Past Shutz Lectures
About the Lecture Series
The Marilyn T. and Byron C. Shutz Lecture Series started in Arts and Literature. It is organized by the departments of English and Media, Art and Design, and brings together speakers from around the nation with expertise in the fields of studio art, art history, composition, rhetoric, creative writing and literature.
Past Events
2026-2027 Lecture Series Events
Tuesday, September 15, 2026 at 6:45 p.m. at the Screenland Armour Theatre in North Kansas City
booster (n.) --- someone who illicitly procures goods from a store and sells them at a discount price
From the mad mind of Boots Riley (Sorry to Bother you; I’m a Virgo) comes I Love Boosters, an electric, mind-bending odyssey through the world of high-fashion and low-rent economies. This film focuses on how women of color work together to try to remake the work in their image. While stories centering women of color often veer toward the pained and anguished, I Love Boosters instead saw a grand struggle that is, in their hands, as whimsical as it is revolutionary.
“It’s about loneliness and overcoming loneliness,” Riley says of his film. “And it’s about connection: the ways that people connect with each other, the ways that people feel a part of the world, and how some may look for that connection through something creative, or through other ways.”
Writer and director Boots Riley will introduced the film and engaged with the audience in an after-screening Q&A.
Wednesday, April 22, 6:00-7:30 p.m.
Janet Echelman will discuss her interdisciplinary process of designing immersive sculptures that transform with wind and light. At the scale of buildings, these public artworks integrate unlikely materials ranging from knotted fiber to atomized water particles. Seemingly fragile yet resilient, her sculptures are based on the visualization of data about environmental and geological changes. To develop these complex aerial structures, Echelman draws inspiration from ancient craft, material science, and high-tech fiber engineering.
Janet Echelman is an internationally renowned artist whose works are on display in major cities around the world, including London, Madrid, Shanghai, Singapore, and Sydney. After graduating from Harvard College, she lived in a Balinese village for five years, then completed graduate programs in painting and psychology. Tufts University awarded Echelman an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts. She received the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award in Visual Arts. Her TED talk "Taking Imagination Seriously" is one of the most viral videos on the Ted platform.
2025-2026 Lecture Series Events
Presenter: Stephen D. Houston, a specialist in Maya civilization, serves as Dupee Family Professor of Social Sciences at Brown University and Chair of the Senior Fellows, Pre-Columbian Studies, Dumbarton Oaks. A MacArthur Fellow, Houston gave the 72nd Andrew W. Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art and was awarded, by the President of Guatemala, the Order of the Quetzal in the grade of Grand Cross, that country’s highest honor. He is also lead author on a standard book about Maya color, Veiled Brightness: A History of Maya Color (U of Texas Press, 2009).
A Gleam in the Forest: Meaning and Material in Maya Color (2025): Colors alone or in combination had profound meaning for the ancestral Maya. They also had a history of use and a rich vocabulary to describe their many nuances. This talk explores a world where color invoked perceptions of materials, directions, and the bold palette of a natural or built setting.
This lecture is organized in conjunction with a two-day symposium on the theme of "Painted Worlds: Color and Culture in Mesoamerican Art."
Presenter: Filmmaker and visual artist Sky Hopinka and film historian Joanna Hearne, Jeanne Hoffman Smith Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of Oklahoma
Powwow People (2025) is a documentary grounded in the rhythms, relationships, and lived experience of a contemporary Native gathering. Rather than entering as outside observers, the filmmakers organized the powwow itself, inviting dancers, singers, vendors, and community members to participate in the making of this film. Structured around the arc of a single day, the film follows four central figures, drawing the viewers into the textures, movement, and collective presence of the powwow. The documentary is both a reflection of a beloved and complicated community and a gesture toward the continuities of Native life. The short Sunflower Siege Engine will also be screened.
Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was born and raised in Ferndale, WA, and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, CA, Portland, OR, and Milwaukee, WI. In Portland, he studied and taught Chinuk Wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video, photo, and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape – designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal and non-fictional forms of media.
