Fellow’s Talk: Stefan Kaufmann on the Language of Time and Possibility

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UCHI Fellow's talks 2022–23. "Speaking of time and possibility" Associate professor of Linguistics Stefan Kaufmann, with a response by Kareem Khalifa. February 1, 2023, 3:30pm. UCHI Conference Room. This event will also be livestreamed.

Speaking of Time and Possibility

Stefan Kaufmann (Associate Professor of Linguistics, UConn)

with a response by Kareem Khalifa (Philosophy, UCLA)

Wednesday, February 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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All languages provide their speakers with ways to talk about uncertainty, unrealized possibilities, expectations for the future and evaluations of the past. Conditional sentences (if-then sentences in English) are prime examples:

  1. If Biden runs in 2024, Kim will vote for him.
  2. If Biden ran in 2024, Kim would vote for him.
  3. If Biden had run in 2024, Kim would have voted for him.

The interpretation of these sentences depends to a large extent on the temporal expressions (tense, aspect, adverbs) in their constituents. Interestingly, conditional constructions create special environments in which temporal expressions seem to take on meanings which they don’t have elsewhere. But what exactly are those special meanings, and how (if at all) are they related to their ordinary meanings? Such questions have attracted much attention in Linguistics and Philosophy. The patterns we find, not only in English but also across languages, offer fascinating case studies on the relationship between superficial diversity and underlying uniformity in the mapping between meaning and form. In this talk I will outline some of the issues and sketch my own ongoing work.

Stefan Kaufmann is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut. Prior to joining UConn in 2013, he received his PhD at Stanford in 2001, was a postdoctoral fellow at Kyoto University, and taught at Northwestern University. His research revolves around the meaning and use of language: how information is encoded in linguistic expressions, the range of variability of this encoding across languages, and what linguistic patterns can reveal about the way speakers view and think about themselves and their physical and social surroundings.

Kareem Khalifa is a professor of philosophy at UCLA (2022–present). Prior to that, he was at Middlebury College in Vermont (2006–2022). His research interests include general philosophy of science, philosophy of social science, and epistemology. In addition to authoring over 30 articles, he authored the book, Understanding, Explanation, and Scientific Knowledge (Cambridge, 2017) and co-edited Scientific Understanding and Representation: Modeling in the Physical Sciences (Routledge, 2022). He is currently extending his previous work in these areas to social-scientific conceptions of race and segregation. He is currently a Future of Truth Fellow at the University of Connecticut’s Humanities Institute. In 2025, he will be the Senior Visiting Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Philosophy of Science. In 2017, he received the American Council of Learned Societies’ Burkhardt Award, which funded a five-year project, Explanation as Inferential Practice.

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.

2023–24 Humanities Research Fellowship Information Session

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Humanities research fellowships for UConn undergraduates. Information Session. January 30, 2023, 2:30pm. Humanities Institute Conference Room

Humanities Research Fellowship Information Session

January 30, 2023, 2:30pm

Humanities Institute Conference Room, HBL 4-209 and on Zoom. Registration is required for virtual attendees.

We are holding an information session for prospective applicants for the 2023–24 Humanities Research Fellowship—a year-long fellowship for UConn undergraduates pursuing innovative research in the humanities. In this session, we will go over the application process, offer tips and tricks for writing a compelling application, and answer questions.

For more details on the fellowship, see the call for applications. Applications are due February 24, 2023.

ACCESS NOTE

Virtual attendees will have access to automated captioning. If you require accommodations to attend, please email uchi@uconn.edu or contact us by phone at (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpreting, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

Fellow’s Talk: Elva Orozco Mendoza on Mothers Reclaiming Our Children

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2022–23 UCHI Fellow's Talk. All Prisoners are Somebody's Children: Mothers ROC—Resisisting People of Color's Captivity Through Direct Action. Assistant Professor Political Science & WGSS, Elva Orozco Mendoza, with a response by Julia Brush. January 25, 2023, 3:30pm. Humanities Institute Conference Room. This event will also be livestreamed.

