Author: Della Zazzera, Elizabeth

NEW DATE: Faculty Talk: Julian Schlöder on the Inauthentic Self

2024 Faculty Talk. "What is an inauthentic self?" Assistant Research Professor, Philosophy, Julian Schlöder. March 27, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room, Fourth floor

What is an Inauthentic Self?

Julian Schlöder (Assistant Research Professor, Philosophy, UConn)

Wednesday March 27, 2024, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

Although these are common phrases, it is somewhat unclear what it is to “be something one is not” or to “not be one’s authentic self.” There is, after all, no other source of selfhood than who one actually is. One also owes to no-one a particular way of being other than to oneself. But given that therefore the self is its own’s only yardstick, how can there be an inauthentic self? Towards an answer, I explore a conception of selfhood as meaning-making. One’s self-narrative creates meaning from bare facticity and is hence is not just something we tell about ourselves, but it is how we articulate our very self. Self-narratives can apprehend themselves as more or less coherent meaning-makers, so a self can fall short of its own standards. From this theoretical standpoint, I explore how stereotypes inflict damage onto selves by standing in the way of meaning-making, and how coming out as a queer identity is to create meaning from incoherence.

Julian J. Schlöder is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut. They studied philosophy, mathematics, and logic at the Universities of Bonn and Amsterdam, receiving their doctorate in 2018. They are a co-author of the monograph Reasoning with Attitude (Oxford UP, 2023).

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.

From Wine Moms to QAnon: A Workshop on Online Wellness and White Supremacy

From Wine Moms to QAnon: or, What’s the Problem with Self-Care? The Surprising Connections between White Supremacy and Online Wellness. Friday, March 22, 2024. 12:30pm Workshop. 2pm Panel 1: Unexpected Crossovers to Conspiracy. 3:30pm Panel 2: So What’s the Problem with Self-Care?. 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 panel discussion will be livestreamed with automated captioning.

The Medical Humanities & Arts Initiative presents:

From Wine Moms to QAnon: or, What’s the Problem with Self-Care? The Surprising Connections between White Supremacy and Online Wellness

March 20, 2020
Writing Workshop: 12:30–2:00. Register to attend workshop.
Panels: 2:00–5:00pm. Register to attend panels virtually

Homer Babbidge Library, UCHI Conference Room

The spread of online racism, homophobia, and misogyny continues to wreak havoc in our homes, our schools, and our streets. Media coverage has illuminated how the toxic masculinity of the Proud Boys and other hate groups function in these spaces. Most of us—students and faculty alike—know to avoid these openly hateful spaces, and often take refuge in seemingly frivolous posts about wellness, beauty and self-care. Yet the spread of white nationalism continues unabated, often with “recruits” emerging in surprising places.

Join us for an interdisciplinary workshop and panel discussion that explores how mommy blogs and beauty influencer posts offer “innocent” vehicles for white supremacist tenets of purity, and rigid bodily surveillance.

The day will begin with a writing workshop (12:30-2:00 pm) in which all researchers working on adjacent topics will be invited to join us in group writing and discussion in response to a pre-circulated article. Join us for lunch and the opportunity to think and write with other scholars thinking through these thorny issues. This workshop is open to faculty and graduate students. Registration is required.

The workshop is followed by two panel discussions, open to all. Please consider inviting your undergraduate students; we are eager to learn from their perspectives on contemporary online culture.

Schedule:

12:30-2:00 Writing Workshop with Lunch Register for the workshop

2:00-3:30 Panel 1: Unexpected Crossovers to Conspiracy

“Conspiracism” Eric Berg, Philosophy, UConn
“Romance” Alexis Boylan, Art History, Africana Institute, UConn
“Wine Mom” Beth Marshall, Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, CA

3:30-3:45 Coffee Break

3:45-5:00: Panel 2: So What’s the Problem with Self-Care?

