Join us in reading closely and discussing rigorously the recent scholarship in theory across various disciplines. We aim to chart and better understand the trajectories of theorizing and thinking theory in and for our time.

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A powerful contribution of the humanities to the study of the environment is the ability to identify emotions that accompany their experience, in the case of both blue and green environments. Relatedly, the blue or oceanic humanities has at least some strains evoke marine environment through highly metaphorical and creative language and practices.

Cohen's paper inquires into correlating the imagination and emotions elicited by an environment with its physical reality attending to the case of how people felt about the Monterey shore in the 1930s. During this period, we have ample literary and cultural documentation about the area, in the writings of John Steinbeck as well as in popular newspapers, among other sources. We also have important scientific description by intertidal ecologists such as Ed Ricketts and Willis Hewatt. What can we learn from coordinating the two types of documentation about people’s relation to the shore? When are fantasies and emotions in sync with physical reality and if they are not, what can that disconnect reveal?

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Co-sponsored by the Visual Studies Research Institute and the Caltech Program in Visual Culture.

RSVP to vsri@usc.edu.

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The 1936 Berlin Olympic Games remain one of the most infamous sporting events of the twentieth century. Held three years into Hitler’s regime, they are often portrayed in scholarship and popular culture as a confrontation of ideologies as much as a clash of athletes—a test of the purported peacefulness and internationalism of the modern Olympic project in the shadow of the violence and discrimination of the Nazi worldview. Although many scholars have explored the 1936 Olympics as a mass propaganda event, few have considered the publicity surrounding developing visualization technologies as key to the capture, dissemination and reception of the Games as a “historic” media event. Where cameras are considered in scholarship, analysis largely centers on the filming of Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938) films, which were released two years after the Olympics had ended. In focusing on the public discussions and depictions of media technologies covering the 1936 Games, such as photo finish cameras, long focus lenses and early television, this talk will elucidate how such camera developments were integral to the German people’s reception of the athletic events as history-in-the-making. Centering the camera’s role in constructing the 1936 Olympics as a seminal event in sports—and world—history will nuance understandings of how image dissemination and reproduction technologies engendered mass sporting spectacle as we know it today.

Jessica Hanson is a PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Southern California, where she specializes in the history of photography. Her dissertation, “Sports, Illustrated: The Making of the Global Image in Sports Photography, 1900-1974,” examines sports photography and f ilm in the twentieth century as extensions of the art historical tradition of capturing the body in motion. Jessica’s research has been supported by the USC Visual Studies Research Institute, the Central European History Society, the French Embassy to the United States and the Josephine de Karman Fellowship Trust. She is a proud recipient of the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate.

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Some of the many photographs Dr. Jefferson has unearthed from these places she will discuss in her presentation are visual evidence which communicate knowledge and understanding of the varied relationships associated with them. As leisure was gaining centrality as part of the American Dream, Black Californians were working to make it an open, inclusive reality for all. African Americans fought for dignity, equal access and the full range of human experiences and fulfillment in exploration of California’s offerings as they contributed to the state’s development and the broader freedom rights struggle in the United States.

Dr. Alison Rose Jefferson is a publicly engaged independent historian and heritage conservation consultant. She has worked extensively to elucidate and re-center the African American experience in California history, heritage conservation efforts, civic memory, cultural tourism, and the American identity. She is the author of the award-winning book Living the California Dream: African American Leisure Sites during the Jim Crow Era (2020). She is currently the coordinator/editor and historian consultant for the “African Americans and the National Park Service, 1872–1965” study project with the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) and the National Park Service. Other Public History projects she has lead illuminating and amplifying knowledge of the African American experience, include undertakings in Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Long Beach, among other places. Learn more about Dr. Jefferson’s work at her website, alisonrosejefferson.com.

Please RSVP to vsri@usc.edu. This event is co-sponsored by the Caltech Program in Visual Culture.

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