The Department of History, Philosophy and Religious Studies kicks off its 2009-10 colloquia with Fitzhugh Brundage, a leading scholar on African American history and art from the American Civil War period. Brundage will present "A Brothers' War: African American Artists Reinterpret the Civil War at the Dawn of the 21st Century," Friday, Sept. 18, at 3 p.m., in the Memorial Union, Hidatsa room.
"Against the backdrop of increasingly nuanced scholarship on the causes and impact of the war, and in the context of contemporary disappointment and frustration with lingering racial inequality, African Americans have been responsible for some of the most provocative reinterpretations of the Civil War in recent years," says Dennis Cooley, associate director of the Northern Plains Ethics Institute and associate professor of philosophy and ethics.
"For example, Kara Walker has revived the lost art of silhouettes and recycled images from 19th century Harper's illustrated magazine to invert mythic images of the war. DJ Spooky's subversive remix of D.W. Griffith's film, 'Birth of a Nation,' has transformed a familiar icon of early cinematography into a meditation on racial imagery. For Suzan-Lori Parks, the searing collective memory of Lincoln's assassination provides the grist for a post-modern ironic drama about the weight of the past on the present in 'The American Play,' " he said.
Brundage earned a bachelor's degree at the University of Chicago and his doctorate from Harvard University. He has taught at Queen's University in Ontario, the University of Florida, and at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is the William B. Umstead Professor of History and interim chair of the Department of History. He has written extensively on lynching, utopian socialism and historical memory in the American South.
All members of the university and local community are encouraged to attend. For more information, contact Cooley at 1-7038 or dennis.cooley@ndsu.edu.