“Retreat” Leigh Gilmore, English, The Ohio State University
“It Girls” Tracy Llanera, Philosophy, UConn
“Microbiome” Rebekah Sheldon, English, University of Indiana

Faculty Talk: Elizabeth Della Zazzera on French Poetry Almanacs

2024 Faculty Talk "The French Left Maastricht on May 4": Time, Place, and French Poetry Almanacs. Assistant Professor in Residence, History, Elizabeth Della Zazzera. Humanities Institute Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library, March 20, 2024, 3:30pm.

“The French Left Maastrich on May 4”: Time, Place, and French Poetry Almanacs

Elizabeth Della Zazzera (Assistant Professor in Residence, History, UConn)

Wednesday March 20, 2024, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

On the May souvenir page of her 1814 copy of Hommage aux dames, Henriette François Louise Rigano recorded that her husband, Albert Prisse, had traveled to Paris on May 19. On that same page, she wrote that “the French left Maastricht on May 4,” juxtaposing the movements of her family members with the history of the collapse of Napoleon’s European empire. Hommage aux dames was one of a series of very similar almanac titles (Almanach des dames, Almanach dédié aux demoiselles, etc.) produced in France and marketed to women in the first decades of the nineteenth century. This talk will explore how these almanacs, which were primarily poetry anthologies with calendars and sometimes souvenir pages attached, shifted the almanac’s relationship to locality and to time, not only because of their content and format, but also because of how they were used.

Elizabeth Della Zazzera is an assistant professor in residence in the University of Connecticut’s History department and Director of Communications & Undergraduate Outreach at the UConn Humanities Institute. A historian of modern Europe, she received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016. Her scholarship focuses on how ideas move on the ground—how their method of transmission and dissemination affects the ideas themselves—with a particular emphasis on the intellectual history of material texts and urban environments in revolutionary and post-revolutionary France. Her current book project explores the role of the periodical press, the theatre, and literary sociability in the bataille romantique: the conflict between romantics and classicists. She is also working on a project about French literary almanacs in the early nineteenth century. Her article, “Translating Revolutionary Time: French Republican Almanacs in the United States” was awarded the 2015 Book History essay prize.

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.

NEW DATE: Fellow’s Talk: Martine Granby on a Black American Legacy of Care

2023–24 UCHI Fellow's talk. "Familial Archives and a Black Family Legacy of Care," Assistant Professor of Journalism, Martine Granby, with a response by Richard Ashby Wilson. March 20, 2024, 12:15pm. UCHi Conference room, Homer Babbidge Library, fourth floor.

Familial Archives and a Black American Legacy of Care

Martine Granby (Assistant Professor, Journalism, UConn)

with a response by Richard Ashby Wilson (Law, Anthropolgy, and Human Rights, UConn)

Wednesday March 20, 2024, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

Spanning decades of familial memories, TEN SECONDS OF SUGAR is a personal essay documentary film chronicling a legacy of caretaking, motherhood, and silence of Black women’s mental health. Reimagining the past as a form of trauma recovery, employing an essayistic approach illustrating the historical relationships between Black American women and the American health system.

SECONDS is a portrait disrupting generational divisions, seeking care, what it means to overcome structural inequalities, and what we pass down. Guided by my narrative voice, captured mainly by an analog tape recorder, the film presents a series of conversations between three generations of women: myself, my mother, and my maternal grandmother. The camera’s presence is a catalyst, paving the way for us to make space to speak openly and without judgment.

Through this talk, I’ll screen excerpts from work-in-progress scenes that render my family’s lineage of caretaking professions, nurses, mental health practitioners, and funeral directors as a form of care reformation and the accompanying research.

Martine Granby is a nonfiction filmmaker and Assistant Professor of Journalism at the University of Connecticut, focusing on documentary filmmaking with a joint appointment in the Africana Studies Institute and an affiliate of UConn’s Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Program. She produces films that weave between documentary, experimental non-fiction, hybrid, and essay forms. Her creative research focuses on interrogations of and material experimentation with family and collective moving image archives, ethical considerations of found footage usage, and discourses around mental health in BIPOC communities.

