Archive of Past Events
2022
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Thursday, November 17, 2022 What Does It Take To Make a Saint? Translating Medieval Women to Modern Times: Dacia Maraini’s Clare of Assisi
Jane Tylus, Yale UniversityOlin Humanities, Room 102 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5 Jane Tylus (Yale) discusses her recent translation of Dacia Maraini's novel In Praise of Disobedience: Clare of Assisi. Jane Tylus specializes in late medieval and early modern European literature, religion, and culture, with secondary interests in 19th–20th century fiction. Her work has focused on the recovery and interrogation of lost and marginalized voices—historical personages, dialects and “parole pellegrine,” minor genres such as pastoral, secondary characters in plays, poems, and epics. She has also been active in the practice and theory of translation. Her current book project explores the ritual of departure in early modernity, especially how writers and artists sent their works into the world. |
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Wednesday, November 16, 2022 The Language of Landscape: Literary Translation in Comparative Context
Jana Mader, Lecturer in the HumanitiesOlin Humanities, Room 203 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5 When we see, feel, and think of nature, it is never just an objective encounter with an outside world. Rather, landscapes carry meaning like a complex language, spoken and written in land, air, and water. Humans are storytellers in dialog with landscapes, influenced by their past, present and imagined future. When a group of German farmers who had fled famine and persecution settled along the Hudson, they were reminded of their river back home, the Rhine, and founded Rhinebeck. In a broad sense, then, they translated their home into their new place. This talk examines two river landscapes, the Hudson River Valley and the Rhine Valley in Germany, the contradictory narratives they were shaped by and the cultural translation of landscape, from the visual into the textual and what that entails. To what extent is our perception filtered through experience and our collective history? |
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Monday, November 7, 2022 Literature Program Salon
Elizabeth Holt, Associate Professor of Arabic,Co-Director, Middle Eastern Studies, Bard College Olin Language Center, Room 115 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5 Please join us for another Literature Program Salon where we’ll have the pleasure of discussing current research by Prof. Elizabeth Holt. When British Petroleum was looking to have their 1955 film The Third River translated into Arabic, they turned to Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, a Palestinian refugee who worked in Baghdad as an editor for the Iraq Petroleum Company's influential in-house industry and culture publications. Better remembered as a novelist, memoirist, painter, and translator of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland and William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury into Arabic, Jabra also advised the architects of networks of United States Cold War culture projects, such as Franklin Books and the CIA's Congress for Cultural Freedom, with his letters appearing frequently in the CCF's 1950s and 1960s archives. Constellating these sources, the production of a global boom in Faulknerian and Eliotic petro-modernism comes into view, allowing us to see how pipelines and energy infrastructures curate the global canon. All students interested in Literature are encouraged to attend! |
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Thursday, November 3, 2022 Medieval Song: A Talk, A Performance
Sarah Kay, Professor of French Literature,Thought and Culture, NYU Christopher Preston Thompson, Tenor and Medieval Harpist Bard Hall 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 This collaborative event – part lecture, part concert – by medieval literary scholar Sarah Kay and early music ensemble Concordian Dawn, under director Christopher Preston Thompson, draws on Kay’s experimental book Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera and Thompson’s companion website of recordings. Together, Kay and Thompson find the sounds of medieval song in the least expected places: stars, the dawn light, the touch of a hand, beasts’ breath, and wild imaginings. The songs on their program range from the earliest alba to Guillaume de Machaut, but their voices sound from the outer spheres to the inner senses. |
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Tuesday, November 1, 2022 Translation In/With Computing - Let Me Count The Ways
Valerie Barr, Margaret Hamilton Distinguished Professor of Computer ScienceReem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 Translation is omnipresent within computer science given that data in human consumable forms (pictures, music, text) is stored in completely different internal representations. Furthermore, the software that allows us to see, hear, and manipulate that data has itself been translated so that the hardware can execute it. Yet the notion of and need for "translation" only increases when we also consider two additional questions: what is it that those using computation should know about computing in order to be effective, and what should all students understand about computing (the good, the bad, the ugly history) in order to actively critique and challenge the current pace and impact of technological change? |
