Colloquium to Discuss How Culture Shapes Society

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- A colloquium examining the complex relationship between culture and social practices will be held from 1:30-5 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 15, in Room 112 in the Center for the Arts on the University at Buffalo North (Amherst) Campus.

The colloquium, "Landscape, Culture and Society," is sponsored by the UB Department of History as a university sesquicentennial event. It is free of charge and open to the public.

In recent years, scholars in several fields have begun to reconceptualize the link between culture and society, says Jonathan Dewald, professor and chair of the UB Department of History. While art and literature once were seen as "reflections" of society and "products" of underlying social forces, a new group of literary critics and art historians has shown the numerous ways in which culture does, in fact, shape society, Dewald says. And, in the process, they have redrawn some of the boundaries between conventional and academic disciplines.

The colloquium will bring together three leading practitioners of this new form of cultural study. They are Norman Bryson, professor of art history at Harvard University and the country¹s leading specialist in the history of 18th-century French art who has begun a study of Japanese art and its impact on social change; Laura Meixner, associate professor of art history at Cornell University who has written on 19th-century American responses to French impressionist painting, and David Miller, associate professor of English at Allegheny College who writes on American understanding of nature.

For further information about the colloquium, call the Department of History at 645-2181.