To Conduct Strange Exercises on Barely Comparable Things

Public Talk by Edith Doron

CAS Speakers Series Presents

Thursday, February 2, 4:30 pm

CFA Room 303

What is at stake in the notion of interdisciplinarity? Does it seek a shared enterprise between fields of knowledge or methods of inquiry? Does it depend on a mastery of multiple disciplines? Or does it seek the limits of a discipline or its points of crisis? And who has the right or authority to approach these borders and fault lines of thought? Can we imagine the good, the bad, and the ugly of interdisciplinarity? By way of a reflection on time spent in and between the academic world and the museum world, I hope to explore the impetus and risk behind hybrid thinking and share current projects born of a new initiative at Carnegie Museums that seek to draw upon the intersections and interstices between the arts and sciences.

Edith Doron serves as the Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow at the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh where she leads a new initiative called, Nexus, charged with creating collaborative, transdisciplinary opportunities across its four museums. Her professional background has straddled between the museum world and academia. After graduating with a degree in Comparative Literature and Biology from SUNY Binghamton, Doron served as the Cultural Program Specialist for the Brooklyn Children's Museum, and then as the Director of Programs at the Long Island Children's Museum. Her museum work evolved from collections-based teaching and exhibition development to launching an experimental series of cultural events by forging partnerships with diverse community based organizations. Philosophical inclination to the history of ideas led me to the Centre for Modern Thought at the University of Aberdeen in the UK. While teaching in the ‘Literature in a World Context’ degree program, she completed her MLitt by Research in 2008 with a thesis entitled, Of Things and Thresholds and continued to the PhD which she received in 2013, with Education and the Idea of Emancipation. Doron's current research is in the Anthropocene. She is working with a team of curators to develop an experimental cross-museum program series called, Strange Times: Earth in the Age of the In/Human.