Humanities Institute

Hypericin Yellow Movie: A Performance-Lecture  Hypericin is a phytochemical produced by the flowering plant St John’s wort. The plant has been used medicinally in different cultures for centuries, primarily as an antidepressant. In this performance-lecture Kerstin Schroedinger and Oliver Husain relate the flower to health, skin, light, and film by discussing their use of St […]

Nineteenth-century French art was eclectic, but you would never know it. This eclecticism was considered a problem in the nineteenth century itself—an impediment to creating a cohesive narrative for the art production of the time. Joris-Karl Huysmans and Émile Zola in particular railed against what they saw as the eclectic nature of the art of […]

Christina Corfield is a British-born multi-disciplinary artist and media scholar and is currently a Visiting Professor of Media Study at the University at Buffalo. Her scholarly and artistic work focuses on media history and the relationships between analog and digital media. Her work has shown at media festivals, in galleries, universities, and at international conferences. […]

"American life has been suddenly and dramatically upended, and, when things are turned upside down, the bottom is brought to the surface and exposed to the light." - Keeanga-Yamatta Taylor, The New Yorker (3/30/2020)   The “Social Reproduction and the Crisis of Housing in Buffalo” panel aims to bring social reproduction theory home to Buffalo […]

This talk examines correspondences between the innovations of the New York School composers (John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff) and those of the painters and sculptors they associated with in the post-war downtown art world. While issues of structure, frame, representation, indeterminacy, surface, abstraction, action, and modularity interested both groups, differences between the […]

hiba ali is a producer of moving images, sounds, garments and words. they reside in many time zones: chicago, toronto and eugene. born in karachi, pakistan, they belong to east african, south asian and arab diasporas. they are a practitioner and (re)learner of swahili, urdu, arabic and spanish languages. they work on two long term […]