The Developing Room’s Fourth Annual Graduate Student Colloquium on the History and Theory of Photography (Virtual Event on Zoom)

Friday, April 2, 2021, online via Zoom
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (New Brunswick, NJ)

The Developing Room, a working group at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University, announces its fourth annual graduate student colloquium, which will be held virtually through Zoom. This event is for Ph.D. students from any field of study who are working on dissertation topics in which photography—its histories and theories—plays a central role. Students selected to present will have the opportunity to share their work with their peers and an official respondent who is a leader in the field. Students may be at any stage of dissertation research, but ideally presentations will consist of a dissertation chapter or a section, along with an account of how that chapter/section fits within the larger project. The format involves a formal 25-minute presentation followed by 30 minutes of discussion, with a general discussion at the end led by the respondent. The event is free and open to the public, and the Developing Room invites a large audience in order to ensure a rich conversation and to build a constituency from which papers can be drawn in subsequent years. In the past, this event brought together an international group of researchers working across a wide range of topics related to photography.

This year’s respondent will be Drew Sawyer, an art historian and a curator who holds the title of the Phillip Leonian and Edith Rosenbaum Leonian Curator at the Brooklyn Museum. He has previously held curatorial positions at the Columbus Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Chazen Museum of Art. He received a 2020 Award for Excellence from the Association of Art Museum Curators. His recent exhibitions include John Edmonds: A Sidelong Glance (2020); Art after Stonewall, 1969-1989 (2019); Liz Johnson Artur: Dusha (2019); Garry Winogrand: Color (2019); I Too Sing America: The Harlem Renaissance at 100 (2018); Isaac Julien: Looking for Langston (2018); and Family Pictures (2018). Sawyer holds an M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in Art History and Archaeology from Columbia University.

More information about the Developing Room can be found at http://developingroom.com/.

To apply, please send the following materials to developingroomgmail.com before the end of the day on January 15, 2021, with the subject line “Fourth Annual Graduate Student Colloquium Application”:

- A presentation title with an abstract of 250 words or less
- A summary of your dissertation progress, 250 words or less
- CV
- A short bio of 150 words or less