I have had the good fortune to be a Faculty Research Fellow at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research over the past academic year, which has given me an opportunity to work on a new project that thinks about serialization in digital cultures as a vector of change. The larger project takes off from Sartre’s concept of “seriality” (as developed in his late Critique of Dialectical Reason) and connects it to forms of serialized media in order to think about reconfigurations of class, gender, and race. Back in March, I presented some of the work pertaining to gender and embodiment to my colleagues at the Clayman, and they have now posted a short write-up about it. Here’s the (controversial) crux:
Also enjoy this image that I used to illustrate my talk!
We’re excited to announce our next event at the Digital Aesthetics Workshop, a talk by writer and curator Legacy Russell, author of Glitch Feminism, which will take place next Thursday, May 20th at 10 am Pacific and is co-sponsored by the Clayman Institute for Gender Research.
Join writer and curator Legacy Russell in a discussion about the ways in which artists engaging the digital are building new models for what monuments can be in a networked era of mechanical reproduction.
Legacy Russell is a curator and writer. Born and raised in New York City, she is the Associate Curator of Exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Russell holds an MRes with Distinction in Art History from Goldsmiths, University of London with a focus in Visual Culture. Her academic, curatorial, and creative work focuses on gender, performance, digital selfdom, internet idolatry, and new media ritual. Russell’s written work, interviews, and essays have been published internationally. She is the recipient of the Thoma Foundation 2019 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, a 2020 Rauschenberg Residency Fellow, and a recipient of the 2021 Creative Capital Award. Her first book Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020) is published by Verso Books. Her second book, BLACK MEME, is forthcoming via Verso Books.
Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center. Made possible by support from Linda Randall Meier, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Co-sponsored by the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research.
This year I am excited to have taken on a couple of new roles at Stanford, and I wanted shout about them briefly to express my gratitude and hope.
First, I am honored to have received a courtesy appointment in German Studies from the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. While my primary appointment remains in the Department of Art & Art History, I will now be able to teach and advise graduate students in German as well, and I am excited to collaborate more closely with my colleagues there.
Second, I have joined the Committee in Charge in Modern Thought & Literature, Stanford’s premier interdisciplinary humanities program. I have been working closely and learning from students in the program over the past couple of years, including serving on several dissertation committees, and I have discovered so many affinities with students and faculty alike, so officially joining the program feels in many ways like coming home.
Finally, for the duration of the 2020-2021 academic year, I am honored to have been awarded a Faculty Research Fellowship at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research, where I am learning from an amazing interdisciplinary cohort of peers while developing a new project around seriality and serialization. Taking up Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of “serialities” as anonymous, alienated collectives, as well as Iris Marion Young’s re-working of the concept with respect to gender and specifically feminist purposes, the project relates these socio-political conceptions of seriality to the serialization of experience and identity in contemporary digital media.
In all, I am feeling very grateful for these new and strengthened interdisciplinary networks, which give me hope for the future of the humanities at Stanford.
