The "Destruction"—and "Reconquest"—of Louisville with Matt Stanley
The "Destruction"—and "Reconquest"—of Louisville: Strikes, Militias, and Blue-Gray Reunion in Gilded Age America with Matt Stanley
This lecture is part of the Taft Colloquium Interlocutor Lecture Series.
This talk explores how business and political elites in the aftermath of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 leveraged Civil War veteranhood to reassert control over workplaces, boost industrial development, and promote a range of pro-owner, anti-worker ideas. In Louisville, those direct efforts led to the reformation of the Louisville Legion, an upper crust militia and de facto anti-labor instrument, and culminated in the city's 1895 "Blue-Gray" encampment and the Legion's celebrated role in the Spanish-American War. Idealized as an institution in which elite Union and Confederate veterans clasped hands in the name of "public order," the Legion came to serve as a powerful symbol of North-South accommodation in a mercurial border region whose civic leaders had long prided themselves on being the nation's…
Audience: Undergraduate. Public. Graduate. Faculty & Staff. Cost: Free. Event Type: Colloquium Lecture.
Thursday, February 19, 2026, 3:00 PM – 4:30 PM.
Taft Research Center
47 Corry Blvd
Edwards 1, Suite 1100.
For more info visit multisite.uc.edu. Writing Collaboratively, Publishing Independently with Alexandra Dantzer, Aleksandar Kecman & Micah Weber
Writing Collaboratively, Publishing Independently
A conversation on the (a)symmetries of collaborating and publishing Glossary of Insomnia with anthropologist and co-author Alexandra Dantzer, interlocutor-turned-friend and co-author Aleksandar Kecman, and friend-turned-publisher Micah Weber. Discussing the process of the book’s creation over three years and across two continents, they will share their collaborative writing methods and discuss the broader landscape of independent publishing.
About the Speakers, Alexandra Dantzer is a Taft Postdoctoral Fellow and cultural anthropologist working with multimodal methods contributing to critical conversations in medical anthropology, temporality, and urban life.
Aleksandar Kecman is an actor based in Belgrade. Now posing as a writer. And vice versa.
Micah Weber is an artist or filmmaker based in Braddock, Pennsylvania. They co-run the publishing project, Huner Francis, a slow/small imprint with an interest in film, poetry, and sound.
Audience: Undergraduate. Public. Graduate. Faculty & Staff. Cost: Free. Event Type: Thematic Lectures.
Friday, February 20, 2026, 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM.
Elliston Poetry Room 646
Langsam Library.
For more info visit multisite.uc.edu. A Community Agreement with Eric Von Haynes & Julia Warner
A Community Agreement
A conversation between artists/designers Eric Von Haynes and Julia Warner on printmaking as craft and practice of community engagement and community building. Discussing recent projects that center mutual aid, slow media, and attentive listening, they will explore design’s role in creating minor archives and pose questions to the audience and one another about the transformative (and transformed) role artists and designers can play in the community.
About the Speakers, Eric Von Haynes is a printmaker, designer, and publisher. He founded Flatlands Press in 2007 and directs a community-focused practice that includes experimental printmaking, artist books, and mutual aid initiatives.
Julia Warner is Creative Director at Cereal Box, specializing in book design and small-edition publishing.
Audience: Undergraduate. Public. Graduate. Faculty & Staff. Cost: Free. Event Type: Thematic Lectures.
Friday, February 27, 2026, 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM.
Aronoff Center for Design & Art 5401
342 Clifton Ct.
For more info visit multisite.uc.edu. Interwoven Spaces: Time, Pattern, and Care, Day 1 with Eric Von Haynes & Julia Warner
Interwoven Spaces: Time, Pattern, and Care, Day 1
In this two-day workshop, drawing from readings such as “Three Key Elements of Mutual Aid,” participants will interpret a shared space and collaboratively build a layered artwork that embodies a collective agreement and shared purpose. Participants will use patterns, collage, text, and visual marks to create a collaborative wall reflecting Community Care and Collective Power. Each participant will produce a 10×10-inch segment that contributes to a unified grid, collectively forming a wall-scale composition. This workshop emphasizes process as much as outcome, encouraging experimentation, iteration, and collaborative response. Day One focuses on developing and refining designs, while Day Two is dedicated to printing, overprinting, and assembling the final collaborative wall display. Space is limited and separate registration is required for each day. All materials provided.
About Von Haynes & Warner, Eric Von Haynes is a printmaker, designer, and publisher. He…
Audience: Faculty & Staff. Graduate. Public. Undergraduate. Cost: Free. Event Type: Multimodal Workshops.
Friday, February 27, 2026, 2:00 PM – 4:00 PM.
DAAP Printmaking Lab
Aronoff Center for Design & Art 6335
342 Clifton Ct.
For more info visit multisite.uc.edu. Interwoven Spaces: Time, Pattern, and Care, Day 2 with Eric Von Haynes & Julia Warner
Interwoven Spaces: Time, Pattern, and Care, Day 2
In this two-day workshop, drawing from readings such as “Three Key Elements of Mutual Aid,” participants will interpret a shared space and collaboratively build a layered artwork that embodies a collective agreement and shared purpose. Participants will use patterns, collage, text, and visual marks to create a collaborative wall reflecting Community Care and Collective Power. Each participant will produce a 10×10-inch segment that contributes to a unified grid, collectively forming a wall-scale composition. This workshop emphasizes process as much as outcome, encouraging experimentation, iteration, and collaborative response. Day One focuses on developing and refining designs, while Day Two is dedicated to printing, overprinting, and assembling the final collaborative wall display. Space is limited and separate registration is required for each day. All materials provided.