Presenter: Joanna Hearne, Jeanne Hoffman Smith Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of Oklahoma
Indigenous makers have been vital creative catalysts in digital production, using technology as a tool for storytelling, activism, and cultural continuity. In this presentation, Hearne will explore the power of short-form media in Indigenous film, video, and animation history. She will be highlighting Indigenous filmmakers' works, as well as their power and presence in the media landscape.
Joanna Hearne is the Jeanne Hoffman Smith Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of Oklahoma, where her work spans Native American and global Indigenous media studies, archival recoveries of Indigenous presence in cinema history, and contemporary digital media, digital storytelling, and animation. Her books argue for the centrality of Indigenous images and image-making to American film history. She is the author of Native Recognition: Indigenous Cinema and the Western (SUNY Press, 2012) and Smoke Signals: Native Cinema Rising (University of Nebraska Press, 2012). She is also the co-editor of the essay collections ReFocus: The Films of Wallace Fox (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) and By Their Work: Indigenous Women's Digital Media in North America (University of Minnesota Press, 2025).
Presenter: Gloria Sutton, professor at Northeastern University
This talk traces the stealthy intrusion of artificial intelligence in everyday imaging apps that make distinctions between human and computer vision more difficult to discern. Aimed at a broad humanities audience, Pattern Recognition connects digitally-born artworks and the mass digitalization of analog artworks to Art History’s own unresolvable conflict with experiencing works of art simultaneously in real life and through reproductive image surrogates including prints, drawings, photographs, models and slides.
Gloria Sutton is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History at Northeastern University. Her scholarship has been supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and the Getty Research Institute. She has been a scholar-in-residence at Harvard University’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. Dr. Sutton served as the inaugural editor of the College Art Association’s Art Journal Open and was a founding board member of Rhizome.org.
What does it take to persist and resist in today's world? How do we remain creative, adaptable, and hopeful amidst atmospheres of unfreedoms? Join writer and curator Laura Raicovich as she discusses the importance of art and cultural work in our times, and why cultivating the imagination is essential to a more just society.
Laura Raicovich is a New York City-based writer and curator known for her dedication to equitable cultural production. Her book, Culture Stike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest, was published by Verso in 2021. She was President and Executive Director of the Queens Museum from 2015 to 2018 and in 2020 served as Interim Director of the Lesley-Lohman Museum of Art. She has recently co-founded The Francis Kite Club, an East Village NYC bar and collaborative space, and curated the first Counterpublic Convening, CIRCUS OF LIFE, in St. Louis, MO.
Esther Margolis is one of the most knowledgeable and experienced professionals in book publishing, having a career in the book world that spans more than six decades, and as the marketing consultant for major film studios for two decades. Through her insider perspective, Esther will recount the functioning of book publishing since the 1960s, including changes relating to mass market and trade paperbacks, film adaptations, publicity/advertising, agents/editors, and cross-media marketing. Come hear the story of the dramatic changes in the book and film industries over the last half-century from a leading insider.
Esther Margolis initially made her mark at Bantam Books, which she joined as a promotion assistant in 1963. Over the next 17 years, she became Bantam’s first Publicity Director, first woman Vice President, first Senior Vice President division head for marketing, publicity and communications worldwide and one of its top five officers. She became, for over 16 years, the book publishing consultant for Columbia Pictures/ Sony Entertainment, among other film and production companies. After 26 years, she sold the majority assets of Newmarket Press to HarperCollins and continued there as the imprint’s executive editor for several years, focusing it on books in film and entertainment. She left Harper in 2014 to re-establish her independent company, Newmarket Publishing Management, to agent, package, and consult on fiction and nonfiction trade and custom books, publishing, editing, marketing, publicity, and cross-media strategies worldwide. She is based in New York.
