Fellow’s Talk: Heather Cassano on The Fate of Human Beings

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2022–2023 UCHI Fellow's Talk. "Stories from State Hospital Cemeteries: Work-in-progress scenes from The Fate of Human Beings. Assistant Professor, Digital Media and Design, Heather Cassano, with a response by Cornelia Dayton. March 1, 2023, 3:30pm. UCHI Conference Room and livestreamed on Zoom.

Stories from State Hospital Cemeteries: Work-in-Progress Scenes from The Fate of Human Beings

Heather Cassano (Assistant Professor, DMD, UConn)

with a response by Cornelia Dayton (History, UConn)

Wednesday, March 1, 2023, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

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The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

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THE FATE OF HUMAN BEINGS is a feature-length documentary film uncovering the stories of people with disabilities and mental illnesses who are buried in unnamed graves in mental institution cemeteries across the United States. Through a multiple narrative approach utilizing archival and present-day material, the film unpacks the ramifications of these cemeteries, seeking to understand our past and present relationships with the “otherness” of those interred. This talk will present work-in-progress scenes from the film and discuss the research behind the project. The selected scenes will include characters from multiple narratives featuring stories of improper burials, activism, and memorialization; all relating to mental institution cemeteries across the country.

Heather Cassano is a documentary filmmaker and Assistant Professor of Film/Video at the University of Connecticut. Her films blend an observational style with deeply personal narratives, striving to tell authentic stories through her personal experiences. Heather’s first feature documentary THE LIMITS OF MY WORLD (2018), followed her severely autistic brother Brian as he transitioned from the school system into adulthood. The film screened at numerous festivals internationally, winning three Best Documentary awards and a Jury Prize. Heather is now working on her second feature documentary THE FATE OF HUMAN BEINGS, which uncovers the stories of people with disabilities and mental illnesses who are buried in unnamed graves in mental institution cemeteries across the United States.

Cornelia H. Dayton is a Professor of History at the University of Connecticut. Her research and teaching interests include law and society; women, gender, and sexuality; Black lives in the northeast and Atlantic world; Revolutionary-era Boston; marital elopement notices; the poor relief practice of warning newcomers; and New Englanders’ responses to mental health challenges prior to 1840. She is a co-editor of Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, heading into its 10th edition; author of Women before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639–1789; Robert Love’s Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston (with Sharon V. Salinger); “Taking the Trade: Abortion and Gender Relations in an 18th-Century New England Village” (William and Mary Quarterly); and, most recently, “Lost Years Recovered: John Peters and Phillis Wheatley Peters in Middleton,” in The New England Quarterly.

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.

DHMS Presents: The Lab Book

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The Digital Humanities and Media Studies Initiative Presents The Lab Book, Lori Emerson, Jussi Parikka, and Darren Wershler. February 27, 2023, 11:00 am. Live. Online. Registration required.

This event will include automated captioning. 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 Digital Humanities and Media Studies Initiative presents:

The Lab Book

with Lori Emerson, Jussi Parikka, and Darren Wershler

February 27, 2022, 11:00am
Live. Online. Registration required.

In this talk, we will discuss our recently published The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies, offering insights into how the book emerged and how it resonates with contemporary developments regarding “labs.” While our focus is on media and humanities labs, we expand the discussion to the broader field of research in STS on laboratories as sites of knowledge production which, however, are also thoroughly embedded in questions of imaginaries, politics of infrastructure, as well as social relations and power. Our book uses historical and contemporary case studies to discuss changes in how academic and non-academic practices are conceived and what sorts of techniques sustain the spaces we come to call “labs.” As we acknowledge in the book, “the first difficulty in talking about labs with any precision is that the metaphor of the lab has permeated contemporary culture to the degree that it can apply to just about anything.” With this starting point, we outline what we call the hybrid lab—a particular kind of a constellation that also applies to historical examples: labs have always already been hybrids.

Lori Emerson is Associate Professor in the English Department and the Intermedia Arts, Writing, and Performance Program (IAWP). She is also Director of IAWP and the Media Archaeology Lab. Emerson is co-author of THE LAB BOOK: Situated Practices in Media Studies (University of Minnesota Press 2022) with Darren Wershler and Jussi Parikka, author of Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound (University of Minnesota Press June 2014), and editor of numerous collections.