Dr. Richard Ashby Wilson is Board of Trustees Professor of Law and Anthropology and Gladstein Chair of Human Rights. He is a scholar of transitional justice and his recent scholarship has focused on hate speech and incitement in international and U.S. law. His books include The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa, Writing History in International Criminal Trials, and Incitement on Trial. He is a member of the Hate Crimes Advisory Council of Connecticut and he is writing a book about the challenges in reporting, investigating, and prosecuting bias-motivated crimes in the United States.

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 Success: Find Your Productivity Style with Jane Elliott

The Faculty Success Initiative Presents: Find your Productivity Style—and make everything easier, with Jane Elliott. An Online Workshop. March 1, 12:00pm.

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 Faculty Success Initiative presents:

Find Your Productivity Style—and Make Everything Easier

An Online Workshop with Jane Elliott

March 1, 2024, 12:00–1:00pm
Live • Online • Registration required

Register
Popular productivity advice usually boils down to the same basic principles: capture all your tasks in list, prioritize them based on goals, and then plan and execute a detailed daily schedule. This approach seems reasonable, plus it’s easy to explain—which means easy to package and sell.

But for many of us, this advice is profoundly counterproductive for the way our brains think and work best.

Trying to use this top-down approach when your brain works differently is like pulling up to the gas station and getting a tank full of sand instead of fuel. We want something to help propel us forward, but we wind up grinding to a halt instead.

In this one-hour workshop, I’ll lay out the core productivity styles that fall outside the usual top-down advice. We’ll identify which style your brain naturally favors and dig into the specific advantages you gain from working this way And I’ll share key strategies for dialing in this style to create more of the progress you want.

You’re going to leave feeling relieved, energized and clear about how to make choices that increase your ability to do focused, satisfying and impactful work.

Jane Elliott is a coach, a writer, and a professor King’s College London. Her coaching practice grew from her experience mentoring students and junior colleagues. She specializes in helping smart people stop avoiding the things they know they want to do.

Student Success: The Value of a Humanities Degree in Today’s Job Market

Student Success: The Value of a Humanities Degree in Today’s Job Market. Michah Heumann, Director of the Office of Undergraduate Research. February 26, 4:00pm, UCHI Conference Room, Homer babbidge library, fourth floor.

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.

Student Success: The Value of a Humanities Degree in Today’s Job Market

with Micah Heumann, Director of the Office of Undergraduate Research
February 26, 2023, 4:00pm
Humanities Institute Conference Room. This event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

Preconceived assumptions and myths about majors prevent students from being able to take full advantage of the college experience. This presentation will focus on elevating the student approach to major exploration by acknowledging and correcting these misconceptions and demonstrating that choosing a major isn’t quite so major. We will also explore research opportunities and how research plays a significant role as an undergraduate student.

Fellow’s Talk: Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann on Virgilio Piñera and Aimé Césaire

2023–24 UCHI Fellow's Talk. "Solidarity in Translation: Virgilio Piñera's Love Letters to Aimé Césaire." Associate Professor LCL and EL Instituto, Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann, with a response by Serkan Görkemli. February 14, 12:15pm. Humanities Institute Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library, 4th floor.

Solidarity in Translation: Virgilio Piñera’s Love Letters to Aimé Césaire

Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann (Associate Professor, LCL & El Instituto, UConn)

with a response by Serkan Görkemli (English, UConn)

Wednesday February 14, 2024, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

