FARMINGTON — In a new forum emphasizing UMF research and scholarship on a national and international level, University of Maine at Farmington is presenting a slate of three lectures in the arts and humanities for fall. This series touches on a variety of topics ranging from filmmaker Quentin Tarantino to the British television series “Doctor Who” to the music of Beethoven.

All events are free and open to the public and will be presented from 11:45 a.m. to 1 p.m. on the UMF campus.

• “Django Unchained and the African American West,” Wednesday in Room 23, UMF Roberts Learning Center.

Originally given at a Western Literature Association conference in California, this lecture is presented by Michael Johnson, UMF professor of English. African American writers and filmmakers have been creatively inventing and reinventing the genre western for centuries. This lecture places “Django Unchained” in the context of the history of the African American West in literature and film. Only against the backdrop of that representational history can we fairly judge what Tarantino’s film does and does not accomplish. Please be aware that this lecture will include clips from films that have been rated R for language and violence.

• “Affirmational and Transformational ‘Doctor Who’ Fan Videos,” Wednesday, Oct. 29, at Emery Community Arts Center.

Karen Hellekson, author of “The Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith” and “The Alternate History: Reconfiguring Time,” co-editor of the journal “Transformative Works and Cultures” and UMF group fitness instructor, presents her keynote address from the World Science Fiction Convention in London. This lecture examines videos created by fans of the British television series, Doctor Who. The “recon” type attempts to recreate or replace episodes that are lost or missing. Transformative videos alter, critique, and reimagine the source material.

• “The Opus 111 Project, Merleau-Ponty, Beethoven and Intermedia,” Wednesday, Nov. 12, at Emery Community Arts Center.

Steven Pane, UMF professor of music, shares his presentation from the Ninth International Conference on the Arts in Society, at Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. Using Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about art, memory and history, this discussion assesses an intermedia, performative project that took place in April 2014, where artists, writers, sound technologists and others within a rural Maine community responded to a theme from the last piano sonata of Beethoven (Opus 111).

The lectures in the Arts and Humanities Series at UMF is sponsored by the Division of Humanities; the Department of Sound, Performance, and Visual Inquiry and the UMF Honors Program.

For more information, call 778-7081.

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