Applying to Graduate School

Applying to Graduate School. Featuring Rachel Szostak (School of Law), Melanie Newport (History), and Alexander Menrisky (English). November 7, 1:00pm. Virtual.

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. Requests should be made at least five business days in advance whenever possible

Applying to Graduate School

November 7, 2025, 1:00pm
Live • Online • Registration Required

Register

Thinking about graduate study in the humanities, social sciences, or law? Join us for “Applying to Graduate School” and learn from the people who make decisions about admitting students into graduate programs. Our panelists will explain what they look for in applicants, and what mistakes you should avoid. There will be ample time for questions.

Featuring Rachel Szostak (School of Law), Melanie Newport (History), and Alexander Menrisky (English).

Register now.

Fellow’s Talk: Jennifer Cazenave on Wiseman’s Deaf and Blind series

2025–26 UCHI Fellow's Talk. "Memories of Public Television: Revisiting Frederick Wiseman’s Deaf and Blind Series." Jennifer Cazenave, French and Cinema Studies, Boston University. With a response by Fiona Somerset. November 5, 3:30pm. UCHI Conference Room, Fourth Floor.

Memories of Public Television: Revisiting Frederick Wiseman’s Deaf and Blind Series

Jennifer Cazenave (Associate Professor, French and Cinema & Media Studies, Boston University)

with a response by Fiona Somerset (Literatures, Cultures, and Languages & Social and Critical Inquiry, UConn)

Wednesday, November 5, 2025, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend

In September 1984, Frederick Wiseman undertook the Deaf and Blind series, a four-part documentary about the Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind in Talladega. At the time, Wiseman was already a veteran of public television: he had made more than a dozen documentaries for PBS, establishing a reputation as an auteur who achieved access inside myriad American institutions. The Deaf and Blind series was broadcast on PBS in 1988, two years before the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Several decades later, this four-part documentary remains a marginalized media object in Wiseman’s archive of American life. This talk reconsiders the Deaf and Blind series through the lens of overlooked histories and perspectives, including issues of access and mainstreaming debates that harken back to the 19th century.

Jennifer Cazenave is Associate Professor of French and Cinema & Media Studies at Boston University. She is currently a Visiting Residential Fellow at UCHI. Her research interests include documentary cinema, disability studies, archive and memory studies, Holocaust and genocide studies, and gender studies. She is the author of An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah.” Her work has also appeared in edited volumes, journals, and magazines including SubStance, Cinema Journal, and Los Angeles Review of Books.

Fiona Somerset is Professor of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies as well as Social and Critical Inquiry at the University of Connecticut, where she has served as Codirector of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies and Interim Director of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is finishing work on a book on the medieval history of consent through silence, and preparing to write another book on personhood in the Middle Ages.

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. Requests should be made at least five business days in advance whenever possible

Fellow’s Talk: Asmita Aasaavari on Aging in Connecticut

UCHI Fellow's Talk 2025-26. Aging and Care Sans Rights: Portraits of Later Life from Northeast Connecticut. Asmita Aasaavari, PhD Canadidate, Sociology. with a response by Christopher Vials. October 29, 3:30pm. UCHI Conference Room, HBL fourth floor.

Aging and Care sans Rights: Portraits of Later Life from Northeast Connecticut

Asmita Aasaavari (Ph.D. Candidate, Sociology, UConn)

with a response by Christopher Vials (English & Social and Critical Inquiry, UConn)

Wednesday, October 29, 2025, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend

Compared to the last three decades, people today spend more of their lives caring for elderly parents or ill spouses than ever before, due to longer lifespans, advancements in medical technology, and an increasing number of disabled adults. Most academic and policy discussions of these trends focus on the challenges this creates for the “sandwich generation,” caregivers who balance employment with care for children and aging parents. Yet 34% of older adults also care for others, including spouses, grandchildren, and parents (AARP 2015). In this talk, I present narratives of aging and care from an ethnography set in Northeast Connecticut. Centering the role of race, class, and gender-based negotiations, I discuss how older adults approach later life, especially in situations where they are expected to care for others alongside their own aging needs. I also highlight the value of rights-informed perspectives in studying later life and discuss how class status, social supports, and life-course developments complicate our understanding of economic disadvantage.

