Cine-Seder Roundtable
Tuesday, March 23 | 7 to 9 PM | FREE
Alumni Hall (Room 112), Victoria College | University of Toronto | 91 Charles St West
A Passover Happening with Artist Melissa Shiff with special guests Professors Doris Bergen, Ritu Birla, Harriet Friedmann and Michelle Murphy.
Times Square Seder, The Medium is the Matzo and Cine-Seder Plate are all art-activist Passover Happenings created by artist and Adjunct Professor at the University of Toronto Melissa Shiff. For this event, Shiff will install her award winning video sculpture Cine-Seder Plate and invite local scholars to respond to the questions raised in her video projection. With this project, as in all of her reinvented Passover projects, Shiff asks us to think about Passover in light of contemporary problems that plague us today.
Presented together with the Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Toronto.
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ABOUT THE PRESENTERS
Melissa Shiff is a video, performance, and installation artist who specializes in utilizing Jewish myths, symbols and rituals in the service of social justice and activism as well as engaging with issues of cultural memory. Shiff received her artistic training at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and holds a degree from Tufts University and has given public lectures about her artwork at such institutions as The Jewish Museum and Brandeis University among others. Shiff is an Adjunct Professor in The Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto.
Doris Bergen (Ph.D. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1991) examines German and Central European history in the 20th century, especially the Nazi era, the Holocaust, and European women's history. Her publications include Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (North Carolina, 1996) and numerous articles on Christian antisemitism, military chaplains, and issues related to gender and ethnicity in World War II. She is a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. She has been a fellow of the Kroc Institute at University of Nore Dame since 1999 and in 2007 was named Full Professor at University of Toronto.
Ritu Berla is an Associate Professor of History at The University of Toronto. Birla received her BA (summa cum laude) at Columbia College, Columbia University, followed by a fellowship to Cambridge University, where she received a second BA and MA, before returning to Columbia for her Ph.D. Professor Birla’s research and teaching interests include modern South Asian history and colonial studies; histories of capitalism and genealogies of modernity; culture, economy, and the social imaginaries of liberal governance; postcolonial intellectual history and historiography; history, epistemology and ethics; fiction (legal and literary) and history; and critical and gendered approaches to law and society.
Harriet Friedmann is Professor of Sociology and Fellow of the Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto. Her research over thirty years has explored many aspects of food and agriculture, mainly through the historical framework of “food regimes.” These include: the structure of family farms; poly-culturalism; international political economy of food and agriculture; multi-scaled agricultural policy; changing patterns of trade and specialization; diasporic cuisines; and agronomies and food practices. Her current research is on the politics of certification and standards both globally and locally.
Michelle Murphy is associate professor of History and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. Murphy's work is at the intersections of science and technology studies, feminist studies, and environmental history. She is author of Sick Building Syndrome and the Politics of Uncertainty (Duke University Press, 2006), which won the Fleck Prize from the Society for Social Studies of Science. Her forthcoming book is titled Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Feminism, Health, and Biopolitical Topographies of Cold War America. Her current project, called Distributed Reproduction, seeks to bring histories of economics, reproduction, and chemical exposure into critical conversation.
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| Location: | Alumni Hall, Victoria College, U of T, 91 Charles St West |