Robin Silbergleid is the author of the memoir Texas Girl and The Baby Book: Poems, as well as co-editor of Reading and Writing Experimental Texts: Critical Innovations. Additionally, with collaborators from The ART of Infertility, she co-edited Infertilities, A Curation, published with Wayne State University Press, which was honored with a Midwest Book Award. Born and raised in the Midwest, she currently lives in East Lansing, Michigan where she is Professor of English at Michigan State University.
Laura Portwood-Stacer will join registered UMKC faculty and graduate students virtually to discuss two topics: “How to Land a Scholarly Book Contract” and “How to Write an Outstanding Proposal.” Lunch will be provided by Café (the Center for Advancing Faculty Excellence) between the two sessions for those who attend in person.
As a publishing consultant and developmental editor for academic authors, Laura Portword-Stacer dispenses advice about editing and publishing on Twitter and Medium as @lportwoodstacer and through my Manuscript Works Newsletter. Her second book, THE BOOK PROPOSAL BOOK: A GUIDE FOR SCHOLARLY AUTHORS, was published by Princeton University Press in 2021. Before starting her consulting business, Portwood-Stacer was a scholar and academic whose research focused on lifestyle choices and how they define, restrict, and empower us.
In light of these developments, this talk focuses on the experiences of reproductive loss and infertility and the role of the reproductive arts. Featuring panelists who contributed to the edited collection, Infertilities, a Curation, attendees will learn how personal engagements with artistic making can be a source of personal healing, community building, and advocacy when discussing infertility and reproductive grief. Whether attendees come to this talk as someone personally affected by infertility or someone who wants to learn more about the experiences of inpiduals facing reproductive loss, this talk invites participants to consider how creative practices can aid in efforts to heal inpidual traumas and the role artists can play in advocating for social justice issues related to health and medicine.
Maria Novotny is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Drawing on a reproductive justice framework, she writes about reproductive advocacy, in particular infertility and recurrent reproductive loss. Her co-edited collection Infertilities, A Curation, published by Wayne State UP, portrays the ranging experiences of infertility in art and writing. She also serves as the Co-Director for The ART of Infertility, which is an arts-based infertility storytelling project.
Join the Shutz Lecture Series for a lecture and screening from award-winning film director, producer, and screenwriter Wendy Jo Carlton. Her talk will focus on her work creating authentic fiction films and television as a queer midwestern artist making independent work. Wendy Jo just completed production on her fourth feature film - Lucy is a Loser, an independent feature film about the healing power of weirdness, music, human touch, and other vibrations. Her works have screened internationally, including at Sundance, The AFI, on PBS, Outfest, Women in the Director’s Chair, and the Vancouver, London, Chicago, Austin, and San Francisco Lesbian Gay Film Festival among others. Her film Jamie and Jessie are Not Together was called the first lesbian RomCom musical, and rated as one of the “Top 100 Lesbian Movies of All Time”. Her other features can be viewed on Netflix, Hulu, AppleTV, and Amazon Prime. Carlton was also an Associate Producer on the award-winning documentary, Circus of Books, on Netflix (2021). Her award-winning lesbian web series, Easy Abby, has received over 100 million views online. A first-generation college graduate, Wendy Jo founded a media literacy film program for teen girls called Chicks Make Flicks, before earning an MFA in Film from the University of Illinois Chicago.
Wendy Jo directed her first feature, Hannah Free, starring Emmy-winner Sharon Gless, in 2009. Her second feature, Jamie and Jessie are Not Together, is said to be the first lesbian RomCom musical, with film critic Roger Ebert giving it a glowing review, and AutoStraddle.com lists Jamie and Jessie are Not Together as one of the “Top 100 Lesbian Movies of All Time”. Carlton’s third feature, Good Kisser, debuted on Netflix and Hulu and is now on AppleTV and Amazon Prime.
Carlton was an Associate Producer on the award-winning documentary, Circus of Books, on Netflix (2021). Her award-winning lesbian web series, Easy Abby, has received over 100 million views online and is the most viewed series on OML TV’s YouTube channel.
