The Libraries are delighted to continue their relationship with Temple Contemporary (formerly Temple Gallery) by co-sponsoring three programs this fall. These programs represent our commitments to bringing speakers, arts, and culture, in a variety of disciplines, to the Temple campus.

All programs take place at Temple Contemporary in the Tyler School of Art building, 2001 North 13th Street, and all require free registration.

• Thursday, September 20 @ 7PM at Temple Contemporary we welcome renowned linguist William Labov. 

How does Philadelphian differ from other dialects across the United States? Learn about Philadelphia’s place in American English with internationally renowned linguist William Labov.  What natural misunderstandings stem from the Philadelphia dialect and how is our accent changing in response to higher education and immigration?

Come early to test your linguistic knowledge with an interactive language display designed by Hive76 that features accents from across Philadelphia and the United States.  Also on display will be linguistically related works by Rachel Perry Welty and Sean Monahan.

William Labov is a University of Pennsylvania linguist who has been studying the Philadelphia dialect for the past 25 years.  Widely regarded as the founder of variationist sociolinguistics, his 1960s studies of African American Vernacular English remain some of the most respected linguistic research of the 20^th century.

The Changing Patterns of Philadelphia English is scheduled to address questions of how Philadelphia talks to itself that were raised by Temple Contemporary’s Advisory Council.

This event is co-sponsored through generous support of Temple University’s Departments of Spanish and Portuguese, Temple University Libraries, Anthropology, American Studies, Geography and Urban Studies, General Student Activities Fund, and Tyler School of Art.

• Thursday, October 18 @ 6PM, world renowned critic Irving Sandler comes to campus

In partnership with the Art History, and Painting Departments at Tyler School of Art, Temple Contemporary is proud to welcome back Temple alumnus and renowned art critic Irving Sandler.  Nationally regarded as one of the most influential writers of the New York art scene, Irving Sandler’s books including The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (1970), The New York School: The Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties (1978), American Art of the 1960s (1988), Art of the Postmodern Era: From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s (1996) stand as the most lucid and critical examinations of the New York art world ever written.
Sandler will be specifically addressing the radical change that took place across the United States and specifically in the art world in the early 1970s.  This shift created the distinction that is now recognized as the development from Modernism to Post-Modernism.  Sandler’s illustrated lecture will be positioning this change into an historical context of cultural and political events that continue to be relevant to the discourse of contemporary art.

Irving Sandler’s visit is part of The Department of Art History’s Distinguished Art History Alumni and Scholar Lecture Series.

This lecture is co-sponsored by Temple University Libraries, The Art History Department, The Department of Painting, Drawing, and Sculpture, Temple University General Activities Fees, Temple Contemporary.

• Tuesday, October 23 @ 7PM Saskia Sassen visits Temple Contemporary

As the oldest street and square grid in the United States, Philadelphia has long been an active participant in the “rhetorical and operational openings” enabled by city public spaces.  On a macro level of media visibility- urban streets have become global stages for enacting political change.  However, on a micro level many of these same urban thoroughfares have themselves been engineered to segregate communities leading to increased civic unrest, economic disinvestment in urban centers, and a booming car culture.  How can we reconcile the uses of urban streets to collapse these disparities of scale?

Saskia Sassen will be addressing the question of how we can best occupy “the global street” for civic, environmental, political, and economic global gain.  Sassen, Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, is one of the world’s leading authorities on the social consequences of globalization. Her meticulous and far-reaching work has encompassed immigration, new networked technologies, the dynamics of global cities, the changes within the nation-state caused by the “transnational” economy and the feminization of labor. Her work is characterized by the “unexpected and the counter-intuitive”, and she uses her research to cut through established “truths” that may not be what they seem.

The Global Street is co-organized by Temple Contemporary and Next American City.  This event is sponsored by Temple University’s Film and Media Arts Department and Temple University Libraries.

The Libraries fall programming begins on September 27 at 2:30 PM in the Paley Library Lecture Hall with a program on “Teaching Diversity,” part of the ongoing Chat in the Stacks series co-organized by the Faculty Senate Committee on the Status of Faculty of Color. Join us at 2:30 PM in Paley Library Lecture Hall. Panelists include Pamela Barnett, Tchet Dorman and Donna Marie Peters.

Dr. Barnett is the Associate Vice Provost and Director of the Teaching and Learning Center at Temple. She  recently published “Discussions across difference: addressing the affective dimensions of teaching diverse students about diversity”, (Teaching in Higher Education, 2011).

Tchet Dorman is the Director for the Center for Social Justice and Multicultural Education. He has had numerous experiences with middle school, high school and undergraduate students as a professor/instructor/teacher, administrator, counselor, and adviser. He has been the director or assistant director of several education programs designed to assist students in matriculating to and/or graduating from high school, college and graduate school while at Temple University, LeMoyneOwen College (Memphis, Tennessee), Swarthmore (PA) College, the University of Pennsylvania, Albright College, the Pennsylvania Institute of Technology, Vassar College, LaGuardia Community College, Oberlin College and Lebanon Valley College.

Donna-Marie Peters is a lecturer in the department of sociology. Dr. Peters received her Ph.D. in Sociology and an M.A. in Liberal Studies from the New School for Social Research, in New York City. She also holds an M.A. in Theater from the University of Connecticut. As a cultural sociologist, Dr. Peter’s articles and research interests include issues of aging, race, art, and culture.

Join us for our first program on the season on Thursday, September 27 at 2:30 PM as the Libraries and the Faculty Senate Committee on the Status of Faculty of Color present a talk on teaching diversity. This is one in a series of conversations that address the research interests and projects of faculty in a diverse variety of disciplines at Temple.