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Imaginary Cities Speakers List

April 13th and 14th, 2007
Penn State University
State College, PA

Professors Charlotte Houghton and Daniel Purdy, co-directors

Ben Edwards

Ben Edwards is a painter who graduated from UCLA in 1992, who lives and works now in Washington, D.C. Working with digital images of suburban strip mall sprawl, which he then paints meticulously, Edwards's images re-arrange the all-too-familiar architecture into endless vistas. In addition to his participation in many group shows, he has had several solo exhibitions at the Van Doren Gallery in New York. In the coming year he will also have exhibits in Paris and Tokyo. His work can be found on his web site http://www.benjaminedwards.net.

About the image used on the conference poster, Edwards wrote:
"'Automatic City' is the first phase of a larger, ongoing project that I call Republic. While the works now on view in this exhibition begin to articulate the early formation of a generic city, there is much to this virtual place still to be explored. The empty squares around the central image on the main directory page (as well as on the Automatic City directory) are like zoned plots waiting to be filled in some ideal city: I have a general idea of what will grow there, but the specifics have yet to be built. In the coming months and years, these empty spaces will turn into more archives and more projects that will eventually feed into the center, into the paintings that will make Republic come alive."

Yoko Tawada

Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960 and was educated at Waseda University and the University of Hamburg. She made her debut as a writer with Missing Heels, which was awarded the Gunzo Prize for new writers in 1991. In 1993, she received the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for The Bridegroom Was a Dog (which was translated by Margaret Mitsutani and published in English in 2003). She writes in both Japanese and German, and in 1996, she won the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, a German award granted to foreign writers for their contribution to German culture. Where Europe Begins, a collection of stories translated from both languages by Yumi Selden and Susan Bernofsky, was published by New Directions in 2002.

Bettina Brandt

Bettina Brandt is assistant professor of German at Montclair State University. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and has also taught at M.I.T. and Columbia University. She has published widely on women in the avant-garde. Her current research focuses on the relation between contemporary transnational literature and surrealism.

Thomas O. Beebee

Thomas Beebee is professor of Comparative Literature and German at the Pennsylvania State University, and the editor of Comparative Literature Studies. His books include Clarissa on the Continent (1991), The Ideology of Genre (1994), and Epistolary Fiction in Europe (1999). He has written on subjects as diverse as Jesuit concepts of the Millennium, the writing of William Faulkner, and Goethe's Italiensiche Reise. He is currently at work on a book on "true imaginary places" in European and American Fiction. The title of his paper for our "Imaginary Cities" symposium is Four-Square City: The New Jerusalem as Proto-Urban Planning.

Stephen Brockmann

Stephen Brockmann is Professor of German at Carnegie Mellon University, the managing editor of The Brecht Yearbook, and serves on the Executive Committee of the German Studies Association. His most recent book, Nuremberg: The Imaginary Capital, explores the ways in which Germans from Albrecht Dürer through Richard Wagner and twentieth-century fascists have appropriated and mythologized sixteenth-century "Nuremberg" as a focus of national identity. His other publications include German Literary Culture at the Zero Hour and Literature and German Reunification.

Susan Dixon

Susan Dixon holds a BS in Architecture from Temple University, and a Ph.D. in Art History from Cornell University. She is assistant professor of Art History at the University of Tulsa. Her Between the Real and the Ideal: The Accademia degli Arcadi and its garden in eighteenth-century Rome was published by the University of Delaware Press in 2006. She has also published multiple essays on Piranesi, including "Ichnographia as Uchronia and other time warps in Piranesi's Il Campo Marzio.

John Shannon Hendrix

John Shannon Hendrix received his Ph.D. in Architecture from Cornell University. He has taught architectural history and theory at the Rhode Island School of Design, the University of Connecticut, and at Roger Williams University, as well as for several universities' programs in Rome, Italy. He is a prolific author. His recent books include Architecture and Psychoanalysis: Peter Eisenman and Jacques Lacan, Platonic Architectonics: Platonic Philosophies and the Visual Arts, and The Relation Between Architectural Forms and Philosophical Structures in the Work of Francesco Borromini in Seventeenth-Century Rome. He has also written on the return of allegory to architecture.

Alberto Perez-Gomez

Alberto Pérez-Gómez's numerous articles have been published in the Journal of Architectural Education, AA Files, Arquitecturas Bis, Section A, VIA, Architectural Design, ARQ, SKALA, A+U, Perspecta, and many other periodicals. His first book in English, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (MIT Press, 1983) won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award in 1984, a prize awarded every two years for the most significant work of scholarship in the field. In January 1987 Pérez-Gómez was appointed Saidye Rosner Bronfman Professor of the History of Architecture at McGill University, where he is currently Director of Post-Professional (Master's and Doctoral) Programs, and chairs the History and Theory of Architecture division. From March 1990 to June 1993, he was also the Founding Director of the Institut de recherche en histoire de l'architecture, a research institute which he instigated, co-sponsored by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Université de Montréal and McGill University. Students of Dr. Pérez-Gómez now teach most Canadian architecture programs, and in many North American and European Universities.

Dr. Pérez-Gómez is the author of Polyphilo or The Dark Forest Revisited (MIT Press, 1992), an erotic narrative/theory of architecture that retells the love story of the famous fifteenth century novel/treatise Hypnerotomachia Poliphili in late twentieth-century terms, a text that has become the source of numerous projects and exhibitions. He is also co-editor of a now well-established series of books entitled CHORA: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture (McGill-Queen's University Press), which collects essays exploring fundamental questions concerning the practice of architecture through its history and theories. A recent major book co-authored with Louise Pelletier, Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge, (MIT Press, 1997), traces the history and theory of modern European architectural representation, with special reference to the role of projection in architectural design.

Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh

Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh, Ph.D. (1999) in Art History, University of California Los Angeles, is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of California, Davis. She has published on the urban and architectural history of Islamic societies. Her first book, The Image of an Ottoman City Imperial Architecture and Urban Experience in Aleppo in the 16th and 17th Centuries, won the 2006 Spiro Kostof Award. This urban and architectural study of Aleppo, a center of early modern global trade, drew upon archival and narrative texts, architectural evidence, and contemporary theoretical discussions of the relation between imperial ideology, urban patterns and rituals, and architectural form. By viewing the urban and social contexts of these acts, tracing their evolution over two centuries, and examining their discussion in Ottoman and Arabic sources, her book proposed a new model for understanding the local reception and adaptation of imperial forms, institutions and norms.

Tom Conley

Tom Conley is Professor of French and Director of Graduate Studies at Harvard University. He has written several important books on maps in French literature, including The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) and The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern French Writing. Cambridge Studies in French (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). He has also translated major works by Gilles Deleuze and Michel de Certeau. Aside from his work on early modern French literature, he has written extensively on French classical cinema.