Author: Della Zazzera, Elizabeth

Pick Up the Thread: A Post-Election Connection

The Well-Being Collective and the UConn Humanities Institute present Pick Up the Thread: A Post-Election Connection. November 6, 11:00am-1:00pm, Dove Tower. ALL are invited, and essential, to gather in community during this time. Pick up the thread of belonging that weaves us together. Create and lean into connection with one another. Satisfy your curiosity with faculty and staff experts on relevant and timely topics. Contribute to the collective fiber arts project. Enjoy comfortable outdoor space and a hot chocolate or cider.

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpreting, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

Pick Up the Thread: A Post-Election Connection

November 6, 2024, 11:00am–1:00pm
Dove Tower

The Well-Being Collective and the Humanities Institute present a moment of pause and inclusivity on the day after election day.

UConn’s Well-Being Collective and the UConn Humanities Institute will be hosting a post-election connection event on Wednesday, November 6th from 11am to 1pm at Dove Tower on the Storrs campus. All members of the UConn community are encouraged to join in this moment of pause and inclusivity. Come share a cup of cider or hot chocolate, relax in pop-up seating, and speak with faculty experts who will help facilitate conversations. A collective fiber arts project will be taking place, representing the thread that weaves us all together; materials will be provided should you feel called to learn or contribute to the endeavor.

A note of gratitude to Student Health and Wellness for supporting this event.

Fellow’s Talk: Daniel Hershenzon on the Enslavement of Muslims in Early Modern Spain

2024-25 UCHI Fellow's Talk. "Forced Baptism and the Inheritability of Servile Status: The Enslavement of Muslims in Early Modern Spain." Daniel Hershenzon, Associate Professor, LCL. With a response by Fumilayo Showers. November 6, 3:30pm. UCHI Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library 4th floor.

Forced Baptism and the Inheritability of Servile Status: The Enslavement of Muslims in Early Modern Spain

Daniel Hershenzon (Associate Professor, LCL, UConn)

with a response by Fumilayo Showers (Sociology and Africana Studies, UConn)

Wednesday November 6, 2024, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

This talk focuses on a barely perceptible local custom practiced by enslaved and enslavers in the port city of Malaga (Spain) during much of the 17th century—the right pregnant cortada slaves had to free their child in utero, and in so doing to free them of their enslavers’ dominium. Hershenzon argues that the practice, alongside labor and residence, was one of the foundations of the local enslavement regime. In this system, enslaved Maghrebis negotiated a cortado (literally ‘cut’) agreement with their enslavers as part of which they were allowed to labor and reside outside their enslavers’ household in return for a daily or weekly payments until they paid the ransom fee upon which the parties agreed. Ransom in utero entailed protection from forced conversion, breaking the chain of status inheritability, that slavery lasted one generation, no more, and that these children ransomed in utero were allowed to return to the Maghrib, right which converted Muslims did not possess.

Daniel Hershenzon is an associate professor in the Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at the University of Connecticut. His awards-winning book, The Captive Sea: Slavery, Commerce, and Communication in Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), explores the 17th century entangled histories of Spain, Morocco, and Ottoman Algiers. Hershenzon has published articles in Past and Present, Annales-HSS, Journal of Early Modern History, African Economic History, History Compass, Philological Encounters, and in edited volumes. His research has been supported by the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, the ACLS, NEH, and other grant foundations. While at UCHI, he will work on “The Maghrib in Spain: Enslavement, Citizenship, and Belonging in the Early Modern Spanish Mediterranean.” Revising the dominant historiographic narratives about early modern Spain, “The Maghrib in Spain” offers the first comprehensive account of North Africans in post-expulsion Spain.

