Mark Linder, Syracuse Architecture associate professor, has been named the inaugural Chancellor’s Fellow in the Humanities beginning in August. This position marks the critical place of architecture within the humanities. It will offer new avenues for programming with the Humanities Center at Syracuse University, aiming to foster discussion and interaction between multiple fields at the University and with partners in other academic and cultural institutions.
In this first year of the fellowship, Linder will collaborate with Gregg Lambert, Dean’s Professor of the Humanities and founding director of the Humanities Center, to organize a series of public events—lectures, seminars, panel discussions, interviews—featuring notable intellectual and cultural figures in the arts and humanities. A seminar will serve as a hub for this activity and the course and the collateral events will focus on a shared transdisciplinary topic. “Images” will be the topic for 2011-12.
“This is an important opportunity for Mark to address his ongoing commitment and interest in collaboration across disciplines,” says Dean Mark Robbins. “We look forward to the programming that will be developed, exemplifying the critical role of interdisciplinary studies in the future of higher education.”
Events will take place in Syracuse and at locations within the SU global network by utilizing advance videoconferencing resources. The content and conversations generated by each year’s events will be extended through a publication or exhibition.
Linder is a noted theorist and critic and co-directs the Transdisciplinary Media Studio. His book, “Nothing Less than Literal: Architecture after Minimalism” (MIT, 2004), examines the role of architecture in the emergence of minimal art in the 1960s. A new project, provisionally titled “That’s Brutal,” places the literalist strategies of minimal art in the broader historical context of post-World War II modernism, from the work of Walter Segal, John Hejduk and New Brutalism in the 1950s to the post-minimalist practices of architects and artists including Herzog & de Meuron, Peter Eisenman, Glen Seator, Bernd and Hilla Becher, James Carpenter, Neutelings Reidijk Architects and others.
Linder served as chair of Syracuse Architecture graduate programs from 2005-10 and was recently the Max Fisher visiting professor at the University of Michigan. Linder has also taught at Harvard, the University of Illinois-Chicago, Rice University, the Illinois Institute of Technology, Rhode Island School of Design and UCLA. His research focuses on transdisciplinary exchanges between art and architecture and he maintains a design practice as a principal in CLEAR.
