Franke Lectures in the Humanities

This lecture will design a roadmap for theorizing “minor passions” as they relate to our everyday involvement with media. The lecture will consider viewers’ insignificant, ordinary feelings of discomfort that often stay below the radar, such as boredom, weariness, disorientation, irritation, disengagement, and failure.

Contrary to the shared interpretation of discomfort as counterproductive or even harmful, these affects might, in fact, be useful, since they enable viewers to take a temporary break from the demands of the world and to adjust to our current “structure of feelings,” which is marked by the diffuse threat of uncertainty: the perpetual belief that a crisis is bound to occur. The circulation of precariousness, frustrated expectations, stimulus overload and digital fatigue will be linked with the global feelings of anxiety, as social, political, ecological, and health crises prevail. The lecture will explore how such “minor passions” circulate and sometimes “stick” across bodies, technologies, and media texts.

Marta Boni is Full Professor in the Department of Art History, Cinema and Audiovisual Media at the Université de Montréal (Canada). Her research examines television in the era of digital platforms from a pragmatic and cultural perspective. She has edited World Building: Transmedia, Fans, Industries (2017) and Formes et plateformes de la télévision à l’ère du numérique (2020), as well as a monograph on uncertainty in contemporary serial narratives, Perdre pied. Le principe d’incertitude dans les séries (2023).

Due to the winter storm, this event has been rescheduled to Thursday, February 26.

Building on the current book project Imagining Russian Hackers: Myths of Men and Machines, this lecture aims to theorize and historicize the relationship of the (former) West’s Russian hacker imaginations to screen technologies, the history of media and war, and fiction power. Not only do screens screen the former West from its favorite enemy, but imagining Russian hackers reveals an underlying tangle of the military-industrial-academic-entertainment complex in which viewers remain victims—but not of Russian hackers.

Lunch will be served.

Marijeta Bozovic is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University, with secondary appointments in Film and Media Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is the author of Nabokov’s Canon: From Onegin to Ada (2016) and Avant-Garde Post– : Radical Poetics After the Soviet Union (2023); and co-editor of the volumes Watersheds: Poetics and Politics of the Danube River and Nabokov Upside Down. She is currently working on a co-authored book with Benjamin Peters entitled Imagining Russian Hackers: Myths of Men and Machines (under contract with Chicago).

Benjamin Peters is the Hazel Rogers Associate Professor and Chair of Media Studies at the University of Tulsa, where he also teaches in Cyber, Honors, and Russian. He is also an affiliated fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School.

In 1919 the newly elected Social Democratic city council of Vienna initiated a radical program of municipal reforms designed to reshape the social and economic structure of the Austrian capital along socialist lines. The cornerstone of this program was a network of health and welfare services that were distributed throughout the city to provide “cradle-to-grave” care, counseling, and instruction in all aspects of public health and welfare. It involved the construction of 400 buildings in which housing and social institutions were distributed throughout the city. Red Vienna was a project to change society by changing the city; a project that saw architecture as playing a major role in that effort. Through a close reading of the architecture, the lecture will explore the interrelation of politics and built form, and the complex processes whereby the connection between social program and urban architectural form was forged in Red Vienna.

Eve Blau is the Director of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University where she is a professor of the history and theory of urban form at the Graduate School of Design, and Co-Director of the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative. A principal concern of her research is the complex dynamics of urban transformation in the context of rapidly changing sociopolitical, environmental, and technological conditions. A major focus is on cities and urban regions in the post-socialist world. Her books include The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919–1934; Baku: Oil and Urbanism; Project Zagreb: Transition as Condition, Strategy, Practice; Shaping the Great City: Modern Architecture in Central Europe; Architecture and Its Image.

Poster

Germany’s Bauhaus (1919–1933) is remembered for its minimalist modern design and globally influential art pedagogy. However, during its early years, in the wake of the First World War, the Bauhaus was also a hotbed of esoteric theories on spirituality and well-being that were central to the art and design produced there. The central figure in this Bauhaus reform movement was Johannes Itten, the influential founder of the Bauhaus’s preliminary course, the mandatory introduction required for all students. Itten centered his teaching on the ideas of Mazdaznan, a new religion that held the body as the key site for spiritual self-improvement and that dominated Bauhaus philosophy, art, and even diet. This talk explores how ideas of illness, health, and race played out in Bauhaus architecture and design of these turbulent, early years.

Elizabeth Otto is Director of the Humanities Institute and Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. She is the author of Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics (MIT Press, 2019) and Tempo, Tempo! The Bauhaus Photomontages of Marianne Brandt (Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 2005), and the coauthor of Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective (Bloomsbury, 2019). Her curatorial work includes the summer 2024 blockbuster exhibition “Bauhaus and National Socialism,” held in the German city of Weimar. She is currently working on a book on Bauhaus members’ work in National Socialist Germany.

Poster

Civil conversation—the thoughtful, exploratory engagement of heart and mind, collective attention to issues of collective urgency—has taken a terrible hit in recent years, in the United States and throughout the world. Put simply, we don’t seem to be very good at talking to one another anymore or at listening to those whose experience, hopes, and fears are different than our own. Where can we turn? Many, of all races and walks of life, have turned to lyric poetry, with a resultant burgeoning, in Anglophone poetry alone, of diverse voices, perspectives, and forms. Lyric poetry has long been identified as the genre of personal expression, and that is surely one of its strengths, but as poetry written to be read by others, it has always occupied a complicated terrain that is at once public and private. Its subjects are not always easily consoling, but its premise, the written-to-be-read part, is by nature a hopeful one.

Linda Gregerson is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently of Canopy (Ecco/HarperCollins 2022). She is also the author of The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic; Negative Capability: Contemporary American Poetry; and numerous essays on early modern English and contemporary American poetry. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Gregerson directs the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. She divides her time between Ann Arbor, Michigan, and London.