All Prisoners Are Somebody’s Children: Mothers ROC—Resisting People of Color’s Captivity Through Direct Action

Elva Orozco Mendoza (Assistant Professor of Political Science and WGSS, UConn)

with a response by Julia Brush (Ph.D. Candidate, English, UConn)

Wednesday, January 25, 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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Following the 1992 uprising in Los Angeles, California, several grassroots organizations emerged to protest the growing imprisonment of Black and Latino men under false or exaggerated charges. One such organization was Mothers Reclaiming our Children, Mothers ROC, formed by women whose children had been incarcerated as they sought to promote a gang truce to bring peace to their neighborhoods. This chapter draws on historical archives, films, web content, and other literary sources to discuss Mothers ROC’s grassroots mobilization against forced separation due to their children’s imprisonment. I argue that Mothers ROC’s activism helped to change the persistent association of Blackness and criminality produced at the highest levels of government by reclaiming motherhood as a political and ethical orientation. While often stigmatized and blamed for fomenting their children’s lawless behavior, Mothers ROC members worked to reclaim their children in several ways. First, by contesting their physical captivity and denouncing the institutions that deliberately fabricated the systematic imprisonment of Black and Latinx youth. Second, by invoking the mothers’ right to tell their children’s stories instead of allowing the state criminalization efforts to go unchallenged. Third, by working to change structural injustice and call public officials accountable for their actions. Lastly, by healing the harm inflicted onto their children and strengthening community ties. As a result, Mothers ROC’s initiatives contributed to longstanding struggles for Black people’s freedom in the United States.

Elva Orozco Mendoza is an assistant professor of political science and women, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Connecticut. She joined UConn in the fall of 2021 and received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in February of 2015. Prior to joining UConn, she taught at Texas Christian University and Drexel University. Her research interests include extreme gender violence, democratic theory and practice, protest politics and political action in Latin America, comparative political theory, and coloniality/decoloniality thought. At UConn, she teaches courses in comparative political theory, decolonial feminisms, and Latin American and Latinx feminist theory.

Julia Brush is a doctoral candidate in English with a graduate certificate in Literary Translation at the University of Connecticut. Her research focuses on contemporary poetry and poetics, queer theory, and transnational American studies, critical refugee studies, and Asian American Studies. While at UCHI, she will complete her dissertation, “State/Less Aesthetics: Queer Cartographies, Transnational Terrains, and Refugee Poetics.”

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 Diana Seave Greenwald on Data-Driven Histories of Art

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The Digital Humanities and Media Studies Initiative Presents: Painting by Numbers: Creeaeting Data-Driven Histories of Art. Diana Seave Greenwald, Assistant Curator, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. January 25, 2023, 1:00pm. Humanities Institute Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library.

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:

Painting by Numbers: Creating Data-Driven Histories of Art

Diana Seave Greenwald

January 25, 2022, 1:00pm
Live. Online. Registration required.
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This talk presents how one can blend historical and social scientific methods to provide fresh insights into nineteenth-century art. It describes the extent to which art historians have focused on a limited—and potentially biased—sample of artwork from that time. With new quantitative evidence for more than five hundred thousand works of art, one can address long-standing art historical questions about the effects of industrialization, gender, and empire on the art world.

In particular, this presentation focuses on a case study that combines theory from labor economics with data about works by nineteenth-century women artists. It examines how women artists’ domestic responsibilities forced them to be active in certain genres and media—particularly still-life paintings and watercolors—that are faster to finish and can be completed on a more flexible schedule. This insight about how artistic form and content change in response to demands on women’s time highlights structural barriers that still hamper nineteenth-century women artists’ posthumous reputations and continue to limit women artists’ attainment today.

Diana Seave Greenwald is an art historian and economic historian. Her work uses both statistical and qualitative analyses to explore the relationship between art and broader social and economic change during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly in the United States and France. Her first book, Painting by Numbers: Data-Driven Histories of Nineteenth Century Art, was published by Princeton University Press in 2021.

Diana is currently the William and Lia Poorvu Interim Curator of the Collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Prior to joining the Gardner, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., working in the departments of American ansd British Paintings and Modern Prints and Drawings.

She received a D.Phil. in History from the University of Oxford. Before doctoral study, Diana earned an M.Phil. in Economic and Social History from Oxford and received a Bachelor’s degree in Art History from Columbia University.

Call for Applications: 2023–24 Undergraduate Humanities Research Fellowships

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NEW DEADLINE: Humanities research fellowships for UConn undergraduates. Apply by March 10, 2023.