Fumilayo Showers is an assistant professor with a joint appointment in the Sociology department, where she directs the Health Professions, Health Care, and Social Inequality Lab, and the Africana Studies Institute. Her research centers on race, gender, and US immigration; the social organization of health and long-term care; health professions; care work; and immigrant workers. Her book, Migrants Who Care: West Africans Working and Building Lives in US Health Care (Rutgers University Press, 2023) is the first book to document the experiences of recent West African immigrants in a range of health care occupations in the US (nursing, disability support, elderly care). Her current research projects focus on tracing changes to US health care systems and the experiences of frontline health care workers as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic; the study and practice of biomedicine in non-western contexts; and the global migration of health professionals.

Access note

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

Faculty Talk: Sara Johnson on the Horror of Orientalism

2024-25 Faculty Talk. "The Horror of Orientalism: Plutarch's Artaxerxes meets the internet." with Sara Johnson, Associate Professor, Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies. October 30, 12:30pm, UCHI Conference Room.

The Horror of Orientalism: Plutarch’s Artaxerxes Meets the Internet

Sara Raup Johnson (Associate Professor, Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies, UConn)

Wednesday October 30, 2024, 12:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

The “cruelty of the barbarian” is a well-worn orientalizing trope that traces a continuous line from the literature of fifth-century Athens to the movie 300 (2006) and beyond. In his life of the Persian king Artaxerxes [Artaxerxes II Mnemon, 404-365 BCE], the Greek biographer Plutarch devotes an entire chapter to a detailed description of an exceptionally gruesome method of torture and execution known as “scaphism” or, more informally, “the torture of the boats.” Evidence suggests that Plutarch found the description in the now lost but notoriously sensational history of Persia by Ctesias, a Greek doctor who served as physician to the royal family at the court of Artaxerxes.

This talk explores the unexpected afterlife of scaphism, from its origins in Ctesias and Plutarch, through the 12th-century Byzantine historian Zonaras, by way of nineteenth-century encyclopedias of torture, to its present-day vogue on the internet and in the death metal music community. It ponders the uneasy intersection between orientalizing discourse and the visceral—pun intended—pleasures of horror.

Sara Raup Johnson is Associate Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies in the Department of Literatures, Cultures and Languages at the University of Connecticut. Her publications include Historical Fictions and Hellenistic Jewish Identity: Third Maccabees in Its Cultural Context (2004), the edited volume Reading and Teaching Ancient Fiction (lead editor, 2018), and articles and book chapters on topics ranging from the date of the book of Esther to classical allusions in the Japanese manga Fullmetal Alchemist. She is currently working on a book-length project on historical fictions centered around Greeks, Jews, and the Persian court in the fourth century BCE.

Access note

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

Fellow’s Talk: Danielle Pieratti on Dante’s Purgatorio

2023-24 UCHI Fellow's talk. "Unoriginal: Poems after Dante's Purgatorio in Translation." Danielle Pieratti, PhD Candidate English, with a response by César Abadia-Barrero. October 30, 3:30pm, UCHI Conference Room.

Unoriginal: Poems after Dante’s Purgatorio in Translation

Danielle Pieratti (Ph.D. Candidate, English, UConn)

with a response by César Abadia-Barrero (Anthropology, UConn)

Wednesday October 30, 2024, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

This talk will be a poetry reading with a critical introduction from Danielle Pieratti’s creative dissertation project entitled, “Unoriginal: Poems after Dante’s Purgatorio in Translation.” In addition to reading poems from her manuscript, Danielle will outline a creative and theoretical rationale for the choice of Purgatorio as the point of entry for her work, applying research in literary translation and translingualism. More than eighty English translations of the Purgatorio exist. What lends this work its ongoing relevance for Anglophone readers, and how might a poet derive inspiration from its tradition as a translated translingual text?

Danielle Pieratti is a current UCHI Dissertation Fellow and a PhD Candidate in the department of English. She is the author most recently of the poetry collection Approximate Body (Carnegie Mellon University Press 2023). Her first book, Fugitives (Lost Horse Press 2016), was selected by Kim Addonizio for the Idaho Prize and won the Connecticut Book Award for poetry. Transparencies, her translated volume of works by Italian poet Maria Borio, was released by World Poetry Books in 2022. She currently serves as poetry editor for the international literary journal Asymptote.

