Lecture

James Nachtwey's Photographs and the problem of the Modern James Nachtwey’s photographs raise the question of who is responsible for holding trauma, and what is the place of the traumatized in culture? Another way to frame this question is to ask who is responsible for holding...

Rebecca Belmore and the Photograph of the Wound Barthes argues that the photograph, if it has power, wounds us, shooting a puncturing arrow into our psyches—very much like Cupid, only this Cupid is one of memory and mourning rather than desire. And yet memory, mourning, and...

On Citizen Ghosts: The Un-Americans  For a while, when I was still teaching for the Studies in Women and Gender Program, a program at that time headed by anthropologist Kath Weston, I taught a course on women and ghosts. The premise of the course was to...

This lecture was delivered in my Gender and Violence class, Sociology 2380, at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Goldin Lecture (12/03/12) [caption id="attachment_63" align="alignright" width="1344"] Greer and Robert on the bed, NYC 1982 by Nan Goldin born 1953[/caption] Nan Goldin is an American photographer born in 1953. She...