Asmita Aasaavari is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at UConn. In her research, she uses interdisciplinary methods and sociological lenses to shed light on how aging and the social organization of care intersect with systems of inequality such as race, class, gender, and disability. Her research and teaching have been recognized and funded by the American Sociological Association, Social and Economic Rights Association, The Hastings Center, UConn Human Rights Institute, among others. Professionally, beyond academia, Asmita has worked with social science research institutions in India and the US in the fields of aging, gender, education, poverty alleviation, politics, and volunteered with rights-based social movements.

Chris Vials is a Professor in English and the School of Social and Critical Inquiry at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of Haunted by Hitler: Liberals, the Left, and the Fight against Fascism in the United States (2014) and Realism for the Masses: Aesthetics, Popular Front Pluralism, and US Culture, 1935-1947 (2009). He is also the editor, with Bill Mullen, of The US Antifascism Reader, published by Verso Press in 2020, and the sole editor of American Literature in Transition: 1940-1950 (Cambridge, 2017).

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. Requests should be made at least five business days in advance whenever possible

Faculty Talk: Sarah Williams on Specters of Ir/responsible Reproduction

2025-26 UCHI Faculty Talk. Eugenic Eidolons: Birth Tourism and Specters of Ir/responsible Reproduction in Mexico. Sarah Williams, Assistant Professor of Anthropology. October 29, 12:15pm. UCHI Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library, Fourth Floor.

Eugenic Eidolons: Birth Tourism and Specters of Ir/responsible Reproduction in Mexico

Sarah Williams (Assistant Professor, Anthropology, UConn)

Wednesday, October 29, 2025, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

Projects of population-shaping rely on fabricated apparitions—eidolons, specters of the idealized responsible reproducer whose decisions serve the eugenic goals of their countries, and revenants of eugenics projects, irresponsible reproducers, who serve as a foil to eugenic goals in discourse and policy. In Yucatan, where eugenic logics permeate local reproductive landscapes, im/migration is high, and a birth tourism economy serving Global North citizens—eidolons—has flourished, exploring the tensions between the figures of eidolon and revenant offers a means of understanding the stickiness of labels of ir/responsible reproduction to race and class. As im/migrants enter a budding economy of guides, legal services, and healthcare that commoditizes their own reproduction as a tool for accessing citizenship and property in Mexico, they do so in a context where Mexican women must contend with the eugenic ghosts that haunt their kin-making decisions while enduring denigrating rhetoric that makes a revenant of their reproduction. Tracing these specters reveals how they are illustrative of the internal contradictions of reproductive racial capitalism: capital demands a regenerating underclass of cheap labor, while the racist logics that enable capitalism stifle the reproduction of that same underclass, resulting in a paradox: responsible reproduction is an always already unachievable goal, whose promotion perpetuates the racial projects that support capitalism.

Sarah A. Williams, PhD, is an applied medical anthropologist, birthworker, and scholar of global and Indigenous perinatal health. Her scholarship is primarily focused on midwifery and obstetrics and the relationship between racialization, medical racism, and perinatal healthcare in Mexico and Canada. Her book project, entitled “Always Already Vanishing: Midwifery’s Future(s), Indigeneity, and the Mexican State,” traces midwifery organizing, professionalization, and collaboration to protect traditional midwifery and counter obstetric violence and racism in Mexico. She is currently the Co-Investigator and Qualitative Research Lead on the QueerCOVID-Toronto project, which is examining the impact of the pandemic and public health policy on queer people’s mental and physical health.

Access note

If you require accommodations 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. Requests should be made at least five business days in advance whenever possible

How to Write Successful Fellowship Applications

How to Write Successful Fellowship Applications. with Yohei Igarashi, Ana María Diaz Marcos, and Geoffrey Hedges-Knyrim. October 17, 1:00pm. Virtual

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. Requests should be made at least five business days in advance whenever possible

How to Write Successful Fellowship Applications

October 24, 2025, 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 UCHI fellows Yohei Igarashi, Ana María Diaz Marcos, and Geoffrey Hedges-Knyrim, 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: Catalina Alvarado-Cañuta on Creative Mapuche Spirits

UCHI Fellow's Talk, 2025-26. "Collective Healings from Wallmapu in Creative Mapuche Spirits," Catalina Alvarado-Cañuta (Phd Candidate, Anthropology, UConn), with a response by Harry van der Hulst. October 22, 3:30pm. Virtual.

Collective Healings from Wallmapu in Creative Mapuche Spirits

Catalina Alvarado-Cañuta (Ph.D. Candidate, Anthropology, UConn)

with a response by Harry van der Hulst (Linguistics, UConn)

Wednesday, October 22, 2025, 3:30pm, Virtual

This virtual event will include automated captioning.