Wendy Jo founded a media literacy film program for teen girls called Chicks Make Flicks, before earning an MFA in Film from the University of Illinois Chicago. Carlton’s early short films screened internationally, including the American Film Institute and Sundance.
The Peripheral Manuscripts Project is a four-year initiative funded by the Council on Library and Information Resources and culminating in November 2024. By digitizing and cataloging hundreds of medieval manuscripts held in twenty-two partner collections across the Midwest, this collaborative project aims to bring attention to and celebrate the medieval manuscripts in the region, as well as the communities that study and care for them. This talk focuses on those communities as they shift throughout history. Beginning with the ways the project strives to foster community with and among our partners, our attention will then move backward in time, considering contemporary and past communities of researchers and donors and their connections with manuscript-holding institutions; rare book dealers, biblioclasts, and networks of national sales and exhibitions; and finally, the medieval communities that project items originated in or moved through. While weaving together these examples of manuscripts that suggest patterns of circulation and traces of past communities, this talk also reflects on the way the Peripheral Manuscripts Project has allowed the project team to do medieval studies in their own backyard, within their own communities.
Liz Hebbard is Assistant Professor of French/Francophone Studies in the Department of French and Italian at Indiana University, and founding co-director with Patricia Ingham of the Indiana University Book Lab. She is a specialist of the music and literatures of medieval France, particularly French and Occitan song, and a paleographer and codicologist specializing in medieval manuscripts, with particular interest in pre-modern book production and book crafts, material culture, and the reuse of parchment manuscripts as binding material. She has published on troubadour and trouvère song and its reception, medieval manuscripts in Midwestern collections, manuscripts as spoils of the Napoleonic Wars, and on the early 20th century American biblioclast Otto Ege. She has just finished her first book, Manuscripts and the Making of the Troubadours. Hebbard is the Primary Principal Investigator of the Peripheral Manuscripts Project, which will be the focus of her talk.
Presenters: Vernelle A. A. Noel, Kimberly Lyle, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram
2023-2024 Shutz Lecture Series Events
Thursday, Sept. 21, 2023
The verb “to curate” originates in Latin and means “to take care.” It is now broadly applied to a wide range of acts of selecting and displaying not only artworks, but also many other types of images and objects in both physical and virtual space. While curating has always implied attentive processes of looking after artifacts, the term has increasingly acquired connections with acts of social care woven around art in exhibition settings. The proliferation of socially engaged art practices and growing concerns over deepening social divisions have considerably contributed to an expanded curatorial agenda. The Covid-19 pandemic has rendered the need for curators’ commitment to fostering social consciousness even better evident. This panel seeks to address how curatorial acts can constitute or mediate radical acts of care. It inquires into the most effective ways in which curatorial approaches can fuel equitable partnerships between artists and communities. It also explores how curatorial acts will transform in conjunction with recent advances in AI.
Thursday, Oct. 26, 2023
This session explored how the emergence of mass-market media shaped the careers of women writers, the establishment of new reading audiences, and the development of new literary genres in nineteenth-century Britain.
Thursday, Nov. 9, 2023
This in-person event featured poet and essayist, Diana Goetsch, who presented her acclaimed memoir, which chronicles the budding trans communities of the late 20th century, and the light it sheds on today’s struggle for trans equality. This Body I Wore, hailed as “achingly beautiful” by The New York Times Book Review, takes readers on the most personal of journeys—the working out of one’s gender identity—and its public ramifications, over a span of five decades of national change. The “newest minority” in American culture seems to have come out of nowhere—except it didn’t.
