’t forget to ask her what that is) she likes to bind books, ride bikes, and run. You can find her on Twitter as @elikaortega