University leaders and faculty gather to highlight the value of the arts and explore kinship in projects across campus
President Michael Schill (at the podium) and Provost Kathleen Hagerty led this year’s Domain Dinner, which featured arts faculty engaged in a wide range of creative and scholarly projects across disciplines. Photo by Bonnie Robinson
The central role of the arts was celebrated for the first time at Northwestern University’s Domain Dinner with the 2024 theme, “Hidden Kinship: The Arts in Conversation.” The event series, which originated in the Office of the Provost in 1998 under Lawrence B. Dumas, convenes faculty and leadership at Northwestern to highlight important interdisciplinary research being conducted at the University.
President Michael Schill spoke of the University’s strategic priority to enhance the creative and performing arts and amplify the power of imagination. “The arts bridge our differences and serve as another platform to explore things differently,” Schill said.
Faculty presenters included:
- Bienen School musicologist Ryan Dohoney, a historian, philosopher and vocalist, who explores musical friendships and interdisciplinary collaborations between visual artists and performers;
- Weinberg College’s Natasha Trethewey, a two-term U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner, who writes about race, history and memory and completed a poem cycle on Renaissance paintings of grotesque medical experiments on Black Ethiopians whose limbs were harvested for white European patients;
- School of Communication’s Özge Samanci, a media artist and graphic novelist who emigrated from Turkey and whose work, rooted in the natural sciences, explores the tendency of humans to perceive themselves above all ecosystems;
- Weinberg’s Michael Rakowitz, an Iraqi-American conceptual artist whose work serves as a placeholder for the decimated cultures and people displaced by war, and whose work often incorporates Iraqi dates, once a major export and staple of Iraqi cuisine.
“We are the luckiest university to have people like this here,” Provost Kathleen Hagerty said.
After the presentations, the panelists discussed the hidden kinships between their projects, identifying patterns of deconstructing and reconstructing forms; dismembering and remembering forgotten histories; and creating new paradigms to return knowledge to the public.
The evening ended on a sweet note: a dessert topped with Iraqi date syrup, sprinkled with salt from Turkey, a nod to the work of the panelists.