Block Graduate Fellow C.C. McKee will draw connections between mourning-related objects and artworks from the Victorian Era and during the AIDS crisis—the foundation of his exhibition Keep the Shadow, Ere the Substance Fade: Mourning during the AIDS Crisis. McKee will be joined in conversation with professor Alessia Ricciardi, whose work has explored mourning from the perspective of psychoanalysis, literature and film.

C.C. McKee is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History and was the 2015-2016 Block Graduate Fellow. McKee’s dissertation explores the relationship between artistic exchange, abolition, and emergent conceptions of racial subjectivity in French Atlantic world during the long nineteenth century. Affiliated with interdisciplinary programs in Critical Theory and Gender and Sexuality Studies, McKee’s research is informed by psychoanalysis and affect theory from feminist, queer, and critical race perspectives. McKee also has a vested interest in writing on and curating contemporary Caribbean art and queer visual culture.

Alessia Ricciardi is a Professor in the French and Italian Department and the Comparative Literary Studies Program. She has a BA in philosophy from the University of Pisa, a DEA (master’s degree) from Paris VII in psychoanalysis, and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Yale University. Her main interests are French and Italian contemporary literature, cinema, political philosophy, psychoanalysis, and gender studies.
Her first book, The Ends of Mourning, was published by Stanford University Press in 2003 and won the MLA’s 2004
Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literature. Her second book, After La Dolce Vita: A Cultural Prehistory of Berlusconi’s Italy, was published by Stanford in 2012 and won the MLA’s 2013
Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies.
Currently, she is completing her third book, which is titled Woman as a Form of Life: Gender Politics in Antonioni’s Films. The book revisits the films made by Antonioni in the early 1960s with Monica Vitti in light of their influence on contemporary artists such as Anne Carson and Cindy Sherman.
She has also written two chapters of her next book, which is titled Reading Pasolini with Agamben: Restoring Life to Poetry and Politics.
Her essays have appeared in PMLA, Modernism/Modernity, Modern Language Notes, diacritics, and The Romanic Review, among other publications. Her most recent articles are about works by Pasolini, Antonioni, Foucault, Deleuze, and Agamben.
At Northwestern, she has taught courses such as, “Fashion and Modernity” and “Antonioni’s Cinema,” at the undergraduate level and “Agamben in Context” and “Desire, Pleasure and their Politics” at the graduate level.
Image: Eric Avery, Emerging Infectious Diseases (detail), 1999, linoleum cut and color lithograph. Collection of the Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art. Courtesy of the artist.

This discussion is in relation to Keep the Shadow, ere the Substance Fade: Mourning During the Aids Crisis

Official Website

More events on this date

Tags: Alessia Ricciardi, Block Museum, C.C. McKee, Ere the Substance Fade Mourning during the AIDS Crisis, Evanston, Keep the Shadow, Keep The Shadow The Body and Mourning