This spring, The Center for Theory will host a colloquium series around the theme “Creativity in Academia.” Our lead-off presenter will be Dr. Amy Tigner, Professor of English, on Monday, February 5 at Noon in University Hall 418. Her presentation will be titled “The Creative Practice: Academics and Artists.” As a noted artist herself, Dr. Tigner has a wealth of experience to share about how being an artist informs being a scholar, and vice versa. (please note that the flyer is a reflection of my own lack of visual artistic creativity).
Abstract:
Dr. Amy Tigner will discuss how to cultivate the creative practice that informs our lives as academics and, for those of us who have “other selves,” our lives as artists. She reflects on how her own scholarly writing has aided her life as a fine-art painter. Academic and artistic pursuits have a great deal in common, as both require research and practice, and she considers ways to parlay one skill set to enable the other. Perhaps the most obvious, but also the most essential, elements of the academic and creative practices are time and time management; thus, this talk examines various techniques to open windows of time for creativity and how to be the most efficient in the use of time, especially considering the brain’s ultradian rhythms. Research is the backbone of good scholarship, but the same could be said of creative works, as we must understand the historical and current conversations in these fields to forge something new. Finally, Dr. Tigner demonstrates how structure and composition in scholarship parallels that of art; being able to construct a composition in one can help us understand how to develop composition in the other.