For more information, visit: https://www.dianagoetsch.com/
Thursday, Feb. 29, 2024
Panelists discussed their work creating databases and systems to detect literary allusions and direct speech in Ancient Greek and Roman Literature. Dr. Coffee discussed the Tesserae Project, which he founded in 2008 as an effort to trace intertextuality and allusion in literary texts using computational means. Dr. Forstall and Dr. Verhelst discussed the DICES project, an international research collaboration for the study of direct speeches in Greek and Latin epic poetry from Homer to Late Antiquity. The heart of the project was an effort to construct a comprehensive, authoritative database of direct speech in Greek and Latin epic. In addition to their specific projects, panelists discussed how their general approaches can be modified and applied to works of literature written in English.
Tuesday, March 5, 2024
Why look closely at publishing? For artists, writers, poets, designers, activists, and anyone else who wants to spread the word—whatever that word may be—"making public" is a powerful means to mobilize communities and inspire change. Artist and design educator Paul Soulellis experiments with independent publishing as an artistic practice, and shares examples of joyful, radical, political, queer, and movement-based publishing as a means to resist, refuse, and survive. Paul is one of the founding members of Queer.Archive.Work, a queer and trans cooperative print studio in Providence, Rhode Island, as well as Department Head of Graphic Design at Rhode Island School of Design. For more information, visit soulellis.com
Thursday, April 25, 2024
This presentation by the author of A Literary Life of Sutton E. Griggs (Oxford University Press 2022) not only brought to light the life and career of the most prolific African American novelist at the turn of the twentieth century but also discussed the work of a Black Topeka, Kansas, and Kansas City artist, Robert E. Bell, who illustrated Griggs’s The Hindered Hand, three versions of which were issued by Griggs’s Nashville-based Orion Publishing Company in 1905 and 1906. The longest, most complex, and most widely distributed of Griggs’s novels, the book was written at the behest of the National Baptist Convention, the largest and most influential African American organization in the early 1900s (with over two million members), as a response to Thomas Dixon’s race-baiting best seller, The Leopard’s Spots, the inspiration, along with Dixon’s later novel, The Clansman, for the controversial film, The Birth of the Nation.
2022-2023 Shutz Lecture Series Events
Thursday, Sept. 29, 2022
This presentation brings to light the reductive ways in which the technologies and bureaucracies of schooling attempt to flatten our differences. Dr. Jesse Stommel critiques the notion that students are interchangeable—that whether they are food insecure, queer, or homeless is of no real consequence to a system (of grades, tests, and credentials) that attempts to rank them tidily against one another. He advocates for identifying more ways to involve students in the design of their own learning. In view of this, Dr. Stommel encourages educators to design for the least privileged, most marginalized students, the ones more likely to have felt isolated even before the pandemic. He advocates for writing new policies and imagining new ways forward for students already facing exclusion.
Thursday, Oct. 20, 2022
The pandemic and the social justice movements of 2020 revealed continuing racial disparities in communities across the United States. Dr. Sheryll D. Cashin invites attendees to engage in a conversation about redlining and residential segregation in hopes of a more integrated and equitable future that leads to community healing in times of strife. By exploring the local history of redlining and its legacies with creative writers, lawyers, historians, and urban designers, she provides participants with a moment for reflection on this important history. Dr. Cashin suggests that we can envision and plan for a better future together by accounting for multiple perspectives and recognizing the ongoing inequities in our communities.
In collaboration with the Educate-Organize-Advocate (EOA) Conference, Shutz presented the following two events as part of the inaugural UMKC Social Justice Month in October 2022.
The EOA Conference encouraged participants to familiarize themselves with the Emergent Strategy philosophy and embrace the real power of change. It called for deepening relationships, building trust, and consolidating political partnerships. Attendees learned about the principles of Emergent Strategy, including adaptation, interdependence, collaborative ideation, fractal thinking, transformative justice, and resilience. Speakers used science fiction as a tool for strengthening imagination and invite participants to think beyond binaries and linear, short-term outcomes. The goal was to foster connection by considering how cultural practices such as song circles, altars/community power tables, and spaces for play and dance help us meet essential spiritual and emotional needs.
