Abiding River: Connecticut River Views & Stories
Janet Pritchard (Professor, Art and Art History, UConn)
with a response by Joscha Jelitzki (LCL, UConn)
Wednesday December 4, 2024, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)
The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.
Janet L. Pritchard will discuss her current creative research project in landscape photography, Abiding River: Connecticut River Views & Stories. As a landscape photographer, her reliance on research sets her work apart. As a UCHI Fellow this year, Pritchard is drafting her project as a book. Fellowship time allows her to keep more balls in the air as she mentally juggles thousands of photographs to decide which to include against what she needs to finish. The nature of this landscape is different than that of her previous project on Yellowstone National Park; thus, the river book’s structure must reflect that. Her presentation will trace work this fall as she immerses herself in the process.
Before photography, Janet L. Pritchard was an outdoor education instructor and spent her youth between the Northeast and Rocky Mountain West in the US. She describes herself as geographically bilingual. Her methodology, described as historical empathy, relies on archival materials to guide her depictions of complex landscapes as expressions of time and place, situating landscapes at the intersection of nature and culture. Pritchard was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019. She exhibits widely, and her recent project on Yellowstone National Park, titled More than Scenery: Yellowstone, an American Love Story, was published in 2022. She is a professor and graduate advisor in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of Connecticut.
Joscha Jelitzki is a scholar of German Jewish literature, and a PhD candidate in German and Judaic Studies at UConn at the Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. Before joining UCHI as the Richard Brown Dissertation Fellow, he completed his research in Vienna as the 2024 Franz Werfel Fellow. He previously studied in Berlin, Frankfurt (Oder), and Jerusalem, and worked as an assistant from 2016–2019 for the critical edition of the works of Hannah Arendt. His focus is on modern German and Austrian Jewish literature and thought, theories of sexuality and secularization. He has published articles on Martin Buber and literature, the biblical figure of Job in modern Jewish literature, and on German-Jewish gangsta-rap.
Access note
If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.
