Arts and Entertainment

UPenn art historian David Young Kim to speak on traveling artists

A lecture Nov. 6 will explore "The Traveling Artist and the Problem of Geography." Credit: Penn StateCreative Commons

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- David Young Kim, assistant professor, Department of the History of Art, University of Pennsylvania, will give a lecture at 6 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 6, in 112 Borland Building.

His talk, "The Traveling Artist and the Problem of Geography," is sponsored by the Committee for Early Modern Studies (CEMS). The lecture is free and open to the public. CEMS is an interdisciplinary group whose topic for this year's lecture series is "cosmopolitanism." Robin Thomas, associate professor of art history at Penn State, is the chair of CEMS. For more information about the event, contact Thomas at rlt18@psu.edu.

Founded in 1996, CEMS has maintained a strong presence through team-taught courses and on-campus events – talks, workshops, symposia, reading groups, contests and social gatherings. Above all, CEMS aims to involve faculty and graduate students in events that produce and showcase interdisciplinary early modern scholarship. Current faculty and graduate student members are drawn from the departments of Art History, English, French and Francophone Studies, German and Slavic Languages and Literatures, History, Music, Philosophy and Spanish/Italian/Portuguese; and maintain strong ties to other campus units, including Penn State’s Center for American Literary Studies, Max Kade German-American Research Institute, the Asian Studies Program and the Department of Women’s Studies.

CEMS actively supports the research of graduate students with two annual competitions. First, in partnership with Penn State's Institute for the Arts and Humanities, CEMS offers an annual Junior Scholar Award in early modern studies, which provides a semester release time from teaching, a research stipend and an office in Ihlseng Cottage. Second, CEMS also presents an annual prize for the best paper delivered at a conference, helping to support graduate student professional development.

CEMS is interested in the cultural, social and political implications of early modern trade, exploration and colonization. CEMS encourages transnational thinking about a past consisting of distinct, but also increasingly inter-connected “early modernities,” not only between Europe, Asia, the Pacific and the Americas, but within each of these regions as well. Two edited volumes have come out of the work, each also the result of a CEMS on-campus conference.

David Young Kim is an assistant professor in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. Credit: UPennAll Rights Reserved.

Last Updated January 9, 2015