Author: Della Zazzera, Elizabeth

Writing a Successful Grant or Fellowship Application

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The Faculty Success Initiative Presents, Writing a Successful Grant or Fellowship Application, with former UCHI fellows Micki McElya, Debapriya Sarkar, and Anna Ziering. virtual panel discussion. November 2, 2:00pm.

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:

Writing a Successful Grant or Fellowship Application

with Micki McElya (History, UConn)
Debapriya Sarkar (English, UConn)
and Anna Ziering (Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Oglethorpe University)

November 2, 2023, 2:00pm
Live • Online • Registration required

Register

This panel discussion will feature advice from UCHI alums who occupy the ranks of senior faculty, mid career faculty and junior faculty in the humanities who have been successful in writing grant and fellowship proposals. 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.

Micki McElya is a professor of History at the University of Connecticut. She was a UCHI Faculty Fellow in 2021–2022.

Debapriya Sarkar is assistant professor of English at the University of Connecticut. She was a UCHI Faculty Fellow in 2019–2020.

Anna Ziering is assistant professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Oglethorpe University. She was a UCHI Graduate Research Scholar in 2021–2022.

Fellow’s Talk: Serkan Görkemli on the Crisis Aesthetic

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2023–24 UCHI Fellow's Talk. "Queer Immigrants and the Crisis Aesthetic in Short Fiction" Serkan Gorkelmi, Associate Professor, Department of English, UConn. with a response by Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann. November 1, 12:15pm, UCHI conference room, Homer Babbidge Library, fourth floor.

Queer Immigrants and the Crisis Aesthetic in Short Fiction

Serkan Görkemli (Associate Professor, English, UConn)

with a response by Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann (LCL & El Instituto, UConn)

Wednesday, November 1, 2023, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

Tobias Wolff once said, “Good stories thrive on difficulty.” Indeed, conflict and, more broadly, crisis are central to the literary genre of the short story and its characters and plot. In this talk, Görkemli will focus on this “crisis aesthetic” in his discussion of You’re Always Welcome Here, his UCHI fellowship project, a collection of fifteen short stories ranging from traditional character-driven narratives to experimental, mixed-form pieces. Featuring queer immigrant and non-immigrant characters in NYC during the Trump presidency and the COVID pandemic, You’re Always Welcome Here roils with personal, political, and existential crises. Görkemli will discuss the genre of the short story, multiple crises in a narrative, and the importance of storytelling to record and reflect on recent events that continue haunting us. Stepping into the shoes of queer immigrant characters who face seemingly unresolvable crises, the audience will contemplate disidentification and allyship in short fiction.

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.

Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann (they or she pronouns) is a scholar of Caribbean literature and intellectual history and the author of Writing the Caribbean in Magazine Time (Rutgers University Press, 2021). Katerina’s essays on literary magazines, literary infrastructure, and Caribbean textual and intellectual circulation also appear in MLN, Small Axe, South Atlantic Quarterly, The Global South, The Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, and Inti. Katerina is also a member of the Aimé Césaire research group of the Francophone manuscripts team at the École normale supérieure in Paris and a translator of contemporary Cuban literature. At UConn, Katerina is associate professor of Spanish and Caribbean Studies in the Literatures, Cultures and Languages Department and El Instituto: Institute for Latina/o, Caribbean, and Latin American Studies.

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: Birgit Brander Rasmussen on Indigenous Literacies

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2023–24 UCHI Fellow's Talk. "Signs of Resistance, Signs of Resurgence: Indigenous Literacies, New Media, and Anti-Colonial Imaginaries in Native American Literature and Culture" Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Associate Professor of English, Binghamton University SUNY. With a response by Zehra Arat. October 25, 12:15pm. UCHI conference room. Homer Babbidge Library, fourth floor.

Signs of Resistance, Signs of Resurgence: Indigenous Literacies, New Media, and Anti-Colonial Imaginaries in Native American Literature and Culture

Birgit Brander Rasmussen (Associate Professor of English, Binghamton University SUNY)

with a response by Zehra Arat (Political Science, UConn)

Wednesday, October 25, 2023, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

What would American literature look like if it began in 901?

