Screen Time with Your Humanities Professors: New lunchtime series features talks by UGA faculty on your favorite TV shows
The humanities faculty at UGA are piloting a new series on campus featuring accessible talks about TV shows: Screen Time with Your Humanities Professors. The series “highlights the sorts of questions and analytical modes that are characteristic of humanistic thinking, while making connections through mutual interests in pop culture. It’s an a.v.-club-slash-humanities spin on UGA’s motto, Et docere et rerum exquirere causas.”
All events take place at the Athenaeum, 287 W Broad St.
Talks are about 30 minutes long, with plenty of time for questions and discussion. Free lunch, students of all majors welcome. Sponsored by the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences and by the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts.
Cody Marrs: “Why did the ending of Games of Thrones suck?”
September 23, 2022, 12:30 pm
It is a truth almost universally acknowledged that the final season, and especially the final episode, of Game of Thrones was terrible. But why? In this talk, Professor Cody Marrs will contrast GoT (and analogues like Lost and Killing Eve) with shows that concluded successfully (like Breaking Bad and The Sopranos), to explore why certain endings are satisfying — or not.
Cody Marrs is Professor of English at UGA. He’s a specialist in American literature, and recently he has taught classes on writers such as Mark Twain and Herman Melville, as well as courses on “Literature and Philosophy” and “The Great American Novel.”
Casie LeGette: “Why is everybody bingeing Bridgerton?”
November 11, 2022, 12:30 pm
When Season 1 of Bridgerton debuted in December 2020, it became the most-watched English-language series on Netflix ever — and when Season 2 premiered in March 2022, the show broke its own record. In this talk, Professor Casie Legette will think about some reasons for the show’s huge popularity, paying particular attention to the way it made a “fan-fiction” version of Regency England available and accessible to non-white viewers.Casie LeGette is Associate Professor of English at UGA. She’s a specialist in Romantic Literature, and her courses range from Jane Austen to poetry to British literature across the Empire.
Mi-Ryong Shim: “How did Crash Landing on You glamorize North Korea?”
January 20, 2023, 12:30 pm
In the global hit South Korean drama Crash Landing on You, a South Korean heiress finds her true love after a paragliding accident drops her in North Korea. In this talk, Professor Mi-Ryong Shim explores how South Korean romantic dramas appeal to their audiences through the mode of overindulgence and how Crash Landing on You manages to stage the pleasures of visual and melodramatic excess even in the unlikeliest of settings.
Mi-Ryong Shim is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Intercultural Studies. She’s an expert on Korean literature, film, and visual culture and teaches a wide range of courses at UGA related to Korea and East Asia.
Ed Pavlić: “What’s so special about the music of Atlanta, Insecure, I May Destroy You, and Queen Sono?”
March 17, 2023, 12:30 pm
In the 1950s James Baldwin wrote that “it is only in his music that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.” Back then, Baldwin held that Black musical textures signaled a story “which no American is prepared to hear.” In film and television for the decades that followed, a wide gap yawned, at times howled, between the music and the characters. Midway in the 2010s, however, the gap between music and filmic elements narrowed. In this talk, Professor Ed Pavlić will highlight how Black characters and Black music weave together in unprecedented closeness in four recent series whose nuance and complexity rivals, and at times surpasses, that of our best contemporary writing.
Ed Pavlić is Distinguished Research Professor of English and African American Studies and affiliated faculty in Creative Writing. He teaches classes mainly in modern and contemporary African American and American poetry, fiction, film and music as well as courses in creative writing.