Faculty Presenter
Jeffrey Schnapp 
Chair, Department of Comparative Literature
Carl A. Pescosolido Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of Comparative Literature
Faculty co-director of Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Affiliate of the Department of Architecture at the GSD
Title | How to Read an Unreadable Book (by Bruno Munari) 
To what extent is it possible to “read” an artist’s book, not to mention one of designer-artist-design educator Bruno Munari’s “illegible books”? Munari’s are some of the most famous artist’s book of the 20th century. They are books “about” perforations, materials, threads, folds, rips and cuts. Several were made during his stint as a visiting professor at Harvard’s Carpenter Center in 1967, among them the one for New York’s MoMA that I will unfold in my Poggioli talk.
Graduate Student Respondent
Sabrina Tarasoff | PhD Student in Comparative Literature

Graduate Student Presenter
Paul Chouchana | PhD Student in Comparative Literature
Title | On Not Being Home: The Poetics of the Everyday in Chantal Akerman’s “No Home Movie”
In the age of digital acceleration, what does it mean to create a cinematic archive of one’s mother using a cheap digital camera, a cellphone, and even a computer webcam? This is the question Chantal Akerman—ever interested in our relationship to the images that surround and invade us—asks in her final film. No Home Movie attempts to give a sense of the temporality of everyday domestic life through resistant filmic tactics—to borrow Michel de Certeau’s vocabulary. Akerman’s film continues a reflection present throughout her oeuvre on what it means to move from the home to the world, from personal story to History.
Faculty Respondent
Tom Conley | Abbot Lawrence Lowell Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies and of Romance Languages and Literatures

Event open to all | Refreshments will be served