A HUMANISTIC INQUIRY SYMPOSIUM /PLACE
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.
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