Continuing its efforts to bring cultural enrichment to the Sampson County area, Sampson Community College has committed to host an event next week at its Activity Center free. SCC hosts Humanities on the Road: Cities of European Art: Florence & Paris next Thursday.

The event is part of a series of events created by Carolina Public Humanities, which falls under the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s College of Arts and Sciences program. Lisa Turlington, Dean of Advancement at SCC, helped coordinate the visit. “We are thrilled to share the resources of UNC Humanities with Sampson County,” she says. “There is so much interest in history, art, culture, and travel in this community, and this is an opportunity to bring all ages and interest together to learn from UNC scholars and discuss personal experiences.”

The Dialogues seminar will focus on the influential development of new artwork and artistic institutions in two of the most important centers of European art: Florence and Paris. Two art historians will analyze the distinctive artistic creativity in these cities and note how the early modern cultural context influenced the lives and aspirations of innovative artists. The seminar offers new perspectives by comparing the Florentine Renaissance with the art of Revolutionary-era Paris and showing how the artistic cultures in these places and times differed or converged.

Mary Pardo, Associate Professor of Art and Art History at UNC serves as the Co-director of the UNC Rome Summer Program, an undergraduate honors study abroad. She earned her PhD at the University of Pittsburgh, concentrating on Art Criticism and Theory of the Italian Renaissance. Her topic will be The City as Work of Art: Florence.

Kathryn Desplanque, Post-Doctoral Fellow in Art and Art History, is an art historian and specialist in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century French visual culture, printed imagery, and art markets. Her topic is The Emergence of a Modern Art World in Paris, 1776–1848.

The event will close with a panel discussion and coincide with another new tradition. The Little Chef food truck will be on campus the same day. A big hit during last year’s food truck rodeo, The Little Chef will be onsite again on the same day. The college encourages visitors to make a day of it. The food truck will arrive at 9:30am, and the UNC event will begin at 11 am. Both will last through 1:30 pm. The event is free and open to the public.