César Abadía-Barrero is a Colombian activist/scholar and Associate Professor of Anthropology and Human Rights at the University of Connecticut. His research approach is grounded in activist, collaborative, and participatory action research frameworks and integrates critical perspectives to study interconnections among capitalism, human rights, and communities of care. He has been a member of or collaborated with collectives and social movements in Brazil, Colombia, and Cameroon, examining how for-profit interests transform access, continuity, and quality of health care, and how communities resist forms of oppression and create and maintain alternative ways of living and caring. He is the author of I Have AIDS but I am Happy: Children’s Subjectivities, AIDS, and Social Responses in Brazil (2011 in English and 2022 in Portuguese) and Health in Ruins: The Capitalist Destruction of Medical Care (2022, English and Spanish editions).

Access note

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

How to Write a Successful Fellowship Application

How to write a successful fellowship application. Yohei Igarashi, Laura Mauldin, and Anna Ziering. October 11, 1:00pm. Virtual Event.

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpreting, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

How to Write Successful Fellowship Applications

October 11, 2024, 1:00pm
Live • Online • Registration Required

Register

Are you planning to apply for a UCHI fellowship, or other fellowship in the humanities or social sciences? Join us for an advice panel on writing successful fellowship applications!

This panel discussion will feature advice from past and present UCHI fellows Yohei Igarashi, Laura Mauldin, and Anna Ziering, who have all been successful in their applications for different kinds of fellowships. Please be sure to bring along the first page of a draft of your own proposal (even in the very early stages) for workshopping and feedback.

Attendees will also have the opportunity to sign up for a fellowship application peer review group.

Register now.

Fellow’s Talk: Julia Wold on Metagaming The Book of the Courtier

2024-25 UCHI fellow's talk. Metagaming the Book of the Courtier. Julia Wold, PhD English, with a response by Yohei Igarashi. October 9, 3:30pm, UCHI Conference Room.

Metagaming The Book of the Courtier

Julia Wold (Ph.D. Candidate, English, UConn)

with a response by Yohei Igarashi (English, UConn)

Wednesday October 9, 2024, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

This talk will focus on the “ludic” or gamified nature of the 16th century Italian courtly manual, The Book of the Courtier. As this text has long been read in a games studies context, this talk will both present the scholarly consensus on the ludic nature of the text and identify structural similarities (homologies) between the text and video games. In taking this next step, we can better understand not only the gamified structure of such early modern texts, but how and why those features appear and function in video game adaptations and appropriations of those texts.

Julia Wold is a PhD Candidate in the English department and Dissertation Fellow at the UCHI. Her research centers on Shakespeare/early modern drama and adaptation theory, with a focus on new media, specifically video games. Her work has recently been published in Adaptation, and she is the author of a forthcoming essay on Shakespeare as genre marker in Star Wars in a collection on Shakespeare and Science Fiction from Arden Bloomsbury. She is also the co-host and editor of the podcast Star Wars English Class, an ongoing public humanities project that recently started its fourth season.

Yohei Igarashi is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. His writing to date focuses on how literature has historically related to communication, information, and technology. He is the author of The Connected Condition: British Romanticism and the Dream of Communication (Stanford University Press, 2020), a prize-winning essay in Studies in Romanticism, and other writing. In the field of computational literary studies, his work includes collaborative papers on topics ranging from poetic form to plain writing, as well as a magazine piece in Aeon on computer-generated text. He is currently writing an account of the role of computing in the history of literary studies. From 2019–2023, he was Assistant then Associate Director at the UConn Humanities Institute, where he oversaw the Digital Humanities and Media Studies Initiative. In 2023–2024, he was the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Fellow at the National Humanities Center.

