Author: Della Zazzera, Elizabeth

Antoinette Brim-Bell and the Ethnic Studies Symposium

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Connecticut Ethnic Studies Symposium. "Archival Activism and Public Memory." Keynote Speaker Antoinette Brim-Bell, Connecticut Poet Laureate. UConn Storrs Wilbur Cross, North Reading Room. Friday April 5, 2024. Keynote speech and lunch, 11:30am–12:30pm.

Connecticut Ethnic Studies Symposium

Friday April 5, 2024, 11:00am–6:00pm, Wilbur Cross North Reading Room

Keynote address by Antoinette Brim-Bell, Connecticut Poet Laureate, 11:30am

Register to attend the keynote. Lunch will be served.

Undergraduate students from across Connecticut will present their work at the 5th Annual Connecticut Ethnic Studies Symposium, on Friday, April 5th from 11:00 AM to 6:00 PM. This in-person symposium is sponsored by the UConn Co-op Legacy Fellowship program and the UConn Humanities Institute.

The keynote speaker will be Antoinette Brim-Bell, the Connecticut State Poet Laureate. Brim-Bell was selected and her address is sponsored by the UConn Humanities Institute’s Undergraduate Advisory Council. The keynote address will take place at 11:30am, following lunch at 11:00am. Those wishing to attend the keynote must register.

This year’s symposium will mark the 50th anniversary of the 1974 sit-in at Wilbur Cross Library in which state police arrested 219 Black students who demanded the construction of an African American Cultural Center. These students’ radical protests for Black liberation created permanent, physical spaces for students of color to gather and inspired cross-racial solidarity. With a theme of “Archival Activism and Public Memory,” the symposium will educate the community about using archives to reconstruct the public memory and honor student leadership in social movements.

For more details, see the CT Ethnic Studies Symposium website.

A schedule of panels and speakers is available here.

Antoinette Brim-Bell, Connecticut’s 8th State Poet Laureate, is the author of three full-length poetry collections: These Women You Gave Me, Icarus in Love, and Psalm of the Sunflower. She is a Cave Canem Foundation Fellow and an alumna of Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA). Her poetry has appeared in various journals, magazines, textbooks, and anthologies. Additionally, Brim-Bell has published critical work, most notably, essays. A printmaker and collage artist, Brim-Bell exhibited both poetry and monoprints in Jazz: An exhibition of Poetry, Prints, and Photography at the Sumner McKnight Crosby Jr. Gallery in New Haven, CT, and Sheroes, in partnership with the Alliance of Women Veterans at the Grove in New Haven, CT. She serves as Secretary of the Board of Directors of Indolent Arts Foundation based in New York City, is a past Board Member of OneWorld Progressive Institute, and a past President of the Board of Directors of the Creative Arts Workshop in New Haven, CT. Additionally, Brim-Bell hosted a series of Black History Month television programs for the OneWorld Progressive Institute. She is also a former guest host of Patrick Oliver’s Literary Nation Talk Radio (KABF 88.3, Little Rock), for which she interviewed a variety of entertainers, literary figures, political pundits, and community developers. A sought-after speaker, editor, educator, and consultant, Brim-Bell is a Professor of English at Capital Community College in Hartford, CT.

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 Fellows Talk: Breanna Bonner and Nathan Howard

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Undergraduate Humanities Research Fellows. Breanna Bonner, “The Space Between Black and Liberation: A Digital Exploration of Intersectional Invisibility" and Nathan Howard, "Homofascism: The Queering of Hate." April 3, 2:30pm. Humanities Institute Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library, 4th floor.

Undergraduate Humanities Research Fellows

Breanna Bonner, “The Space Between Black and Liberation: A Digital Exploration of Intersectional Invisibility”

and Nathan Howard, “Homofascism: The Queering of Hate”

Wednesday April 3, 2024, 2:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

Undergraduate Humanities Research Fellows Breanna Bonner and Nathan Howard will present on their fellowship projects.

“The Space Between Black and Liberation: A Digital Exploration of Intersectional Invisibility,” Breanna Bonner

“The Space Between Black and Liberation,” aims to conceptualize Black Women’s experiences of Intersectional Invisibility in Social Movements. While Black Women hold two or more marginalized identities and are hyper-visible in the violence that necessitates the creation of social movements (e.g sexual assault, police violence, racial or gender-based discrimination), they are often invisible within the goals and outcomes of social movement advocacy. This research project aims to understand and combat intersectional invisibility through the creation of an educational, interactive website. Considering the guiding question: “how do we physically make invisibility visible,validated, and move towards solutions? ”The website explores historical contexts and interventions in Intersectional Invisibility, amplifies ethnographic research of Black Women students on campus, and creates a crucial guiding framework for future journalists, social movement advocates, and policy-makers.

