Distinguished Lecture Series
Distinguished Lecture Series
The Denbo Center’s Distinguished Lecture Series brings acclaimed humanities scholars and renowned artists to the Knoxville campus and connects UT humanities faculty to the best researchers in their fields. Speakers are nominated and hosted by faculty from our nine affiliated arts and humanities departments. Because only speakers with exceptional records of publication and research activity are eligible to receive a nomination as a visiting scholar, the program brings to campus some of the most cutting-edge and prolific intellectuals in the humanities today.
Lectures are free and open to the public. For information about visiting our Cherokee Mills location, please visit the Find Us page on our website. Public parking for our on-campus events is available in the Volunteer Hall parking garage or via on-street parking around campus. Everyone is welcome!
Follow our Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram accounts for updates on our events. Details about our Distinguished Lectures are also available on the UT Calendar.
2024–2025 Lecture Series
2024–2025 Series Details
September 16, 2024 – Althea Murphy-Price, Karen Revis, and Tanekeya Word
Panel Discussion: Black Women of Print
Althea Murphy-Price, Karen Revis, and Tanekeya Word
In partnership with the UT School of Art and UT Downtown Gallery
5:30-7:00 PM
Monday, September 16, 2024
UT School of Art, AA109
About the talk: Panel Discussion: Black Women of Print
UT’s Downtown Gallery will be hosting an exhibition of new triptychs by Black Women of Print featuring work by Deborah Grayson, Karen J. Revis, Stephanie Santana, LaToya Hobbs, Althea Murphy-Price, and Tanekeya Word. Join us for a special panel discussion with Black Women of Print members Althea Murphy-Price, Karen J. Revis, and Tanekeya Word as they discuss the personal, familial, and spiritual creative legacies behind their work.
This panel discussion is held in conjunction with the UT Downtown Galleries’ exhibition, Lore: What We Were Told | What We Saw | What We Tell Ourselves, on display from August 30 – October 17, 2024. Details here. The exhibition is supported by a Haines-Morris Grant from UT’s College of Arts & Sciences.
About Black Women of Print:
Black Women of Print was founded in October 2018 by Tanekeya Word, a Black woman, visual artist, art educator, scholar and fine art printmaker who resides in Milwaukee, WI. Word was interested in creating an equitable safe place for Black women printmakers who were underrepresented in the discipline of printmaking, a space that is eulogized as democratic.
Black Women of Print offers a counternarrative that decolonizes our highest proficiency level title from the traditional Eurocentric usage of the term master, rooted in trade/union print labor, to the term Established. Established Black women printmakers have brought into being an expansive body of work—personal or through artistic collaboration. We understand that our praxis is not superior to our peers. We are representations of one way to expand knowledge in the discipline of printmaking.
Learn more about Black Women of Print here.
September 30, 2024 – Cecelia Condit
Cecelia Condit: Video Works from 1981 to the Present
Cecelia Condit
Film Artist
Professor Emerita in the Department of Film, Video, Animation & New Genres at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
5:30-7:00 PM
Monday, September 30, 2024
UT School of Art, AA109
About the talk: Cecelia Condit: Video Works from 1981 to the Present
Ground-breaking filmmaker, Cecelia Condit, will give an artist talk punctuated by screenings of her video works from 1981-present. Condit’s videos have created heroines whose lives swing between beauty and the grotesque, innocence and cruelty, youth and fragility. Her work puts a subversive spin on the traditional mythology of women in film and the psychology of sexuality and violence. Exploring the dark side of female subjectivity, her “feminist fairy tales” focus on friendships, age, and the natural world. Condit will focus on ways her creative practice has shaped her life and conversely how her biography has shaped these intimate works—making a cohesive thread out of a fractured, disjointed world.
This talk is hosted in partnership with the UT School of Art and UT Ewing Gallery of Art + Architecture. The Ewing Gallery will be exhibiting a rotating selection of Condit’s short films as well as a monumental installation of her latest film, “There are No Words” — a triptych that represents Condit’s reaction to the environmental crisis and our uncertain futures.
About the speaker:
Cecelia Condit is a filmmaker and storyteller who has created heroines whose lives swing between beauty and the grotesque, innocence and cruelty, youth and age. Her work puts a subversive spin on the mythology of women in film and the psychology of sexuality and violence. She has shown internationally in festivals, museums and alternative spaces, and has received numerous awards and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, American Film Institute, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Mary L. Nohl Foundation. She’s a professor emerita in the Department of Film, Video, Animation & New Genres at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Condit was invited to campus by Janelle VanderKelen (School of Art/Cinema Studies).
October 14, 2024 – Katherine L. Jansen
The Veil of Veronica in Premodern Rome
Katherine L. Jansen
Ordinary Professor of History
The Catholic University of America
3:30-5:00 PM
Monday, October 14, 2024
Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts
About the Talk: The Veil of Veronica in Premodern Rome
This talk examines the history of the most important relic in the Christian world: the holy sudarium. Known colloquially as “the Veronica,” the relic is the cloth that is believed to have been imbued with the likeness of Christ’s face when Saint Veronica wiped the sweat from his brow as he made his way, carrying the cross, to the crucifixion. Surveying first how the relic arrived in Rome at the basilica of St. Peter, Katherine L. Jansen will demonstrate that attention to one holy object over a long period can reveal patterns of religious practice, papal ceremony and politics, and change over time in the eternal city.
