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When I decided to participate in the Faulconer Gallery's summer seminar for faculty, I had
no idea that this would be an opportunity to bring together my interests in memory,
personal history, literature, and art. If there is any one thing that I will take away
from this experience, it's that interdisciplinarity is really at its best in a collaborative context.
And so in collaborating with my colleagues, I developed the curiosity cabinet "Remembered."
And in this cabinet the focus is to take these exhibits of African American literature and
history to reframe this often-somber period in light of its triumphant possibilities.
So in my neo-slave narrative seminar, where students will come here and they will deliver
unpublished slave narratives, the goal is to really reframe the African American tradition
from the brutal blues experience into a redemptive gospel one.
The basic idea of this cabinet was to get people to think about how artists use images
of animals to evoke emotions in ourselves, and it really is connected to an idea that
Darwin first described as a problem in understanding animal behavior in that we tend to cast
our own emotions onto them. And that was important because he was interested in showing that
there were real continuities, real influences that the genealogy of organisms
had on our behavior. So I'm using this in my class this semester as my students study
the evolution of animal behavior, the processes by which that occurs, and in fact do their
own studies, their own investigations of the origins and causes of animal behavior.