Event | Book Launch Media / Art / Politics

Event | Book Launch Media / Art / Politics
LUCAS Modern and Contemporary Cluster (Leiden University)
Location: Hybrid – Lipsius 0.19, online
Dates: 21 March 2022, 17.15-19.00
Registration: Here

NICA presents, in collaboration with LUCAS and LUP: a book launch of the first two titles in the new series in Media / Art / Politics at Leiden University Press. We will be joined by Inge van der Ven (Tilburg University) who will pitch her book Big Books in Times of Big Data (2020) and Ali Shobeiri (Leiden University) who will reflect on his Place: Towards a Geophilosophy of Photography (2021).

The Launch will take place on Monday, 21 March 2022 from 17:15-19:00 at Lipsius 019 (Leiden University) as part of the Modern and Contemporary seminar series of the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society at Leiden university. The launch will also be streamed.

We encourage everyone who is interested in the topics of these books or the series as a whole, as well as those who feel encouraged to hand in a proposal for the series, to join us physically in Leiden or to participate online.

Inge van der Ven, Ali Shobeiri, Pepita Hesselberth and Yasco Horsman will all be present.

Program

• Introduction by Yasco Horsman and Pepita Hesselberth
• Presentation by Inge van der Ven on her new book Big Books in Times of Big Data, followed by a Q&A (30 minutes)
• Presentation by Ali Shobeiri on his new book Place: Towards a Geophilosophy of Photography, followed by a Q&A (30 minutes)

Big Books in Times of Big Data

Big Books in Times of Big Data examines recent trends of size and scale in the novel in terms of the shift from the bound book to the newer materialities of the digital. This study makes a case for the cultural agency of the big book—as a material object and a discursive phenomenon, entangled in complex ways with questions of canonicity, mediality, gender, and power.

Inge van de Ven is Assistant Professor of Online Culture in the Department of Culture Studies at Tilburg School of Humanities & Digital Sciences. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Utrecht University, where she also completed postdoctoral research on creativity in education. 

Place: Towards a Geophilosophy of Photography

By examining photography through geography and philosophy, this book makes evident that place is not the content of a definite representation. In doing so, it establishes a ‘geophilosophy of photography’, which regards place as that which resists being restricted to where it is (the photographer), to what it is (the camera), to where it goes (the photograph), to what it encloses (the photographic image), to how and when it occurs (the spectator), and to what it represents (the genre).

Ali Shobeiri is Assistant Professor of Visual Art Theories in the Departments of Art History and Media Studies at Leiden University. He is co-editor of Animation and Memory (2020).

The series: Media / Art / Politics

Both books are part of the new Leiden University Press series Media / Art / Politics, edited by Pepita Hesselberth and Yasco Horsman. The series stimulates cutting-edge research in the fields of media, arts, and politics, focusing on transformations in technology, cultural expressions, and political processes, and their intertwinement, in our everyday, increasingly media-saturated, and globalized world. 

Registration

The event is open to members of the Modern and Contemporary research cluster at LUCAS, other scholars affiliated with LUCAS, as well as MA and ResMa students at LUCAS, and anyone else with an interest. Finally, we encourage everyone who is potentially interested in publishing in our series to join us. Please register here.

This will be a hybrid event. Weblink: https://universiteitleiden.zoom.us/j/68503858062?pwd=UzJCeHpZbHJuU0FjTWdoLy91OC9vdz09