Register to attend

This talk explores the role of contemporary Mapuche art in healing colonial trauma. Understanding colonial trauma as a historical and transgenerational process that continues to produce violence through modern state structures, the research proposes indigenous art as a decolonial methodology capable of transforming narratives of defeat into stories of dignity and resistance.

Based on the work of four renowned Mapuche creators—a jeweler, two visual artists, and a weaver—the talk analyzes creative experiences that not only rescue memory and traditional knowledge but also generate new forms of political and cultural representation. Art is conceived here as a means of collective healing, in which healing goes beyond the individual dimension to include territories, spiritualities, and intergenerational bonds.

From this perspective, indigenous art becomes a practice of re-existence and affirmation of autonomy, allowing for the restoration of Küme Mongen (Good Living) and opening spaces for historical, cultural, and spiritual reparation for the Mapuche people.

Catalina Alvarado-Cañuta is a Fulbright scholar of Mapuche origin who is currently a PhD candidate in Medical Anthropology at the University of Connecticut. She has a master’s degree in Social Anthropology from the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS), Oaxaca, Mexico. Catalina has worked in public service as a manager of health programs for the indigenous population in Chile, and she has worked as an academic at universities in Chile. Alvarado-Cañuta’s main focus is on colonial trauma and the processes of collective healings of indigenous peoples, and indigenous art as a decolonial methodology. Her latest co-authored work is the chapter “Trig Metawe: Restoring the cracks of dispossession for Küme Mongen,” in which she and Mapuche artist Francisco Huichaqueo analyze the plundering of Mapuche archaeological heritage distributed among museums in Chile and around the world as part of the processes that generate Colonial Trauma and how its possible restitution or accompaniment to Mapuche archaeological heritage contributes to the restitution of the collective well-being of Mapuche people. Alvarado- Cañuta is an activist scholar who maintains family ties with her Mapuche community in Ercilla, where she is the community coordinator for Mapuche heritage restitution issues. She is currently a member of the Buen Vivir and Collective Healings Initiative, a research group that uses participatory action methodologies led by Dr. César Abadía-Barrero at the University of Connecticut. Catalina has recently taken on the role of Co-Coordinator of the Abiayala Working Group section of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA).

Harry van der Hulst (PhD 1984, Leiden University, Netherlands) specializes in phonology (of spoken and signed languages). He has published 5 books, over 180 articles, (co-)edited 32 books and 6 journal theme issues, among them The Oxford Handbook of Vowel Harmony (with Nancy Ritter) in 2024. He is Editor-in-Chief of The Linguistic Review. He is professor of linguistics at the University of Connecticut. His most recent books include, Asymmetries in Vowel Harmony – A Representational Account (Oxford, 2018); Radical CV Phonology – A Theory of Segmental and Syllabic Structure (Edinburgh, 2020), A Mind for Language (Cambridge, 2024) and Genes, Brains and Evolution (Cambridge, forthcoming).

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. Requests should be made at least five business days in advance whenever possible

The Strategic Pitch Workshop

Incubator for Collaborative Grants Series: The Strategic Pitch, A Workshop. October 21, 2025. 2:00PM-3:30PM. UCHI Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library, 4th 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. Requests should be made at least five business days in advance whenever possible.

The Incubator for Collaborative Grants Series

The Strategic Pitch Workshop

October 21, 2025, 2:00–3:30pm
UCHI Conference Room, HBL Fourth Floor

Register

The Strategic Pitch Workshop is designed to guide attendees through the process of distilling a project idea into a compelling summary. Like the spoken-word, two-minute elevator pitch, the strategic pitch is a brief written document used during early project conceptualization as well as pre-proposal activities. Its purpose is to gain early support, connect with collaborators, and garner feedback and recommendations along the way to a grant proposal. Attendees need not have a project already in mind. Those who do will be able to develop their ideas during the session.

The Incubator for Collaborative Humanities Grants series is a program of UCHI and Greenhouse Studios at Internal Insights & Innovation (GS@i3). Our mission is to help those working in the humanities, arts, and humanistic social sciences to connect with each other, other disciplines, and community partners in order to conceptualize, develop, and implement collaborative grants. Stay tuned for future workshops and news.

Register now.

Environmental Humanities: Common Ground

The Environmental Humanities Initiative presents Common Ground. Join us for a community building event. October 22, 11:00am to 2:00pm, Benton Museum, Upstairs.

