To think about repair means to consider not just present conditions, but past circumstances of things and systems that we recognize as broken, or perhaps as having never functioned at all. Repair also encompasses future aspirations—the prospect of remediation, refurbishing, restoration. Devices and objects, of course, are often in need of repair, as are bodies, psyches, systems, environments, institutions, ideologies, cultures, histories… the list goes on.
The Humanities Research Center invites you to join our series of conversations around the theme of repair. The goal is to build multi-layered conversations about how various scholars and practitioners in the humanities and the arts mobilize the idea of repair, both through its embracing and contesting.
We will activate the theme of repair along two axes: (1) by organizing a two-year-long program featuring dialogic panels, workshops, and public lectures; and (2) by sponsoring or co-sponsoring interdisciplinary events and other collaborative programming.
The Humanities Research Center welcomes the Rice and Houston communities to join us for a keynote lecture on the HRC’s 2023-25 theme of Repair, featuring the award-winning nonfiction writer, poet, and scholar Maggie Nelson.
Date: Friday, September 20, 2024
Time: 4 PM
Location: Kyle Morrow Room (Fondren Library, 3rd floor)
Reception to follow
Link to register: https://events.rice.edu/event/hrc-maggie-nelson
MAGGIE NELSON is the author of several acclaimed books of poetry and prose, including Like Love: Essays and Conversations (2024), the national bestseller On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (2021), the National Book Critics Circle Award winner and international bestseller The Argonauts (2015), The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (2011), Bluets (2009; named by Bookforum as one of the top 10 best books of the past 20 years), The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial (2007), and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (2007), Something Bright, Then Holes (2007), and Jane: A Murder (2005; finalist, the PEN/ Martha Albrand Art of the Memoir). She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA grant, an Innovative Literature Fellowship from Creative Capital, an Arts Writers Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation, and a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship. Since 2017 she has been a professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
Header Image: Darning Sampler, Dutch, 1797. Used to demonstrate and practice mending skills, darning samplers display a wide array of weaves, patterns, and colors.