We invite you to join in this two-day conference, March 27-28, 2025.
Skenographia - from skēnē and graphō meaning “scenic compostion” - originally referred to the practice of painting environments on stage. What sets a scene apart from a mere place or setting? Exploring design in a scenic lens involves investigating how reality is both enacted and represented, with a particluar focus on the staging of everyday life. The conference asks: How are the production and movement of objects intentionally arranged to present the totality of places, institutions, and brands? Acorss histories, in what ways does this design facilitate the transition from indexes of self - from the humoral to the neurological, from character to personality? **Please register with this link.**
Skenographia Conference Schedule
March 27th - Bingham Hall Library, 8th Floor
4:00–5:30 PM | Graduate workshop
6:00–8:00 PM | Dinner with keynote speaker
March 28th - William L. Harkness Hall, Room 309
10:30 AM | Welcome
11:00 AM–12:30 PM | Panel 1: Staging
Chair: Kartika Puri
Discussant: Gundula Kreuzer
● Kasiet Toktomusheva (Columbia University) – Murayama Tomoyoshi: Set Design for Von Morgens bis Mitternachts
● Kelsey Chen (Stanford University) – Chinatown Spilling: Racial Things & Heterotopic Scenes in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
● Devin Jernigan (Yale University) – Freaktopia: Scenographic Mediation of the Liminal Space Between Town and the Circus
● Philipp Lojak (Yale University) – Ruling Nature by the Means of Opera: The Teatro Amazonas in Manaus
12:30 -1:30 PM | Lunch
1:30–3:00 PM | Panel 2: Furnishing
Chair: Suvij Sudershan
Discussant: Morgan Ng
● Luis Mörke (Harvard University) – Armchair Ideology: Henrike Naumann Stages the 1990s
● R. Morris Levine (Duke University) – Roland Barthes and the Queer Peripatetic
● Nicole Boyd (Yale University) – Colonna and Mitelli’s Palatial Scenographies
● Raphael Tandler (Yale University) – Title TBD
3:00–3:30 PM | Tea Break
3:30–5:00 PM | Panel 3: Animating
Chair: Nathaniel LaCelle-Peterson
Discussant: Rüdiger Campe
● Lauryn Elise Bolz (Bard Graduate Center, New York City) – Knowing Nervenkunst: Empathy, Agency, and Exoticism in Vienna 1900
● Alex Tischer (Fordham University) – Vegetal Players: Stage Lighting as Grow Lights in Come From Away
● Alicia Badea (University of Chicago) – Title TBD
Introduction: Jane Zhang
5:00–6:30 PM | Keynote Speaker
● Spyros Papapetros, Princeton University, Title TBD