Jussi Parikka is Professor in Digital Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University in Denmark. He is also visiting professor at Winchester School of Art and at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague where he leads the project Operational Images and Visual Culture. His books include Insect Media (2010), Digital Contagions (2007/2016) and A Geology of Media (2015) Recently, he co-edited Photography Off the Scale (2021) and he is the co-author (with Lori Emerson and Darren Wershler) of The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies (2022). Jussi is also on the curatorial board of the next Helsinki Biennial as well as the curator (with Daphne Dragona) of Weather Engines (2022, 2023). http://jussiparikka.net.

Darren Wershler is Professor of English, Affiliate Professor of Communication Studies and Cinema and Acting Director of the Milieux Institute at Concordia. With Lori Emerson and Jussi Parikka, he is an author of THE LAB BOOK: Situated Practices in Media Studies (University of Minnesota Press, 2022).

UCHI Awarded Grant to Create Global Humanities Institute

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The UConn Humanities Institute is excited to announce that its joint application with Rutgers University for a Global Humanities Institute on Design Justice AI has been awarded funding. The project, which is led by the Rutgers Center of Cultural Analysis, has three (co-PI) partner institutes: the Humanities Research Centre at ANU, the Center for Advancement of Scholarship at the University of Pretoria, and the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut. Supported by the Mellon Foundation via the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, the project will fund an interdisciplinary series of workshops and conferences dedicated to building sustainable global research partnerships that address the ethics of artificial intelligence, including a two-week long institute held at the University of Pretoria in 2024.

The rapid diffusion of so-called “Generative AI”—machine learning technologies that simulate human languages, communication, arts, and cultures through the statistical modeling of vast troves of “scraped” internet data, including ChatGPT and Dall-E3—signals the importance of bringing humanities scholars into conversations about “ethical AI.” The challenge of studying “generative AI” is to lay out the stakes, human as well as humanistic, of commercial technologies that aim to influence—even “revolutionize”—the practices and political economies that bear on human cultural production. The Global Humanities Institute on Design Justice AI will ask:

What would be lost from human creativity and diversity if writers or visual artists come to rely on predictive models trained on selective datasets that exclude the majority of the world’s many cultures and languages?

What frameworks or evaluation practices might help to concretize what is meant by “intelligence,” “understanding,” or “creativity”—for machines as well as humans? How might such humanistic interventions help diverse citizens to participate in the design and implementation of generative technologies and the benchmarks that evaluate them?

If evidence suggests that “generative AI” is harmful—and/or counter to the professed object of enhancing human lifeworlds—what alternatives might be forged through community participation in research that rearticulates goals, and reframes design from the bottom up? What kinds of teaching, research, community practices, and policies might sustain these humanist-inflected and justice-oriented design processes?

These research questions go to the heart of what inclusive collaborations can contribute to the study of resource-intensive technologies that aim to monetize and “disrupt” human communication and creativity.

This project is an exciting reaffirmation of UCHI’s dedication to addressing crucial issues on a global scale.

Fellow’s Talk: Sandy Grande on Indigenous Elders

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2022-2023 UCHI Fellow's talk. Indigenous Elders, Decolonial Futures. Professor of Political Science and NAIS Sandy Grande, with a response by Joseph Darda. February 22, 2023, 3:30pm. UCHI Conference Room. This event will also be livestreamed.

Indigenous Elders, Decolonial Futures

Sandy Grande (Professor, Political Science & NAIS, UConn)

with a response by Joseph Darda (English, Texas Christian University)

Wednesday, February 22, 2023, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

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In this talk, Prof. Sandy Grande troubles the prevailing narrative of global aging as a crisis wherein older adults are conceived as a threat to current systems of governance and infrastructure. Against this narrative she asks: What if instead of crisis, we imagine global aging as a condition of possibility? More specifically, her work considers the rising tide of older adults as providing a portal for reconsidering some of the central dichotomies and contradictions of a settler society built on the exigencies of capital: the conflation of work with existence; the tying of economic growth to production; the limiting of production to wage labor; and association of old age with declining yield. In this work, she centers Indigenous Elders as both subject and analytic, considering how they intervene in and ‘refuse’ the dominant formulations of aging. Her central claim is that Elder ways of being and knowing will become increasingly important as we conceptualize the end of settler hegemony and the possibilities of decolonial futures.

