The Institute for Comparative Literature, Art and Culture (ICSLAC) is delighted to announce the appointment of Dr. Birgit Hopfener (SSAC/ICSLAC) as the inaugural holder of the Ruth and Mark Phillips Professorship in Cultural Mediations. This exciting new position is intended to provide an ICSLAC faculty member with the opportunity to shape a doctoral seminar and year-long program of intellectual engagement around their ongoing interdisciplinary research. Dr. Hopfener, an art historian of contemporary art and theory in the global context, will be focusing her two-year tenure on critical temporalities. She invites students, faculty as well as other colleagues and friends to explore how scholarly writing, art and cultural artifacts engage with the temporal heterogeneity of our time, its socio-political, geo-political and historical conditions and the multiplicity of temporal assumptions that shape us, art and knowledges. Entitled The Temporal Diversity of our Time. Pluralizing time and unlearning the modern Western temporal regime, her graduate seminar will be offered in the fall of 2021, with more information to follow around the program of events enhancing the seminar throughout the 21-22 academic year. The Professorship in Cultural Mediations is named in honour of Professors Emeriti Ruth Phillips and Mark Phillips, two long-time ICSLAC faculty members whose lasting contributions shaped the Cultural Mediations program as a haven for innovative doctoral research that challenges traditional disciplinary boundaries. For more information…