E. Ann Kaplan, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies and director of the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook University, will present a lecture on Monday, Sept. 15, at 4:10 p.m. in the auditorium of the Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center at Vanderbilt University.
She will discuss "Global Trauma, Empathy, and Public Feelings: Viewing Images of Catastrophe." The lecture, sponsored by the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities 2008-2009 Fellows program on "New Directions in Trauma Studies," is free and open to the public.
The broader political and cultural contexts within which a catastrophe takes place and how it is "managed" by institutional forces, including the media, are important to the experience of trauma, says Kaplan.
Kaplan recently published Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. Kaplan explores the relationship between the impact of trauma on individuals and on entire cultures and nations, writes publisher Rutgers University Press. Arguing that humans possess a compelling need to draw meaning from personal experience and to communicate what happens to others, Kaplan examines the artistic, literary and cinematic forms that are often used to bridge the individual and collective experiences.
Kaplan has written many books and articles on topics in cultural studies, media, and women’s studies, from diverse theoretical perspectives including psychoanalysis, feminism, postmodernism and postcolonialism. Her many books include Looking For the Other: Feminism, Film and the Imperial Gaze (Routledge, 1997), Playing Dolly: Technocultural Formations, Fantasies and Fictions of Assisted Reproduction (Rutgers University Press, 1998, co-edited with Susan Squier) and Feminism and Film (Oxford University Press, 2000). Her volume, Trauma and Cinema: Cross-Cultural Explorations (co-edited with Ban Wang) appeared from Hong Kong University Press in 2004.
Media Contact: Missy Pankake, (615) 322-NEWS
missy.pankake@vanderbilt.edu