2024-2025
The Nature of Representation
Hosted by the Department of English
“There is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that does not in some way partake of language, for it is in the nature of each one to communicate its mental contents.”
— Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” (1916)
The Nature of Representation asks how our understandings of “nature” have been shaped by representational practices in both the aesthetic and political senses, exploring how the current climate catastrophe is inextricable from colonialism and anthropocentric worldviews. The festival features contemporary writers, artists, and thinkers who don’t take for granted that language is merely human, that there are other “natural” languages, and that attuning to those other languages allows us to tell stories that disrupt the violence of Man.
2023-2024
Reimagining Community In Cinema
The University of Richmond 2023-2024 Tucker Boatwright Festival of Literature and Arts is hosted by the Film Studies interdisciplinary program. “Reimagining Community in Cinema” explores the diverse ways in which community is historically imagined and reimagined in documentary and fiction film from the silent era to the digital age. Through events such as symposia, masterclasses, film screenings and conversations with filmmakers, the festival honors in particular the contributions of historically marginalized communities.
2022-2023
Nuestra América | Our America
The festival will offer poetry readings, lectures, panel discussions, and residencies by artists and scholars whose works implicitly or explicitly address the Latino past of the United States, along with its present and future.
El festival ofrecerá lecturas de poesía, conferencias, paneles de discusión y residencias de artistas y académicos cuyas obras abordan implícita o explícitamente el pasado latino de los Estados Unidos, junto con su presente y futuro.
2019-2020
Dancing Histories: This Ground
The University of Richmond’s 2019-2020 Tucker-Boatwright Festival of Literature and the Arts was hosted by the Department of Theatre & Dance, in collaboration with the Modlin Center for the Arts. This festival’s events will focus on the theme “Dancing Histories: This Ground.” The festival presented performances, lectures, panel discussions, and residencies by artists whose works reflect a unique engagement with contemporary politics and the interplay between history and memory.
2018-2019
Beyond Exoticism
Beyond Exoticism, presented by the Department of Music, investigated expression across difference and recognizes the ethical ambiguity and aesthetic complexity this entails. Musical performances, public panels, film screenings, and a cross-disciplinary academic conference will highlight the dynamic and cosmopolitan histories of the many global cultures with which Western orientalists were once enamored, while also expanding its geographic scope beyond those cultures to examine the ways that contemporary artists maintain, resist, reject, and critique the impulse to exoticize others, or lend cultural legitimacy to themselves.
2017-2018
The Personal is Political / The Political is Personal
The 2017-2018 Tucker-Boatwright Festival of Literature and the Arts, presented by the Department of Theatre and Dance, offered performances, lectures, artist residencies, master classes, and films that encourage us to examine the ways in which the personal and the political are inextricably intertwined. The festival presented theatre artists and scholars whose work explores notions of identity, citizenship, and the challenges of personal and collective action.
2016-2017
Change is Possible & Necessary: New Perspectives on Wim Wenders as Filmmaker & Visual Critic
Wim Wenders came to international prominence as one of the pioneers of the New German Cinema in the 1970’s and is considered to be one of the most important figures in contemporary German film. In addition to his many prize-winning feature films, his work as a scriptwriter, director, producer, photographer and author also encompasses an abundance of innovative documentary films, international photo exhibitions and numerous monographs, film books, and prose collections.
Critical acclaim and regular reviews in the mainstream and specialized presses have not translated into a heightened presence of Wenders’ contributions to cinema in the fields of film studies and German studies, or in more interdisciplinary conversations about visual culture. This conference aims at filling that gap and at bringing new intellectual energy to the scholarship on Wenders’ body of work. Scholars will gather from around the world to discuss all things Wenders and take stock of his major contributions to the visual arts.
2015-2016
Writers Series
The University of Richmond’s 2015–2016 Tucker-Boatwright Festival of Literature and the Arts was hosted by the Department of English in spring 2016. This festival’s events focused on the relationship between the “popular” and the “literary,” showcasing the growing number of novelists and short-story writers today who work in popular genres, adapting their element to create new kinds of literary fiction.
Through lectures and readings by writers from the United States and Britain, the series will explore the manner in which science fiction, fantasy, horror, romance, mystery, thriller, erotica, and the graphic novel (among others) have become staples of contemporary English-language fiction.
2014-2015
The University of Richmond’s 2014-2015 Tucker-Boatwright Festival for Literature and the Arts was hosted by the Department of Art and Art History, in collaboration with University Museums. The programs, exhibitions, and projects created around this year’s festival engaged the campus and local community in examining how landscape and land use have been defined historically, and how we respond to the opportunities, challenges, and tensions inherent in the topics today.
Throughout the fall and spring semesters, there were exhibitions, student research projects, lectures, performances, poetry readings, video and movie screenings, artist residencies, and more. The series also fostered opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration with such campus partners as Bonner Center for Civic Engagement; the Modlin Center for the Arts; Geography and the Environment; Theatre and Dance; University Facilities; and the Office of the Chaplaincy.