Jane_Taylor

=Jane Taylor visits Brandeis University=

The noted South African novelist, playwright and scholar Jane Taylor visits Brandeis University on Monday, November 8 and Tuesday November 9. Events include:

1. Public lecture: **//"Past Imperative: Time and Tide in William Kentridge."//** A talk on the art of William Kentridge, with whom Dr. Taylor has collaborated, especially on his fascinating short animated film //Tide Table//, currently installed at the Rose Art Museum. Taylor will also speak to Kentridge's much-discussed production of Shostakovich's //The Nose// at the Met. (Monday, Nov 8, at 7:00 pm in the Mandel Humanities Center, G12, following a reception in the Center's atrium. )

2. A **gallery talk** in the Rose Art Museum on Tuesday, Nov 8 (12 noon-2:00 .m.) with particular reference to paintings in the //"Regarding Painting"// exhibition engaging with traumatic experience, including Natalie Frank's enigmatic work, "The Czech Bride." (Buffet lunch served in the Lee Gallery. Please RSVP for lunch to Dabney Hailey: dhailey@brandeis.edu

3. A **reading** from Taylor's remarkable 2009 novel, //The Transplant Men,// a fascinating meditation on race, memory and power in Apartheid era South Africa, anchored in the world's first heart transplant. Tuesday, November 9 at 4:40 pm in the Mandel Humanities Center atrium.

//Jane Taylor's visit to Brandeis is co-sponsored by the Mandel Humanities Center, the Rose Art Museum and the M.A. Program in Cultural Production.//


 * Background:**


 * Jane Taylo**r is a writer, scholar and curator from South Africa. For the past several decades she has been involved in cultural critique and public scholarship as well as creative writing. In 1987 she and David Bunn co-edited From South Africa (TriQuarterly Magazine; and U of Chicago Press). In 1996 she designed and curated "FAULT LINES", a series of cultural responses to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that followed the end of Apartheid in South Africa. As part of this program she wrote the playtext, Ubu and the Truth Commission, for South African artist/director William Kentridge and the Handspring Puppet Company. In 2000 she wrote the libretto for a new opera for Kentridge, The Confessions of Zeno, a work that was performed at the Lincoln Centre in New York as well as at the MCA in Chicago. She has two published novels, Of Wild Dogs (which won the prestigious Olive Schreiner Prize for new fiction in South Africa) and The Transplant Men (a work of fiction that is grounded in the first heart transplant, an event that took place in South Africa). Current scholarly projects: Taylor is currently writing a book on the artist William Kentridge, as well as a scholarly work on the history and theory of Sincerity in the early modern era in the West. Current creative writing: Taylor has been commissioned by Renaissance Scholar Stephen Greenblatt to write a version of the so-called 'missing Shakespeare play', Cardenio. Taylor has for several years been a Visiting Fellow at the University of Chicago. She has been a Visiting Fellow at Oxford and at Cambridge Universities in the UK; and has been recipient of Mellon and Rockefeller Fellowships



For more information: Mark Auslander (mausland@brandeis.edu)