25 Latest Articles Current Articles | Archives | Search

Roundtable on sustainable efforts taking place April 1

Monday, March 23, 2009

As a tie-in to April's pending Earth Week activities and in support of Fredonia's ongoing sustainability efforts, the next College of Arts and Humanities Brown Bag Lecture Series event will be an interdisciplinary roundtable on conservation and environmental issues. During this informal presentation, faculty members will explore connections between their scholarly and creative projects, personal lives and commitments to strengthening the sustainability efforts on campus and in our community. The discussion will take place on Wednesday, April 1, from 12:00 to 12:50 p.m. in S-104 of the Williams Center.

In “Greening a Toxic Art Studio: Theory and Practice in Printmaking,” Timothy Frerichs, associate professor of Visual Arts and New Media, will discuss the personal and professional processes of switching to more environmental and healthy “green” studio practices. During his talk, Professor Frerichs will also share images of recent artwork produced using sustainable methods.

Tracy Marafiote, assistant professor of Communication, will explore the tensions that arise in corporate “green” partnerships in her presentation, “Meeting the (Sustainable) In-laws: The (Unholy?) Union of Business & Environmental Organizations.” Dr. Marafiote will focus specifically on debates within environmental communities about the practicality and ethicality of environmental groups allying with corporate America.

Concluding the panel, Christina Jarvis, associate professor of English and American Studies, will share the origins of a new scholarly project on conservation in her talk, “My Grandmother’s Curtains: Discovering a Usable Past for a Sustainable Future.” Dr. Jarvis will examine selected post-World War II cultural artifacts and the importance of rethinking American consumption practices during that era.

Jeremy Linden, the Head of Archives and Special Collections at Reed Library, will introduce and moderate the event. Professor Linden brings to this role his current research interests in preservation-environment monitoring in archives and museum studies, as well as his experience managing archival resources relevant to the environmental history of our region.

 
The four participants biographies include:
  • Timothy Frerichs is an associate professor of art in the Department of Visual Arts and New Media. He received a Bachelor of Arts from St. Olaf College, MN, and a Master of Arts and Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa, Iowa. Professor Frerichs has received a number of awards including a 2007 Senior Fulbright Lecture Award through which he taught drawing and printmaking (non-toxic) courses at the Universität Osnabück, Germany. This was Professor Frerichs’ second Fulbright to Germany; he had previously received an award for the year following his MFA in 1991. Professor Frerichs also received a Salton-Stall Foundation Grant for Printmaking in 2007. He has also spent time doing research in Uppsala, Sweden, first through an American-Scandinavian Fellowship, and later as a Visiting Artist with the Universität Uppsala Botanical Gardens. Professor Frerichs’ drawings, prints and multimedia work have been widely exhibited internationally and nationally. His artwork is included in international and national public and private collections.
  • Tracy Marafiote is an assistant professor of communication studies in the Department of Communication. Dr. Marafiote earned her Ph.D. at the University of Utah with a focus on critical inter/cultural studies and environmental communication. Motivated to bridge her environmental activism and academic work, Dr. Marafiote pursues scholarly interests that lie broadly with the discursive/cultural constructions of identity and difference (particularly as related to race/ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality) and the natural world. Reflecting these areas of culture and communication, much of her current research explores the contributions and influences of historical discourses, cultural formations, and social constructions of identities on the passage of a historic piece of political/environmental legislation: namely, the Wilderness Act of 1964. Her future research goals include examining the intersections of gender, race, class, and nature with sustainability and social/environmental justice.
  • Christina Jarvis is the director of American studies and an associate professor in the English Department, where she teaches courses in 20th-century American literature and culture, gender studies, and sustainability. Professor Jarvis earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Penn State University, and she also holds a B.A. in History and English from Rutgers University. She is the author of The Male Body at War: American Masculinity during World War II (2004), and she has published articles on gender and embodiment in journals such as Women's Studies, The Southern Quarterly, and War, Literature, and the Arts. While her past publications have focused on intersections between war and gender, she is currently working to translate new research on sustainability and American consumer culture into a book project and various forms of public engagement. This year she is the campus Earth Week coordinator and chair of the academics sustainability subcommittee.
  • Jeremy Linden is the Head of Archives and Special Collections at Reed Library.  He holds an M.A. in History and an M.L.S. with a concentration in Archives from the University of Maryland, College Park, and he worked as an archives and museum consultant before joining the Fredonia faculty in May 2006.   Among the many holdings that Mr. Linden manages at SUNY Fredonia are resources concerning the environmental history of the region, including the Records of the West Valley Coalition on Nuclear Wastes.  His current research interests include preservation-environment monitoring in archives and museum repositories and the connection between document preservation, preservation environment management, and sustainability in archives settings.
 The Brown Bag Lecture series, sponsored by the College of Arts and Humanities, offers informal talks on the first Wednesday of each academic month, October through May, featuring new creative and scholarly work by members of the SUNY Fredonia faculty. Each talk and/or presentation is followed by a brief discussion. Refreshments will be served, and all members of the campus and community are welcome to attend these free events.

For more information on the lecture series, please contact Natalie Gerber, series director, at (716) 673-3855 or at natalie.gerber@fredonia.edu.

Comment By SUNY Fredonia News Services - Read more...