Nigel Smith is Professor of English at Princeton and currently the John P. Birkelund Fellow at the National Humanities Center. While his scholarly work has focused primarily on early modern literature, especially the seventeenth century, his approach is interdisciplinary and his interests are diverse. His extensive writings have covered Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Herbert, Milton, Hobbes, Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips, and Marvell. Some of his significant works include the Longman Annotated English Poets edition of Andrew Marvell's Poems, a TLS 'Book of the Year' for 2003; Literature and Revolution in England, 1640-1660 (Yale UP, 1994); and Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640-1660 (Oxford UP, 1989). A biography of Marvell, a study of Milton's poetry and prose, and (with Nicholas McDowell) an extensive anthology of 17th-century radical literature, are forthcoming.

Smith has been the recipient of British Academy and NEH Research Awards, and was the British Academy Chatterton Lecturer for 1998. In 2007-08 he is a Guggenheim Fellow as well as a Fellow at the National Humanities Center. While at the Center, he is working on a project comparing European literary cultures in the context of the remarkable political and scientific transformations between 1500 and 1800.

With Paul Muldoon he founded the rock band 'Rackett', featured in the New York Times Magazine and the New Yorker, and which recently completed a tour of Ireland.

Terry Smith, FAHA, CIHA, is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Pittsburgh and a 2007-08 GlaxoSmithKline Fellow at the National Humanities Center. From 1994-2001 he was Power Professor of Contemporary Art and Director of the Power Institute, Foundation for Art and Visual Culture, University of Sydney, where he is a Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Architecture. A foundation board member of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, he is currently a board member of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. In 1996 he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a Membré Titulaire of the Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art.

Smith's major research interests are world contemporary art, including its institutional and social contexts; the history and theory of contemporaneity; and the historiography of art history and art criticism. His many publications include What Is Contemporary Art? (Chicago, forthcoming); The Architecture of Aftermath (Chicago, 2006); and Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America (Chicago, 1993). While at the Center, Smith is working on a project tracing the rise of "contemporary" art from its relative rarity within the larger project of modern art to its current, seemingly natural ubiquity.

Maud Ellmann is the Donald and Marilyn Keough Professor of Irish Studies and English at Notre Dame and a 2007-08 ASC Fellow at the National Humanities Center. Educated at Cambridge, Oxford and the Université de Paris, Sorbonne, and formerly Reader in Modern Literature at King's College, University of Cambridge, Ellmann's publications include The Poetics of Impersonality: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (1987); The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing and Imprisonment (1993); and Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism (1994). Her latest book Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page (2003) was awarded the British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for 2004. She is also the editor of Oxford World's Classics edition of Bram Stoker's Dracula, and among her many articles are major essays on Joyce.

Ellmann has held a number of significant fellowships, including awards from Harvard (Mellon), Guggenheim, ACLS, British Academy, and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, as well as the National Humanities Center. While at the Center, she is working on a book titled The Nets of Modernism that brings together historical and psychoanalytic approaches to examine themes of circulation and exchange in Woolf, James, Joyce, and Freud.

Historian Judith Byfield recently joined the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University where she is an associate professor. Prior to this year she had been an associate professor of African and Caribbean history at Dartmouth College. She is the author of The Bluest Hands: A Social and Economic History of Women Indigo Dyers in Western Nigeria, 1890-1940 (Heinemann, 2002) as well as numerous articles in edited volumes and journals, exploring the complex social, political, and economic history of women in Africa. Her research has probed the interconnections and rich details of family and urban life as well as the economic power and important contributions to nationalism among her subjects. Her current project, tentatively titled "The Egba Women's Tax Revolt: Gender and Nationalist Politics in Nigeria," sheds light on the emergence of women's political organizing in post World War II Nigeria and the role this movement played in establishing Nigeria's independence.

Byfield has received numerous fellowships including this year's John Hurford Fellowship from the National Humanities Center: the Dartmouth College, Senior Faculty Fellowship (2007-08); a Fulbright Alumni Grant (2004); a National Humanities Endowment Fellowship (2003-04); and the Fulbright Senior Scholar Fellowship (2002-03). She was Chair of Women's and Gender Studies at Dartmouth (2004-07), Chair of the Association of African Studies Programs (2002-05), and a member of the program committees of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians (2008) and the African Studies Association Conference (2007). She recently completed a term on the Advisory Board of the Journal of African History (2003-07) and currently sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Women's History, and the Blacks in the Diaspora Series, Indiana University Press.

