Lisa Parks, who teaches in the Department of Film Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, will discuss her current research project entitled, "Remote Sensing Cleopatra" at noon on Friday, November 16 in the Crowell Reading Room, 6028 Humanities and Social Sciences Building.

In this paper Parks considers archaeology as a tele-visual practice, examining the use of remote sensing and global positioning satellites in the excavation of Cleopatra's palace off the coast of Alexandria, Egypt. Rather than embrace the technologically determinist claim that satellites and computers enhance archaeologists' scientific vision, she explores their use in relation to cultural discourses that construct Cleopatra as a sexual spectacle, site of racial ambiguity, and monument of Western civilization.

Lisa Parks is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She is finishing a book entitled Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and Televisuality (Duke University Press, forthcoming 2002). Parks has also co-edited Planet TV: A Global Television Studies Reader (NYU Press, forthcoming 2002), and she has published articles in the journals Screen, Television and New Media, Social Identities, and Ecumene: A Journal of Cultural Geographies. Her next research project is called "Kinetic Screens: Epistemologies of Movement and Media."

Established in the fall of 2000, the IHC Noon Work-in-Progress Series is devoted to wide-ranging interdisciplinary projects currently pursued by scholars across the campus. It consists of informal presentations and discussion from 12 to 1 on selected afternoons. All interested faculty and students are welcome. We meet in the IHC Crowell Reading Room, 6028 Humanities and Social Sciences Building. Feel free to bring your lunch; the IHC will supply something to drink and the cookies.