Letter of Seminar
Long neglected, animals have once again, especially since the 1980s, been placed at the center of contemporary art. Against all expectations, animals serve less the cause of ecology than to reassure humans of their own status, as we are told by Marion Duquerroy, whose dissertation on this subject will be published by Presses ...
Thierry Bonnot exits from the strictly positivist view the social sciences hold of objects. No, he says — in the wake of other researchers who have refreshed the history of things — objects are not “witnesses” but social facts that have complex relationships with human beings as they interact in our social exchanges. In ...
Anne Lafont offers us a foretaste of her key new research on the genre of massacres, which she examines in a perspective that encompasses the history of scientific expeditions, territorial conquests, and eighteenth-century colonization efforts. She blends American, European, and Caribbean images into the same corpus. Lafont admirably shows in what way representations ...
Dorian Astor has just published a major book on Friedrich Nietzsche, La détresse au présent (Folio). No one is better qualified than he to reexamine the question of how philosophy and war relate to each other. As Astor recalls in his Introduction, “Nietzsche addresses us as a problem that has not yet been ...
Amanda Herold-Marme, who is preparing a dissertation at Sciences Po on Spanish artists in Paris during the Francoist period returns to our seminar to examine the singular trajectory of Roberta González, an artist who worked in France beginning in the 1930s and until her death, in 1976. Herold-Marme spots in González’s work traces of ...
Romain Fathi is a student of the Great War and of commemorative practices. He invites us to reflect on the way in which Australia set up a section for the celebration of the arrival of the Australian and New Zealand Corps (ANZAC) in the Dardanelles in April 1915, a date hallowed as ...
War destroys human beings and things, and among the latter, it destroys cultural property, which testifies to the pastness of the past. Particular attention has been paid to the protection of such property, and this concern has been enshrined in law since the Hague Convention of 1906-1907 and followed up on in the ...
What comics and photography have in common is that they both emerged in the early nineteenth century while giving shape to their authors’ imaginaries. Isabelle Delorme, who is preparing a dissertation at Sciences-Po on historical graphic memoirs, calls to mind the growing role of photography in graphic albums which have themselves been on the ...
Through Chim’s biography, Carole Naggar raises the question of war photojournalism, its methods and motivations. Deeply disturbed by war as early as his youth in Warsaw, Chim lived through all the major conflicts of his time, starting with the Spanish Civil War, wherein he acted as a committed observer who sought to affect viewers ...
Art historians have gone to work on Italy’s colonial past. Yet visual sources for such a history remain rather rare, either because they have been destroyed or because they have been covered over or willfully omitted. Laura Iamurri opens a few possible paths of research and recalls that colonial exhibitions were indeed documented: the works ...
