November 18

Talk

6PM – 7:30PM
LAWRENCE, PUBLIC LIBRARY, AUDITORIUM; 707 VERMONT STREET, LAWRENCE, KS 66044

NedRa Bonds, a celebrated Kansas City-based quilt, educator, and activist, will discuss her prolific body of work, including projects that center the healing power of art. This lecture is part of KU’s Sawyer Seminar; to learn more, visit: http://chronicconditions.ku.edu.

Sponsored By: Spencer Museum of Art, Hall Center for the Humanities, Kansas African Studies Center

November 21

Performance

6PM – 7:30PM
SPENCER MUSEUM OF ART, SAM AND CONNIE PERKINS CENTRAL COURT, 317

Inspired by NASA’s Voyager mission and recordings of music on the Golden Record, a time capsule placed onboard in the event the spacecraft are discovered in the future, this concert-length work for percussion octet invites new encounters with art and music and ways of understanding our cosmic neighborhood. Explore the Museum as members of the KU Percussion Group perform this piece by Ben Justis, 2019 doctoral graduate in music composition.

November 22

Talk

4PM – 5:30PM
THE COMMONS, SPOONER HALL, 1340 JAYHAWK BLVD

Red Hot Graduate Research brings together student scholars from different disciplines to deliver six-minute flash presentations about current research. Audience members are encouraged to connect with the speakers and one other during breaks.

Sponsored By: The Commons

November 23

Activity

1PM – 3:30PM
SPENCER MUSEUM OF ART, LARRY AND BARBARA MARSHALL FAMILY BALCONY, 404

The Art Cart is a drop-in activity station where children and grown-ups enjoy hands-on art projects together, taking inspiration from original works of art on view. Create a mixed-media “home-holder” by using materials to visualize what home means to you.

November 24

Talk

2PM – 3PM
SPENCER MUSEUM OF ART

Slow down at the Spencer on the last Sunday of each month and spend time getting to know one great work of art. Slow Art Sunday features one work for visitors to contemplate and converse about with Museum staff. For November, get to know the Nigerian ere ibeji (twin figures).

December 03

Talk

5PM – 6PM
THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS SCHOOL OF MEDICINE-SALINA, WEST LOBBY 101; 138 N SANTA FE AVENUE, SALINA, KS 67401

Dr. Paul Mkandawire studies the intersections of global and public health, social justice, and human rights. He will be sharing his research on HIV/AIDS and Ebola in Africa and the ways that state and non-state institutions mobilize responses to epidemics of global proportions. Dr. Mkwandawire serves as the Co-Director of the Human Rights and Social Justice Program and Assistant Professor of Health Sciences at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. This lecture is part of KU’s Sawyer Seminar; to learn more, visit: http://chronicconditions.ku.edu.

Sponsored By: Hall Center for the Humanities, Kansas African Studies Center, Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas School of Medicine-Salina

December 06

Talk

4PM – 5:30PM
THE COMMONS, SPOONER HALL, 1340 JAYHAWK BLVD

Red Hot Research brings together scholars from different disciplines to deliver six-minute flash presentations about current research. Audience members are encouraged to connect with the speakers and one another during breaks.

Sponsored By: The Commons

December 07

Activity

9AM – 12PM
WATKINS MUSEUM OF HISTORY, 1047 MASSACHUSETTS ST

Visit the Watkins Museum to create and celebrate holiday traditions with your family at this free annual event. The Spencer Museum will be on hand to lead a special art activity.

Sponsored By: Watkins Museum of History

December 12

Talk

10:15AM – 11:15AM
SPENCER MUSEUM OF ART, SAM AND CONNIE PERKINS CENTRAL COURT, 317

Neal Long, doctoral candidate in vocal performance and Spencer Museum tour coordinator, illuminates art of the season with a recital of holiday songs from different traditions. Audience members will learn about the history behind favorite and less familiar tunes and be invited to participate in a sing-a-long. Senior Sessions are designed for senior citizens but open to everyone.

December 29

Talk

1PM – 4PM
SPENCER MUSEUM OF ART, SAM AND CONNIE PERKINS CENTRAL COURT, 317

Every year, Spencer Museum Director Saralyn Reece Hardy spends an afternoon in the galleries welcoming visitors and leading informal tours to celebrate the holiday season. Tours are offered at 1:00PM and 2:30PM. Join us and make this Spencer Museum tradition your own.

February 05

Talk

5:30PM – 6:30PM
THE HALL CENTER FOR THE HUMANITIES, CONFERENCE HALL; 900 SUNNYSIDE AVENUE, LAWRENCE, KS 66045

Dr. Moya Bailey (Assistant Professor of Cultures, Societies and Global Studies and Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies, Northeastern University) is a scholar of critical race, feminist, and disability studies. Her work focuses on Black women’s use of digital media to promote social justice as acts of self-affirmation and health promotion and is particularly interested in how race, gender, and sexuality are represented in media and medicine. This lecture is part of KU’s Sawyer Seminar; to learn more, visit: http://chronicconditions.ku.edu.