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Thursday, October 6, 2022 Archives, Accessibility, and Translation: Dura-Europos and the Digital Future
Anne Hunnell Chen, Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual CultureReem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 In the last decade, the explosion of digital surrogates for archival content online has been a huge step in the right direction in terms of providing more equitable access to information and collections. Yet major gaps and barriers still remain. Chief among those gaps is linguistic accessibility, especially where it pertains to disenfranchised stakeholder populations. Drawing on the work of the International (Digital) Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA), this talk will explore the ways in which Linked Open Useable Data (LOUD) holds promise for greater native-language discoverability, and thus accessibility, of archival content. |
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Tuesday, May 10, 2022 68 Voces
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4A screening of a series of short films narrating stories of Mexican oral tradition from 68 different Indigenous languages, traditions, and hearts. The series seeks to represent the richness of Indigenous communities and to promote their languages. |
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Friday, May 6, 2022 BTTI Translation Symposium: Ends of Translation
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 9:00 am – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4Please join us for a full day of events all centered around translation—from student panels, to guest speakers, to the keynote address by Wyatt Mason, Seasons and Castles: Rimbaud Retranslated (5 pm, RKC 103). All events will take place in RKC 103, 200, and 102. |
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Thursday, May 5, 2022 The Politics of Language and Translation: Reflections from the Arab-Israeli Conflict
Ahmad Ayyad (Al-Quds Bard College, Occupied Palestine)Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 This event is part of the BTTI Symposium. |
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Thursday, April 28, 2022 Orientalist Strategies and Modernist Design: The Design of the 1988 Seoul Olympics
Seungyeon Gabrielle Jung Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities, Stanford University This event is presented on Zoom. 11:50 am – 1:10 pm EDT/GMT-4 Olympic design needs to express the universal values that the Olympic Movement promotes, and it should be understood easily by a global audience; at the same time, it needs to set the host apart from other nations visually and highlight the uniqueness of its culture. This is a particularly difficult task for non-Western countries, whose national culture and identity can easily fall victim to Orientalism when presented on the world stage. This lecture examines the design style and strategies chosen for the 1988 Summer Olympics and how this design project, which is deemed successful by many, “spectacularly failed” to understand the concepts such as universalism, modernity, modernist design, and Orientalism. Seungyeon Gabrielle Jung studies politics and aesthetics of modern design with a focus on South Korean and Silicon Valley design. She received her PhD in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University in 2020. Trained in graphic design, Gabrielle also writes on the issues of design and feminism. Her book project, Toward a Utopia Without Revolution: Globalization, Developmentalism, and Design, looks at political and aesthetic problems that modern design projects generated in South Korea, a country that has experienced not only rapid economic development but also immense political progress in less than a century, from the end of the World War II to the beginning of the new millennium. In Fall 2022, she will join the Department of Art History and PhD Program in Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine as Assistant Professor of Korean Art History. |
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Wednesday, April 27, 2022 Korea’s Forever Wars
