Dora Apel

 October 5, 2022.

Dora Apel, W. Hawkins Ferry Professor Emerita of Modern and Contemporary Art History at Wayne State University, returns to the program to talk about her book Beautiful, Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline, published by Rutgers University Press in 2015.

"In Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline, Dora Apel goes on the offensive against the myriad myths and delusions peddled about the Motor City; not only that, she rebuffs the blame and shame that have traditionally been directed at the Detroit citizenry, and redirects our attention to the corporations and bureaucrats who have abandoned it. The result is a work that seems to invigorate a depressed debate and ask timely questions about social values in America and the world it influences." ― Los Angeles Review of Books

"In the early twentieth century, Detroit was defined by Charles Sheeler's photos of the River Rouge plant and Diego Rivera's murals of work. Today, the hulking ruins of old industrial buildings and empty skyscrapers symbolize the city. In this provocative analysis, informed by urban geography, political economy, and art history, Dora Apel reflects on what images of ruined Detroit teach us about the city,  popular culture, and American capitalism." -- Thomas J. Sugrue ― The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit

 

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Tobias Armborst

February 28, 2018. 

Tobias Armborst, Professor of Art and Urban Studies at Vassar College and Principal Architect of the award winning design and planning firm Interboro Partners, discusses his book The Arsenal of Exclusion and Inclusion (Actar 2017).

"The Arsenal comes at a critical time when interest in the urban realm has moved beyond the innocence of tactical urbanism, with its ubiquitous vocabulary of parklets and bike lanes, and now includes protest movements to fight the perceived agents of gentrification.... The text ultimately embraces history over how-to. The Arsenal, then, could be thought of as an urbanist’s I Ching, but rather than divining the future, each entry tells us about where we have been and where we are right now." --Metropolis Magazine

Nicholas Adams

May 10, 2017: SEASON FINALE.

Architectural historian Nicholas Adams, Mary Conover Mellon Professor of Art at Vassar College, talks about the exhibition he conceived and helped to curate at the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library entitled Building Buffalo: Buildings from Books, Books from Buildings: Books on Architecture and Landscape from the Rare Book Collection of the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library, on view until March 31,  2018.

Order the Catalogue.

42:46 minutes

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Maxine McClintock

Eleanor Roosevelt Memorial, Riverside Park, New York by Penelope Jencks

April 27, 2016.

For our last discussion of the season in our series on the value of liberal arts education in contemporary society, historian Maxine McClintock, emeritus teacher at Trinity School in New York, talks about her book Letters of Recommendation (Collaboratory for Liberal Learning, 2014) and the role of the liberal arts in secondary education.

"This is a remarkable and rewarding book. In the best tradition of John Dewey's vision of education as a journey that makes for more fully formed, flourishing human beings as well as a more informed citizenry, Maxine McClintock has constructed an intricate and compelling account not just of the fictional student Emilia's winding "senior year odyssey" toward college (and beyond) but also of the mentor-mentee educative process by which both share insights, learn, and develop through intellectual exchanges. The erudition here is striking and subtle. William James, Randolph Bourne, Dewey, Thomas Jefferson, and scores of other major thinkers appear and serve to propel the narrative as well as the analysis, provoking much bigger questions and concerns than simply: where should Emilia go to school? This is a book that interrogates the proper and best role of intellectuals and educators in society. It ponders the city "as educator." It critiques and embraces the drawbacks as well as the opportunities provided by Emilia's elite private school. It investigates the history of ideas and the "purposes of a liberal arts education" in a democracy. And it challenges readers to consider how self-awareness is and might be enabled via education as the book probes how and why this is not happening more in the U.S. At the core of this book, then, lies the so-called "education crisis" and the "crisis of the humanities" as integral to the "dysfunctional meritocracy" endemic to the contemporary educational landscape." -- Christopher M. Nichols.

54:57 minutes.

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Tobias Armborst

September 30, 2015.

Tobias Armborst, Associate Professor of Art and Urban Studies at Vassar College and principal of the award-winning architecture and urban planning firm Interboro Partners, talks about design thinking and the liberal arts, urban planning, and Interboro's project to reform areas of the Long Island shoreline to protect communities from rising sea levels and future hurricanes.

40:59 minutes.

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Lydia Murdoch

October 8, 2014.

 Lydia Murdoch (VC'92), Associate Professor of History at Vassar College, talks about her book Daily Life of Victorian Women (Greenwood, 2014).

"Contrary to popular misconception, many Victorian women performed manual labor for wages directly alongside men, had political voice before women's suffrage, and otherwise contributed significantly to society outside of the domestic sphere. Daily Life of Victorian Women documents the varied realities of the lives of Victorian women; provides in-depth comparative analysis of the experiences of women from all classes, especially the working class; and addresses changes in their lives and society over time. The book covers key social, intellectual, and geographical aspects of women's lives, with main chapters on gender and ideals of womanhood, the state, religion, home and family, the body, childhood and youth, paid labor and professional work, urban life, and imperialism."

58:55 minutes

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