The UMKC Trustees and School of Humanities and Social Sciences are proud to introduce the Marilyn T. and Byron C. Shutz Lecture Series. This annual series hosts lectures, seminars, and workshops in fields such as creative writing, literature, and art history.

 

September 21, 2024 1:00-2:00 pm (CDT)

(In-person) Kauffman Conference Center

Centering Community in the Peripheral Manuscripts Project

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.

blank

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.

UMKC Affiliated

Non-UMKC Affiliated

Zoom

Portrait of Elizabeth Hebbard

October 7, 2024 10:00-11:30 am (CDT)

Zoom 

Register

Artificial Intelligence and Human Creativity 

 

ChatGPT, Midjourney, Alexa, Siri. Artificial intelligence has become ubiquitous in our daily lives. Embrace it, fear it, or ignore it? What is the optimal interaction between humans and AI? How can generative AI tools be used creatively to move beyond the functions for which they were designed? Join these three artists and professors as they discuss ways in which they use AI to aid in design processes, improve human interactions, and interrogate power structures.

Vernelle A. A. Noel is an Assistant Professor of Computational Design at Carnegie Mellon University and director of the Situated Computation + Design Lab. With a background in architecture, art, and design, Dr. Noel investigates embodied and technological practices, the built environment, and their societal intersections to create new frameworks, tools, and expressions. She has won awards from the Graham Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation. Dr. Noel is also the recipient of the DigitalFUTURES Young Award for exceptional research and scholarship in the field of critical computational design. She has a TEDx Talk titled
The Power of Making 
Portrait of Vernelle A. A. Noel
Kimberly Lyle is an artist and assistant professor of Sculpture and Technologies at the University of Georgia. She received an MFA in Intermedia from Arizona State University and a BA in Psychology and Studio Art. Her work challenges the social values historically embedded in emerging technologies and explores how they affect our relationship with the natural world. Lyle is the recipient of fellowships and residencies at Sculpture Space, Mildred’s Lane, Elsewhere Museum, Signal Culture, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her work has been featured in symposia such as ISEA (Gwangju, Korea); Flux Factory (NYC); International Conference on Contemporary Cast Iron Art (Berlin, Germany); Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction Conference (Tempe, AZ).
Portrait of Kimberly Lyle
Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is an African American writer, poet, artist, and educator who works at the intersection of computation, AI, race, and gender. They direct the MFA in creative writing program at the University of Maryland and are a 2024 Foundation for Contemporary Arts poetry grant recipient. Dr. Bertram holds a PhD in Literature & Creative Writing from the creative writing program at the University of Utah. They are the author of several poetry collections, including Negative Money (Soft Skull, 2023) and Travesty Generator (Noemi Press, 2019), winner of the 2018 Noemi Press Poetry Prize, and a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Their honors include a 2017 Harvard University Woodberry Poetry Room Creative Grant and a 2014 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship.
Portrait of Lillian-Yvonne Bertram