Close Up
Meaningful connections
Read navigates humanities from Buffalo to Latin America
Justin Read is one of the organizers of “Fluid Culture,” the intriguing arts and lecture series presented this academic year by the Humanities Institute. Photo: DOUGLAS LEVERE
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“I don’t have a job card that tells me this is my field. I really want to go where my mind takes me and establish connections.”
“It’s difficult to define what Buffalo is, but it’s a place where it’s wide open,” offering opportunities for collaboration at both the city and university level, says Justin Read.
Read, associate professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures in the College of Arts and Sciences for the past decade, says that kind of flexibility “allows a kind of interdisciplinary work that is freed from traditional and institutional boundaries. It’s a place that allows you to experiment and establish dialogues that wouldn’t be possible at other institutions.”
Since last fall, Read and department colleague Colleen Culleton, assistant professor, have staged one of the area’s most intriguing arts and lecture series. “Fluid Culture,” under the auspices of the Humanities Institute, has been an interdisciplinary voyage of water, globalization and culture, bringing acclaimed environmental scholars to Buffalo for lectures and featuring the work of local artists along area waterways.
The series was spawned by the pair’s interest in ecology and how spaces are created by social and cultural factors. “We really wanted to connect the university with the rest of the community,” Read explains. “We have more fresh water in Buffalo than pretty much anywhere else in the world, but it feels sometimes as if the city is disconnected from the rest of the waterways. So we wanted to set up conditions in which people can form meaningful connections to the water.”
According to Read, making connections is a prime purpose of the humanities in studying the relationships of people, places and things. He says the ambitions of Fluid Culture were great and the logistics of organization were daunting. But in the end, he feels that the series—which concludes in May—strengthened the connection between UB and the surrounding area’s arts scene.
“I think more people in the community now know what the Humanities Institute is and the research that is done at UB,” observes Read. “The series will be over, but we’re putting together a book collecting essays and photos of the art projects. I think that will get the word out in the profession. When they [humanities professionals outside UB] see what kind of art is being done in this region and its place on the landscape, hopefully it will create a different picture of Buffalo.”
Read also is completing his second book under a Humanities Institute fellowship. “Alternative Functions: The Spatial Poetics of Latin American Modernization” looks at the transformation of such places as Mexico City, Rio, Sao Paulo and Brasilia from predominantly rural to urban and industrial within the space of a generation after the turn of the 20th century.
“It was a rapid rise of very large and crowded cities, a completely new mechanized economy and all sorts of political and demographic changes,” he says. “I’m looking at how that transformation of space occurred. On the one hand, you have architects and urban planners who are designing new spaces with visions of either a utopian future or making some kind of message about how people move through that space, but there were also a lot of poets who were projecting new kinds of space for this new world around them. There’s a kind of interface between the poetry and the architects and urban planners.”
Read’s research for the book has taken the better part of his decade here. He refers to the conducive environment at UB that allows one to juxtapose research ideas and make new connections.
“I don’t have a job card that tells me this is my field. I really want to go where my mind takes me and establish connections,” he explains. “My research over the past decade has taken off into architecture and urban planning as much as it has been literature. Even though it may seem like my work is diffuse because I’m doing a lot of different projects, it’s really about thinking about cities in panoramic fashion, and that’s been made possible because I’m here at UB.”
Read teaches primarily in Spanish at the undergraduate and graduate levels, communicating to students of varied socioeconomic backgrounds and grasps of the language.
“Part of the Spanish major is that you continue learning the language as you go through, so that adds a layer of complexity to it,” he says. “I’m teaching a 300-level class right now that I think most students walked into not knowing that they could read a 250-page contemporary novel in Spanish. They come out knowing that they can do it, write a paper about it and do a presentation in front of the class. When you see that, it’s very rewarding because you can see their growth.”
Raised in a bilingual household in Southern California, Read was exposed to the arts at an early age. He embraces his adopted home in Buffalo. “It’s a big city, but it’s also a small town. I like how once you get to know people in Buffalo, there’s a sense of community here. And the arts scene in Buffalo is incredible. For a city of this size to have the artists that it does is simply amazing.”
He is quick to negate the perception of Buffalo as a poster child for post-industrial collapse. “Over the past decade, I’ve seen Buffalo, for all its problems, is still moving ahead. I see a lot of promise in what’s going on here and I see a lot of promise at this university. There’s a lot of new blood here over the past few years and there’s a lot of potential in the humanities for Buffalo to keep on growing and attain an impressive stature nationally.”
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