Meet the HISB 2020-2021 Faculty Fellows
Nerissa S. Balce, Asian and Asian American Studies Department
Project: “Dark Lense: Essays on Philippine Photographs”
This proposed project is to turn Dark Lens / Lente ng Karimlan: The Filipino Camera in Duterte’s Republic, an on-line digital art exhibition that I co-curated, into an anthology of essays, featuring the photographs and twelve critical essays by scholars who work in the field of cultural studies, media, art, Asian studies, Asian American studies and Filipinx studies. This visual anthology anthology ( co-edited with media scholar Sarita See, University of California-Riverside) examines what scholars in media refer to as the “atrocity photograph”, an image of the violent action on the human body such as “death; massacre; torture; amputation; burning; desecration of a corpse”. The etymology of the term suggests its mean: the root word in artox, Latin for “cruel” or “fierce”. Atrocity photographs are thus images of the “pain of others”. This Filipinx visual anthology focuses on Philippine histories, empire and modernity. We envision the Dark Lens anthology as a project that blends our scholarly commitments in ethnic studies, public humanities and digital humanities.
Lecture: Beyond the “Atrocity Photograph”: On the Decolonized Eye and Filipino Images
Date: April 5, 2022 4:30-6:00 PM in 1008 Humanities
Nerissa S. Balce is Associate Professor of Asian American Studies in the Asian and Asian America Studies Department at Stony Brook University. She is the author of Body Parts of Empire: Visual Abjection, Filipino Images and the American Archive. She is also co-curator of the online art project, Dark Lens / Lente ng Karimlan: The Filipino Camera in Duterte’s Republic, an online exhibition of Philippine photographs of injustice and loss featuring commissioned poems and captions by 40 scholars and artists from the Philippines and North America.
Allegra de Laurentiis, Philosophy Department
Project: "Ethical Implications of Political Economies: Revisiting the Marxian Oeuvre"
The general area of this book project is moral philosophy. For multiple reasons, twentieth and twenty-first century philosophy has seen a retreat from classical conceptions of the ultimate purpose of science and philosophy, namely, the quest for the ethically “good life.” More prominent today are types of ahistorical and apolitical reflections about selfhood and authenticity that, although in themselves highly interesting, occasionally culminate in post-truth and post-human theorizing. This book offers an alternative philosophical aim, one that weds an explicitly ethical interest in the earthly success of the human species to the investigation of the historical nature of humanity and the material realities of human agency.
Lecture: " Commercialization of Everything or Freedom of Commerce? Two Historical Views on Civil
Society "
Date: November 16, 2021 4:30-6:00 PM via Zoom and in-person in 1008 Humanities
Allegra de Laurentiis is Professor of Philosophy at SBU. She specializes in German nineteenth-century philosophy and its relation to classical Greek thought. Between 2013 and 2020 she has edited and co-edited three volumes on her specialty. She has authored Subjects in the Ancient and Modern World (2005) and Hegel’s Anthropology. Life, Psyche and Second Nature (2021).
Paul Firbas, Hispanic Langauages and Literature Department
Project: “News Production and Networks in Colonial Lima (1620-1720): the Contreras Family Print Shop”
This book project is devoted to the study of printed news in Lima (Peru) from 1620-1720. As a colonial capital of Spanish South America, Lima had an official print shop that was heavily used for news printing – European and local – and, therefore, for the articulation of local and metropolitan interests. The production of news-sheet in Lima involved transatlantic networks, native agents, traditional postal routes, local writers and printers. The close examination of the textuality and materiality of news-sheets opens new avenues for understanding Baroque viceregal culture and tis new rhetoric of information. The book also aims to be an innovative intervention into colonial Latin American studies due to the use of overlooked primary sources and to the methodological implications that accompany textual scholarship applied to a vast network of texts and their variants.
Lecture: "Transatlantic and Colonial Media Culture: the Lima Periodical News Sheets 1700-1711"
Date: September 28, 2021 4:30-6:00 PM via Zoom
Paul Firbas is Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University. He specializes in Ibero-American texts of the colonial period, particularly in epic poetry, Andean historiography and transatlantic printed news and pamphlets. He has published diverse books and articles on Early Modern textual culture in South America.