UCHI’s Environmental Humanities Initiative Presents:

Common Ground

Wednesday, October 22, 2025, 11:00am–2:00pm, Benton Museum, Upstairs

Join the Environmental Humanities Initiative for Common Ground, a community-building and networking event for UConn faculty, staff, and students! Connect with others who care about the environment, contribute to an interactive community tree art project, and pick up practical sustainability tips.

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. Requests should be made at least five business days in advance whenever possible.

Humanities Student Support Open House

Questions about course registration? about your major? your minor? about being a humanities, arts, or social science student at UConn? Get your questions answered at the Humanities Peer Support Open House. October 17, 3:45pm at the humanities institute, fourth floor of homer babbidge library. Pizza and refreshments will be served. Organized by the Humanities Institute Undergraduate Advisory Council.

The Humanities Institute Undergraduate Advisory Council and the Student Success Initiative Present:

Humanities Peer Support Open House

October 17, 2025, 3:45pm

Humanities Institute, Homer Babbidge Library, Fourth Floor

Free pizza and refreshments will be served

Do you have questions about course registration? about your major? your minor? about being a humanities, arts, or social science student at UConn? Do you want to meet other people in your major or in other related majors? Join the Humanities Institute Undergraduate Advisory Council for the inaugural Humanities Peer Support Open House and get advice from your peers while enjoying free pizza and snacks!

Students who wish to serve as peer leaders at the open house should fill in this form.

What Are We Talking About When We Talk About AI?

UConn and UIR present and interdisciplinary, international symposium: What are we talking about when we talk about AI?. UCHI Conference Room, Homer Babbidge library, 4th floor. October 9, 9:15am-4:30pm.

The University of Connecticut Humanities Institute and the International University of Rabat presents:

What Are We Talking About When We Talk About AI?

An Interdisciplinary, International Symposium

Thursday, October 9, 2025, 9:15am–4:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)
The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually Register to attend in person

When computer scientists, philosophers, medical researchers, and legal scholars use words like “learning,” “intelligence,” and “autonomy,” do they mean the same thing? Join us for an international symposium exploring how disciplinary and cultural differences in AI terminology are shaping how artificial intelligence is understood, engaged and developed.

This symposium will address the challenges that language and translation (both conceptual and linguistic) pose to collaboration on AI research. It is part of “Reading Between the Lines: An Interdisciplinary Glossary for Human-Centered AI,” a project is funded by The Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes’ Human Craft in the Age of Digital Technologies Initiative.

Schedule

9:15am Coffee and welcome
9:45-10:00am Introductions
10:05-11:30am Panel 1: Care

How might we define how “care” functions via Artificial Intelligence? What are the challenges and opportunities for integrating vulnerable patient voices in healthcare? How is AI changing how we care for one another as AI companions and therapists become more common?

Chair: Jiyoun Suk; Assistant Professor of Communication, University of Connecticut
Panelists:
Anna Mae Duane; Professor of English, University of Connecticut
Ihsane Hmamouchi; Rheumatologist and Epidemiologist, International University of Rabat
Ouassim Karrakchou; Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Digital Engineering, International University of Rabat

11:30am-12:15pm Lunch and Networking
12:15-2:00pm Panel 2: Literacy

What does it mean to be “literate” in AI? This panel will bring together educators, historians, and literary experts to ask how the rise of AI literacy evokes comparisons to past transformations in literacy, and concomitant expansions of democratic and economic participation. What do we risk if we restrict literacy to an elite few? What skill sets are required to make us truly AI literate?

Chair: Tina Huey; Adjunct Professor of English, University of Connecticut
Panelists:
Anke Finger; Professor of German and Comparative Literature, University of Connecticut
Arash Zaghi; Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Connecticut
Ting-An Lin; Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Connecticut
Hakim Hafidi; Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Digital Engineering, International University of Rabat

2:00-2:15pm Coffee Break
2:20-4:00pm Panel 3: Rights (to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness?)

How will AI transform property rights, labor rights and human rights? How does language shape this process?

Chair: Brad Tuttle; Assistant Professor of Journalism, University of Connecticut
Panelists:
John Murphy; Assistant Professor-in Residence of Digital Media Business Strategies, University of Connecticut
Avijit Ghosh; Applied Policy Researcher for the Machine Learning and Society Team at Hugging Face
Meriem Regragui; Professor of Law, International University of Rabat
Michael Lynch; Provost Professor of the Humanities and Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, University of Connecticut

4:00-4:10pm Closing Remarks, Dean Ofer Harel
4:10-4:30pm Reception

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. Requests should be made at least five business days in advance whenever possible