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The Annual Invitational Lecture of the Society for the Humanities is designed to give a Cornell audience a chance to hear one of our distinguished Cornell humanities faculty members who may frequently speak at other universities, but whom we seldom have the privilege of hearing.

This year's Society Invitational Lecture, "Sanctuary from the Storm: Making (My) Room with The Torkelsons" will be delivered by Samantha N. Sheppard (Associate Professor in the Department of Performing and Media Arts, College of Arts & Sciences). 

This talk responds to Nick Salvato's call to reconsider how houses are foundational to television studies. As a domestic medium, television can link home and identity in numerous ways. Reflecting on my teenage scrapbook, "Sam & Friends," I approach this televisual link between home and self via an autotheoretical reading of the fictional home centered in the white family sitcom The Torkelsons (NBC, 1991-1993). I argue that my teenage scrapbook, which references the series,  functions as a self-portrait of domestic spacemaking with and through television spectatorship. Through an analysis of the The Torkelesons' domestic world as well as my own, I tune into broader living practices, looking relations, and meaning-making processes for Black viewers and audiences of dominant white television. 

For more on Samantha and the foundation for this lecture, check out this article from A&S Communications. 

Samantha N. Sheppard is an associate professor of cinema and media studies in, and chair of, the Department of Performing and Media Arts, where she is also affliated with the Africana Studies and Reserch Center, the American Studies Program and the Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program. She is the author of Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen (University of California Press, 2020). She is co-editor of the anthologies From Madea to Media Mogul: Theorizing Tyler Perry (University Press of Mississippi, 2016) with TreaAndrea Russworm and Karen Bowdre and Sporting Realities: Critical Readings on the Sports Documentary (University of Nebraska Press, 2020) with Travis Vogan. More on Samantha Sheppard's research interests and work can be found via her department profile

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