Upcoming talk

Chiaki Sakai, our beloved Japan Studies librarian, thought some of you might be interested in this public lecture:

Martial Guedron, art historian from Strasbourg, France, will speak April 21

Martial Guedron, a professor of art history at the Université Marc Bloch in Strasbourg, France, will speak about the "look" of race that was created by the earliest anthropologists in a University of Iowa guest lecture at

7 p.m on Monday, April 21, in Room 116 of Art Building West.

Guedron's lecture, "Nature, Ideal, and Caricature: The Perception of Physical Types by the First Anthropologists," is free and open to the public.

"People of color often first circulated in Europeans' orbit through words and images produced by anthropologists," Guedron notes. "These anthropological images arose at the intersection of aesthetic criteria, scientific accounts of human differences and racial prejudices in 18th-century physiognomic arguments about the 'look' of race. These same systems of representation then circulated even more widely and damagingly in the innumerable caricatures of the period."

Guedron's talk is sponsored by the UI School of Art and Art History; the 18th/19th-Century Interdisciplinary Colloquium of UI International Programs; the departments of English, French and Italian, and History; the African Studies Program; Caribbean, Diaspora and Atlantic Studies; the European Studies Group; and the UI Center for Human Rights.