The final verse of Virgilio Piñera’s famous poem La isla en peso (The Weight of the Island), has become an ambivalent Cuban national refrain. Piñera ends his poem asserting “el peso de una isla en el amor de un pueblo” (the weight of an island in the love of a people). The verse conveys an island weighed down in the love of its people. This structuring ambivalence between love and weight tempers the redemptive possibility of erotic desire against colonial histories and presents that is also Piñera’s signature offering in the poem. This ambivalence recalls the structure of another highly influential poetic signature: Aimé Césaire’s. Piñera self-published La isla en peso the very same year that Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Journal of a Homecoming) was published in Havana, 1943. Earlier that year, Piñera also translated Césaire’s poem “Conquête de l’aube” (Conquest of dawn). Both of Césaire’s poems leave obvious residues in Piñera’s own poem; Césaire’s influence also marks Piñera’s controversial reception in both public and private among Cuban poet-critics. In this presentation, I consider Piñera’s almost-ideal work translating Césaire and his innovative dialogue with Césaire in La isla en peso as love letters to Césaire. I read the weight of Césaire in Piñera’s poetics as the weight of a love that is both personal and aesthetic—towards Césaire the poet—and social—towards Cuba as a part of the Caribbean, and I reconsider Piñera’s poetics through his loving and productive literary submission to Césaire.

Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann (they or she pronouns) is a scholar of Caribbean literature and intellectual history, a literary translator, and the author of Writing the Caribbean in Magazine Time (Rutgers University Press, 2021). Seligmann is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Caribbean Studies at the University of Connecticut in the Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages and El Instituto: Institute of Latina/o, Caribbean, and Latin American Studies. Seligmann’s essays on Caribbean literary magazines, literary infrastructure, translation, and other forms of intellectual travel appear in MLN, Small Axe, South Atlantic Quarterly, The Global South, The Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Continents manuscrits, and more. Their translated books include José Ramón Sánchez’s The Black Arrow (Linkgua 2023, translated with Esther Whitfield) and Legna Rodríguez Iglesias’s Spinning Mill (Cardboard House Press, 2019). As a fellow at the Humanities Institute, Seligmann advances a book-length study of the dynamics of solidarity and translation that comprise Aimé Césaire’s Spanish-language legacy called “Solidarity in Translation: Aimé Césaire and His Cuban Comrades in Art.”

Serkan Görkemli (he/him) is originally from Türkiye and is an associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut in Stamford. His research and publications focus on LGBTQ+ literacies and storytelling. He is the author of two books: Sweet Tooth and Other Stories, a collection of interconnected LGBTQ+ short stories set in Turkey (University Press of Kentucky, 2024; 2022 prose selection for UPK’s New Poetry and Prose Series), and Grassroots Literacies: Lesbian and Gay Activism and the Internet in Turkey (SUNY Press, 2014; 2015 Conference on College Composition and Communication Lavender Rhetorics Book Award). Serkan has a PhD in English with a concentration in Rhetoric and Composition from Purdue University. While at UCHI, he will complete his third book, You’re Always Welcome Here.

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: Evelyn Simien on Historic U.S. Elections

2024 Faculty Talk. "The Last Shall be First: Historic Candidates in US Elections." Professor of Political Science and Interim Director of Africana Studies, Evelyn Simien. Humanities Institute Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library fourth floor, Feb 7, 3:30pm.

The Last Shall Be First: Historic Candidates in U.S. Elections

Evelyn Simien (Professor, Political Science, UConn)

Wednesday February 7, 2024, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

Evelyn Simien’s book project, “The Last Shall Be First: Historic Candidates in U.S. Elections,” will show that historic first candidates have long-standing effects on new segments of the American polity, whether they win or lose, their campaigns revitalize American democracy and legitimize our political institutions. Utilizing in-depth, mixed methods case studies of historic candidates at the local, state, and national levels, the book length project situates historic firsts in terms of their ability to restore confidence in a polarized nation by renewing faith in fair elections, inspiring civic engagement, and cultivating trust in government. These case studies are complemented by opinion data, voter turnout reports, election maps, textual analysis of campaign rhetoric, and content analysis of newspapers. The rich array of sources—photographs, speeches, interviews, and election maps—used for this project will take the form of a digital archive.

