"Finding Your Place" featuring Niall Atkinson
Event Details
Petrarch had a serious problem when he arrived in Rome for the first time. He was completely lost in a city he knew so well. Unlike our modern society, complete with the evolution of the individual, the fate of a premodern city dweller was linked to the people with whom and the structures in which they lived. If those people and structures couldn't be located, a person's identity was in serious jeopardy.
In this lecture, Niall Atkinson looks at the moment of reurbanization in Europe in a series of 14th-century urban contexts and uses the ancient wisdom, deployed by people to orient themselves in alien environments, to discuss how we can participate in the construction of modern cities and make them work better for us.
Niall Atkinson is a Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Art History and the College. Atkinson's research has focused on the urban experience of the Renaissance city, and he has recently completed a manuscript on the soundscapes of Renaissance Florence.
To learn more, watch Atkinson speak at Humanities Day 2012: Digital Humanities Forum; listen to a lecture by Atkinson at the Franke Institute for the Humanities on the urban experience in the Italian Renaissance; and read about the conference Digital Mapping and Techniques of Visualizing the Premodern Italian City.
$20/person for general admission
$10/person for recent graduates (College alumni of the past ten years and graduate alumni of the past five years)
Two complimentary registrations for members of the Alumni Leadership, Chicago, Harper, and Phoenix Societies
Includes program and refreshments
Program
6:00 PM-7:00 PM: Registration and reception
7:00 PM-8:30 PM: Presentation and discussion