Department of History Graduate Symposium on Women's and Gender History Plenary Address "Venus in Two Acts"

• Event Date: Friday, March 7, 2008
• Time: 4:00 pm (CST)
• Location: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL
• Cost: Free Admission

• Talk

Saidiya Hartman
Professor of African American and American Literature, Columbia University

Dr. Hartman is a specialist in African American literature and history at Columbia University, whose profound, original work addresses both the experience and legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. Professor Hartman's first book, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America explores the intersections of enslavement, gender, desire, and the making of liberal reason in the United States through a variety of cultural materials—slave narratives, song and dance, legal texts, journals, diaries, and narratives. Her latest book Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route lyrically confronts the disturbing relationships among memory, representation, and narrative. She focuses on the "non-history" of the slave, the way in which the unnameable catastrophe of slavery erased any conventional modality for writing an intelligible past. Weaving her own biography into an imaginative historical construction, she explores and evokes the non-spaces of black experience—the experience through which the African captive became a slave, became a non-person, became alienated from personhood.

For more information about Spurlock Museum facilities or for other inquiries, contact Brian Cudiamat at (217) 333-0889.

Museum visitors are reminded that food and drinks are not allowed in the Museum. Backpacks and other large items brought to the Museum will have to be stored; there is limited locker storage space available for these items.