Humanities to the Rescue – 2019
An Evening with Molly Crabapple| Friday, March 8
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Based in New York, but a frequent world-traveller, Molly Crabapple was shortlisted for a 2013 Frontline Print Journalism Award for her internationally acclaimed reportage on Guantanamo Bay and her current work on the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico is just as gripping. She is a contributing editor at VICE, and has written for The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Paris Review, CNN, and The Guardian. She has done illustrated journalism in Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, The United Arab Emirates, Spain and Greece. Her published books include Discordia (with Laurie Penny), on the Greek economic crisis, and the art books Devil in the Details and Week in Hell. Her illustrated memoir, Drawing Blood, received rave reviews in The New York Times, The Economist, Die Welt, and in many other publications. Random House’s One World imprint released Brothers of the Gun: Marwan Hisham’s account of life under ISIS in Syria, co-written and illustrated by Crabapple.
Crabapple has been called “equal parts Hieronymus Bosch, William S. Burroughs and Cirque du Soleil,” by The Guardian, and “THE artist of our time” by comedian Margaret Cho. She spent four years as the staff artist of The Box, one of the world’s most lavish (and notorious) nightclubs. Crabapple has taken her sketchbook from burlesque halls to refugee camps, always with a skeptical eye for power.
Humanities to the Rescue: Sounds: Avant-Garde, Modernism, and Fascism| April 8
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The Humanities Institute’s Modernisms Research Workshop will participate in a series of events at UB celebrating composer Kurt Weill with a one-day symposium, free and open to the public. The point of departure for this symposium is the intersection of political upheaval, cultural criticism, and aesthetic experimentation, one specific to the first decades of the twentieth century but with undeniable echoes in today’s world.
In the spirit of the Modernisms Research Workshop, the symposium will explore music and sound, performance and spectatorship, in a variety of different geographical and national contexts, while seeking to foster interdisciplinary conversations across several fields of intellectual endeavor: literature, visual arts, architecture, dance, theater and stage design, film, and – most of all – music.
The symposium will feature guest speakers Kim Kowalke (Professor of Musicology at the Eastman School of Music and Professor of Music and Chair of the College Music Department of the University of Rochester), Jacques Lezra (Professor and Chair in the Department of Hispanic Studies at University of California – Riverside) and Peter Szendy (David Herlihy Professor of Humanities and Comparative Literature at Brown University).