Sandy Grande is a Professor of Political Science and Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Connecticut with affiliations in American Studies, Philosophy, and the Race, Ethnicity and Politics program. Her research and teaching interfaces Native American and Indigenous Studies with critical theory toward the development of more nuanced analyses of the colonial present. She was recently awarded the Ford Foundation, Senior Fellowship (2019–2020) for a project on Indigenous Elders and aging. Her book, Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought was published in a 10th anniversary edition and a Portuguese translation is anticipated to be published in Brazil in 2023.

Joseph Darda is an associate professor of literature at Texas Christian University and the author of three books on the cultural life of race in the United States: The Strange Career of Racial Liberalism (Stanford, 2022), How White Men Won the Culture Wars (California, 2021), and Empire of Defense (Chicago, 2019). He has published articles in American Literary History, American Literature, American Quarterly, and Critical Inquiry, among other journals, and contributed essays to the Los Angeles Review of Books. With the historian Amira Rose Davis, he is coediting a forthcoming special issue of American Quarterly titled “The Body Issue: Sports and the Politics of Embodiment.”

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.

#IndigiReads 2023

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The #IndigiReads working group, organized by Cristina Connolly, Sandy Grande, and Amy Safran, invites UConn community members from across the university to join students, staff and faculty in the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative (NAISI) to meet regularly across the spring semester 2023, to read and discuss texts related to food sovereignty, Indigenous knowledge systems, agriculture, and the environment. In acknowledgement that Connecticut is home to several Tribal Nations and the University sits on Indigenous lands, this group will work to increase understanding of the history and current state of these relations. Participants will grow their perspectives and deepen their interdisciplinary understandings with an aim to develop better working relations across academic units and with Native American and Indigenous students/communities.

This semester the group is reading Hi′ilei Hobart’s book, Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment, which, “connects the colonialist introduction of ice and refrigeration to Hawaii to current Native Hawaiian food sovereignty.”

Join them in ODI Commons, SU 103, NACP student space on

Friday, February 24, 2023 at 12:30pm
Friday, March 10, 2023 at 12:30pm
Friday, March 24, 2023 at 12:30pm
Friday, March 31, 2023 at 3:00pm

The Political Theory Workshop Presents: Roberto Alejandro

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THE POLITICAL THEORY WORKSHOP PRESENTS

“Political Disorientation, Legibility, and Trumpism”

Roberto Alejandro, Political Science, UMass Amherst
with commentary by Justin Theodra, Political Science, UConn
February 20, 2023 from 12:15–1:30pm, Oak 438 and Zoom.

With generous support from the UConn Humanities Institute.

Questions? Email jane.gordon@uconn.edu

Fellow’s Talk: Cornelia Dayton on Lawyering while Black in the 18th Century

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2022–23 UCHI Fellow's Talk. Litigating and Lawyering while Black in Late 18th-Century Massachusetts. Professor of History Cornelia Dayton, with a response by Yuhan Liang. February 15, 2023, 3:30pm. UCHI Conference Room. This event will also be livestreamed.

Litigating and Lawyering while Black in Late 18th-Century Massachusetts

Cornelia Dayton (Professor of History, UConn)

with a response by Yuhan Liang (Ph.D. Candidate, Philosophy, UConn)

Wednesday, February 15, 2023, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

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The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

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The talk presents an overview of new research findings on the legal activities of John Peters of Boston (ca. 1745–1801). His multi-faceted entwinement with the law may have been the most extensive for any Black person in the Northeast in the 1700s. Peters was a savvy litigator who employed eminent lawyers and called himself a lawyer at one point. As a Black man who aspired to gentility and who married a celebrated Black woman of letters, the poet Phillis Wheatley (d. 1784), Peters drew some Whites’ ire and condescension. My larger aim is to produce a biography of Peters framed for academic, classroom, and general audiences.

