FAMS Speaker Series - "Sarah Winchester and the Origins of Silicon Valley"

The second of the FAMS Speaker Series Fall 2019

Prof Homay King, History of Art and Film Studies, Bryn Mawr College

"Sarah Winchester and the Origins of Silicon Valley"

This talk is about Sarah Winchester (1840-1922), the heiress to the Winchester Repeating Arms company. Winchester moved from Connecticut to San Jose, CA after the death of her husband and spent the remainder of her life building a colossal Victorian "mystery mansion." She was a spiritualist, and her persona was shrouded in mystique. Winchester was painted by the press as an eccentric who built her mausoleum-like house out of guilt, melancholy, and superstition, in an attempt to assuage the spirits of the Native Americans slaughtered by her family’s guns. I claim that she was also a savvy real estate developer and business woman whose vast construction projects were as much about Gilded Age displays of wealth and territorial acquisition as symbolic reparation. Her many property holdings throughout the Bay Area anticipate the contemporary built environment in that region. How do our stories about Silicon Valley and the information age change if we situate her, a 19th-century woman, at the origins of tech “innovation” culture? The full-length chapter includes readings of related films and artworks: Winchester ’73 (Anthony Mann, 1950), Cowboy and “Indian” Film (Raphael Montañez-Ortiz, 1958), Winchester Trilogy (Jeremy Blake, 2002-04), Sarah Winchester, Opéra Fantôme (Bertrand Bonello, 2016), and Winchester (Michael and Peter Spierig, 2018).

Homay King is Eugenia Chase Guild Chair and Professor in the Department of History of Art and Program in Film Studies at Bryn Mawr College. She is the author of Virtual Memory: Time-based Art and the Dream of Digitality (Duke, 2015), which won the Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award of Distinction from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier (Duke, 2010), an inspiration for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s blockbuster exhibition China: Through the Looking Glass, to which she contributed a catalog essay. Her work on film, digital media, contemporary art, and theory has appeared in Afterall, Discourse, Film Criticism, Film Quarterly, October, and elsewhere. She was recently featured in a video essay for the Criterion Collection’s edition of Shanghai Express. She is a member of the Camera Obscura editorial collective.