‘Photography, Ontology’

Art history professor Blake Stimson is due to give a talk Oct. 27 on “Photography and Ontology,” at 4:10 p.m. in 210D Art Building.

Here is part of the description from the campus’s online calendar: “Because of its uniquely bipolar appeal as art and nonart, photography’s ontology is defined to an exceptional extent by a dynamic tension between the one and the all, between unity and multiplicity. This essay will explore some of the aesthetic and sociopolitical opportunities — some of the ways that the ontological subject (being) might be imagined or experienced — arising from that distinctive tension.”

‘Sex-in-Change’ in Iran

The Middle East-Southeast Asia Studies Program is hosting a Harvard professor for a talk on the topic of her upcoming book Sex-in-Change: Configurations of Sexuality and Gender in Contemporary Iran.

The program, free and open to the public, is scheduled for Oct. 27 in Ballroom A at the Activities and Recreation Center, with a reception at 6 p.m. and the lecture at 7.

The speaker is Afsaneh Najmabadi, Harvard’s Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History and of Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality.

Her last book, Women with Mustaches and Men Without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity, received the 2005 Joan Kelly Memorial Prize from the American Historical Association.

The talk is being presented as part of the Suad Joseph Lecture Series, named after the founding director of the Middle East-Southeast Asia Studies Program. Joseph is a professor of anthropology, and of women and gender studies.

All Seminars and Colloquia