Here’s a sampling of my invited public talks over the years. You can hear my occasional podcasts for Small Museums Canada (here) and Slow Ottawa (here). Go here for my road safety media work, including frequent radio and TV appearances.
2019
“H.W. Longfellow and E.T.A. Hoffmann in the manner of Jacques Callot.” Talk at the Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University.
2018
Speaker on the Complete Streets panel at the Building a Better City event, Westin Hotel Ottawa, June 21. Organized by The Globe & Mail, in partnership with Dream Unlimited.
Speaker on the Vulnerable Road Users panel at the Canada Bikes National Bike Summit, Ottawa, May 28-29.
Workshop leader on a Vision Zero panel at the 124th Ontario Good Roads Association annual conference, Toronto.
2017
“Advocating for True Vision Zero.” Workshop at the CycleNation UK conference in Oxford, England.
“The Book Arrives Too Late: A Fresh Look at Marshall McLuhan’s DEW Line Newsletter.” Talk at West Den Haag gallery, the Hague, NL.
“The Vision Zero Difference.” Scadding Community Centre, Toronto, ON.
Presentations and panel discussion on The Radicalism of “Vision Zero” Traffic Safety at the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) Annual Meeting, Toronto.
Presentation on Vision Zero Canada to the Centretown Citizens Community Association, Ottawa.
2016
Safe streets presentation at Ottawa City Hall for Budget Speak 2016.
Mobilizing McLuhan talk at the Marshall McLuhan’s Media Practice symposium, University of Westminster Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, London (UK).
Organizer and main presenter at the Rosamond Woolworks Community Forum, pitching a revival of the Eastern Ontario wool processing tradition at the Mississippi Valley Textile Museum, Almonte, ON.
Leader of the panel “To Tag or Not To Tag: Digitizing Personal Scrapbooks and Photo Albums” at the Rhetorics of Art, Space, and Culture (RASC/a) conference, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX.
2013
In my keynote address at the remarkable Technologies of Experience conference organized by musicologist Phil Ford and art historian Dawna Schuld (Indiana U, Bloomington) I was one of many presenters who tried to induce an experience instead of merely talking about it. It was a thing that happened.
In my talk school >> makerspace at the Dcentered II showcase in Ottawa I emphasized the need for new teaching paradigms at the high school level here in Ottawa and in Canada’s north, along the lines of Toronto’s Oasis Skateboard Factory.
2011
For the centenary of his birth I presented my extensive research into Marshall McLuhan’s archive with talks in Barcelona, Berlin and Toronto. For a video of the Berlin talk see here.
2010
“Material Wit: McLuhan as Media Practitioner.” Talk in the symposium Freeze Frame on Marshall McLuhan, St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto.
“Patrimony Foul and Fair: Addressing the Challenges of Provenance Research in Canada.” Talk at the Canadian Heritage Information Network Digital Heritage Symposium, Vancouver. A talk about my efforts to step up the National Gallery’s research and restitution efforts regarding Nazi-era art.
2008
“Between Map and View: Mongrelized Depictions in Early Modern Europe.” Burke Lecture, Indiana University, Bloomington. A talk about landscape representations that defy our post-Enlightenment categories such as map and view.
2006
Interview with Colin Low following a screening of his film Moving Pictures (NFB, 2000). National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
2005
“Callot Again and Again.” Paper at the Paper Museums conference, University of Chicago. A paper on Jacques Callot’s radically original strategies of repetition.
Debate on academic freedom with Orange County Senator Bill Morrow at California State University, San Marcos. Described in this report.
Speak no Evil: Freedom of Speech on Campus. Televised debate with David Horowitz, moderated by former Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson.
2004
Co-Chair (with Barnaby Nygren) of the session Visual Wit and Pictorial Play in Netherlandish Art, Sixteenth Century Society and Conference Annual Meeting, Toronto.
“On Finesse.” Talk at the Art and Art History Department, Wesleyan University.
“Collecting Callot and his Contemporaries.” Talk at the Milwaukee Museum of Art.
“Construing the Oeuvre in Eighteenth-Century France.” Talk at the College Art Association conference, Seattle.
2003
“Unsettling Originality: The Sterile Genius of Jacques Callot.” Department of Art History and Communications Studies, McGill University, Montreal.
2002
“‘Cunning, Skill, Artificiallnesse’: Dexterity and Deceit in Early Modern Prints.” College Art Association annual conference, Philadelphia. Joseph Leo Koerner invited me to participate in this lively session that he chaired.
2001
“Representations of Rural Life in Renaissance France.” Talk at Brown University.
1999
Moderator for the colloquium Visual Studies and its Discontents. Humanities Center, Harvard University.
“The Ironic Artist: Originality and Repetition in the Prints of Callot.” Center for Literary and Cultural Studies, Harvard University.
1998
“French Renaissance and Baroque Festival Imagery.” Talk at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in conjunction with the exhibition French Prints from the Age of the Musketeers.”
Coordinator, with Lisa Pon, and introductory speaker for the conference Printing Matters: The Materiality of Print in Early Modern Europe. Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University. This was an international symposium attended by well over a hundred people. The proceedings were later published as a double issue of the journal Word & Image.
“French Renaissance and Baroque Landscape Prints.” Lecture, NEH seminar in the Department of Romance Languages and Literature, Harvard University.
“The Technical and Historical Examination of Stella’s Liberality of Louis XIII and Richelieu.” Mellon Research Fellowship Colloquium, Harvard University Art Museums. This was a presentation based on a painting that I investigated in two successive internships, which involved restoring this painting to its original oval shape with a lot of surprises along the way.
1997
“Common Ground: Describing Ottoman Conventions of Spatial Representation.” This paper, delivered in the Testing Grounds/Contesting Space conference at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, presented findings from the most rewarding student paper that I ever wrote, on 16thC architectural renderings that look flat but are actually multidimensional. This re-visioning exercise led me to see early modern European work in new ways.
1996
“Fête Accomplie: Modernist Origins of the Classic French Garden.” Lecture, with a response by Antoine Picon. Graduate School of Design, Harvard University.
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