Evelyn M. Simien is professor of political science at the University of Connecticut. She is also Interim Director of the Africana Studies Institute at UConn. Simien received her B.A. in political science from Xavier University of Louisiana, along with her master’s degree and Ph.D. in political science from Purdue University. Simien is the author of two books Black Feminist Voices in Politics (State University of New York Press, 2006), and Historic Firsts: How Symbolic Empowerment Changes U.S. Politics (Oxford University Press, 2016), and editor of Gender and Lynching (Palgrave/Macmillan 2011) and Historic Firsts in U.S. Elections: Trailblazing Candidates (Routledge, 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.

Fellow’s Talk: Tracy Llanera on Misfits of Extremism

2023–24 Fellow's Talk. The Misfits of Extremism: Brides, Moms, and Daughters. Assistant Professor of Philosophy Tracy Llanera, with a response by Jordan Camp. February 7, 12:15pm. Humanities Institute Conference Room, HBL Library 4th floor.

The Misfits of Extremism: Brides, Moms, and Daughters

Tracy Llanera (Assistant Professor, Philosophy, UConn)

with a response by Jordan T. Camp (American Studies, Trinity College)

Wednesday February 7, 2024, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

While patriarchal hate and terror ideologies assign subordinative and domestic roles to women, contemporary research shows the women participate as political agents in Islamic terror and white supremacist movements. This situation raises complex issues about agency and political accountability. In debates on gender, extremism, and terrorism, for example, women are described either as merely having a “façade of agency” (Lahoud 2018) or as exercising “active agency” (Termeer & Duyvesteyn 2022). Both approaches are problematic: the former insinuates that women, encumbered by their oppressed gender status, are less blameworthy than men even if they follow the same directives; the latter, meanwhile, sidesteps the impact of hierarchical patriarchal dynamics, making men and women equal in terms of liability and blame.

In light of these two unsatisfactory approaches, I develop a more nuanced conception of women’s agency in patriarchal hate and terror groups in this talk. I offer a philosophical account of “women’s hate agency,” detailing its three enabling conditions: first, it is inspired by a ressentiment-fostering narrative perpetuated by their terrorist or hate group; second, the group licenses women to defy gender norms for expedient political action; and third, the group calls on women to perform special duties that bring them fame, praise, honor, and prestige as women. I conclude by linking this work with my UCHI book project, The Misfits of Extremism.

Tracy Llanera is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut-Storrs. She is author of Richard Rorty: Outgrowing Modern Nihilism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), co-author of A Defence of Nihilism (Routledge, 2021), and editor of Resilience and the Brown Babe’s Burden: Writings by Filipina Philosophers (Routledge, forthcoming). Llanera works at the intersection of social and political philosophy, philosophy of religion, feminist philosophy, and pragmatism, specializing on the topics of nihilism, extremism, conversion, and the politics of language and resilience. She is affiliated with the UConn Asian and Asian American Studies Institute and the UConn Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. Llanera is also a core member of Women Doing Philosophy, a global feminist organization of Filipina philosophers.

Jordan T. Camp is an Associate Professor of American Studies and founding Co-Director of the Social Justice Institute at Trinity College, and a Visiting Fellow in the UConn Humanities Institute. He is the author of Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State (University of California Press, 2016); co-editor (with Christina Heatherton) of Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (Verso, 2016); and co-editor (with Laura Pulido) of the late Clyde Woods’ Development Drowned and Reborn: The Blues and Bourbon Restorations in Post-Katrina New Orleans (University of Georgia Press, 2017). He is the co-host and co-producer of the Conjuncture podcast and web series. He is currently working on a new book entitled, The Southern Question.

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.

Undergraduate Research Fellowship Information Session

Undergraduate Research Fellowship Information Session. Online Event. February 2, 1:00pm.

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.

Undergraduate Research Fellowship Information Session

February 2, 2023, 1:00pm
Live • Online • Registration required

Register

We are holding an information session for prospective applicants for the 2024–25 Humanities Research Fellowship—a year-long fellowship for UConn undergraduates pursuing innovative research in the humanities. In this session, we will go over the application process, offer tips and tricks for writing a compelling application, and answer questions.