November 2008 - January 2009, Prof. Michal Kobialka (University of Minnesota) holds the Belle van Zuylen chair at the Faculty of the Humanities of Utrecht University. Prof. Kobialka is a Professor of Theatre at the Department of Theatre Arts & Dance, University of Minnesota. He has written on medieval, contemporary European theatre, and theatre historiography. His book on the early medieval drama and theatre, This Is My Body: Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages (University of Michigan Press, 1999) received the 2000 ATHE Annual Research Award for Outstanding Book in Theatre Practice and Pedagogy. He is the editor of Of Borders and Thresholds: Theatre History, Practice, and Theory (published by the University of Minnesota Press in February 1999), a co-editor (with Barbara Hanawalt) of Medieval Practices of Space (University of Minnesota Press in June 2000) and author of two books on Tadeusz Kantor: A Journey Through Other Spaces: Essays and Manifestos, 1944-1990 (University of California Press, 1993) and Further on Nothing: Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming Spring 2009).
As part of his Belle van Zuylen professorship, Prof. Kobialka organizes a lecture series with international guest speakers, an intensive seminar titled This is my Body and a study day about the work of Tadeusz Kantor. His inaugural lecture will be on January 8.
BELLE VAN ZUYLEN LECTURE SERIES
As homage to Belle Van Zuylen and her "no talent for subordination", this series of lectures has been organized in order to explore the labor of thought within and without the Enlightenment as well as the multiple and diverse representational practices associated with it. The guest speakers were asked to address the issue of how the work they are doing in their respective fields intersects with the Enlightenment concepts and definitions in the space of the now.
November 26, 2008:
Timothy Brennan (Department of Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature; and English, University of Minnesota)
"Giambattista Vico and Enlightenment in the Twentieth Century"
Sweelinckzaal, Drift 21, Utrecht, 16.00h
November 27, 2008:
Keya Ganguly (Department of Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota)
"Social Freedom, the 'Third World', and the Dialectic of Enlightenment"
Place tba
December 8, 2008:
Andrzej Piotrowski (School of Architecture, University of Minnesota)
"Architecture between Heresy and Enlightenment"
Sweelinckzaal, Drift 21, Utrecht, 16.00h
December 15, 2008:
Rosemarie Bank (School of Theatre, Kent State University)
"Enlightenment Thinking and the Staging of the Native in the United States during the Long Nineteenth Century"
Belle van Zuylenzaal, Academiegebouw, Domplein 29, Utrecht, 16.00h.
January 8, 2009:
Inaugural lecture Prof. Michal Kobialka
"Theatre/Performance Culture in Eighteenth-century London: A Prolegomenon to Theatre Historiography of the Enlightenment"
Academiegebouw, Domplein 29, Utrecht, 16.15h.
Admission free. Please make a reservation, by sending an e-mail to belle@theatrestudies.nl
