Rescheduled to November 21 Thursday, 4:30pm | Oakley Center
Nathan Timpano, Chair and Associate Professor of Art History, Department of Art & Art History, University of Miami in conversation with Christophe Koné, Associate Professor of German at Williams College
In recent years, Hollywood has confirmed the societal interest in “creepy” dolls that seemingly come-to-life or gain sentience to outwit (or destroy) their human counterparts. The M3GAN (2022, 2025), Annabelle (2014, 2017, 2019), and Child’s Play (1988–2019) film franchises all testify to this continuous fascination with unsettling humanoids – a trend that actually began in turn-of-the-century Germany. Timpano’s research – and the topic of his current book project titled (Un)Canny Dolls: Toying with Germanic Modern Art – takes this observation as its very catalyst. Rather than perpetuate a false narrative of a doll’s uncanniness, he proposes that it was precisely a doll’s canniness, or false sense of familiarity as a harmless toy, that allowed visual artists to so effectively use this object as a metaphor for the manipulated female body/subject in the modern era. As such, he argues that dolls, as gendered toys, were used by fin-de-siècle German artists as doppelgängers for the prepubescent female body in order to question notions of sex, gender, and subjectivity in the fluxes of art and society that defined German modernism.
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