About Von Haynes & Warner, Eric Von Haynes is a printmaker, designer, and publisher. He…
Audience: Faculty & Staff. Graduate. Public. Undergraduate. Cost: Free. Event Type: Multimodal Workshops.
Saturday, February 28, 2026, 10:00 AM – 1:30 PM.
Cereal Box
1645 Blue Rock St
Studio 406
Northside, OH.
For more info visit multisite.uc.edu. Writing to Images workshop with Tina Campt
Writing to Images
In her workshop, Tina Campt will engage participants in her practice of “writing to images” and the ways in which correspondence can be a generative model for research and writing on art, visual culture and much more.
About Tina Campt
Tina Campt is a black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art and lead convener of the Practicing Refusal Collective and the Sojourner Project. Her recent scholarship bridges the divide between vernacular image-making in black diasporic communities and the interventions of black contemporary artists in reshaping how we see ourselves and our societies. Her teaching reflects her ongoing interest in exploring the multiple sensory registers of images and the importance of attending to their sonic and haptic registers. She is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor of Humanities at Princeton University and holds a joint appointment between the Department of Art and Archeaology and the Lewis Center for the Arts.
Audience: Undergraduate. Public. Graduate. Faculty & Staff. Cost: Free. Event Type: Multimodal Workshops. Keynote.
Thursday, March 5, 2026, 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM.
Taft Research Center
47 Corry Blvd
Edwards 1, Suite 1100.
For more info visit multisite.uc.edu. Afterimages: Grieving in Fractured Time spring keynote lecture with Tina Campt
2026 Spring Keynote Lecture
Afterimages: Grieving in Fractured Time
Grief fundamentally fractures time. It situates us simultaneously in time and out of it. It is always deeply personal, yet it is also utterly universal. We experience it as individuals, yet it is also the great equalizer that summons us to face the limits of our mortality and the relationships that sustain us. In her talk, Tina Campt will present selections from her forthcoming book, Afterimages: Grieving in Fractured Time, which tells the story of how writing to art became a survival tactic that helped her grapple with intense experiences of personal grief during a period of pervasive social grievance. Focusing on what she describes as the exemplary psychic, temporal, and sensory structure of grief, the afterimage, her talk will explore how Black contemporary artists create artworks that speak beyond what we see and give expression to the absent presences that constitute some of the most palpable manifestations of grief and mourning.
About…
Audience: Undergraduate. Public. Graduate. Faculty & Staff. Cost: Free. Event Type: Thematic Lectures. Keynote.
Thursday, March 5, 2026, 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM.
The Mercantile Library, 11th Floor
414 Walnut St.
For more info visit multisite.uc.edu. Writing, Feeling, and the History of Flow with Sarah Mesle
Writing, Feeling, and the History of Flow
This talk puts two problems in dialogue: first, the private misery many academics experience on a given day spent hoping our writing will “flow,” and second, the public challenge of explaining why academic expertise matters now, when so many of higher education’s resources have been blocked. These two problems bridge several perceived divides: individual and social, emotional and rational, psychological and political. Such divides are so familiar we can forget they have histories. But they do. Indeed, the river city of Cincinnati— with its particular relation to the global flows of water, immigrants, industrial products, and ideas—has played a significant role in those histories. Taking Cincinnati as a case study and drawing on her recent book Reasons and Feelings: Writing for the Humanities Now, Sarah Mesle explores how personal feelings have material, trackable, and transformable connections to our communities. She further proposes that humanists’ skills— such as…
Audience: Undergraduate. Public. Graduate. Faculty & Staff. Cost: Free. Event Type: Multimodal Workshops.
Wednesday, March 11, 2026, 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM.
Valentine Overlook
Clifton Court Hall 5280.
For more info visit multisite.uc.edu. Openings, Audience, and the Everyday: A Writing Workshop with Sarah Mesle
Openings, Audience, and the Everyday: A Writing Workshop
This workshop invites participants to share and learn strategies for one of writing’s ongoing challenges: starting. It will take up the joint problems of first finding the time (and motivation, and conviction) to start writing, and then, once we’ve done so, styling the words on the page so they’ll reach the audiences we care about. This workshop will draw on Sarah Mesle’s experiences as a writer, editor, and professor of writing to give practical advice for writers and teachers. Participants are invited to bring a notebook, a calendar, a laptop if they’d like, and a digital version of an opening paragraph(s)—no more than 250 words— of a piece of writing they’re working on, or that they admire, for our collective discussion.
About Sarah Mesle
Sarah Mesle is a professor, writer, and editor based in Los Angeles, California. She is faculty at USC, the former Senior Humanities Editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books, and founding co-editor of the LARB…
Audience: Undergraduate. Public. Graduate. Faculty & Staff. Cost: Free. Event Type: Multimodal Workshops.
Wednesday, March 11, 2026, 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM.
Taft Research Center
Edwards 1, Suite 1100
47 Corry Blvd.
For more info visit multisite.uc.edu.