Cornelia H. Dayton is a Professor of History at the University of Connecticut. Her research and teaching interests include law and society; women, gender, and sexuality; Black lives in the northeast and Atlantic world; Revolutionary-era Boston; marital elopement notices; the poor relief practice of warning newcomers; and New Englanders’ responses to mental health challenges prior to 1840. She is a co-editor of Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, heading into its 10th edition; author of Women before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639–1789; Robert Love’s Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston (with Sharon V. Salinger); “Taking the Trade: Abortion and Gender Relations in an 18th-Century New England Village” (William and Mary Quarterly); and, most recently, “Lost Years Recovered: John Peters and Phillis Wheatley Peters in Middleton,” in The New England Quarterly.

Yuhan Liang is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Connecticut. Her research is interdisciplinary and involves Chinese philosophy, virtue epistemology, and moral psychology. At UCHI, she works on the dissertation “Confucian exemplars and Moral Diversity.” This dissertation aims to reconcile moral diversity and consistency via exemplarism approaches. Unlike most Anglo-American philosophies that adopt a top-down approach to studying moral questions in the frame of normative ethics and metaethics, Confucian exemplarism provides a bottom-up pragmatic approach: through reverse engineer exemplars’ everyday practices or instructions, we reconstruct the theoretical commitments based on their moral excellency.

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.

DHMS Presents: Andrew Piper on Textual Evidence in a Time of Data

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The Digital Humanities and Media Studies Initiative Present. Can We Be Wrong?: The Problem of Textual Evidence in a Time of Data. Andrew Piper, Professor, Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, McGill University. February 8, 2023, 1:00pm. Live. Online. Registration required.

This event will include automated captioning. 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 Digital Humanities and Media Studies Initiative presents:

Can We Be Wrong?: The Problem of Textual Evidence in a Time of Data

Andrew Piper

February 8, 2022, 1:00pm
Live. Online. Registration required.

This talk will address the problem of generalization when it comes to text-based evidence. How can we move, reliably and credibly, from individual observations about texts to more general beliefs about the world? The rise of computational methods has highlighted major shortcomings informing traditional approaches to textual analysis. In this talk, I will illustrate how we can use methods like machine-learning to study texts and reflect on the limitations (and affordances) of traditional text analysis.

Andrew Piper is Professor and William Dawson Scholar in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University. He is the director of .txtlab a laboratory for cultural analytics, and author most recently of Can We Be Wrong? The Problem of Textual Evidence in a Time of Data (Cambridge) and Enumerations: Data and Literary Study (Chicago).

Fellow’s Talk: Hind Ahmed Zaki on Feminism, Law, and Violence

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UCHI Fellow's Talks 2022–23. Gendered Sovereignty: Feminist Politics, , Law, and Violence in Egypt and Tunisia (2011-2017). Assistant Professor, Political Science & LCL Hind Ahmed Zaki. With a response by Britney Murphy. February 8, 2023, 3:30pm. Humanities Institute Conference Room. This event will also be livestreamed.

Gendered Sovereignty: Feminist Politics, Law, and Violence in Egypt and Tunisia (2011–2017)

Hind Ahmed Zaki (Assistant Professor of Political Science and Literatures, Cultures, & Languages, UConn)

with a response by Britney Murphy (Ph.D. Candidate, History, UConn)

Wednesday, February 8, 2023, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

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The few months following the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia in 2010–2011, more widely known as the first wave of the Arab spring, were an exhilarating time for a diverse set group of feminists. New women-led groups were forming at an astonishing rate, with new feminist initiatives and collectives springing up every day. These initiatives ranged from seeking to influence post-revolutionary constitutions, negotiating women’s safety in public and at home, fighting for increased political participation, and holding state agents accountable for committing acts of gender-based violence. Despite their diversity, these groups shared an engagement with the Law as the main tool for improving the status of women. All saw the uprisings as an opportunity to negotiate laws that had produced the gendered legal categories they had to contest everywhere.

