Faculty Talks

Faculty Talk: Gary English on Theatre as Dialectics

2024-25 UCHI Faculty Talk. "Theatre as Dialectics: Justice, Reconciliation, and Peace." with Gary English, Distinguished Professor of Dramatic Arts. November 2, 12:15pm. Humanities Institute Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library 4th floor.

Theatre as Dialectics: Justice, Reconciliation, and Peace

Gary M. English (Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Dramatic Arts, UConn)

Wednesday November 20, 2024, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

Theatre and other forms of cultural production provide a valuable means to discover how populations respond to forms of oppression and political processes connected to attempts at reconciliation in post-conflict. To attain a renewed national unity in some post-conflict settings, states and international organizations who pursue the dual objectives of peace and reconciliation utilize forms of transitional justice that emphasize the “healing” of victims and the reintegration of perpetrators as a higher priority than criminal accountability through rule of law. A dialectic, or dichotomy, then emerges between the objectives of justice, through accountability, and reconciliation such that imperatives for peace and stability allow one to be sacrificed to achieve the other. Employing research connected to the emerging discourse on irreconciliation and dynamics related to the dualities of “memory and forgetting” and “justice and reconciliation” Gary English explores how theatre production critiques this dichotomy by insisting that justice and a positive peace cannot be achieved without criminal accountability regarding the most egregious violations of international law. In addition, this talk examines how accountability through international law becomes frustrated by the strategic interests of donor states who utilize coercive approaches in development to enforce an unjust, or negative peace that essentially maintains the underlying forms of oppression as historically practiced.

Gary M. English is stage director, designer, and a Distinguished Professor of Drama at the University of Connecticut and Affiliate Faculty with the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute with whom he has taught Theatre and Human Rights for ten years. From 2010 through 2018, he lived and worked in the West Bank for a total of four years, including two years in the Jenin Refugee Camp where he served as Artistic Director of The Freedom Theatre, (2012–13). He also served as Visiting Professor and Head of the Media Studies program at Al/Quds Bard College in Abu Dis, in the West Bank, (2017–18). His research focuses on theatre as a methodology to study human rights, and the use of theatre and cultural production to investigate the political conflict between Israel and Palestinians. His most recent book, Theatre and Human Rights: The Politics of Dramatic Form was published by Routledge in August, 2024. Previous publications include the volume, Stories Under Occupation and other Plays from Palestine, co-edited with Samer Al-Saber, and published by Seagull Press in 2020, and “Artistic Practice and Production at the Jenin Freedom Theatre” within the anthology, Theater in the Middle East: Between Performance and Politics. His most recent essay, “Palestinian Theatre: Alienation, Mediation and Assimilation in Cross Cultural Research” was recently released in the volume, Arabs, Politics and Performance, by Routledge in September, 2024.

Access note

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

Faculty Talk: Sara Johnson on the Horror of Orientalism

2024-25 Faculty Talk. "The Horror of Orientalism: Plutarch's Artaxerxes meets the internet." with Sara Johnson, Associate Professor, Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies. October 30, 12:30pm, UCHI Conference Room.

The Horror of Orientalism: Plutarch’s Artaxerxes Meets the Internet

Sara Raup Johnson (Associate Professor, Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies, UConn)

Wednesday October 30, 2024, 12:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

The “cruelty of the barbarian” is a well-worn orientalizing trope that traces a continuous line from the literature of fifth-century Athens to the movie 300 (2006) and beyond. In his life of the Persian king Artaxerxes [Artaxerxes II Mnemon, 404-365 BCE], the Greek biographer Plutarch devotes an entire chapter to a detailed description of an exceptionally gruesome method of torture and execution known as “scaphism” or, more informally, “the torture of the boats.” Evidence suggests that Plutarch found the description in the now lost but notoriously sensational history of Persia by Ctesias, a Greek doctor who served as physician to the royal family at the court of Artaxerxes.

This talk explores the unexpected afterlife of scaphism, from its origins in Ctesias and Plutarch, through the 12th-century Byzantine historian Zonaras, by way of nineteenth-century encyclopedias of torture, to its present-day vogue on the internet and in the death metal music community. It ponders the uneasy intersection between orientalizing discourse and the visceral—pun intended—pleasures of horror.