The UConn Humanities Institute (UCHI) and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS) are excited to once again offer year-long fellowships for undergraduate students pursuing innovative research in the humanities.

The fellowship supports a year-long research project supervised by a UConn faculty member. The project should explore big questions about human society and culture and should lead to an original contribution to your area of study. The exact parameters (length, format, etc) will be set by your faculty advisor. Depending on your major and your academic and professional plans, your project may consist of a scholarly research project or a creative product with a significant research component. At the end of the year, students will submit the final project to their faculty advisor, UCHI, and CLAS.

The project should ask questions or explore issues and ideas that feel urgent and exciting to you. We highly encourage proposals for projects that use methods, ideas, and approaches from more than one discipline.

Fellows will be welcomed as members of the Humanities Institute, a lively community of accomplished faculty and graduate student scholars conducting advanced research in the humanities. In addition to immersion in this intellectual community, the fellowship offers:

  • A $2,000 scholarship
  • A desk/work area at UCHI, located conveniently in Homer Babbidge Library for conducting research
  • Bi-weekly check-in meetings
  • A public presentation about the project at UCHI in the spring semester
  • Participation at UCHI’s events (for example, presentations by visiting scholars and artists) and special opportunities to meet with such visiting speakers
  • A field trip or cultural excursion (for example, a visit to a museum or archive) to be announced during the year
  • The opportunity to present your work at the Humanities Undergraduate Research Symposium the fall following your fellowship year
  • 6 credits for the academic year, through the successful completion of one 3-credit independent study each semester with the UConn faculty member supervising your project
  • (For non-Honors students) Admission into the Honors Program through the successful completion of this program, if other Honors admissions criteria are met.

Eligibility

Fellowship applicants should be rising sophomores or rising juniors in good academic standing (that is, students who will be sophomores or juniors in Fall 2023). Rising seniors are also eligible to apply, but preference will be given to students earlier in their degrees. Please note that students who applied in previous years and did not receive a fellowship are eligible to apply again.

Fellows from all campuses are welcome. But fellows are expected to be on the Storrs campus for their bi-weekly meetings. In the event that campus is closed for public health reasons, these meetings will be held virtually and the fellowship will be conducted remotely.

The proposed project should be humanities research. Broadly speaking, the “humanities” means the study of human society and culture. Humanities majors or minors typically include but are not limited to: Africana Studies; American Studies; Anthropology; Art and Art History; Asian and Asian American Studies; English; History; Human Rights; Journalism; Latino and Latin American Studies; Philosophy; Sociology; Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. If you aren’t sure if your project is humanistic, please email uchi@uconn.edu.

Fellows should check individually with the Office of Student Financial Aid Services to ensure that they are eligible to accept the scholarship.

Application

  1. A Word document with answers to the following questions:
    1. What is your project’s title?
    2. What big question(s) is your project asking, and why are those questions important to you, your community, and society? (maximum 300 words)
    3. What is your plan for the project? What work will you do to try to answer its questions? (maximum 300 words)
    4. How do you think working on this project contributes to your own goals? (maximum 200 words)
    5. Optional question: Are there additional factors in your background or life experience that would help you benefit from this opportunity? Discuss social, economic, educational, or other obstacles, as appropriate. (maximum 300 words)
  1. A writing sample of your best research and writing (for example, your best final paper).
  2. One letter of recommendation from a UConn faculty member that also includes their willingness to supervise the project over the course of an academic year. (The faculty member should email their letter directly to uchi@uconn.edu. There’s no need to wait until the letter is complete to submit the rest of your application.)
  3. An unofficial transcript.

Deadline: Friday, February 24, 2023 extended to March 10, 2023

All questions and application materials can be sent to uchi@uconn.edu.

We are hosting an information session for prospective applicants on January 30, 2023 at 2:30pm in the UCHI Conference Room on the fourth floor of Homer Babbidge Library and on Zoom. Virtual attendees must register.

