Buffalo Rising Online

Sep 5th, 12:06am By Chao Li

When Riverrun and the Humanities Institute of the State University of NY at Buffalo was looking for a fresh environment to serve as a focal point of intellectual activity, the Muse Restaurant of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery seemed like the obvious choice. Starting as early as the 17th century, the salon movement combined food, wine, and relaxed intellectual conversation. The result was that people exercised their minds. What was impressive about the salon movement in France was that women, as well as men, showed off their intellectual opinions and ideas. It was a place where one can speak freely and without feeling judged.

Friday, September 5that 4 P.M. will mark the start of ‘Scholars at Muse,’ the first of eight lectures by UB Humanities Institute Research Fellows. The speakers were chosen from a large number of applicants. The Muse will turn into an intellectual salon, a place where Buffaloninans can gather together to challenge each other’s minds and a creativity. Food, wine, and scholarly conversation—a perfect mix. Riverrun and UB selected a multifaceted group of scholars that will certainly inspire. “The University [of Buffalo] and the city needs each other,” Josephine Hogan of Riverrun expressed. “and what this program hopes to do is to bring the university out to the city of Buffalo.” This program is a part of the early effort of the collaboration of Riverrun and the Humanities Institute of University at Buffalo to bring back an intellectual boom that used to be a larger part of Buffalo. Riverrun and the Humanities Institute chose a wide variety of topics (“from anthropology, to history, to dance, to film and more”) to encourage everyone to find at least one topic that they would be interested in and come out to the Muse.

The lectures would, in turn, benefit both the speakers and also their audiences. To take the scholars to an off campus setting and to put them in front of an audience with a wide range of levels of knowledge about their topic would give the speaker a variety of refreshing comments and give them other considerations. Hogan says that the ultimate goal of this series, along with some of the past series presented by Riverrun and the Humanities Institution is to “establish a poet laureate of Buffalo and to bring the International James Joyce Symposium to Buffalo.” The growth of educational opportunities in the University would also bring more students and other scholars to Buffalo.

On Friday, Associate Professor of Anthropology (PhD, UCLA), Ana Mariella Bacigalupo will be talking about “Forgetting and Willful Transformation of Memory: The Death and Rebirth of a Mapuche Shaman in Chile.” This will be a conversation about gender and sexuality within the context of the culture in Chile. This whole series will be free and open to the general public. To find out more about each speaker, head to humanitiesinstitute.buffalo.edu or riverrunbuffalo.org, where the abstract of each lecture is available.