Sara Raup Johnson is Associate Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies in the Department of Literatures, Cultures and Languages at the University of Connecticut. Her publications include Historical Fictions and Hellenistic Jewish Identity: Third Maccabees in Its Cultural Context (2004), the edited volume Reading and Teaching Ancient Fiction (lead editor, 2018), and articles and book chapters on topics ranging from the date of the book of Esther to classical allusions in the Japanese manga Fullmetal Alchemist. She is currently working on a book-length project on historical fictions centered around Greeks, Jews, and the Persian court in the fourth century BCE.

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.

Welcome to Fall 2024 at UCHI

Dear Colleagues,

As we begin a new year at the Humanities Institute (UCHI), we are delighted to welcome a new cohort of faculty, graduate and undergraduate fellows, who will spend the year working on a host of fascinating interdisciplinary research projects. We hope that you’ll join us for our weekly fellows’ talks, held on Wednesdays from 3:30–4:45 pm, with a short reception following.

As always, we are eager to support humanities research across the university and offer funding for working groups, conferences and colloquia, and book publications. Thanks to the generous support of the Office of the Vice President for Research, we are particularly proud to offer for funding for research projects that augment the work of the Mellon-Funded Faculty of Color Working Group through a focus on equity, justice, and repair.

UCHI’s theme this year is “Connections/Disconnections.” In an era defined by proliferating connections to technology and a growing loneliness epidemic marked by disconnection from one another, the humanities’ focus on the experiences and the perspectives of others illuminates how we might find community and meaning in the lives we lead. In our scholarship, in our responses to one another’s work, and in the vibrant and powerful conversations we generate in our classrooms, we build the capacity for understanding ourselves and others as we recognize the historical and cultural forces that shape our world.

Wishing you a warm welcome back to campus from myself and the whole team here at UCHI,

Anna Mae Duane
Director, UCHI


Fall 2024 events

Fellow’s Talk: Joscha Jelitzki

September 11, 2024

3:30pm

UCHI Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

Details

Fellow’s Talk: Yusuf Mansoor

September 25, 2024

3:30pm

UCHI Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

Details

Getting the Grant Started: Turning Ideas into Action

September 26, 2024

2:00pm

UCHI Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

Details

Connections/Disconnections: A Conversation on the Loneliness Epidemic

October 1, 2024

3:30pm

Wilbur Cross Reading Room

Details

Fellow’s Talk: Julia Wold

October 9, 2024

3:30pm

UCHI Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

Details

Faculty Talk: Sara Johnson

October 30, 2024

12:30pm

UCHI Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

Details

Fellow’s Talk: Danielle Pieratti

October 30, 2024

3:30pm

UCHI Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

Details

Fellow’s Talk: Daniel Hershenzon

November 6, 2024

3:30pm

UCHI Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

Details

Fellow’s Talk: Hana Maruyama

November 13, 2024

3:30pm

UCHI Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

Details

Faculty Talk: Gary English

November 20, 2024

12:15pm

UCHI Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

Details

Fellow’s Talk: Janet Pritchard

December 4, 2024

3:30pm

UCHI Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

Details

NEW DATE: Faculty Talk: Julian Schlöder on the Inauthentic Self

2024 Faculty Talk. "What is an inauthentic self?" Assistant Research Professor, Philosophy, Julian Schlöder. March 27, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room, Fourth floor

What is an Inauthentic Self?

Julian Schlöder (Assistant Research Professor, Philosophy, UConn)

Wednesday March 27, 2024, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

Although these are common phrases, it is somewhat unclear what it is to “be something one is not” or to “not be one’s authentic self.” There is, after all, no other source of selfhood than who one actually is. One also owes to no-one a particular way of being other than to oneself. But given that therefore the self is its own’s only yardstick, how can there be an inauthentic self? Towards an answer, I explore a conception of selfhood as meaning-making. One’s self-narrative creates meaning from bare facticity and is hence is not just something we tell about ourselves, but it is how we articulate our very self. Self-narratives can apprehend themselves as more or less coherent meaning-makers, so a self can fall short of its own standards. From this theoretical standpoint, I explore how stereotypes inflict damage onto selves by standing in the way of meaning-making, and how coming out as a queer identity is to create meaning from incoherence.

