Saturday, September 3, 2011

Radical Aesthetics & Politics Conference Discussants






Since 1983 Andrea Blum has worked in Public Space in Europe and the United States. She has received Grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, Graham Foundation, NEA, NYFA and in 2005 was named Chevalier of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture. She is a Full Professor in the Department of Art at Hunter College.

Patricia Clough, Professor of Sociology, Women’s Studies, and Intercultural Studies at Queens College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York.

Neni Panourgiá, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society and the Harriman Institute, Columbia University

Klara Seddon is Research Director for the Institute of Cultural Research, NY, an independent scholarly research organization.  She received her Master’s degree from the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture in New York City.  Klara is a contributor to Critical Studies in Expressive Culture and co-organizer of the Radical Aesthetics and Politics Conference.  Her research interests are in the areas of material/visual culture, women’s studies, digital culture, and food studies in East Asia.   Her current research looks at gendered food roles through women’s fake food hobby crafts in Japan and Korea.  Klara serves on the Board of Directors of the National Coalition of Independent Scholars and is the author of the blog, the five o’clock teaspoon, featuring analysis of contemporary and historical foodways.

Erin Siodmak is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her dissertation interests are politics, art, and collectivity. Erin teaches at Hunter College and likes skiing.

Mary N. Taylor is adjunct assistant professor of anthropology at Hunter College, CUNY, and the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. She is co-founder of the Open University in Brooklyn. She received her PhD in anthropology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and was postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Place Culture and Politics in 2009-2010.

Her research focuses on the sites, technologies and politics of civic cultivation, cultural management and heritage governance, the relationship of ethics and aesthetics, nationalism and cultural differentiation, and social movements in socialist and postsocialist Europe. She is currently revising her dissertation on folk dance revival and civic cultivation in Hungary into a book entitled The Aesthetic Nation; Folk Dance, Citizenship and the Cultivation of Hungarian National Sentiment, and is working on an edited volume entitled “Talking Culture”: Political Mobilizations of Culture at the Turn of the Millennium.