Ancient and diverse literary cultures interacted for centuries before Europeans arrived in the Americas. Peoples, corn, stories, and technologies moved along trade and migration routes connecting the continents for millennia.

Many around the world continue to believe, incorrectly, that European settlers brought literacy to these continents. The colonial conflict brought multiple forms of literacy into contact and conflict. In the “textual conflict zone,” indigenous literacies, like pictography, become signs of resistance in the colonial era that are reclaimed as signs of resurgence in the digital present.

Contemporary Native writers, artists, and activists use digital media to connect past and present, pictography and digital media. Digital Indigenous literacies invite new ways of thinking about literature, writing, history, and even time itself.

Birgit Brander Rasmussen is Associate Professor in the English Department at Binghamton University (SUNY), located on unceded Onandaga land. She wrote the award-winning book Queequeg’s Coffin: Indigenous Literacies and Early American Literature and co-edited The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness.

Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat is Professor of Political Science at the University of Connecticut. She studies human rights, with an emphasis on women’s rights, as well as processes of democratization, globalization, and development. In addition to her scholarship, she has been active in professional organizations in various capacities (e.g., Founding President, Human Rights Section of APSA); she has served on the editorial boards of several journals and book series and is currently the editor of the book series “Power and Human Rights” by the Lynne Rienner Publishers. Her work is recognized by several awards, including the APSA Award of Distinguished Scholar in Human Rights (2010).

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.

The Popular Culture Initiative: Can You Fall in Love with ChatGPT?

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Can You Fall in Love with ChatGPT? Panel Discussion: Dan Rockmore, Anna Mae Duane, Stephen Dyson, and Jeffrey Dudas. October 23, 4:00pm. Konover Auditorium.

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 Popular Culture Initiative presents:

Can You Fall in Love with ChatGPT?

A Panel Discussion and Live Podcast Recording

October 23, 2023, 4:00pm
Konover Auditorium

A panel discussion and live podcast recording featuring AI expert Dan Rockmore (Dartmouth College), Anna Mae Duane (Director, UCHI), Stephen Dyson (Associate Director, UCHI), and Jeffrey Dudas (UConn Political Science).

How will current and next generation AI reshape our understanding of conversation, companionship, and even love? Taking in the latest technical developments and inspired by movies such as Spike Jonze’s Her, join us! Catered reception to follow. Sponsored by the Popular Culture Initiative of the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute.

Dan Rockmore is professor of mathematics and computer science at Dartmouth College, and the Director of the Neukom Institute for Computational Science. His writings on AI and the humanities have appeared in the New Yorker, LA Review of Books, and Slate.

Anna Mae Duane is Professor of English and Director of the UConn Humanities Institute. She teaches and writes in the fields of American Studies, African American Literature, and the Medical Humanities. She’s particularly interested in how definitions of youth and childhood shape culture and policy in ways that require the abdication of rights in order to claim care. She is the author or editor of six books including Educated for Freedom: The Incredible Story of Two Fugitive Schoolboys who Grew Up to Change a Nation, and Child Slavery Before and After Emancipation: An Argument for Child-Centered Slavery Studies. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Japan-US Friendship Commission. Her public-facing scholarship includes publications in Salon.com, Slate.com, and an ongoing podcast.

Stephen Dyson is the associate director of the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, and a professor of political science. Dyson’s work concerns the politics of popular culture, especially science fiction, and the psychology of political leadership. He is the author of Imagining Politics (University of Michigan Press, 2019); Otherworldly Politics (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015); Leaders in Conflict (Manchester University Press, 2014); and The Blair Identity (Manchester University Press, 2009). His work has appeared in Extrapolation, British Politics, International Security, and Political Psychology, among other venues.