Please know while we will make every effort to review submissions as soon as possible, the materials you submit may not be reviewed immediately upon receipt. Please note that all University employees are mandated reporters of child abuse or child neglect. In addition, UConn employees have responsibilities to report to the Office of Institutional Equity student disclosures of sexual assault and related interpersonal violence; any information you submit in this application is subject to UConn reporting policies. If you feel you need more immediate assistance or support, we encourage you to reach out to the Dean of Students Office and/or Student Health and Wellness- Mental Health. In addition, if you have concerns related to sexual harassment, sexual assault, intimate partner violence and/or stalking, we encourage you to review the resources and reporting options available at: https://titleix.uconn.edu

Fellow’s Talk: Kareem Khalifa on Segregation Indices

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2022–23 Fellow's Talk: "How Value-Laden are Segregation Indices?" Professor of Philosophy, UCLA, Kareem Khalifa, with a response by Heather Cassano. December 14, 2022, 3:30pm. Humanities Institute Conference Room. This event will also be livestreamed.

How Value Laden are Segregation Indices

Kareem Khalifa (Professor of Philosophy, UCLA)

with a response by Heather Cassano (Digital Media & Design, UConn)

Wednesday, December 14, 2022, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

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The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

Science’s objectivity is often thought to hinge on its impartiality. Roughly stated, impartiality is the requirement that only epistemic considerations, such as empirical evidence and cogent reasoning, should justify the acceptance of a scientific claim. Yet, the social sciences frequently employ thick concepts, i.e., concepts that both describe and evaluate. Examples include well-being, crime, poverty, and—central to our discussion—segregation. Given their inextricable link with values, it’s tempting to think that scientific claims that deploy thick concepts—so-called mixed claims—cannot be accepted impartially. Using the development of segregation indices and the operational definition of hypersegregation as illustrations, we argue that scientists’ use of thick concepts is compatible with impartial justification of mixed claims. This paper is co-authored with Jared Millson (Rhodes College) and Mark Risjord (Emory University).

Kareem Khalifa is a professor of philosophy at UCLA (2022–present). Prior to that, he was at Middlebury College in Vermont (2006–2022). His research interests include general philosophy of science, philosophy of social science, and epistemology. In addition to authoring over 30 articles, he authored the book, Understanding, Explanation, and Scientific Knowledge (Cambridge, 2017) and co-edited Scientific Understanding and Representation: Modeling in the Physical Sciences (Routledge, 2022). He is currently extending his previous work in these areas to social-scientific conceptions of race and segregation. He is currently a Future of Truth Fellow at the University of Connecticut’s Humanities Institute. In 2025, he will be the Senior Visiting Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Philosophy of Science. In 2017, he received the American Council of Learned Societies’ Burkhardt Award, which funded a five-year project, Explanation as Inferential Practice.

Heather Cassano is a documentary filmmaker and Assistant Professor in the Digital Media & Design Department. Cassano’s first documentary film The Limits of My World (2018) followed her severely autistic brother Brian as he transitioned from the school system to adulthood. The film unpacks what it means to be a nonverbal disabled adult in today’s society. The film won several awards and is now being used as a tool for impact by organizations like Autism Canada and the National Council on Severe Autism.

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.

SEWing Circle: Manuel Almagro on Affective Polarization

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The Social Epistemology Working Group Presents a SEWing circle workshop: The Concept of Affective Polarization and the Ways to Measure It, Manuel Almagro, Visiting Scholar, UConn Humanities Institute. December 15, 2022. UCHI Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library.

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 Social Epistemology Working Group presents:

A SEWing Circle Workshop

The Concept of Affective Polarization and the Ways to Measure It

Manuel Almagro

December 15, 2022, 2:00pm
Homer Babbidge Library, Humanities Institute Conference Room

This event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning. Register to attend virtually.

Affective polarization is usually defined as a tendency to dislike those from other party/parties while holding positive feelings toward the in-group, and it is usually measured by asking citizens if they have cold or warm feelings toward certain political leaders, political topics, or political parties. Thus, the claim “many contemporary democracies have become affectively polarized” usually means that their citizens have become more negative in their feelings toward the other party, moving from moderate levels of sympathy toward increasingly strong dislike. Here I will argue that feelings are just an element—possibly not the most relevant one—of the complex, multidimensional concept of affective polarization. I also review the main challenges the techniques to measure affective polarization face, and discuss the possible benefits of focusing on other dimensions of the concept in order to detect it at an early stage.

Manuel Almagro is a “Margarita Salas” postdoctoral fellow at the University of Granada (Spain), currently visiting the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut and working with Professor Michael P. Lynch. He will join the University of Valencia (Spain) in the summer of 2023 as a “Juan de la Cierva” postdoctoral fellow. He works on political epistemology, philosophy of language, and experimental philosophy. Most of his current research is focused on affective polarization and disagreement.