“Homofascism: The Queering of Hate,” Nathan Howard

Violent homophobia is a core component of white supremacist fascist ideologies, such as white separatist movements and neo-Nazism. How, then, do we make sense of the historical and contemporaneous incidence of gay fascist activism? How do gay fascists make sense of, or even reconcile, their gay identity with the heterosexist expectations endemic to fascist projects? Why would they endorse the abuse of persons like them, or agitate for projects that seek to oppress them? “Homofascism: The Queering of Hate,” is an attempt to answer such questions, highlighting the primacy of gender in fascist and homofascist discourse.

Breanna Bonner, sophomore at the University of Connecticut (UCONN) double-majoring in Human Rights and Political Science. Breanna is a former Student Strategist for Kansas City Defender, a mentor for the Human Rights Close to Home Program, Research Specialist for UConn’s First Year Programing office exploring institutional barriers for students accessing Higher Education , and an Undergraduate Research Fellow for the UConn Humanities Institute. In her free time she enjoys hiking, ice-skating, embroidery, hanging out with friends, and using Twitter.

Nathan Howard is a senior at UConn, majoring in Philosophy with a minor in Music. Nathan is an assistant editorial board member at the undergraduate philosophy journal Stance and an Undergraduate Fellow at the UConn Humanities Institute. His research interests include fascism and extremism, nihilism, feminist and queer theory, and social and political philosophy. In his spare time, he enjoys reading, making music, doomscrolling on social media, and watching bad movies.

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: Oscar Guerra on Unveiling Migration Trauma

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2023–24 Fellow's Talk. Invisible Wounds: Unveiling Migration Trauma. Associate Professor of Film and Video Production, Digital Media and Design, Oscar Guerra. With a response by Ana Maria Diaz-Marcos. March 27, 12:15pm. UCHI Conference Room. Homer Babbidge Library, fourth floor.

Invisible Wounds: Unveiling Migration Trauma

Oscar Guerra (Associate Professor of Film and Video, DMD, UConn)

with a response by Ana María Díaz-Marcos (LCL, UConn)

Wednesday March 27, 2024, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

“Invisible Wounds: Unveiling Migration Trauma” chronicles 15-year-old Ruth’s migration from Honduras to the US upon discovering her pregnancy. Through interviews and home videos, the documentary intimately reveals the struggles of millions of undocumented migrants, emphasizing their contributions to the nation. Beyond the journey’s challenges, it delves into reuniting with family, adapting to new lives, and confronting anti-immigrant sentiments. The film critically examines mental health barriers, offering a timely and empathetic portrayal of the often-overlooked struggles faced by this vulnerable sector of American society.

Oscar Guerra is an Emmy® award-winning director, researcher, and educator. He is an Associate Professor of Film and Video at the University of Connecticut and a producer at PBS FRONTLINE. Dr. Guerra’s focus is storytelling that promotes critical thinking and social investment. He aims to produce media that provides a way for underrepresented groups to share and disseminate counterstories, contradict dominant and potentially stereotypical narratives, and strengthen their voices and identities. Dr. Guerra’s career spans the spectrum of television environments, music, multimedia production, documentaries for social change, promotional video, immersive media, and vast international experience. Follow him @guerraproduction.

Ana María Díaz-Marcos is a Professor of Spanish Literature at the Department of Literatures, Cultures and Languages. Her research interests include Spanish literature and theater, feminism and gender studies, and Hispanic antifascism in the press. She has published a monograph on representations of fashion in modern Spanish literature entitled The Age of Silk (2006). Her book Thinking out of the Box: Spanish Writers and the Quest for Emancipation (2013) examines the rising of a feminist consciousness in Spain. She is the editor of an open-access anthology of plays written by contemporary Spanish women playwrights: Escenarios de crisis: dramaturgas españolas en el nuevo milenio (2018). Her latest Digital Humanities projects include a bilingual exhibition about the history of the antifascist newspaper La voz (1937-1939) that was published in New York, a collection of articles from that newspaper that illustrate the intersections of Pan-Hispanic feminism and antifascism in the thirties, and a collection of cartoons from the press entitled “Sketches of Harlem” by Puerto Rican artist José Valdés Cadilla, that is on display at CUNY this Fall.

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: Faculty Talk: Julian Schlöder on the Inauthentic Self

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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

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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

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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 Françoise 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

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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

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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

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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

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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.