Faculty Colloquium - "The Ideal Home: A Theater of Good Taste"
Tuesday, October 9, 2018 12:30 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4Bard College Berlin Cafeteria, Waldstr. 70, Berlin - Pankow
Guest talk by Dina Ramadan (Bard College)
Have you even wondered what your choice of wallpaper or home decoration reveals about your moral standing? In her talk, Ramadan will consider this and other questions raised by Kawkab Yusuf in “al-Bayt al-Mithali” [The Ideal Home], her regular column in the Egyptian monthly art journal Sawt el-Fannan [The Artist’s Voice, 1950-2]. Concerned with the question of aesthetics within the domestic realm, “al-Bayt al-Mithali”—written by a woman and addressed (implicitly) to female readers—highlights the lead role played by elite Egyptian women in the development of “sound taste,” and specifically artistic taste, in the early decades of the twentieth century, as well as the perceived relationship between aesthetic taste and moral sensibilities.
Dina A. Ramadan is Assistant Professor of Arabic at Bard College. She received her PhD from the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary cultural production in Egypt, especially the visual arts and is currently completing a manuscript entitled An Education of Taste: Art, Aesthetics, and Subject Formation in Colonial Egypt. She is a senior editor of Arab Studies Journal and a founding member of the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA). She is visiting professor at BCB in fall 2018 and an affiliated EUME fellow at the Berlin-based Forum Transregionale Studien.
Date & time: Tuesday, October 9, 2018, from 12:30pm
Venue: Bard College Berlin Cafeteria
Waldstr. 70, Berlin - Pankow
Email: [email protected]