WGS: Color & Chora: (a reconsideration)

Description

Please join the Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality (WGS) for a talk by Jennifer Stager, assistant professor in the history of art at Johns Hopkins University. Stager will be presenting a paper titled "Color & Chora: (a reconsideration)," and a Q&A will follow.

Jennifer Stager's research focuses on the art and architecture of the ancient Mediterranean and its long reception history. Her first book, Seeing Ancient Mediterranean Color, examines color as phenomenon in Mediterranean art, considering it in material, cultural, and theoretical dimensions. This involves the analysis of dyes, pigments, stones, and metals; attention to ancient theories of vision and perception; and a focus on medium specific instantiations of color and composition, such as mosaic. Two essays related to this research have been published, "The Materiality of Color in Ancient Mediterranean Art" (in Essays in Global Color History, Gorgias 2016 ) and "The Unbearable Whiteness of Whiteness" (Art Practical, 2018). Related to this project, she has launched the Antioch Recovery Project, "an international collaboration that uses digital tools to analyze mosaics from the ancient city of Antioch." She has also begun work on a second book project, Deliverance from Pain: Feminisms and Hippocratic Medicine, which examines the representations of early Western medicine in relationship to traditional depictions of healing gods, and to those areas of healing often excluded from medical history: "portable arts, body-part dedications, curses, and spells."

As a curator, Stager has worked on projects like "The Archaeology of Disability" and "Picasso & Rivera: Conversations Across Time." She has published widely in forums like Art Practical, ASAP/J, Open Space, and Eidolon. Another book project, Public Feminism in Times of Crisis (co-authored with Leila Easa) is under contract with Lexington Books. Stager has held fellowships from the National Institute of Humanities, the Getty Research Institute, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, and The Berkeley Fellowship. She is currently a fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C.