Julian J. Schlöder is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut. They studied philosophy, mathematics, and logic at the Universities of Bonn and Amsterdam, receiving their doctorate in 2018. They are a co-author of the monograph Reasoning with Attitude (Oxford UP, 2023).

Access note

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

Faculty Talk: Elizabeth Della Zazzera on French Poetry Almanacs

2024 Faculty Talk "The French Left Maastricht on May 4": Time, Place, and French Poetry Almanacs. Assistant Professor in Residence, History, Elizabeth Della Zazzera. Humanities Institute Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library, March 20, 2024, 3:30pm.

“The French Left Maastrich on May 4”: Time, Place, and French Poetry Almanacs

Elizabeth Della Zazzera (Assistant Professor in Residence, History, UConn)

Wednesday March 20, 2024, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

On the May souvenir page of her 1814 copy of Hommage aux dames, Henriette Françoise Louise Rigano recorded that her husband, Albert Prisse, had traveled to Paris on May 19. On that same page, she wrote that “the French left Maastricht on May 4,” juxtaposing the movements of her family members with the history of the collapse of Napoleon’s European empire. Hommage aux dames was one of a series of very similar almanac titles (Almanach des dames, Almanach dédié aux demoiselles, etc.) produced in France and marketed to women in the first decades of the nineteenth century. This talk will explore how these almanacs, which were primarily poetry anthologies with calendars and sometimes souvenir pages attached, shifted the almanac’s relationship to locality and to time, not only because of their content and format, but also because of how they were used.

Elizabeth Della Zazzera is an assistant professor in residence in the University of Connecticut’s History department and Director of Communications & Undergraduate Outreach at the UConn Humanities Institute. A historian of modern Europe, she received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016. Her scholarship focuses on how ideas move on the ground—how their method of transmission and dissemination affects the ideas themselves—with a particular emphasis on the intellectual history of material texts and urban environments in revolutionary and post-revolutionary France. Her current book project explores the role of the periodical press, the theatre, and literary sociability in the bataille romantique: the conflict between romantics and classicists. She is also working on a project about French literary almanacs in the early nineteenth century. Her article, “Translating Revolutionary Time: French Republican Almanacs in the United States” was awarded the 2015 Book History essay prize.

Access note

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

Faculty Talk: Evelyn Simien on Historic U.S. Elections

2024 Faculty Talk. "The Last Shall be First: Historic Candidates in US Elections." Professor of Political Science and Interim Director of Africana Studies, Evelyn Simien. Humanities Institute Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library fourth floor, Feb 7, 3:30pm.

The Last Shall Be First: Historic Candidates in U.S. Elections

Evelyn Simien (Professor, Political Science, UConn)

Wednesday February 7, 2024, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

Evelyn Simien’s book project, “The Last Shall Be First: Historic Candidates in U.S. Elections,” will show that historic first candidates have long-standing effects on new segments of the American polity, whether they win or lose, their campaigns revitalize American democracy and legitimize our political institutions. Utilizing in-depth, mixed methods case studies of historic candidates at the local, state, and national levels, the book length project situates historic firsts in terms of their ability to restore confidence in a polarized nation by renewing faith in fair elections, inspiring civic engagement, and cultivating trust in government. These case studies are complemented by opinion data, voter turnout reports, election maps, textual analysis of campaign rhetoric, and content analysis of newspapers. The rich array of sources—photographs, speeches, interviews, and election maps—used for this project will take the form of a digital archive.

Evelyn M. Simien is professor of political science at the University of Connecticut. She is also Interim Director of the Africana Studies Institute at UConn. Simien received her B.A. in political science from Xavier University of Louisiana, along with her master’s degree and Ph.D. in political science from Purdue University. Simien is the author of two books Black Feminist Voices in Politics (State University of New York Press, 2006), and Historic Firsts: How Symbolic Empowerment Changes U.S. Politics (Oxford University Press, 2016), and editor of Gender and Lynching (Palgrave/Macmillan 2011) and Historic Firsts in U.S. Elections: Trailblazing Candidates (Routledge, 2022).

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.