Two HFA Faculty Members Named to 2022-23 Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series
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Two faculty members from the College of Humanities & Fine Arts have been named part of the 2022-23 Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series and recipients of the Chancellor's Medal: Paul Murray Kendall Chair in Biography and professor of English Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina and Professor and Chair of the Department of Art Young Min Moon.
Established in 1974, the annual Distinguished Faculty Lecture is dedicated to acknowledging the work of our most esteemed and accomplished faculty members. The lecture series not only honors individual faculty members and their achievements but also celebrates the values of academic excellence that we share as a community. Each honoree is presented with the Chancellor’s Medal, the highest recognition bestowed upon faculty by the campus.
Event details are available on the Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series website prior to each lecture.
Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina
Paul Murray Kendall Chair in Biography and professor of English, College of Humanities and Fine Arts
Wednesday, Feb. 8, 2023, 4 p.m.
Great Hall, Old Chapel
"Forgotten Lives: What They Mean, and Why They’re Important"
Professor Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina is an internationally acclaimed scholar widely known for her work in British literary and cultural studies. Much of her award-winning work explores forgotten lives. Most recently, an updated edition of her book Black London was published in the UK under the new title Black England: A Forgotten Georgian History, with a foreword by Zadie Smith. Gerzina’s work reaches beyond the field of literary studies and has made significant contributions to scholarship in history, art history, and African American studies.
In her lecture, Professor Gerzina will describe how in times past, only the lives of the famous, political, or influential were deemed worthy of exploration. Today, however, much can be learned by the lives of the ordinary or the overlooked. Gerzina will speak about what those lived experiences tell us about how people actually belonged to their times, and the way that national myths can be questioned or altered when we take another look at those who helped make social and artistic changes and allow us to reimagine the past.
Young Min Moon
Professor and Chair of the Department of Art, College of Humanities and Fine Arts
Wednesday, April 12, 2023, 4 p.m.
Great Hall, Old Chapel
"The Aftereffects of War in Contemporary Korean Art"
Over the past century, the Korean Peninsula has seen a succession of violent ruptures, and it remains a flashpoint for the world’s superpowers. The peninsula is still gripped by Cold War geopolitics, long after the fall of the Communist bloc. In the aftermath of the Korean War, South Korea was built on androcentric nation building, anti-communism, and a relentless drive for industrialization. In the period of compressed development from the poverty-stricken 1950s to the global success of today, countless lives have been lost to the state apparatus—lives whose memories must be contextualized in the history and politics of the Cold War.