Humanistic Inquiry Online Program 2026

/ P L AC E A HUMANISTIC INQUIRY SYMPOSIUM

This topic continues the work of last year’s theme TIME as we expand to include the spacetime continuum.

We all live in space; all places have their stories. How do we come to know a place? Might we think about borders, walls, signs, memories, a mind’s associations, our emotions and our narratives? How do human bodies move through, dwell in built environments?

How do we understand and experience “lived space”?

Whatever direction this topic takes you in — architecture, landscape, the public sphere, home/shelter, community/ neighborhood, nation/planet, the poetics of space, preservation and destruction, rebuilding and repair of the past and/or for the future — space/place tell us who we are.

Cover art by Emilio Vavarella, Double Blind, 2020-2022

Friday, March 20, 2026 SOMERS ROOM, TANG

3:30 –5 P.M. Welcome Remarks Keynote Address by Jennifer Roberts — The Pastel from Mars and Other Tales from Outer Space Art History, introduced

by Ian Berry, Dayton Director of The Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery and Professor of Liberal Arts

5– 6:30 P.M. | SESSION I Lisa Jackson-Schebetta, Theater

Relational Movements/Relational Space: Fútbol and Peace-building in Colombia Violeta Lorenzo, World Languages & Literatures Arkansas as Poetic Space: Race, Memory, and Place in Guillén and Walcott Emilio Vavarella, Media & Film Studies Physical Places or Mental Spaces?

Italian Landscapes in the Age of Technical Reproducibility

Saturday, March 21, 2026

SOMERS ROOM, TANG (unless otherwise noted)

8:30 –9 A.M. Continental Breakfast 9 –10:30 A.M. | SESSION II President Marc C. Conner

Making the Past Home Present: Sacramental Memory of Place in Ellison’s Invisible Man April Bernard, English Crossroads: Poems of Places Real and Imaginary Mary Crone Odekon, Physics

Our Place in (Outer) Space Coffee Break

11 A.M.–12:30 P.M. | SESSION III Brian Lawson, Dance and Ryan Homsey, Director of Academic Advising

Partner Sequence Charlotte D’Evelyn, Music

Sounds Like Home: Listening as Placemaking in Inner Mongolia, China Natalie Taylor, Dean of the Faculty America: The Country of the Mädchen

12:30 –1:15 P.M. | Lunch | PAYNE ROOM, TANG 1:15–2:20 P.M. | SESSION IV WACHENHEIM GALLERY, TANG

Kathy Butterly: Assume Yes with Ian Berry An inside look at the mischievous, seductive and defiant ceramic sculptures of Kathy Butterly. This highly anticipated 30-year survey fills the Tang’s Wachenheim Gallery with experimental and expressive small-scale porcelain and earthenware artworks that contain a wide range of colors, textures and moods.

Performance in atrium, Lawson/Homsey

2:30 –4 P.M. | SESSION V Kaylin O’Dell, English

The Spectacle of Devotion: Navigating Sacred Space in Old English Poetry Ryan Overbey, Religious Studies & Asian Studies

Space and Place in an Early Medieval Buddhist Grimoire Philip A. Glotzbach, President Emeritus

The Hansel & Gretel Fallacy: On Responsibility and Freedom in An Age of Excuse Coffee Break

4:30 – 6 P.M. | SESSION VI Lena Retamoso Urbano, World Languages & Literatures

When Words Dream Michael Gaige, Environmental Studies/Sciences

Trees as Text: Skidmore’s Arboreal Palimpsest Adam Cottle, Metadata Librarian

Figurative Echolocation and the Technologies of Dimensional Simulation Within the Terrain of Popular Music Dennis Schebetta, Theater

Brave Spaces: Building Community in the Rehearsal Room

6–7 P.M. | ATRIUM

Closing Remarks and Champagne Reception

Artist note: Double Blind, 2020-2022. Photographic elaboration from artificial neural network. Lightjet print on Kodak metallic paper mounted on Dibond and acrylic glass, framed in black oak. 49 photos. Variable dimensions.

Double Blind is a photographic series in which I use an ANN (artificial neural network) to re-produce images extracted from the memories of former Italian immigrants, trying to bridge the gap between mental and algorithmic image production, while investigating the limits and fallibility of both human memory and technical reproducibility. Every time we think about something our brain produces a kind of mental representation. Current research describes this production of mental representations as akin to digital renderings and data elaborations, since all these processes elaborate information and dynamically produce images. Double Blind investigates the complex relationship between imaging and imagination by mirroring as much as possible, from a technical, conceptual and methodological standpoint, the way in which our mental images are produced.

– Emilio Vavarella emiliovavarella.com/doubleblind/

WE WISH TO THANK THE FOLLOWING FOR THEIR SUPPORT AND ASSISTANCE: Ian Berry Megan Bove The Office of Communications and Marketing President Marc C. Conner Ellen Grandy Katherine Gross Carrie Imbrogno-O'Dell, Chef Michael Hinrichs, & the Dining Services team Barbara Kahn Moller Media Services Elizabeth Stauderman Natalie Taylor Tom Yoshikami and Olivia Cammisa-Frost