The Political Theory Workshop Presents Dana Francisco Miranda

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THE POLITICAL THEORY WORKSHOP PRESENTS

“The Conspiracy of Peace”

Dana Francisco Miranda, Philosophy, UMass Boston
with commentary by August Shipman, Political Science, UConn
December 5, 2022 from 12:15–1:30pm, Oak 438 and Zoom.

In the 1968 documentary drama, Tell Me Lies, the Pan-African organizer Kwame Ture states: “There is a difference between peace and liberation, is there not? You can have injustice and have peace. Isn’t that correct? You can have peace and be enslaved. So, peace isn’t the answer. Liberation is the answer.” Political orders free from disturbance or “at peace” have long served as the ideal. Yet, states can be functional, can even thrive, through the production of social interactions wherein some are subject to non-relations, or treated as nonbeings. The maintenance of non-relations often requires the subjection and violent subordination of such groups. Peace is maintained through disorder. Drawing on the works of Martin Luther King, Jr, Frantz Fanon, Roseann Liu, and Savannah Shange, this work interrogates how “peace” functions in conspiracy with domination and oppression and describes the solidarities necessary to combat and upend dysfunctional orders.

With generous support from the UConn Humanities Institute.

Questions? Email jane.gordon@uconn.edu

Publishing Now: Access, Representation, Collaboration

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Publishing Now and DHMS present: Publishing Now: Access, Representation, Collaboration Victoria Hindley (MIT Press) and Allison Levy (Brown University Digital Publication) November 30, 2022, 2:00pm Homer Babbidge Library, Humanities Institute Conference Room

Publishing NOW and the Digital Humanities and Media Studies Initiative present

Publishing Now: Access, Representation, Collaboration

Victoria Hindley (MIT Press) and Allison Levy (Brown University Digital Publications)

November 30, 2022, 2:00pm

Homer Babbidge Library, Humanities Institute Conference Room

This event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning. Register to attend virtually.

Victoria Hindley and Allison Levy will be talking about publishing in the context of larger concerns such as diversity, access, and collaboration and their work with their “On Seeing” series—an experiment in multimodal publishing that hopes to shape new conversations about how we see, comprehend, and participate in visual culture.

Victoria Hindley is Acquisitions Editor of Visual Culture and Design at the MIT Press and the founding organizer of the Press’s Grant Program for Diverse Voices. Known for its forward-looking intellectual rigor and distinctive design, the MIT Press has been publishing groundbreaking work since the 1960s.

Allison Levy is the Director of Brown University Digital Publications.

ACCESS NOTE

This event will offer 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.

DHMS: The Ends of Knowledge

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The Ends of Knowledge. Seth Rudy and Rachael Scarborough King, with a response from Michael Lynch. November 16, 2022, 1:00pm. UConn Humanities Institute Conference Room. This even will also be livestreamed.

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 Ends of Knowledge

Rachael Scarborough King and Seth Rudy

November 16, 2022, 1:00pm
Homer Babbidge Library, Humanities Institute Conference Room
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This event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning. Register to attend virtually.

Toward interdisciplinary exchange, this event addresses the following questions: What would you say your discipline’s goals are, when it comes to advancing knowledge? How are they like or unlike the “ends” of other disciplines? The speakers, Rachael Scarborough King (UC Santa Barbara) and Seth Rudy (Rhodes College) put such questions to a historian, a physicist, a literary scholar, a computer scientist, a biologist, a digital humanist, a legal scholar, a journalist, an AI researcher, an activist, as well as scholars working in gender studies, environmental studies, Black studies, cultural studies, and more. Each scholar wrote up an essay in response, and these are collected in the forthcoming volume, The Ends of Knowledge: Outcomes and Endpoints Across the Arts and Sciences (Bloomsbury).

UCHI Director, Michael Lynch, will be acting as respondent to the two speakers.

Rachael Scarborough King is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Writing to the World: Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres (2018) and editor of After Print: Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Cultures (2020). She is the Principal Investigator and Project Director for the Ballitore Project, an archives- and digital humanities-based research project.

Seth Rudy is Associate Professor of English at Rhodes College. He is the author of Literature and Encyclopedism in Enlightenment Britain: The Pursuit of Complete Knowledge (2014).