Emergent Strategy Keynote by Mia Herndon
- Thursday, Oct. 6, 2022
Emergent Strategy Workshops
- Thursday, Oct. 13, 2022 − with Kawanza Billy
- Thursday, Oct. 27, 2022 − with chelsea cleveland
Thursday, Feb. 2, 2023
In this workshop, Marie Thompson explored the importance of storytelling in communicating the human experience.
Thursday, March 2, 2023
Panelists Janine Antoni, Victoria Vesna, and Kate Mondloch engaged in a conversation concerning inquiries into open-ended practices of art making and encouraged audience members to reflect on the role of aesthetics, bodily awareness, interpersonal consciousness in healing practices.
Thursday, Feb. 16, 2023
Panelists Sandi L. Wisenberg and Monica Prince engaged attendees in a conversation about how laughter eases tension, delivers a new perspective, changes power dynamics, and provides a respite.
Thursday, April 20, 2023
Traumatic events can impact multiple members of a community. While community resilience efforts have often focused on preventing trauma from occurring, prevention is only one aspect of resilience. We must consider how we navigate and heal from trauma, building safe and trustworthy relationships that prioritize equity and justice in our communities. Come prepared to consider how you can connect with various communities to respond to trauma in innovative and strengths-based ways.
2021-2022 Shutz Lecture Series Events
Thursday, Sept. 16, 2021
This roundtable explored interconnections among art, cultural appropriation, and indigenous rights. It was moderated by Lisa Tatonetti (Professor of English at Kansas State University) and featured Gregg Deal (artist and activist), Kate Morris (Professor of Art History at Santa Clara University), and Malea Powell (Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University).
Thursdays, Oct. 14, 21 and 28, 2021
This three-part workshop encouraged participants to interrogate their biases while developing and implementing antiracist classroom assessment practices. It was led by Antonio Byrd (Assistant Professor of English at University of Missouri-Kansas City), Virginia Schwarz (Assistant Professor English at San Francisco State University), and Lizbett Tinoco (Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University).
Thursday, Nov. 4, 2021
This panel explored how photographs have shaped the perception of Black subjects and historical events. Artist Isaac Julien discussed his recent film installation Lessons of the Hour which reimagines the life of statesman and freed slave Frederick Douglass. Art historian Krista Thompson examined the circulation of a photograph depicting Paul Bogle, the leader of the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion, who called for justice for all the people of Jamaica. The conversation was moderated by Cristina Albu (Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History at University of Missouri-Kansas City).
Thursday, Feb. 17, 2022
In this seminar, participants engaged in anti-racist creative writing strategies, empowering students to claim ownership not only of their work, but also of their working relationships with professors and peers. The session offered 20 specific, practical take-aways to re-conceptualize critique and encourage everyday anti-racist action. For more information, please visit The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop website.
Thursday, March 17, 2022
This panel addressed how curatorial practice can contribute to racial equity and enhance solidarity between diverse audience groups. It brought into discussion the strategies used by museums to acknowledge the legacy of colonial histories, dismantle exclusionary policies, and serve the interests of specific local communities. Led by Stephanie Fox Knappe (The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art), Valerie Cassel Oliver (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts), and Jade Powers (Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art). The conversation was moderated by Cristina Albu (Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History at University of Missouri-Kansas City).
Thursday, April 14, 2022
This panel explored how the use of digital humanities allows for the recovery of black voices through the scholarship of Kim Gallon (Associate Professor of History at Purdue University), Nicole N. Aljoe (English and Africana Studies at Northeastern University), and Adrian Wisnicki (Associate Professor of English and Faculty Fellow of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln).
Thursday, April 28, 2022
This panel examined how painful memories of racial abuses are integrated into texts and material objects which speak to the prolonged psychological and physical impact of social injustice. It brought together Nicole R. Fleetwood (Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU), Sara Sonié Joi Thompson-Ruffin (fabric artist and designer), and Kenturah Davis (artist). The conversation was moderated by Cristina Albu (Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History at University of Missouri-Kansas City).