Webcast of Carol Mavor’s Keynote:

https://media.library.utoronto.ca/play.php?HyWfHi8Eu5JZ&id=3532&access=public

Carol Mavor is Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester, England. Mavor is the author of four books: Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J. M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust, and D. W. Winnicott (Duke UP, 2007), Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess, Hawarden (Duke UP, 1999), and Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs (Duke UP, 1995) and Black and Blue: The Bruising of Camera Lucida, La Jetée, Sans soleil and Hiroshima mon amour, is forthcoming from Duke UP (2011). Her essays have appeared in Cabinet Magazine, Art History, Photography and Culture, Photographies, as well as edited volumes, including Geoffrey Batchen’s Photography Degree Zero and Mary Sheriff’s Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art. Her most recent published essay is on the French child-poet Minou Drouet.

Mavor’s writing has been widely reviewed in publications in the U.S. and U.K., including the Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Times, and The Village Voice. She has lectured broadly in the US and the UK, including The Photographers’ Gallery (London), University of Cambridge, Duke University and the Royal College of Art.  For 2010-2011, Mavor was named the Northrop Frye Chair in Literary Theory at University of Toronto. Currently, Mavor is completing Blue Mythologies: A Study of the Hue of Blue (forthcoming from Reaktion in 2012).

Keynote Lecture:

“Summer Was Inside the Marble: The Iconoclasm of Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras’s Hiroshima mon amour” argues that the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima demands a new post-nuclear indexicality. With an emphasis on Resnais and Duras’s 1959 film Hiroshima mon amour, this lectures reads photography’s early prints (by Henry Fox Talbot and Anna Atkins) alongside the “photographs left on stone,” shadows of bodies left behind from the terrible radiation that devoured life on the spot.  At hand are issues of memory, seeingness, forgetting, devastating beauty, and the unrepresentability of both love and the possible annihilation of the world. “Iconoclasm” means the breaking or destroying of images. “Summer Was Inside the Marble” is a sacrilegious response to the most unfathomable iconoclasm: the obliteration of the world in whole.

Webcast of Michael Taussig’s Keynote:

https://media.library.utoronto.ca/play.php?GkoyuH2sWNT4&id=3548&access=public

Michael Taussig is Class of 1933 Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. He studied medicine in Sydney, sociology in London, and real life in Colombia where he first went in 1969 and has returned every year since. He has written several books and essays including a book on iconoclasm called Defacement  and a short essay on the US flag , immediate aftermath of post 9/11, in Bruno Latour's Iconoclash. Recent works include Walter Benjamin's Grave and What Color is the Sacred. Re theory, his work tends to revolve around a mix of Benjamin and Bataille, commitment to fieldwork, and the writing of  fictocriticsm. Currently he lives in NYC with his cat Norman.

Bibliography:

The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (1980), Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (1987), The Nervous System (1992), Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (1993), The Magic of the State (1997), Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (1999), Law in a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza in Colombia (2003), My Cocaine Museum (2004), Walter Benjamin's Grave (2006), and What Color is the Sacred? (2009)

Keynote Lecture:

“Iconoclasm Dictionary”

Eric Cazdyn teaches in the Centre for Comparative Literature and the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. He is the author of The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan (Duke, 2002), After Globalization (with Imre Szeman, Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) and the forthcoming The Already Dead: The New Time of Politics, Culture and Illness (Duke, 2011).  He is also editor of Trespasses: Selected Writings of Masao Miyoshi (Duke, 2010) and a special volume of South Atlantic Quarterly on Disaster (Fall, 2007).

Keynote Lecture:

“A Future Without an Icon”