SPEAKERS:Doris Sommer (Harvard University), Miguel Sicart (University of Copenhagen), Louis Arthur Ruprecht, Jr. ( Georgia State University)
MODERATOR:Vassiliki Rapti, Emerson College
We are pleased to announce the publication of the edited volume Ludics: Play as Humanistic Inquiry (Palgrave/MacMillan 2021, https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9789811574344) and we would like to celebrate this contribution to the Humanities and Play Studies with an online book launch at the Ludics Seminar. This multimodal event will take the form of a series of conversations among the contributors to the volume, focused on how play informs their work. There will be a series of four seminars taking place from March until May 2021, focused on the following topics:
The Role of Play in the Humanities (March).:
The first conversation, entitled The Role of Play in the Humanities brings together four thinkers from a range of disciplines to discuss transformations in humanistic inquiry and how play might be a productive logic through which to pursue it.
Laughter and Interpretation (April): The second conversation is focused on laughter and the comic as a political and social action. We explore the role of laughter in interpreting texts from antiquity to the present. We examine laughter as a diachronic mechanism of social cohesion and disruption. Laughter makes strange, while at the same time, it is an invitation for human connection. The speakers question how laughter can be used as a critical, interpretative device, and how we might create a critical take on laughing. Distinction will be made between laughing at versus laughing with.
Translation and Transition (April): Translation is a form of play. Meaning is fluid and unstable as it transgresses one language and moves to another. The conversation will be an exploration of bilingualism, of transition, of passing from one to another, of being in play. The speakers will reflect on what it means to center play in the work of translation, how that might transform interpretation and what its political implications/challenges/solutions might be.
Play and Politics (May): When is play a political act? When does it transgress and when is it simply a playing out of prescribed tasks? The final conversation of the semester will discuss how play functions in protest and resistance, how play generates discourse in public life, and how play transforms the relationship between the designer of systems and its players.
The Role of Play in the Humanities, the first conversation brings together three thinkers from a range of disciplines to discuss transformations in humanistic inquiry and how play might be a productive logic through which to pursue it. Doris Sommer, Miguel Sicart and Louis Arthur Ruprecht, Jr. will discuss the innovative ways play informs their work in a conversation moderated by Vassiliki Rapti.
Doris Sommer, Director of the Cultural Agents Initiative at Harvard University, is Ira and Jewell Williams Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of African and African American Studies. Her academic and outreach work promotes development through arts and humanities, specifically through “Pre-Texts” in Boston Public Schools, throughout Latin America and beyond. Pre-Texts is an arts-based training program for teachers of literacy, critical thinking, and citizenship. Among her books are Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (1991) about novels that helped to consolidate new republics; Proceed with Caution when Engaged by MinorityLiterature (1999) on a rhetoric of particularism; Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education (2004); and TheWork of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities (2014). Sommer has enjoyed and is dedicated to developing good public school education. She has a B.A. from New Jersey's Douglass College for Women, and Ph.D. from Rutgers University.
Miguel Angel Sicart is an Associate Professor at the Center for Computer Games, IT University of Copenhagen. His research has focused on the ethics of digital games and game design. His more recent work explores the nature of play, with a particular interest in the ludic aspects of computational technologies. He is the author of The Ethics ofComputer Games, Beyond Choices: The Design of Ethical Gameplay, and Play Matters (The MIT Press, 2009, 2013, 2014).
Louis A. Ruprecht Jr. is the inaugural holder of the William M. Suttles Chair in Religious Studies as well as Director of the Center for Hellenic Studies. His doctoral concentration was in the area of philosophical and religious ethics, with special emphasis on classical literature and philosophy. His work covers a wide range of topics but may best be characterized as an historical study of the appropriation of Greek themes in a number of subsequent historical periods, especially the Early Modern period. He interrogates this classical legacy in areas ranging from ethics and politics, to psychology and sexuality, to drama and film. For the past ten years he has been a Research Fellow at the Vatican Library and the Vatican Secret Archives, where he has extended these research interests to the emergence of the Early Modern conception of Art, and the privileging of classical art as embodied in that preeminent institution, the Vatican Museums. His recent books include: Winckelmann and the Vatican’s First Profane Museum (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Policing the State: Democratic Reflections on Police Power Gone Awry, in Memory of KathrynJohnston (Wipf and Stock, 2013) and Classics at the Dawn of the Museum Era: The Life and Times of AntoineChrysostome Quatremere de Quincy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
How To Join
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