BOWLING GREEN, O.—Nearly 40 scholars from North America and Europe, as well as two prominent keynote speakers, will gather at Bowling Green State University and the Toledo Museum of Art Thursday through Saturday (Feb. 28-March 1) for “Beholding Violence: A Conference on Medieval and Early Modern Culture.”

The interdisciplinary conference, co-organized by BGSU faculty members Dr. Erin Labbie, an associate professor of English, and Dr. Allie Terry, an assistant professor of art history, takes as its point of departure the beholder of violence and the significance of the gaze in medieval and early modern culture.

Introducing the topic will be keynote speakers Drs. W. J. T. Mitchell, a professor of English and art history at the University of Chicago, and Michael Uebel, author and currently a candidate at the Austin (Texas) Center for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. Mitchell and Uebel will foreground the centrality of the play of history in our knowledge about the present and our concept of the future.

Mitchell will open the conference with his talk on “Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9-11 to Abu Ghraib" at 7:30 p.m. Thursday in the Bowen-Thompson Student Union Theater. A scholar and theorist of media, visual art and literature, Mitchell is associated with the emergent fields of visual culture and iconology (the study of images across the media). He is known especially for his work on the relations of visual and verbal representations in the context of social and political issues.

Uebel has taught literature and theory at the University of Virginia, Georgetown University and the University of Kentucky. He now practices as a psychotherapist in private practice and as a medical social worker at a hospital in Austin. H is talk on Friday at 6 p.m. in the Little Theater at the Toledo Museum of Art is titled "Masochism in America." The talk examines the production of moral and social consciousness in the post-war period with special attention to the two decades following WWII.

Uebel was Fellow at the Houston-Galveston Psychoanalytic Institute in 2006-07. He is the author of a wide range of essays on cultural and intellectual history and on mental health practice. Author and editor of several books, including “Race and the Subject of Masculinities” (Duke University Press) and “Ecstatic Transformation: On the Uses of Alterity in the Middle Ages” (Palgrave), he is currently working on “Masochism in America,” examining the formation of moral and social consciousness in the post-war period.

“Beholding Violence” conference papers will consider how images, texts and performances promoted, supported or helped negotiate real or imagined violence during the era and consider how certain types of artistic or literary production may be viewed as a response to collective cultural attitudes and customs.

The conference is sponsored by the School of Art, the Institute for the Study of Culture & Society, the Graduate College, Office of Sponsored Programs and Research, the departments of English, American culture studies, German, Russian and East Asian languages, and the Sigma Tau Delta English Honor Society.

For more details, visit http://www.bgsu.edu/departments/art/beholding , or contact

Dr. Allie Terry at alterry@bgsu.edu or Dr. Erin Labbie at labbie@bgnet.bgsu.edu .

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(Posted February 26, 2008 )