E. Tammy Kim (New York Times)Olin Humanities, Room 102 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 When the U.S. military finally withdrew from Afghanistan, an old tally reappeared in the news. Our “forever wars” were not only the live military operations we’d pursued in the Middle East since 9/11; they also encompassed some 500 U.S. bases and installations all over the world, stretching back to the early 20th century. Some call this “empire;” some call it “security,” even “altruism.” In East Asia, the long arm of U.S. power reaches intimately into people’s lives. South Korea has hosted U.S. military personnel since World War II and remains a primary base of operations in the Asia Pacific. Some thirty thousand U.S. soldiers and marines are stationed there, on more than 70 installations. In 2018, U.S. Army Garrison Humphreys opened in the city of Pyeongtaek, at a cost of $11 billion. Humphreys is now the largest overseas U.S. military base by size and the symbol of a new era in the U.S.-South Korea alliance. Meanwhile, South Korea has become the tenth-richest country in the world and has one of the largest militaries—thanks to universal male conscription and an extraordinary budget. The country’s arms industry is also world-class, known for its planes, submarines, and tanks. This talk will draw on reporting and family history to explore the evolving U.S.-South Korea alliance. How do the martial investments of these historic “allies” affect the lives of ordinary South Koreans—and Korean Americans? And if the two Koreas are still technically at war, what kind of war is it? E. Tammy Kim is a freelance magazine reporter and a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times, covering labor issues, arts and culture, and the Koreas. She cohosts Time to Say Goodbye, a podcast on Asia and Asian America, and is a contributing editor at Lux, a new feminist socialist magazine. She holds fellowships from the Alicia Patterson Foundation and Type Media Center. In 2016, she and Yale ethnomusicologist Michael Veal published Punk Ethnography, a book about the aesthetics and politics of contemporary world music. Her first career was as a social justice lawyer in New York City. This event is part of the Asian Diasporic Initiative Speaker Series. For more information, please contact Nate Shockey: [email protected]. |
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Thursday, April 21, 2022 Narrating Paranoia, Passing, and Precarity Between Japanese Colonial Texts and Zainichi Korean Fiction
Andre Haag, Assistant Professor of Japanese Literature at the University of Hawaii, ManoaOnline Event 5:00 pm – 6:15 pm EDT/GMT-4 The field of post/colonial East Asian cultural studies has recently rediscovered the transpacific potential of the theme of ethnic passing, a problematic that is deeply rooted in North American racial contexts but might serve to disrupt global fictions of race and power. Although tropes adjacent to ethnonational passing frequently appear in minority literatures produced in Japan, particularly Zainichi Korean fiction, the salience of the phenomenon was often obscured within the avowedly-integrative and assimilative cultural production of Japanese colonialism. This talk will challenge that aporia by demonstrating how the structural possibility of Korean passing left behind indelible traces of racialized paranoia in the writings of the Japanese colonial empire that have long outlived its fall. Introducing narratives and speech acts in Japanese from disparate genres, past and present, I argue that paranoia was as an effect of insecure imperial modes of containing the passing specters of Korea and Korean people uneasily absorbed within expanding Japan by colonial merger. I trace how disavowed anxieties of passing merge with fears of treachery, blurred borders, and the unreadability of ethnoracial difference in narrative scripts that traveled across space, from the colonial periphery to the Japanese metropole along with migrating bodies, between subjects, and through time. If imperial paranoia around passing took its most extreme expression in narratives of the murderous 1923 “Korean Panic,” popular Zainichi fiction today exposes not only the enduring structures of Japanese Koreaphobia (and Koreaphilia) but the persistence of shared anxieties and precarities binding former colonizer and colonized a century later. This meeting will be on Zoom: https://bard.zoom.us/j/89025574917 |
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Thursday, April 14, 2022 The Art of Whiteness: A Lecture and Discussion on Race and Power in Southeast and East Asian Literature
Jen Wei TingOlin Humanities, Room 201 11:50 am – 1:10 pm EDT/GMT-4 How and why do we come to think of certain paintings or books as “good” art? Through a critical examination of the works of 19th century Southeast Asian painters Raden Saleh and Juan Luna, and a review of recent translated works by Indonesian and Korean writers, we will discuss how race and power dynamics have come to influence and dictate perceptions of artistic merit. By sharing my journey writing and publishing fiction, I hope this can lead everyone to question their own cognitive biases about “good” or “bad” art, and to recognize both the art of whiteness, and the whiteness of art. Jen Wei Ting is an essayist, novelist and critic whose work has been published in the Economist, Time Magazine, Electric Literature, Catapult, Room Magazine, and more. Born in Singapore and educated in the US and Japan, she lives and thinks in multiple languages including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and is a prize-winning Chinese screenwriter. This event is part of the Asian Diasporic Initiative Speaker Series. For more information: contact Nate Shockey at [email protected]. |