Tuesday, September 23rd, 2025
Dr. Dustin Condren - "Imagining Eisenstein Imagining Mexico"
Eskenazi Museum of Art - Martin Commons in the 2nd floor Center for Education | 5:30 p.m.
Sergei Eisenstein, one of the most important figures in cinema history, spent much of his career working devotedly on film projects (by some counts more than thirty) that were, for various reasons, never completed. Acutely aware of his orientation toward the unfinished, a filmmaker who regularly failed to make his films, Eisenstein saw these labors in the realm of the unrealized as an intrinsic stage of the creative process: the productive meeting place of theory and practice, of the ideal and the real. This talk will examine the director’s unrealized 1930–31 Mexican film—the most notorious of these unrealized projects, and the one for which we have the most available filmed footage—in the light of his larger unrealized body of work in order both to better understand the ambiguities of the project within Eisenstein’s full creative biography and to suggest how the film may be seen as a key indicator of cinema’s capacity for and categorical dependence on the unfinished.
Dustin Condren is an Associate Professor of Russian, affiliate faculty in Film and Media Studies, and a core member of the Romanoff Center for Russian Studies at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of An Imaginary Cinema: Sergei Eisenstein and the Unrealized Film (Cornell University Press, 2024), a technical and theoretical exploration of the unfinished work of cinema, and the first in-depth analysis of Eisenstein’s unrealized body of work. He has published on Eisenstein, Russian and Soviet cinema, and Vladimir Nabokov. He is also the translator into English of two book-length theoretical works by Eisenstein—Disney (2014) and The Primal Phenomenon (2017)—as well as of Leo Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief (HarperCollins, 2012). This year he is a Fulbright Scholar and visiting researcher at Filmuniversität Babelsberg in Potsdam, Germany where he is researching a new book project on the animals of early Soviet cinema.
Friday, October 17th, 2025
Dr. De-nin Lee - "Tectonic Shifts: Earth’s History and Art History"
Eskenazi Museum of Art - Martin Commons in the 2nd floor Center for Education | 4:00 p.m.
How often do we look at an artwork and think not only of its antiquity but also of the age of our planet? Can the consideration of an artist’s biography be set meaningfully within the history of the successive stages of life on Earth? Could art history offer a means to foster affection and stewardship of our shared, planetary home? The Anthropocene thesis that human activities, due to their prevalence and range, now constitute a major factor altering Earth’s systems implies the convergence of human history with geological history, spurring new questions for art history. This lecture takes landscape paintings of Song-dynasty scholar-artist Li Gonglin as a point of departure to explore intersections of earth’s history and art history.
De-nin D. Lee is Professor of Art History and, currently, the Assistant Dean in the School of Film, Television, and Media Arts at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts. She earned her master’s and doctoral degrees in art history from Williams College and Stanford University, respectively. She is author of The Night Banquet: A Chinese Scroll through Time (2010), editor of Eco–Art History in East and Southeast Asia (2019), and co-author of The History of Art: A Global View (2022) and The History of Asian Art: A Global View (2023). Dr. Lee’s current research focuses on the intersection of Chinese landscape and environment. Her ecocritical work has been published in Verge, Journal of Song-Yuan Studies, Picture Ecology: Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective (2021), and the forthcoming Methods for Ecocritical Art History (Manchester University Press, 2026).
Friday, January 30th, 2026
Dr. Gennifer Weisenfeld - TBA
Eskenazi Museum of Art - Martin Commons in the 2nd floor Center for Education | 4:00 p.m.
Dr. Gennifer Weisenfeld is a Professor of Art and Art History from Duke University.
Please check back soon for more information on this upcoming lecture.
Friday, March 6th, 2026
Dr. Kirsten Pai Buick - TBA
Eskenazi Museum of Art - Martin Commons in the 2nd floor Center for Education | 4:00 p.m.
Dr. Kirsten Pai Buick is a Professor of Art History at the University of New Mexico.
Please check back soon for more information on this upcoming lecture.
Friday, March 27th, 2026
Dr. Sampada Aranke - TBA
Eskenazi Museum of Art - Martin Commons in the 2nd floor Center for Education | 4:00 p.m.
Dr. Sampada Aranke is Associate Professor of Art History and Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University.
Please check back soon for more information on this upcoming lecture.
The College of Arts