Students of Kate Mendeloff’s class RCHUMS 481 perform four short plays by Tennessee Williams.
EMU women’s and gender studies professor Elizabeth Currans discusses her new book.
4:10 p.m., 2239 Lane, 204 S. State. Free. 764-9537.
U-M drama students in Kate Mendeloff’s play production seminar direct and perform renowned English playwright Caryl Churchill’s acclaimed 2012 play about relationships in the digital age presented as an evolving mosaic of more than 50 fragmented and superficially unconnected scenes.
7 p.m., Keene Theatre, East Quad, 701 East University. Free. 647-4354.
Talk by New York Times columnist Bret Stephens.
4-5:30 p.m., Mendelssohn Theatre. Free. 998-7666.
Literati is proud to partner with the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies to welcome author and activist Masha Gessen and photographer Misha Friedman to Ann Arbor for a talk on their new book Never Remember: Searching for Stalin’s Gulags in Putin’s Russia. This lecture will occur at the Weiser Hall on the University of Michigan campus.
About Never Remember:
The Gulag was a monstrous network of labor camps that held and killed millions of prisoners from the 1930s to the 1950s. More than half a century after the end of Stalinist terror, the geography of the Gulag has been barely sketched and the number of its victims remains unknown. Has the Gulag been forgotten? Writer Masha Gessen and photographer Misha Friedman set out across Russia in search of the memory of the Gulag. They journey from Moscow to Sandarmokh, a forested site of mass executions during Stalin’s Great Terror; to the only Gulag camp turned into a museum, outside of the city of Perm in the Urals; and to Kolyma, where prisoners worked in deadly mines in the remote reaches of the Far East. They find that in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where Stalin is remembered as a great leader, Soviet terror has not been forgotten: it was never remembered in the first place.
Masha Gessen is a Russian-American journalist and the bestselling biographer of Vladimir Putin. Gessen’s books include The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, winner of the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction, and The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. She is the recipient of numerous other awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Carnegie Fellowship, and her work appears regularly in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, and Slate. A longtime resident of Moscow, Gessen now lives in New York City.
Misha Friedman regularly photographs for The New Yorker, Time, Der Spiegel, GQ, Le Monde, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Sports Illustrated, Amnesty International and Doctors Without Borders. His work has received numerous awards, including grants from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting. He was born in Moldova and graduated from Binghamton University and the London School of Economics. He taught himself photography while working in humanitarian medical aid. He lives in New York City.
Karen L. Cox is an award-winning historian who has written op-eds for the New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, TIME magazine, Publishers Weekly, and the Huffington Post. Her expertise on the American South has led to interviews with the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, The Daily Beast, Mic, The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, Slate (France), the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, the Houston Chronicle, and the Charlotte Observer, as well as international newspapers in Germany, Denmark, Ireland, and Japan. She has also appeared on BBC Newshour, Black Politics Today, The Mike Smerconish Show (Sirius XM), C-SPAN, Canadian Public Broadcasting, Minnesota Public Radio, Georgia Public Radio, and Charlotte Talks.
Cox is the author of three books and numerous essays and articles on the subject of southern history and culture. Her first book, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture, won the 2004 Julia Cherry Spruill Prize from the Southern Association for Women Historians for the Best Book in Southern Women’s History. Her second book, published by UNC Press in 2011, is Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture. She is also the editor of Destination Dixie: Tourism and Southern History (University Press of Florida, 2012), which won the Allen G. Noble Book Award from the Pioneer America Society for the Best Edited Book on North American material culture. She authored the blog Pop South: Reflections on the South in Popular Culture where she wrote over 100 essays about representations of the region and its people in popular media.
Her most recent book, Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South, was released in October 2017.
Cox is originally from Huntington, West Virginia, and is professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
The RC’s Center for World Performance Studies Faculty Lecture Series features Faculty Fellows and visiting scholars and practitioners in the fields of ethnography and performance. Designed to create an informal and intimate setting for intellectual exchange among students, scholars, and the community, faculty are invited to present their work in an interactive and performative fashion.
Emily Wilcox is Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese Studies at U-M.
During the latter half of the 1980s, a popular dance craze known as “piliwu” 霹雳舞 swept urban communities across China. Incorporating two new styles of U.S. urban popular dance–New York-based b-boying/b-girling or “breaking” and California-based popping and locking– piliwu was China’s first localized movement of hip-hop culture, which reflected new circuits of intercultural exchange between China and the United States during the first decade of China’s Reform Era. Analyzing the dance choreography recorded in a 1988 Chinese film, Rock Youth 摇滚青年 (dir. Tian Zhangzhuang), together with media reports and testimonials from members of China’s piliwu generation, this talk reconstructs the history of the piliwu movement, arguing for the central influence of U.S. pop culture icon Michael Jackson, the growth of China’s underground commercial dance (zou xue 走穴) economy, and the agency of dancers’ bodies in transnational movements of media culture.
RC Players is thrilled to present Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit as this semester’s full-length production.
Blithe Spirit is a farcical play that follows Charles Condomine, a novelist who invites a medium to his home in order to gather information for his latest novel. However, this quickly backfires: as a result of the encounter, Charles finds himself haunted by his mischievous first wife, Elvira. Throughout the play, Elvira does her best to undermine Charles’s relationship with his current wife Ruth, who cannot see or hear her. Hijinks ensue, and Charles must rely on the eccentric Madame Arcati to help the spirits pass on. The play looks at marriage, gender roles, and dealing with past mistakes, all with a supernatural twist.
Performances will take place in the Keene Theater, located in the basement of East Quadrangle, Friday March 16 and Saturday March 17 at 8 p.m.
Admission is pay what you can, which can mean FREE!
RC Players is thrilled to present Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit as this semester’s full-length production.
Blithe Spirit is a farcical play that follows Charles Condomine, a novelist who invites a medium to his home in order to gather information for his latest novel. However, this quickly backfires: as a result of the encounter, Charles finds himself haunted by his mischievous first wife, Elvira. Throughout the play, Elvira does her best to undermine Charles’s relationship with his current wife Ruth, who cannot see or hear her. Hijinks ensue, and Charles must rely on the eccentric Madame Arcati to help the spirits pass on. The play looks at marriage, gender roles, and dealing with past mistakes, all with a supernatural twist.
Performances will take place in the Keene Theater, located in the basement of East Quadrangle, Friday March 16 and Saturday March 17 at 8 p.m.
Admission is pay what you can, which can mean FREE!
U-M drama students in Kate Mendeloff’s play production seminar direct and perform present several short farces by contemporary playwright David Ives.
8-9 p.m., Keene Theatre, East Quad, 701 East University. Free. 647-4354.