Jump to:
Innovations: Text, Technologies and New Media in Ancient Worlds and Contemporary Cultures
How is innovation recognized and valued in ancient and contemporary cultures? What kinds of relationships are possible between technological and artistic innovation? How do researchers conceptualize? How have visual, aural, and textual representations and technologies altered conceptions of human identity and played into the construction of histories?
The Summer Institute in the Arts and Humanities provides a unique opportunity for selected undergraduates to earn full-time, academic credit through immersion in scholarly research with accomplished scholars and peers. A diverse cohort of arts and humanities faculty will introduce participants to aesthetic and critical viewpoints on a variety of iconographic and textual subjects related to the institute’s interdisciplinary theme – Innovations: Text, Technologies and New Media in Ancient Worlds and Contemporary Cultures.
Bringing together four faculty and twenty students in plenary, seminar and tutorial-style sessions, the Summer Institute enables intensive, engaging discussion and encourages mutual learning as well as independent thought. Participants will develop an original, individual project related to the theme through the exploration of source materials and research methods essential for advanced research in the arts and humanities. This final student project will be a substantial and exemplary piece of research, distinguished from routine course work and valuable for future applications to postgraduate or professional programs. The Institute will culminate in the publication of an anthology of students’ projects and a formal symposium to celebrate the unique efforts of undergraduate research in the arts and humanities.
Teaching Team
Patricia Failing
Professor and Chair of the Division of Art History
Patricia Failing is Professor and Chair of the Division of Art History. Her areas of specialty in teaching are modern and contemporary art and critical theory. She also teaches graduate courses on legal and ethical issues in the visual arts and serves on the College Art Association’s Intellectual Property Committee. She is a winner of a College of Arts and Sciences Exceptional Teaching Award. Failing is active as a free-lance writer on the visual arts and serves as a contributing editor to Art News magazine. She is author of more than 90 articles, catalog essays and exhibition reviews. She has published three books, the most recent, Howard Kottler: Face to Face (1995), a monograph on a contemporary ceramic sculptor.
Richard Karpen
Professor of Music, Director the UW Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS)
Richard Karpen is Professor of Music at the University of Washington in Seattle where he has been teaching composition and computer music since 1989. He is also Director the UW Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS). Karpen’s works are widely performed in the U.S. and internationally. He has been the recipient of many awards, grants and prizes including those from the NEA, the ASCAP Foundation, the Bourges Contest in France, and the Luigi Russolo Foundation in Italy. Fellowships and grants for work outside of the U.S. include a Fulbright to Italy, Stanford University’s Prix de Paris to work at IRCAM, and a Leverhulme Visiting Fellowship to the United Kingdom. He received his doctorate in composition from Stanford University, where he also worked at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). He is a native of New York where he studied composition with Charles Dodge, Gheorghe Costinescu, and Morton Subotnick. In addition to Karpen’s work in electronic media, for which he is primarily known, he has composed symphonic and chamber works for a wide variety of ensembles. Karpen is acknowledged as one of the leading international figures in Computer Music for both his pioneering compositions and his work in developing computer applications for music composition and sound design. Along with numerous concert and radio performances, his works have been set to dance by groups such as the Royal Danish Ballet and the Guandong Dance Company of China. Recent commissions include those from Swedish Radio, The Northwest Chamber Chorus, and the Institute International de Musique Electroacoustique de Bourges. Karpen’s compositions have been recorded on CD by Le Chant du Monde/Cultures Electroniques, Wergo, Centaur, Neuma, and DIFFUSION i MeDIA.
Scott Noegel
Associate Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
Scott Noegel is Associate Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Washington. He received his Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures from Cornell University in 1995. Dr. Noegel has served as consultant on ancient language and history for the Discovery Channel’s CD-ROM “Nile: Passage to Egypt,” the History Channel’s “History of Sex,” and for several books. He is the current President of the American Research Center of Egypt, Northwest Chapter. His publications include more than forty articles, four dozen book reviews, and several books including two on the subject of word play in ancient languages. His three most recent books include: Nocturnal Ciphers: The Allusive Language of Dreams in the Ancient Near East; A Historical Dictionary of Prophets in Islam and Judaism (co-authored with Dr. Brannon Wheeler); and a co-edited work entitled Prayer, Magic, and the Stars in the Ancient and Late Antique World (Magic in History Series; Penn State University Press). In addition, Dr. Noegel is now co-editing The Linguistic Cycle: Selected Writings of Carleton T. Hodge (CDL Press), and is writing a monograph for Routledge Press on the subject of “Magic” and the Bible. Dr. Noegel is also active in the art world. He is the creator and producer of OffLine, a nationally funded online resource for artist interviews, and has served as a Seattle Arts Commissioner. This year Dr. Noegel was awarded the City of Seattle’s Distinguished Citizen Award for his service in the arts.
Sarah Culpepper Stroup
Assistant Professor of Classics
Sarah Stroup is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Washington. She completed her undergraduate education at the University of Washington (B.A. Philosophy, B.A. Latin and Classical Studies) and received her Ph.D. in Classics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2000. Professor Stroup’s interests lie in the textual and material culture of the Roman Republic and Early Empire, the literary and social intersections of Greek and Roman spectacle, Greek and Roman Art and Archaeology (especially of the East), and Literary Theory and Criticism. She has published on the interactions of language and social economy in Aiskhylos, as well as several reviews of scholarly texts, and is currently completing a book length study of the textual materiality of the late Republic, a collection of translations, with notes and introduction, of all the ancient writings on the Catilinarian Conspiracy, and articles on Cicero, Ovid, Seneca, and Aristophanes. Professor Stroup has also excavated Hellenistic and Roman sites in Greece (Arkhaia Nemea) and Israel (Tel Dor) and plans to return to Israel in 2003 to lead the UW contingent of a newly formed UW-UC Berkeley Tel Dor Excavation partnership.