British-born poet John Wilkinson teaches in both the Creative Writing and English Literature programs at Notre Dame University, where he is poet-in-residence. His verse has been noted not only for its "startling incisiveness" and wit but its "infectious power." His first book appeared in 1974, and Wilkinson won the Chancellor's Medal for Poetry at Cambridge University that same year. In all, Wilkinson has published six major collections of verse as well as numerous critical articles on British and American poetry, recently collected as The Lyric Touch (2007). His most recent verse collections are Lake Shore Drive (2006), Contrivances (2003), and Effigies Against the Light (2001); and his 1986 collection, Proud Flesh, was re-issued in 2005 with an introduction by Drew Milne. Wilkinson has held a Frank Knox Fellowship at Harvard University, and was a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in 2003-04 at the Nathan S. Kline Institute. This year he is the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Fellow at the National Humanities Center.

On Friday, April 4th, Wilkinson will read selections from his newest book, Down to Earth (forthcoming, October, 2008 from Salt Publishing, Cambridge), as well as from poems set to appear this spring in the Chicago Review. These poems track (inter alia) the global market in energy, human labor and body-parts, and the reading may be found uncomfortable.

"Can art actually exist outside of ideology?"

"How do artists'—or writers'—ideological agendas change the environment around them?"

"What does it take to make art ideological, and how dangerous is the aestheticization of politics?"

These questions, as important now as they were at the beginning of the twentieth century, will be the focus of this one-day symposium at the National Humanities Center. We will be exploring, among other topics, radical ideologies in European modernism, the clash of aesthetic and political ideologies in revolutionary Russia, and the dismissal of ideology in most contemporary academic art history narratives.

This event is free and open to the public, but seating is limited. To reserve space, contact Martha Johnson (919) 549-0661 x 110, or mjohnson@nationalhumanitiescenter.org. Lunch will be provided to symposium attendees.

Nathaniel Quinn’s vibrant work is both visually stimulating and intricate, employing brush techniques and complex color composition to draw viewers into his expansive canvases, encouraging them to explore their fluctuating, complex spaces.

Trained at the Maryland Institute College of Art and the San Francisco Art Institute and with an MFA in Painting from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Quinn not only works as a professional artist but has taught painting and drawing at the University of North Carolina, Shaw University, and Durham Technical Community College. His work has been exhibited in group and solo shows on both coasts—in New York, Los Angeles, and in numerous galleries around the Triangle. In 2008, he will be artist in residence and stage a solo exhibition in Barcelona, Spain.

In Kabbalistic folklore, the thirty-six hidden ones have the potential to save the world—appearing when they are needed, at times of great peril, called out of their anonymity and humility by the dictates of necessity. It could be the person we least suspect, because the thirty-six, like all the sustaining notions of the world in the Kabbalah, are hidden. They may appear, they may not appear. If they do appear, they may be known, they may be unknown. In each generation, we look for them everywhere.

In this exhibit of images from photographer Todd Weinstein, we are invited to discover these redemptive figures evoked in the details and arrangement of inanimate objects, discovered at places which in the past have been associated with cruelty and unspeakable suffering: Berlin, Auschwitz, Dachau. Exhibited to acclaim in galleries around the world, "The Thirty-Six Unknown" are now appearing for the first time in the Southeast at the National Humanities Center.

These lectures and exhibits at the National Humanities Center are free and open to the public and are supported by the North Carolina GlaxoSmithKline Educational and Cultural Outreach Endowment Fund.

For more information, please contact Martha Johnson by phone (919) 549-0661, ext. 110 or e-mail mjohnson@nationalhumanitiescenter.org.

Images: Celestial Jeweled Canyon, acrylic on canvas, 60" x 60", Nathaniel Quinn; King, Mainz, Germany, color photograph, Todd Weinstein

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