Laura Wexler
Claremont, Calif. (August 28, 2015)—Pitzer College’s Munroe Center for Social Inquiry launches its annual fall series on the theme ARCHIVE with “Juxtapositions: Archive, Image and Event,” a talk by Laura Wexler, professor of American studies and women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Yale University, and Lauren Tilton, co-director of the web-based platform Photogrammar at Yale University. Wexler and Tilton’s talk will be held on September 15 at 4:15 p.m. in Benson Auditorium.
Wexler and Tilton are the first in a field of prominent scholars, artists and activists across a range of disciplines who, throughout the fall, will examine the power, transience and technologies of collection. Who preserves what? How are collections displayed? Who sees them? What might be left out or lost? And what is the role of the digital? The series aims to illuminate what historian Carolyn Steedman calls the dust raised by the impulse to remember via “our stubborn set of beliefs about an objective material world.”
Lauren Tilton
Wexler is a historian of race, gender and photography and has written the prize-winning book Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of US Imperialism and Pregnant Pictures with co-author Sandra Matthews. She is working on a history of white supremacy in the US and on the intergenerational transfer of historical memory in family photograph albums.
At Yale, Tilton oversees a web-based program for organizing, searching and visualizing the 170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the US Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information. She also co-directs the Digital Humanities Working Group and Public Humanities Working Group.
Professor of Media Studies Alexandra Juhasz is the director of MCSI.
Related Links:
Munroe Center for Social Inquiry
