Queering the Colonial Revival

Kevin Murphy has taught in the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia and is currently John Rewald Professor and Executive Officer of the Ph.D. Program in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center in Manhattan. His publications have spanned European and American architecture and culture and include several books, among them Colonial Revival Maine (2004) and a forthcoming book Jonathan Fisher of Blue Hill, Maine: Commerce, Culture and Community on the Eastern Frontier (U Mass Press).

This illustrated lecture will offer a new interpretation of the Colonial Revival movement in northern New England. By investigating the histories of several preservation projects undertaken just before 1900 in southern Maine and seacoast New Hampshire, the talk will revise past interpretations of the Colonial Revival that have underscored its politically conservative nature. Instead, this talk will show how restoring old buildings in some instances could become a "queer" practice in which convential gender and social roles were challenged.

Farmstead Nation: The Culture of Work in Agricultural Communities

Pavel Cenkl is currently Dean of Academics and Professor of Humanities at Sterling College in Vermont. His scholarship focuses on intersections of literature, culture, and environment in the Northern Forest of the United States and the Canadian and European Arctic. He is the author of This Vast Book of Nature: Writing the Landscape of New Hampshire's White Mountains, 1784-1911 (Iowa, 2006), and is currently editing an interdisciplinary anthology of essays that engage culture, economy, and environment in the U.S. Northeast titled Nature and Culture in the Northern Forest.

Pavel Cenkl's talk will consider the relationship of work and community in northern New England agricultural communities from near the beginning of the nineteenth century to the apparent renaissance of local agricultural networks today. By looking at specific historical and contemporary examples, Cenkl will engage the ongoing debate about transitioning from subsistence to market farming in New England history and consider how that historical moment informs the current thinking and practice of rural agriculture.

Alumni Lecture:

The Stories they Tell, the Histories they Perform: Modern African American Musicals and American Memory

Kathryn Edney received her MA in American Studies from USM in 1998, and recently completed the PH.D., also in American Studies, at Michigan State University. Her dissertation was entitled "Gliding through our Memories: The Broadway Musical does 'History.'" She was managing editor of the Journal of Popular Culture for two years, currently serves on its editorial board, and has published and presented on various Broadway musicals.

Anxious about their place in popular culture, mainstream Broadway musicals cannot resist holding onto the idea of a Golden Age; the form is steeped in nostalgia. Paradoxically, one of the characteristics of nostalgia is forgetfulness because, for a Golden Age to exist, the unpleasant realities of the past must be elided. Although all-black musicals are often viewed as simple celebrations of black musics such as jazz and Motown, modern all-black musicals actually have very little to be nostalgic about. This presentation examines several recent all-black musicals, including Jelly's Last Jam, Dreamgirls, and The Color Purple, to discuss how they variously combat Broadway's typical nostalgia by connecting the histories of African American musics to the histories of African American experiences.

Winslow Homer's Place in the Portland Museum of Art

Student Research Panel

ANES 2008-09 Lecture Series Poster - COMING SOON!

ANES 2007-08 Lecture Series Poster

ANES 2006-07 Lecture Series Poster

American Sign Language Interpreters can be provided at any lecture upon request.