Graduate Student Talk: Brittany Ellis

MIT List Visual Arts Center, 20 Ames Street, Building E15, Cambridge, MA 02139

Join Brittany Ellis, a PhD candidate in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture and the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art Programs at MIT for a conversation around Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme: Only sounds that tremble through us.In this talk, Brittany Ellis will discuss her research on the early formation of a relationship between photography and archaeology, focusing on a series of photographic expeditions that took place in Egypt, Palestine, and Syria during the mid-nineteenth century. Ellis will place these images in conversation with Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme: Only sounds that tremble through us and reflect on the relationship between media and memory, presence and absence, land and history as staged in these encounters.This will be a hybrid event with a live video that can be streamed here at 5:30 PM.About the SpeakerBrittany Ellis is a current doctoral student in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture and the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art programs at MIT. Her doctoral research explores how the nascent practices of photography and archaeology came together in the mid-nineteenth century as means of representing and understanding the past. At MIT, she is co-chair of the 2023-2024 HTC Forum lecture series. Brittany received a B.A. in Anthropology from Harvard University and an M.Phil. in Visual, Material, and Museum Anthropology from the University of Oxford as a 2019 Rhodes Scholar. She has worked on archaeological excavations in Macedonia and Jordan as well as at cultural institutions including the National Gallery of Art, Pitt Rivers Museum, the American Center of Oriental Research in Jordan, and the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture.Graduate Student TalksMIT graduate students explore current exhibitions at the List Center through the lens of their own research, background, and interests. Join us for this interdisciplinary lecture series where we dive into how art and research are overlapping on MIT’s campus.