About the Speaker:
Katherine L. Jansen is a historian of the later Middle Ages. She is the author of the award-winning book, The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) and Peace and Penance in late Medieval Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). She has also published three co-edited volumes: Medieval Italy: Texts in Translation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Charisma and Religious Authority: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Preaching, 1200–1500 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010); and Center and Periphery: Essays on Power in the Middle Ages in Honor of William Chester Jordan (Leiden: Brill, 2013). Professor Jansen has held fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, Villa I Tatti (The Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies in Florence), the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, among others. She has taught at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC since 1995 and has been Visiting Professor at the Johns Hopkins University and Princeton University. She was elected Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America in 2020. She is currently Editor of Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies. Her current book project is entitled, The Relics of Rome to which this lecture, “The Veil of Veronica in Premodern Rome” contributes.
Katherine Jansen was invited to campus by Gina Di Salvo (Theatre; Marco Institute). Her visit is co-sponsored by the Marco Institute for Medieval & Renaissance Studies.
October 28, 2024 – Elisa Beshero-Bondar
Visualizing the Frankenstein Variorum
Part of our Dialogues mini-series in Digital Humanities
Elisa Beshero-Bondar
Professor of Digital Humanities at Penn State Behrend
3:30-5:00 PM
Monday, October 28, 2023
Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts
About the Talk: Visualizing the Frankenstein Variorum
The Frankenstein Variorum team has completed work on a digital scholarly edition that compares five distinct versions of the novel Frankenstein. Working with the Frankenstein Variorum‘s edition files, we can study precisely where and how much the novel changed over five distinct instantiations from 1816 to 1831. Our encoded data invites us to visualize the edition’s moments of alignment, divergence, and gaps where material was missing or removed. This presentation shares a “big picture” view of Frankenstein’s changes over time using two variations of eXtensible Markup Language (XML): images drawn in Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) from our data encoded in TEI, the language of the Text Encoding Initiative.
About the Speaker:
An active member of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), Elisa Beshero-Bondar serves as an elected member and now chair of the TEI Technical Council, an eleven-member international committee that supervises amendments to the TEI Guidelines. She has been teaching humanities in web-savvy ways since the 1990s, and she began teaching markup languages and XML stack processing almost as soon as she began learning them in the 2010s. Before moving to direct the DIGIT program at Penn State Erie, she directed Pitt-Greensburg’s Center for the Digital Text. She has led TEI data modeling of the Frankenstein Variorum project, the Digital Mitford Project and other digital research projects involving TEI XML to build editions and prepare structured analyses of variants and collocations in texts. Find her on GitHub at https://github.com/ebeshero and on her development site named for her pet firebelly newts at https://newtfire.org.
Elisa Beshero-Bondar was invited to campus by Hilary Havens (English).
February 3, 2025 – Dan Sinykin
How We Got Our Books: The Conglomerate Era in Publishing
Dan Sinykin
Assistant Professor of English
Emory University
3:30-5:00 PM
Monday, February 3, 2025
Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts
Talk Title: “How We Got Our Books: The Conglomerate Era in Publishing”
Details forthcoming
Dan Sinykin was invited to campus by Amy Elias (Denbo Center, English).
March 03, 2025 – Shatema Threadcraft
Title TBD
Shatema Threadcraft
Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies, Philosophy, and Political Science at Vanderbilt University
3:30-5:00 PM
Monday, March 03, 2025
Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts
Talk Title: TBD
Details coming soon
Shatema Threadcraft was invited to campus by Danielle Procope Bell (Africana Studies).
March 10, 2025 – Olivia C. Harrison
Going Native: Jean Raspail and the Fictions of Indigeneity
Olivia C. Harrison
Associate Professor of French and Italian, Comparative Literature, Middle East Studies and American Studies & Ethnicity
University of Southern California Dornsife
3:30-5:00 PM
Monday, March 10, 2025
Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts
Talk Title: “Going Native: Jean Raspail and the Fictions of Indigeneity”
Olivia Harrison was invited to campus by Matt Brauer (WLC-French).
March [TBD], 2025 – Fred Moten
Title TBD
Fred Moten
Details coming soon
Held in conjunction with Big Ears Music Festival
April 07, 2025 – Menno Schilthuizen
Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution
Menno Schilthuizen
Professor of evolution and biodiversity at Leiden University; senior researcher at the National Natural History Museum ‘Naturalis’ in Leiden
3:30-5:00 PM
Monday, April 07, 2025
Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts
Talk Title: “Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution”
About the Talk:
We are marching towards a future in which three-quarters of humans live in cities, and a large portion of the planet’s landmass is urbanized. With much of the rest covered by human-shaped farms, pasture, and plantations, where can nature still go? One possibility: to the cities. And with more and more wildlife carving out new niches among humans, evolution takes a surprising turn. Urban animals evolve to become more tolerant, curious and resourceful, city pigeons develop “detox”-plumage, and weeds growing from cracks in the pavement adjust their seeds. Some city animals are even on their way of becoming an entirely new species. Thanks to evolutionary adaptation taking place at unprecedented speeds, plants and animals are coming up with new ways of living in the seemingly hostile environments of asphalt and steel that we humans have created. We may be on the verge of a new chapter in the history of life — a chapter in which much old biodiversity is, sadly, disappearing, but also one in which a new and exciting set of life forms is being born.
About the Speaker:
Menno Schilthuizen (1965) is a professor of evolution and biodiversity at Leiden University and a senior researcher at the National Natural History Museum ‘Naturalis’ in Leiden, the Netherlands. He studies the processes by which urbanization promotes rapid evolution in wild organisms. He also runs the Taxon Foundation, a nonprofit for urban biodiversity studies. In his recent books, Darwin Comes to Town (Picador, 2018) and The Urban Naturalist (MIT Press, 2025) he offers a new and optimistic view of cities as places where exciting ecosystems are arising, with community science as a way for city dwellers to be explorers of their own urban neighborhoods.
We would like to thank the Office of Research & Engagement for their generous support.