Clark Art Hosts Talk By Richard Taws

08:59AM / Tuesday, February 17, 2026Print Story | Email Story

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — On Saturday, Feb. 21 at 2 pm, the Clark Art Institute's Research and Academic Program presents a lecture by Richard Taws, professor and head of the History of Art Department at University College London, in conjunction with the Shadow Visionaries: French Artists Against the Current, 1840–70 exhibition.

The talk takes place in the Manton Research Center auditorium.

Taws examines how representations of infrastructure, nature, and technology shaped the cultural imaginaries of nineteenth-century urban modernity, and how they intersected with contemporary ideas about time and history in France. Focusing on artists featured in Shadow Visionaries, including Charles Meryon, Victor Hugo, and Nadar, the talk explores tensions between organic life and mechanical form, visibility and invisibility, and tradition and transformation, in Paris and further afield.

Richard Taws specializes in European visual cultures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He taught previously at McGill University, Canada, and has been a Getty Postdoctoral Fellow, a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a Visiting Fellow at the Bard Graduate Center, New York. In 2012, he was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize; in 2018, a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship; and in 2022, a Leverhulme Research Fellowship.

Free. Accessible seats available; for information, call 413 458 0524.

Tags: Clark Art,

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Discrimination Against Muslim Americans Persists 25 Years After 9/11

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
07:00AM / Saturday, September 12, 2026

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Dozens of Muslim Americans were among people killed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Untold numbers of Muslim Americans have suffered countless acts of discrimination in their aftermath.

"Of course, you'll find several accounts of Muslims from all over the U.S. describing how they went from the unknown kids in the school to being stereotyped or ridiculed for their Muslim names," Sidra Mahmood recalled recently. "However, many Americans forget that the victims of 9/11 were also Muslim Americans.

"I can't forget the time when a classmate broke down in sobs when 9/11 came up in our classroom at the Islamic seminary I went to in Texas, because her father's best friend who was like an uncle to her, died on 9/11."

Today, Mahmood is a chaplain at Williams College. In 2001, she was growing up in Karachi, Pakistan, when terrorists forced two passenger jets into the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan and another plane into the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C. A third plane, which terrorists hoped to crash into a D.C. landmark, was brought down in western Pennsylvania after passengers and crew fought back against the hijackers.

The attacks, which ultimately claimed 2,976 lives, horrified people around the world, including in Mahmood's native land.

"I remember being aghast like anyone who witnessed the fall of the Twin Towers in real time," she said. "However, even as a child, fear gripped me about the possibility of war, especially once we learned that Afghanistan, right adjacent to Pakistan, would be attacked by the U.S. My mother had told me about the 1971 war between India and Pakistan when she remembered hiding in the dark after bomb sirens would go off in Punjab after intentional blackouts.

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