McGill Department of Art History & Communication Studies, 853 Rue Sherbrooke Ouest, Arts Building, Montreal, QC (2026)

Follow us for news and events, including our speaker series, which is open to the public!

03/25/2025

The Department of Art History and Communication Studies mourns the death of our cherished colleague, Dr. Jonathan Sterne (1970-2025), James McGill Professor of Culture and Technology. Guggenheim Fellow, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Professor Sterne joined the Department in 2004, following a previous appointment at the University of Pittsburgh and having earned a Ph.D. in 1999 from the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His impact on the Department was transformative and sustaining.
As a field-defining scholar in media and cultural studies, sound studies, and disability studies, Professor Sterne published multiple award-winning books, including Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment (Duke 2021), MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke 2012), The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke 2003) and edited the definitive volume, The Sound Studies Reader (Routledge 2012). He was also an award-winning teacher and graduate advisor, a generous and formative mentor to countless students, collaborators, activists and peers, a gifted public communicator, and a conscientious contributor to collegial governance. When he was not thinking, writing and teaching about sound, he was making it, as a formidable and accomplished musician.
Beloved son, spouse, brother, uncle, friend, teacher, mentor and colleague, Jonathan Sterne passed away peacefully on March 20, 2025, after a long encounter with cancer, his loving spouse Professor Carrie Rentschler at his side. The Department of Art History and Communication Studies extends its condolences to his family and loved ones everywhere. Details concerning celebrations of his life and legacy are forthcoming.
May he rest in peace.

10/10/2023

Coming up in Library workshops ⬇️
💻 AI Tools for Research
✏️ APA Citation Style -- The Basics and Beyond
📄 Introduction to Git and GitHub
🔓Predatory Publishing, , and ORCID
➕ more
Register: https://mcgill.ca/x/Ufu

10/05/2023

📣🗓️ Mark your calendars: We have another speaker series event for you this October!

The Department of Art History and Communication Studies presents:

Prof. Juliet Bellow (American University)
“Faunesque: Auguste Rodin, Vaslav Nijinsky, and Public Sexuality in Paris, ca. 1912”
October 19, 4:30-5:30 pm
Arts W-215

On the evening of May 29, 1912, Vaslav Nijinsky, the star dancer for the Ballets Russes troupe, made his choreographic debut to a packed house at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. Set in archaic Greece, L’Après-midi d’un faune concerned a young faun’s lustful and ultimately fruitless pursuit of two alluring nymphs, which culminated in an onanistic s*x act. The morning after, the newspaper Le Matin published a front-page article by “the great sculptor Rodin” that praised the ballet’s contribution to a modern aesthetic and compared its beauty with that of ancient Greek statuary. In the following days, Nijinsky and Rodin were swept up in a scandal stirred by critics who denounced both artists for their perceived offenses against public morality. The affaire Nijinsky is one of the most famous scandals in the history of modern art, yet there has been surprisingly little reflection on its causes and effects. This talk will consider why Rodin and Nijinsky publicly tied themselves to one another, and what their decision to do so tells us about the connections between dance, sculpture, bodies, and s*x circa 1912. It will situate the scandal in the hyper-partisan atmosphere of the early French Third Republic and discuss its links to Parisian music-hall culture, where the limits of tolerance for displays of s*xuality were regularly tested. The talk will also relate this episode to Rodin’s successful campaign to convert his studio in the Hôtel Biron into the Musée Rodin. It will show how Nijinsky helped Rodin to revolutionize the art of sculpture and to present himself as an embodiment of the Republic’s secular values.

Find out more at: https://www.mcgill.ca/ahcs/channels/event/juliet-bellow-faunesque-auguste-rodin-vaslav-nijinsky-and-public-s*xuality-paris-ca-1912-351426

10/03/2023

📢 Join us for our first AHCS Speaker Series event this semester:

Dr. Kath Albury: "Digital s*xual health - from literacies to capabilities"
October 16, 4-6 p.m. (EST)
Leacock 429 & on Zoom

This is a hybrid event. Please register here to receive a Zoom link: https://tinyurl.com/nhbeecw6

The event is presented in partnership with IGSF, McGill, the Feminist and Accessible Publishing/ Communications Technologies Series, and Concordia's Digital Intimacy, Gender, and Sexuality Lab (DIGS)

09/28/2023

Dr. Kath Albury will speak about digital s*xual health- from literacies to capabilities. This will be followed by a Q and A. (hybrid event)

Address

853 Rue Sherbrooke Ouest, Arts Building
Montreal, QC
H3A0G5

Website

http://www.mcgill.ca/ahcs

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when McGill Department of Art History & Communication Studies posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The University

Send a message to McGill Department of Art History & Communication Studies:

McGill Department of Art History & Communication Studies