Detroit 101: Art & Image

DETROIT 101 Lecture Series
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Friday, February 26
12p–1:30p

Art & Image

Judith Hamera, Princeton University

John Patrick Leary, Wayne State University

Judith Hamera is Professor of Dance at the Lewis Center for the Arts.  Her books examine dance in Los Angeles, American travel writing, and the American home aquarium, as well as the intersections of performance studies, cultural studies, and rhetoric.  She is currently completing a book about Michael Jackson and Detroit as figures of the deindustrial, which is under contract to Oxford University Press.

John Patrick Leary is Assistant Professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit, where he teaches 19th to 20th-century transnational American literature. His research focuses on the representation of modern cultural geographies like the city, nation, and hemisphere. He is the author of A Cultural History of Underdevelopment: Latin America in the U.S. Imagination, forthcoming from University of Virginia Press (2016). He is also the author of Keywords for the Age of Austerity, an online primer for the vocabulary of inequality.

The DETROIT 101 Lecture Series
Curated by Marc Maxey

The story of Detroit is well known: A once thriving ‘motor city’—the fourth largest in the country—now deindustrialized, underpopulated, and struggling to rebuild itself after bankruptcy. Academics are quick to speculate on solutions for the city’s rebirth, tourists visit the ruinous neighborhoods with awe, architects and artists see the city as a blank slate for imaginative proposals. Yet the real story of Detroit goes quietly untold.

The Detroit 101 lecture series at Princeton University’s School of Architecture will focus on the underlying causes that perpetuated Detroit’s decline, and use this as a lens to supplant the usual disciplinary rhetoric and explore new territories across multiple fields of study. With increased attention on Detroit and urgent calls for social justice in America, many disciplines are retelling the city’s history while others are projecting its future. We must ask ourselves: is the contemporary narrative of Detroit based on a fact or fiction?

All events will be held in Betts Auditorium located in the School of Architecture. Lunch will be provided, and all are welcome. For more information, please visit the Princeton University School of Architecture’s main page: soa.princeton.edu

Marc Maxey is a recpient of the 2015 Princeton University Dalai Lama Fellowhip for his project: A Citizen’s Guide To Real Estate Investment

Detroit 101 was made possible with generous support from the Princeton University Community:
The Lewis Center for the Arts
American Studies Department
Department of African American Studies
Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Studies
Office of the Vice President for Campus Life
Office of the Provost
Politics Department
Princeton University School of Architecture
Princeton Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities
Dalai Lama Fellows
Architecture Association of Princeton
Woodrow Wilson School
Undergraduate Student Government