Jeffrey R. Dudas is Professor of Political Science and Affiliate Faculty of American Studies at the University of Connecticut. He specializes in the areas of American law, politics, and culture and focuses, in particular, on the many facets of the American politics of rights. He joined the UConn Political Science department in 2004 after earning the M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Washington.

Faculty Success: Dealing with Resistance with Jane Elliott

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Presented by the Faculty Success Initiative, Dealing With Resistance: When Research Time Is Hard To Use With Jane Elliott. Virtual event. October 20, 1:00–3:00pm.

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:

Dealing with Resistance: When Research Time Is Hard to Use

with Jane Elliott

October 20, 2023, 1:00–3:00pm
Live • Online • Registration required

Register
From single hours carved out of the teaching week to hard-won sabbatical leaves, finding time for research can feel like an achievement in itself for most academics. Because we strive and strategize to create this time, it’s particularly frustrating when we still can’t seem to use it the way we want. At the very moment we finally have the brain space to start reading or writing, we often find ourselves doing something else instead.

If you’ve experienced this dynamic, you know it can feel almost like an out-of-body experience. One minute, you’re reviewing the chapter outline you drafted months ago, the next you’re in your email replying to a message about committee work that could definitely wait.

Although this dynamic feels mysterious, what’s actually happening is very concrete and technical. There’s a specific feedback loop that gets created between our sense of how precious and rare this time is, and our resistance to using it fully. It comes down to the expectations, thoughts and feelings we bring to these moments—all of which can be changed.

In this workshop, I’m going to explain exactly how this feedback loop gets activated, what its component parts are, and how to dismantle them so you can use your research time with ease. Although you won’t need to share any of your personal reflections with the group if you don’t want to, you will have time to practice with tools and bank some progress in real time. Along the way, you’ll learn:

  • Why this resistance can’t be resolved via time-management techniques (spoiler alert: it’s not because you’re not trying hard enough!)
  • How the perception of time-scarcity and urgency actually create resistance
  • When enforcing strict research goals backfires and why
  • Why understanding resistance as ‘procrastination’ isn’t helpful
  • How to reframe your relationship to research time in a way that will actually work.

Jane Elliott is a professor of contemporary literature at King’s College London, a coach and a writer. Her coaching practice grew from her experience mentoring students and junior colleagues. She specializes in helping smart people get out of their own way.

Medical Humanities: A Daughter’s Long Goodbye, Screening and Q&A

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The Medical Humanities & Arts Initiative Presents, A Daughter's Long Goodbye: The Caregivers Journey, screening and discussion with filmmakers Steven G. Smith. October 18, 4:30pm, Homer Babbidge Library, Screening Room 2119A.

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 Medical Humanities & Arts Initiative presents:

“A Daughter’s Long Goodbye” Screening & Discussion with filmmaker Steven G. Smith

October 19, 2023, 4:30pm
Homer Babbidge Library, Screening Room 2119A

Leandra Manos has spent nearly three years as the full-time caregiver for her 86-year-old father who is in the late stages of dementia. The award-winning documentary A Daughter’s Long Goodbye (dir. Steven G. Smith) chronicles Leandra’s journey balancing COVID-19, unemployment, and caring for her aging father. Filmmaker and photojournalist Steven G. Smith will join for a discussion and Q&A after the film screening.

Fellow’s Talk: Alexander Diener on Place Attachment

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2023–23 UCHI Fellow's Talk: "The Middle of Somewhere: Place Attachment and the Geographies of Being" Professor of Geography, University of Kansas Alexander Diener. With a response by Martine Granby. October 18, 12:15 pm. UCHI conference room, Homer Babbidge Library, Fourth Floor.

