Stephen Brockmann is Professor of German in the Department of Modern Languages. He is the author of German Literary Culture at the Zero Hour (2004) and Literature and German Reunification (1999). This year (2006), his newest book, "Nuremberg": The Imaginary Capital will be appearing. It is a study of cultural images and concepts of Nuremberg over the last two centuries and includes chapters on Richard Wagner’s opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, as well as on Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph des Willens. Brockmann is also managing editor of the Brecht Yearbook, and he is co-organizer of the International Brecht Society’s symposium Brecht and Death / Brecht und der Tod, which will take place in Augsburg, the city of Brecht’s birth, from July 12-16 2006 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Brecht’s death in the summer of 1956.

Douglas Cooper executes large urban panoramic murals: in many cases working with residents to incorporate their memories (often in their own hands) into the work, (Pittsburgh '92, Philadelphia '94, New York '97, San Francisco '01-02). These murals present a highly personal record of the urban life of each city. Two projects (Rome '03-04, Frankfurt '96) have combined mural making with foreign language instruction engaging CMU undergraduates together with local residents.

James Duesing is in production on End of Code, an animation about two groups of animal/human hybrid characters trying to control a city’s system of traffic lights. In order to hack into the system they must examine and decipher the social and behavioral codes of their culture. The animation concludes when both groups hack the system at the same time only to cause all the lights in the city to flash a yellow caution signal, resulting in massive traffic jams and accidents.

Kenya Dworkin's current research explores the Sephardic Jews in New York City in the early 20th century. She is contextualizing their experience as that of a Hispanic people in the greater context of general Hispanic immigration to New York during that period, particularly from Puerto Rico. Both brought Hispanic language and culture with them; the Sephardim, via Turkey and the Balkans, as descendants of the Jews who were expulsed from Spain in 1492, the Puerto Ricans as victims of Spanish and American imperialism. There were many commonalities between the experience of the two groups, among them language, issues of cultural, social and linguistic assimilation, and racism.

Tim Haggerty is currently writing a history of graphic satire and caricature in antebellum New York City from 1848 to 1865 with Jared Day, his co-author. They are investigating the social and economic contexts that gave rise to a new form of graphic humor in newspapers and weekly magazines, laying the foundation for the political cartoons, funny pages and comic books that became a distinctly American art form in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.

Elaine A. King, professor of the History of Art, Theory and Museum Studies  is currently writing two volumes: one is on the evolution of contemporary portraiture from 1960 to our present time. This project began when King was a Senior Fellow at the Smithsonian's American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery. Her interest in portraiture stems from a belief that the portrait remains one of the most varied and elusive forms of representation and portraits  continue to function as a  ubiquitous interface between society and its evolvingculture; the other book will focus on the  National Endowment for the Arts and its role inshaping Post-Modernism.  An in-depth examination and evaluation of this specific program unfolds in this work intending to demonstrate that the Arts Endowment’s Visual Arts Programs throughout the 1970s played a substantial role in reshaping the art  canon  in the USA away from the formalist ideals of  Modernism  to the diverse arena of Post-Modernism.
 
In addition, Elaine A. King, was on a panel  titled, "Hot & Bothered, A Discussion on Censorship in the Arts," at the 45th Ann Arbor Film Festival, on Saturday 24 March. King delivered a paper titled "Museum  Ethics vs.Vanity and  Desperation," at the annual College Art Association  meeting in  New York, February 2007 in the session, The Unethical Museum.

The book "Ethics and the Visual Arts", that King co-edited with Gail Levin is available in bookstores and on line. And, Dr. King was the invited guest curator for the mid-career exhibition titled, "ARTIST
INTERRUPTED: Selected Works by Maria Mater O' Neill, FROM POST TO AFTER 1983 – 2006", at the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico.  A bi-lingual 135 page was compiled to accompany this show.

Franco Sciannameo , College of Fine Arts Distinguished Scholar in Multidisciplinary Studies, is under contract with Scarecrow Press for a volume entitled: NINO ROTA’S THE GODFATHER TRILOGY: A FILM SCORE GUIDE.

The book re-introduces critics, film musicologists, cinemagoers, and fans of Francis Ford Coppola’s cinema and Nino Rota’s music to the events that led to the realization of the three films that make up The Godfather Trilogy. Released in 1972, 1974, and 1990 respectively, Coppola’s three-part saga constitutes one of the greatest artistic accomplishments (and financial successes) in the history of Hollywood cinema.

Through analytical observations on the form and significance of Coppola and Rota’s achievements, the book demonstrates how a filmmaker and composer worked to revise the conventions of the American crime film in light of the Vietnam era, while offering, at the same time, a critique of capitalism as represented by the criminal underworld -- its inherent violence, and the power struggles within Hollywood over the film. Ultimately, in The Godfather Part III, elements of opera, literally and figuratively, add considerably to the force and cinematic style of Coppola’s epic vision of an Italian-American criminal dynasty.

The volume is scheduled for release in May 2007.

Susanne Slavick, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Art, is working on a series of works on paper that combine mixed media drawing and digital prints.  Entitled “R&R&R,” the works twist the military abbreviation for rest and relaxation, visualizing words like remorse and reconstruct instead.  Working from photographs of merciless destruction (predominantly in the Middle East), whether of ancient cedars downed by freak tornadoes or national infrastructures deliberately ruined, she transfers and transforms digital images with her hand, revealing, restoring and regretting what has been decimated through the flesh of her materials, a palette that breathes, and forms that supplant what has been lost.  The functional aesthetic often associated with modernism and cultures of poverty becomes ornamental. Concrete and asphalt becomes fluid. Rubble becomes renewed —gestures, albeit feeble, at undoing the damage.

Donald S. Sutton (History) is working with Xiaofei Kang (Modern Languages) to complete a collaborative book on  religion, ethnicity and tourism at a UNESCO World Heritage site (Huanglong, or Yellow Dragon in northern Sichuan), with the support of two NEH collaborative grants. In April 2007 he gave a paper on visual aspects of tourism at the conference of the Association for Social Anthropology in London. Last January he edited a special issue of Modern China criticizing conventional views of cultural standardization in China. This issue included his article on death rituals, which will be part of a future project, a book of his collected pieces exploring the role of performance and ritual in Chinese societies, mostly set in diverse borderlands like Taiwan and the Miao and Tibetan regions of China.

[top]