We Only Come Out at Night
Presenter: Dr. Rachael L. Pasierowska
Title: Animal / Human Shapeshifters across Africa: from Were-Leopards to Were-Hyenas
This presentation looks at the importance of shapeshifters across African belief systems in respect to two principal animals: the leopard and the hyena. These two predators have long represented spiritualistic creatures with abilities to communicate and to cross the worlds of the tangible and intangible within numerous communities. Through a study of these two animals, we see the various ways in which societies have ostracized people believed to possess the abilities to shapeshift. In concluding this study, we are called to reflect on the question: “what do these two animals share that has led to them being linked to witchcraft”?
Presenter: Colleen Smith, Assistant Professor of Fine Arts
Title: TITLE: Chasing the Witch through Art History
Throughout art history, as at the stake, the witch has been bound and controlled by contemporaneous ideas concerning femininity and womanhood, historically viewed as a femme fatale men should avoid and an example of what women dare not become. Manifestations of these beliefs include such atrocities as the Salem Witch Trials and more covertly, the perception and treatment of women in power. Traversing across art history, the witch is chased through paintings such as Goya's "The Witch's Sabbath" all the way to her employment by contemporary feminist artists seeking to reckon with and reshape the misogynistic narratives that bore her.
Presenter: Thomas J. Gubbels, Professor of History
Title: Watching Movies in the Dark: The Story of the Autoscope
In the 1950s, a Missouri entrepreneur developed the unique “autoscope” system. The autoscope drive-in movie featured individual viewing screens for each car. The autoscope design did not catch on, but it experienced a renaissance in the 1970s during the controversy over efforts to revive the drive-in industry via the showing of pornographic films. Several auroscopes were built across the nation in the 1970s, including the “Mini-Art” Drive-in in Joplin, Missouri. This theatre operated in Joplin until 1985, marking the end of the autoscope era.
Presenter: Anna Perrigo, Assistant Professor of English
Title: Darkness, Wildness, and Motherhood
In Rachel Yoder’s 2021 novel Nightbitch, an unnamed, highly educated woman quits her “dream job” to care for her toddler. Finding her new work tedious, the mother begins turning into a dog at night and wandering the streets of her middle-class neighborhood, killing small animals with her bare hands and teeth. Only darkness has the power to restore the mother’s sense of self, which ultimately implies that contemporary American culture continues to have great difficulty resolving the tensions between violence and nurturing, and between the individual and the family, that are inherent to motherhood.