Events

Upcoming

 

March

Writing to Images, a writing workshop with Tina Campt 

Thursday, March 5, 12–2pm | Taft Research Center | Register

In her workshop, Campt will engage participants in her practice of “writing to images” and the ways in which correspondence can be a generative model for research and writing on art, visual culture and much more.

Afterimages: Grieving in Fractured Time with Tina Campt 

Thursday, March 5, 6pm, The Mercantile Library, 414 Walnut Street, 11th Fl. | Register

Grief fundamentally fractures time. It situates us simultaneously in time and out of it. It is always deeply personal, yet it is also utterly universal. We experience it as individuals, yet it is also the great equalizer that summons us to face the limits of our mortality and the relationships that sustain us. In her talk, Tina Campt will present selections from her forthcoming book, Afterimages: Grieving in Fractured Time, which tells the story of how writing to art became a survival tactic that helped her grapple with intense experiences of personal grief during a period of pervasive social grievance. Focusing on what she describes as the exemplary psychic, temporal, and sensory structure of grief, the afterimage, her talk will explore how Black contemporary artists create artworks that speak beyond what we see and give expression to the absent presences that constitute some of the most palpable manifestations of grief and mourning. 

Writing, Feeling, and the History of Flow with Sarah Mesle 

Wednesday, March 11, 12–2pm | Valentine Overlook, 5280 Clifton Court Hall | Register

This talk puts two problems in dialogue: first, the private misery many academics experience on a given day spent hoping our writing will “flow,” and second, the public challenge of explaining why academic expertise matters now, when so many of higher education’s resources have been blocked. These two problems bridge several perceived divides: individual and social, emotional and rational, psychological and political. Such divides are so familiar we can forget they have histories. But, they do. Indeed, the river city of Cincinnati— with its particular relation to the global flows of water, immigrants, industrial products, and ideas—has played a significant role in those histories. Taking Cincinnati as a case study, and drawing on her recent book Reasons and Feelings: Writing for the Humanities Now, Mesle explores how personal feelings have material, trackable, and transformable connections to our communities. She further proposes that humanists’ skills— such as our ability to historicize seemingly ephemeral experiences, like bad writing feelings— make us uniquely suited to addressing the broader crises of our period. 

 

Openings, Audience, and the Everyday, a writing workshop with Sarah Mesle 

Wednesday, March 11, 4–6pm | Register

This workshop invites participants to share and learn strategies for one of writing’s ongoing challenges: starting. It will take up the joint problems of first finding the time (and motivation, and conviction) to start writing, and then, once we’ve done so, styling the words on the page so they’ll reach the audiences we care about. This workshop will draw on Sarah Mesle’s experiences as a writer, editor, and professor of writing to give practical advice for writers and teachers. Participants are invited to bring a notebook, a calendar, a laptop if they’d like, and a digital version of an opening paragraph(s)—no more than 250 words— of a piece of writing they’re working on, or that they admire, for our collective discussion.