Architecture of Life Lectures | Animate Objects: Mel Chen and Julia Bryan-Wilson on Science, Art, and Language in the Architecture of Life

Mel Y. Chen is Associate Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at U.C. Berkeley and an affiliate of the Center for Race and Gender, the Science and Technology Studies Center, and the Institute for Cognitive and Behavioral Sciences.Mel’s research and teaching interests include queer and gender theory, animal studies, critical race theory and Asian American studies, disability studies, science studies, and critical linguistics.

Associate Professor Julia Bryan-Wilson teaches modern and contemporary art, with a focus on art since 1960 in the US, Europe, and Latin America. A scholar and a critic, Bryan-Wilson has written articles that have appeared in Art Bulletin, Art Journal, Artforum, Bookforum, Cabinet, Camera Austria, Camera Obscura, differences, Frieze, Grey Room, October, the Journal of Modern Craft, and Oxford Art Journal. Her article “Invisible Products” received the 2013 Art Journal Award from the College Art Association. Before coming to UC Berkeley in fall 2011, she taught at RISD and UC Irvine. She was the Terra Foundation Visiting Professor of American Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art in Spring 2014, and from fall 2014 to spring 2015 she was a Townsend Center for the Humanities Associate Professor Fellow. Bryan-Wilson studies theories of artistic labor, feminist and queer theory, performance, craft histories, photography, video, visual culture of the nuclear age, and collaborative practices. She is an affiliate of the Art Practice Department, the Arts Research Center, the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, and the Designated Emphasis in Gender, Women, and Sexuality.