Access note

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

Connections/Disconnections: A Conversation on Loneliness

Connections/disconnections: A conversations on the loneliness epidemic. October 1, 2024, 3:30-5:00pm, Wilbur Cross North Reading Room

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpreting, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

Connections/Disconnections: A Conversation on the Loneliness Epidemic

October 1, 2024, 3:30–5:00pm
Wilbur Cross North Reading Room

Register

A conversation that brings UConn Professors, alumni, and students together to talk about the impact of the loneliness epidemic on young people, and to share individual stories about finding connection and community.

This event was organized in partnership with the CT Collaborative to End Loneliness, with special guest co-host Catherine Shen, host of “Where We Live,” Connecticut Public Radio.

Panel 1:

  • Keith Bellizzi, Professor, Human Development & Family Studies, UConn
  • Mary Beth Osborne, Asst. Professor-in-Residence, Kinesiology, UConn
  • Bobby Melley, 2016 UConn alumni, baseball player

Panel 2:

  • Nick Mangene, 2022 UConn graduate
  • Krista Mitchell, current UConn student
  • Breanna Bonner, current UConn student

Light refreshments will be served. All are welcome!

This is an Honors Event. Category: “Career, Professional, & Personal Development” #UHL10922

Register now.

Getting the Grant Started: Turning Ideas into Action

Getting the Grant Started: Turning Ideas into Action. September 26th, 2-4pm, UCHI Conference Room.

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpreting, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

The Incubator for Collaborative Grants Series

Getting the Grant Started: Turning Ideas into Action

September 26, 2024, 2:00–4:00pm
UCHI Conference, HBL 4-209

Register

A collaboration between UCHI and Greenhouse Studios, the Incubator series is designed to help UConn faculty and colleagues in the humanities and humanistic social sciences to conceptualize, develop, and implement large collaborative grants that put your research strengths in conversation with potential partners in the community.

Clarissa J. Ceglio, UCHI’s Associate Director of Collaborative Research, and Sara Sikes, Managing Director, Greenhouse Studios, will be the lead facilitators.

Attendees from UConn and community organizations will learn how to work across organizations and disciplines to generate ideas for collaboration and then plan the immediate next steps in the grant proposal process. Attendees need not have a specific grant idea already in mind; rather, we hope that the conversation among attendees will lay the groundwork for future collaborations. Please share this invitation with colleagues and collaborators within the community and across UConn. Select projects will receive support from UCHI and/or Greenhouse Studios to facilitate moving the grant through the writing, application, and implementation process. This event is part of a series designed to offer multiple forms of support for viable grant proposals in the humanities.

Register now.

Fellow’s Talk: Yusuf Mansoor on Indigenous Slavery

2024–25 UCHI Fellow's Talk: "From New England to Tangier: Indigenous Slavery and the English Atlantic at the beginning of King Philip's War." Yusuf Mansoor, PhD Candidate, History, with a response by Heather Ostman. September 25, 3:30pm, UCHI Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library fourth floor.

From New England to Tangier: Indigenous Slavery and the English Atlantic at the beginning of King Philip’s War

Yusuf Mansoor (Ph.D. Candidate, History, UConn)

with a response by Heather Ostman (English, SUNY Westchester Community College)

Wednesday September 25, 2024, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

This talk focuses on a group of Native Americans who were enslaved and sent to English Tangier in the 1670s. It will contextualize this enslavement by detailing the beginning of King Philip’s War to examine more closely who these captives were, where they came from, and how they came to be enslaved by English colonists. From there, the presentation will track their passage from New England to Tangier, as well as the transatlantic imperial connections that fueled this unusual path.