The Middle of Somewhere: Place Attachment and the Geographies of Being

Alexander Diener (Professor of Geography, University of Kansas)

with a response by Martine Granby (Journalism, UConn)

Wednesday, October 18, 2023, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

Place attachment is a burgeoning field of scholarship maturing in theory, method, and application. The phenomenon obviously relates to concepts of residency, including key questions such as: Who moves and why? Who stays and why? Who returns and why? But place attachment also encompasses broader networks of place and geographic contingency, including questions such as: How do place attachments form? Why do people form attachments to some places and not others? How are concepts of home and homeland negotiated within and across varied conditions of mobility? In this talk, Alexander Diener approaches place attachment as an assemblage of materiality, performance, and narration. Rather than being static or deterministic, this model points to people’s varied capacities to make and remake place attachments, and how this shapes everyday routines (e.g. routes to work, shopping, social interactions), major life choices (e.g. places of residence, education, vacations), and identities (e.g. civic, national, religious).

Alexander Diener is a Professor of Geography at the University of Kansas. His interests include borders, urban landscape, place attachment, axial development, migration, and diaspora. He possesses area studies expertise in Central Eurasia and Northeast Asia, having worked extensively in Russian borderlands. Alex has authored and edited nine books, most recently Borders: A Very Short Introduction (2023), The Power of Place in Place Attachment (2023), Invisible Borders: Geographies of Power, Mobility, and Belonging (2022), and Cities as Power: Urban Space, Place, and National Identity (2019). His work has been funded by the NSF, SSRC, IREX, AAG, and the MacArthur Foundation. He has held fellowships at the Kennan Institute of the Wilson Center, the American University of Central Asia, Mongolia National University, George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, Harvard University’s Davis Center, and Fulbright’s Regional Research Scholar for Central Asia. At UCHI, Alex is writing The Middle of Somewhere, a book about the extensive but understudied effects of place attachment on the human condition.

Martine N. Granby is a nonfiction filmmaker, producer, and video journalist. She is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Connecticut, with a focus on documentary filmmaking. She holds a joint appointment in the Africana Studies Institute and is an affiliate of UConn’s Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Program. Granby 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.

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: Geoffrey Hedges-Knyrim on Iron Age Politics and Agriculture

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2023–23 UCHI fellow's talk. Political Power during the Iron Age of the Southern Levant Through the Lens of Agricultural Production. Ph.D Candidate, Anthrpology department, Geoffrey Hedges-Knyrim. with a response by Xu Pen. October 11, 12:15pm. Humanities Institute Conference Room. Homer Babbidge Library 4th Floor.

Political Power during the Iron Age of the Southern Levant Through the Lens of Agricultural Production

Geoffrey Hedges-Knyrim (Anthropology, UConn)

with a response by Xu Peng (LCL, UConn)

Wednesday, October 11, 2023, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

The mundane agricultural practices of the Iron Age (c.1200—c.600 BCE) southern Levant (modern Jordan, Palestine, and Israel) are less understood and appreciated relative to larger historical narratives. Understanding the mundane through the archaeological record can exemplify the daily lives of people often ignored or marginalized in the historical record. Using a political ecology framework and plant data, we can determine how state-level societies controlled their agricultural base within their specific environmental and social constraints. This presentation will discuss the current understanding of Iron Age southern Levantine agriculture from an integrated and regional archaeological perspective, focusing on the contribution of archaeological plant remains. This will show how integrating mundane data within a regional perspective using political ecology is preferable to a subregional, siloed perspective.

Geoffrey Hedges-Knyrim is an archaeologist and doctoral candidate in the Anthropology Department. He received his BS in Anthropology from The College at Brockport, SUNY in 2013 and his MA in Anthropology from the University at Buffalo, SUNY in 2015. His research interests include archaeobotany, Bronze and Iron Age archaeology of Southwest Asia, and ancient subsistence practices.

Xu Peng is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut. His research focuses on the articulation of Asianness, and Chineseness in particular, in Latin America and the Caribbean. He will work on his dissertation, “From History to the Future: Chineseness in Contemporary Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Dominican Literatures and Cultures,” as a dissertation fellow at UCHI. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in College Literature, Hispanic American Historical Review, Caribbean Quarterly, and Journal of Asian American Studies.

