Pitt and Warhol Museum Sponsor Lecture, Seminar, and Panel Discussion March 13 and 14

University of Pennsylvania Professor Wendy Steiner

Begins three-event series with lecture "Beauty is Not Shoe Anymore"

March 12, 2003

PITTSBURGH—The University of Pittsburgh and the Andy Warhol Museum will host a three-event series featuring Wendy Steiner in a lecture, "Beauty is Not Shoe Anymore," at 5:30 p.m. March 13 in the Cathedral of Learning's Room 324. The series will continue at 10 a.m. March 14 with a research seminar in Room 512 of the Cathedral, followed by a panel discussion and 1950s fashion show at 7 p.m. at the Warhol Museum, 117 Sandusky St., North Side.

There is a $3 cover charge for the Warhol event. The opening lecture and research seminar are free.

In addition to her remarks at the opening event, Steiner, the Richard L. Fisher Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and the founding director of the university's Penn Humanities Forum, will take part in the Friday evening panel discussion at the Warhol. Other participants in the discussion, "Women in the 1950s: High Heels, Tupperware, Sex, and Miss Dior," are Pitt's Lucy Fischer, director of Film Studies; Carol Stabile, director of Women's Studies; and Nancy Condee, director of Cultural Studies, who will serve as moderator.

Eons Fashions Antique and Utopia Model Agency will participate in the fashion show, and Sugar Daddy and the Big Boned Girls will perform classic '50s lounge jazz.

Steiner's recent work includes Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art and The Trouble with Beauty: An Essay in Twentieth Century Aesthetics. She also is the author of Postmodern Fictions: 1970-1990, volume eight of the Cambridge History of American Literature, and Art in an Age of Fundamentalism, Pictures of Romance: Form Against Context in Painting and Literature, The Colors of Rhetoric, and Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of Gertrude Stein.

A recipient of Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanities, and American Council of Learned Societies awards, Steiner has served on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle and as a judge for the National Book Award. Her research interests include modern literature and critical theory, relations between literature and the visual arts, and the contemporary American novel.

Preparatory readings for the Friday morning research seminar are available outside the Cultural Studies Office, Room 1301 Cathedral of Learning, and in the English Department's Crow Room, 526 Cathedral of Learning.

The Graduate Program for Cultural Studies and the Andy Warhol Museum are sponsoring the series—with support from English Professor Paul Bove, the French and Italian Department, the Department of English, and the Honors College.

For more information, contact Nancy Condee at condee@pitt.edu.

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