Sponsored By: Hall Center for the Humanities, Kansas African Studies Center, Spencer Museum of Art

February 19

Talk

5:30PM – 6:30PM
THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS SCHOOL OF MEDICINE—WICHITA, ROBERTS AMPHITHEATER; 1010 NORTH KANSAS STREET, WICHITA, KS 67214

Dr. Ama de-Graft Aikins (British Academy Global Professor at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London) will discuss her research on “chronicity”—the complexity of addressing disease conditions that progress slowly, are of long duration, and cause debility—among Ghanaian communities living in London, Amsterdam, and Berlin. She will demonstrate the ways that place, migration history, and generational status intersect with chronic illness in these communities and the implications they bear for long-term care. This lecture is part of KU’s Sawyer Seminar; to learn more, visit: http://chronicconditions.ku.edu.

Sponsored By: Hall Center for the Humanities, Kansas African Studies Center, Spencer Museum of Art

March 04

Talk

5:30PM – 6:30PM
THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS MEMORIAL UNION, MALOTT ROOM (LEVEL 6); 1301 JAYHAWK BOULEVARD, LAWRENCE, KS 66045

Charly Evon Simpson is a playwright and teacher. Her plays include Jump, Behind the Sheet, form of a girl unknown, it’s not a trip it’s a journey, and more. Charly will be sharing the ways that her work has centered black women's bodies and the ways that Black bodies have been viewed and treated differently, including in medicine. Charly was recently named the co-recipient of the Dramatists Guild’s Lanford Wilson Award, was nominated for the Outer Critics Circle’s John Gassner Award, and had two of her plays on the 2019 Kilroys List. Her play Jump is the first recipient of the David Goldman Fund for New Plays. This lecture is part of KU’s Sawyer Seminar; to learn more, visit: http://chronicconditions.ku.edu.

Sponsored By: Hall Center for the Humanities, Kansas African Studies Center, Spencer Museum of Art

March 16

Talk

5:30PM – 6:30PM
UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS MEMORIAL UNION, ALDERSON AUDITORIUM (LEVEL 4), 1301 JAYHAWK BLVD, LAWRENCE, KS 66045

Duana Fullwiley, who is an anthropologist of science and medicine, will present her research on the increasing intersections between social identities, health outcomes, and molecular genetics, exploring notions of privacy, informed consent, and ethics. Professor Fullwiley teaches in the Department of Anthropology, as well as the interdisciplinary programs in the Comparative Studies of Race & Ethnicity and Science, Technology, & Society at Stanford University. This lecture is part of KU’s Sawyer Seminar; to learn more, visit: http://chronicconditions.ku.edu.

Sponsored By: Kansas African Studies Center, Spencer Museum of Art, Hall Center for the Humanities

April 16

Talk

6PM – 7PM
LAWRENCE PUBLIC LIBRARY, AUDITORIUM, 707 VERMONT STREET, LAWRENCE, KS 66045

In this talk, Therí Alyce Pickens (Associate Professor of English, Bates College) rethinks the relationship between Blackness and disability, unsettling the common theorization that they are mutually constitutive. Pickens shows how Black speculative and science fiction authors such as Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, and Tananarive Due craft new worlds that reimagine the intersection of Blackness and madness. Pickens will demonstrate how the theorizations of race and disability that emerge from these works challenge the paradigms of subjectivity that white supremacy and ableism enforce, thereby pointing to the potential for new forms of radical politics. This lecture is part of KU’s Sawyer Seminar; to learn more, visit: http://chronicconditions.ku.edu.

Sponsored By: Kansas African Studies Center, Spencer Museum of Art, Hall Center for the Humanities

April 29

Talk

5:30PM – 6:30PM
HALL CENTER FOR THE HUMANITIES CONFERENCE HALL, 900 SUNNYSIDE AVE

Physicians who lived and practiced in American slave societies created a corpus of medical knowledge about blackness that was used to buttress white medical authority and professional expertise by treating blackness as peculiar—a deviation from the standard of whiteness. In this talk, Rana A. Hogarth (Assistant Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) examines medical knowledge about the so-called peculiarities of black people’s bodies produced during the era of slavery and its relationship to eugenic era studies of race crossing between blacks and whites. These early twentieth-century race crossing studies are known for harnessing Mendelian genetics to interpret and predict the physical attributes of mixed race offspring. They employed tests and tools designed to measure the skin color, fitness, and intelligence of mixed race people. An essential, but overlooked, component of this process was the indirect reliance on slavery era lore about the physical and mental capabilities of mixed race people’s bodies. Thus, this talk traces the genealogy of anti-black discourse that permeated these eugenic race crossing studies and the anxieties eugenicists faced over the “problem” of racial inter-mixture to the era slavery. This lecture is part of KU’s Sawyer Seminar; to learn more, visit: http://chronicconditions.ku.edu.

Sponsored By: Hall Center for the Humanities, Spencer Museum of Art, Kansas African Studies Center