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: David Evans on the Human Right to Food

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2023–24 UCHI fellow's talk. Rediscovering Hunger: The Human Right to Food and US Politics in the 1970s. Ph.D. candidate, history, David Evans. With a response by Kathryn Angelica. october 4, 12:15 pm. Humanities Institute conference room, fourth floor Homer Babbidge Library.

Rediscovering Hunger: The Human Right to Food and US Politics in the 1970s

David Evans (History, UConn)

with a response by Kathryn Angelica (History, UConn)

Wednesday, October 4, 2023, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

“Rediscovering Hunger” examines the political struggle surrounding the effort to embed the human right to food into US foreign and domestic policy in the mid-1970s. Following a disastrous world food crisis that lasted from 1973-1974, US citizens and political leaders re-awoke to the ethical problem that hunger presented. The promise of the modernization projects of the 1960s gave way to a reality in which wealthy countries remained well-fed, the global poor starved and suffered. Therefore in 1976, various US Congressional leaders, supported by a broad coalition of religious and secular activists, sought to establish the human right to food in US policy. The effort represented one of the earliest efforts in a wider human rights project that came to dominate US politics by the end of the decade. The episode also illustrated the constraints of effectively achieving human rights, as food producers and market fundamentalists contested the meaning and viability of the human right to food despite its moral universality.

David Evans is a doctoral candidate at the University of Connecticut where he studies the history of human rights, US foreign relations, and agricultural diplomacy. His dissertation “Hunger for Rights: Establishing the Human Right to Food, 1933–1988” explores how politicians, internationalists, and activists envisioned the human right to food, first within the discourse of international economic development, and then as a point of contention between advocates for social justice and supporters of deregulatory market policies. David is a husband and father to two children. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Before pursuing his academic career, David served eight years in the United States Marine Corps.

Kathryn Angelica is Ph.D. candidate in the History Department. Her research interests include gender & sexuality, women’s activism, and African American history in the nineteenth-century United States. While at UCHI, Kathryn will complete her dissertation “An Uneasy Alliance: Cooperation and Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Black and White Women’s Activism.”

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: Kathryn Angelica on Black Women’s Activism

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2023–24 UCHI Fellow's Talk. Public Patriotism: The United States Sanitary Commission and Black Women's Interregional Grassroots Activism During the Civil War. Kathryn Angelica, Ph.D. Candidate in history, with a response by Geoffrey Hedges-Knyrim. September 27, 12:15pm. Humanities Institute Conference Room, HBL Fourth Floor.

Public Patriotism: The United States Sanitary Commission and Black Women’s Interregional Grassroots Activism During the Civil War

Kathryn Angelica (History, UConn)

with a response by Geoffrey Hedges-Knyrim (Anthropology, UConn)

Wednesday, September 27, 2023, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

This talk examines how histories of the Civil War have neglected the contributions of African American women within and beyond the United States Sanitary Commission during the Civil War. Exploring African American laborers as janitors, clerks, waiters, and cooks, Black women’s contributions to the Sanitary Commission, and African American women’s independent patriotic organizations this talk considers the many ways women of color claimed their rightful place under the banner of patriotic Northern womanhood. Importantly, it also demonstrates how African American women’s organizations diverged from the centralized goals of the Sanitary Commission to encompass Black community support, aid for refugees, and medical relief for disabled soldiers.

Kathryn Angelica is Ph.D. candidate in the History Department. Her research interests include gender & sexuality, women’s activism, and African American history in the nineteenth-century United States. While at UCHI, Kathryn will complete her dissertation “An Uneasy Alliance: Cooperation and Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Black and White Women’s Activism.”

Geoffrey Hedges-Knyrim is an archaeologist and doctoral candidate in the Anthropology Department. He received his BS in Anthropology from The College at Brockport, SUNY in 2013 and his MA in Anthropology from the University at Buffalo, SUNY in 2015. His research interests include archaeobotany, Bronze and Iron Age archaeology of Southwest Asia, and ancient subsistence practices.

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.