This talk situates feminist activism in the context of the Arab spring within broader political struggles over the limits of state’s authority in the aftermath of uprisings. I theorize outcomes of feminist politics through a new framework that I term gendered sovereignty: the web of attachments, procedurals, and identities that are formed in relation to histories of state sponsored legal feminism that are, in turn, closely tied with longer histories of authoritarian rule. I draw on three years (2013–2017) of multi-cited ethnographic field work, 200 in-depth interviews, archival research, NGO reports, court cases, draft by-laws, transcripts of transitional justice proceedings, to illuminate the ways in which histories of state-sponsored feminist were implicated in the production of local notions and practices of state sovereignty over the long durée, and the ways in which contemporary feminist movements challenged gendered practices of state sovereignty following the uprisings. Applying this framework comparatively to the cases of Egypt and Tunisia, I show how in Tunisia, legal reforms related to combatting gender-based violence played a major role in reinstating state power and authority; while in Egypt sovereignty and prestige were restored through the suspension of juridical and legal state powers, and the use of state-sanctioned gendered violence. Ultimately, I argue that feminist identities created through affective, procedural, and legal attachments to histories of state-sponsored feminism, not only influenced the political outcome for women’s rights, but also reshaped state sovereignty through reproducing, reinforcing, and challenging the prerogative and carceral powers of the authoritarian states. As such, this research project places feminist projects at the heart of broader struggles for democratization, human dignity and rights. It also questions common liberal assumptions about the links between gender justice and the rule of law, especially in transitional political contexts.

Hind Ahmed Zaki an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. She joined UConn in 2019 and received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Washington in Seattle in 2018. Prior to joining UConn, Dr. Ahmed Zaki was the Harold Grinspoon postdoctoral fellow at Brandies University (2018/2019), and Middle East Initiative Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her scholarly interests span feminist political theory and praxis, transnational feminist movements and politics, gender-based violence, and comparative politics of the state, with a special focus on the Middle East and North Africa. Dr. Ahmed Zaki’s research is published in several languages. She has been an elected member at large of the board of the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies (AMEWS) since 2018.

Britney Murphy is a doctoral candidate in the History Department. Her research interests include modern U.S. history, urban history, environmental justice, food access, and volunteerism. While at UCHI, Britney will complete her dissertation, “Outsiders Within: Volunteers in Service to America and the Boundaries of Citizenship, 1962–1971.”

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.

A New Director for the Humanities Institute

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We are very excited to welcome Professor Anna Mae Duane as the fourth director of the UConn Humanities Institute. Her appointment as director will begin this August.

As Provost Anne D’Alleva noted in her announcement of Professor Duane’s appointment, Professor Duane was selected from a very impressive pool of candidates and “has demonstrated a commitment to and understanding of the humanities across a range of disciplines and support for the diverse voices and perspectives that constitute UCHI.”

The recipient of two UCHI fellowships, Professor Duane is deeply involved in interdisciplinary scholarship at UConn and beyond. A professor of English, Professor Duane conducts research that reaches beyond disciplinary boundaries, engaging with childhood studies, literary and critical theory, and disability studies.

Professor Duane has articulated an exciting vision for the Humanities Institute—building on the legacy created over the past twenty-one years, in large part by the leadership of current director Michael Lynch, and branching out in new directions to create an even more robust and vibrant community of humanities scholars at UConn. We can’t wait to see that vision in action.

We’d like to thank the search committee for their work, and we would also like to thank the whole Provost’s office for overseeing the search process, with special thanks to Senior Vice Provost Jeffrey Shoulson.

A Message from the New Director

Anna Mae Duane headshot

It’s a dream come true for me to lead the Humanities Institute here at UConn. As a faculty member and as a UCHI fellow, I’ve had a front row seat to the remarkable leadership of our previous Director, Michael Lynch, Director of Academic Affairs Alexis Boylan, and the rest of the UCHI team, including Yohei Igarashi, Elizabeth Della Zazzera, Nasya Al-Saidy, and Mary Volpe. Together, they have fostered an internationally recognized site of intellectual excellence that fosters cutting-edge research and collaboration. As we move forward, I am committed to building on this foundation by continuing our outreach to renowned scholars in the humanities across the globe, while expanding our efforts within the UConn community to support our faculty and students.
—Anna Mae Duane