Critical Place Theory

Sandy Grande (Professor, Political Science & Social and Critical Inquiry, UConn)

Wednesday, February 18, 2026, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

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In this presentation, Sandy Grande will explore the epistemic impasses that often emerge between Indigenous and non-Indigenous theories of governance and (human) life. The paper particularly focuses on how the praxis of being of/on land—to be of place—gives rise to different theories and conceptions of governance and power and, therefore, knowledge and liberation.

Sandy Grande is a Professor of Political Science and Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Connecticut. Across her work, she aims to produce more nuanced analyses of the colonial present. Her work has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and more recently by the UConn Humanities Institute and the Institute for Collaboration on Health, Intervention, and Policy, for her new project on Indigenous Elders and aging. She has also published numerous book chapters and articles and 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 2025. In addition to publishing numerous articles and book chapters, she is a founding member of New York Stands for Standing Rock. As one of their projects, they published the Standing Rock Syllabus. In addition to her academic and organizing work, she is most proud of providing eldercare for her parents up until and through their passage elsewhere.

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 the recent emergence of new sign languages can shed light on how human languages came about in the far past

Harry van der Hulst (Professor, Linguistics, UConn)

with a response by Ashmita Mukherjee (Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, UConn)

Wednesday, February 18, 2026, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend

In this talk Harry van der Hulst will first discuss the goal of his current project which is to write a book that explains why we say that sign languages are real and full-fledged human languages. His current focus is on one chapter in this book which deals with evolutionary questions concerning the origin of human language, both spoken and signed. While the origin of human language is hidden in the prehistoric past, which means that direct evidence for its emergence is in principle not available, for some time researchers from many different disciplines have shown that there is potential ‘circumstantial’ evidence based on the study of attested languages (their grammars and use), their documented history, archeology, ethology (the study of animal behavior), stages in child language acquisition, among others, that can serve as ‘windows’ on early (and undocumented) stages of human language. In this endeavor, sign languages that have recently come into existence provide a particularly interesting window given that various stages in their development have been documented by sign linguists.

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.

Ashmita Mukherjee is a doctoral researcher in Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut. Her dissertation, “Textual Pleasures: Amusement and Affect in Post/Colonial India (1850-1950),” examines the role of literary amusement as a tool for anti-colonial resistance. She is interested in global 19th-20th century, theories of emotion and affect, South Asian Studies, world literature and culture, public humanities, and digital media. She has published articles in Literature/Film Quarterly and South Asian Review, and is a creator and co-host at the YouTube channel @theantilibrarypodcast.

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 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.

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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

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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.