Yusuf Mansoor is a PhD candidate in the History Department, and the Draper Dissertation Fellow at the UCHI. His research focuses on Native Americans and the Atlantic World in the seventeenth century, with a focus on New England. He has received research fellowships from the Massachusetts Historical Society, the John Carter Brown Library, the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture, the American Philosophical Society, and the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Heather Ostman Heather Ostman is Professor of English, Director of the Humanities Institute, and Humanities Curriculum Chair at SUNY Westchester Community College in Valhalla, New York. She is the author/editor of ten books, including Kate Chopin and the City: The New Orleans Stories (2024). She is the recipient of two NEH grants and a SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities, and she is the co-founder and president of the Kate Chopin International Society. The UCHI Visiting Fellowship will enable Heather the time and space to work on her next book project, which is titled “Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Religion, and the Search for Grace.”

Access note

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

Fellow’s Talk: Joscha Jelitzki on Rethinking Viennese Jewish Literature

2024–25 UCHI Fellow's Talk, Rethinking Vienna: Jewish Difference, the Evil Inclination, and the Study of Culture. Joscha Jelitzki, Ph.D. Candidate, LCL, with a response by Sara Matthiesen. September 11, 3:30pm, UCHI Conference Room.

Rethinking Vienna: Jewish Difference, the Evil Inclination, and the Study of Culture

Joscha Jelitzki (Ph.D. Candidate, LCL, UConn)

with a response by Sara Matthiesen (History & Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, George Washington University)

Wednesday September 11, 2024, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

Inside the prolific scholarship on the cultural history of fin-de-siècle Vienna, there is a methodological debate on what to make of the high percentage of Jewish authors, artists, and thinkers on its forefront. Methodologically, the challenge is how to give an account of secularized Jewish culture without falling into the essentialism of constructs like “the Jewish mind.” The challenge becomes even more delicate when we turn to the prominent subject of sexuality and desire in Viennese cultural productions, as that field of association was historically strongly exploited by antisemitism. Jelitzki’s dissertation studies Viennese Jewish literature on sexual desire at this fraught intersection of antisemitic attribution and Jewish self-representation.

This presentation, “Rethinking Vienna: Jewish Difference, the Evil Inclination, and the Study of Culture,” will take specifically the Jewish concept of the Evil Inclination, the “Yetzer Hara,” as a starting point and make it into a case study in these larger methodological questions. The Evil Inclination goes back to Talmudic sources, and, handed down by Jewish folk traditions, worked as a shorthand for sexual drive. Interestingly, this remnant of religious culture was secularized and taken up by a number of Viennese and Habsburg Jewish writers when addressing sexuality and Jewish-Catholic differences. This talk will survey these sources and discuss their implications for the study of Jewish Vienna.

Joscha Jelitzki is a scholar of German Jewish literature, and a PhD candidate in German and Judaic Studies at UConn at the Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. Before joining UCHI as the Richard Brown Dissertation Fellow, he completed his research in Vienna as the 2024 Franz Werfel Fellow. He previously studied in Berlin, Frankfurt (Oder), and Jerusalem, and worked as an assistant from 2016–2019 for the critical edition of the works of Hannah Arendt. His focus is on modern German and Austrian Jewish literature and thought, theories of sexuality and secularization. He has published articles on Martin Buber and literature, the biblical figure of Job in modern Jewish literature, and on German-Jewish gangsta-rap.

Sara Matthiesen is Associate Professor of History and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at George Washington University. Her first book, Reproduction Reconceived: Family Making and the Limits of Choice after Roe v. Wade (University of California Press, 2021), shows how incarceration, for-profit and racist healthcare, HIV/AIDS, parentage laws, and poverty were worsened by state neglect in the decades following Roe. In 2022, Reproduction Reconceived received the Sara A. Whaley Prize for best monograph on gender and labor from National Women’s Studies Association. Professor Matthiesen’s current project, “‘Free Abortion on Demand’ after Roe: A Reproductive Justice History of Abortion Organizing in the United States,” traces the multi-racial feminist activism that opposed state and medical control of abortion throughout the era of choice. At GWU, she regularly teaches Introduction to Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, for which she was awarded the Kenny Teaching Prize in 2022.

Access note

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.