Abusing Your Rulers: Protest and Performance in East Rome

Kevin Feeney (Assistant Professor, History, UConn)

Thursday, November 12, 2026, 12:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

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Today, we tend to imagine the Roman emperor as an absolute monarch with few checks on his authority. In the sixth century CE however, the emperors of Constantinople also had to win over a crowd. This talk considers a remarkable transcript of a public confrontation in the Hippodrome, Constantinople’s central chariot-racing stadium, between a spokesman for the emperor Justinian and a group of rowdy sports fans called the Greens. As abuse and accusations fly before a vast popular audience, we see both sides taking part in a lively and public negotiation about justice and authority in the Eastern Roman Empire. Through this text, we can better understand how even the most powerful monarch in the Mediterranean depended on the consent of the crowd.

Kevin Feeney is a Roman Historian who researches the political and social history of the Roman Empire in Late Antiquity (250–600 CE). He is especially interested in comparative interdisciplinary work drawing on the social sciences. He has published a number of articles on Roman emperors and the political role of the Roman People, especially in Constantinople. He is currently revising his first monograph on imperial accession in Late Antiquity.

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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.

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Communicating across Difference: Dialogue as a Tool for Research and Teaching

Brendan Kane (Professor, History & LCL; Co-Director, Democracy and Dialogues Initiative, UConn) and Nana Amos (Co-Director, Democracy and Dialogues Initiative, UConn)

Wednesday, March 25, April 15, 2026, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

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The need to communicate across difference frequently occurs in research, teaching, and public engagement. But how do we do it? How do we do it in different situations and disciplines? How do we do it well…or less well? What are the stakes in getting it right or wrong? Drawing on years of experience in academic and public settings, this presentation will offer thoughts on what constitutes “structured dialogue,” how it differs from other communicative modes, and how it might be useful to a variety of scholarly, educational, and outreach activities. Topics to be covered include the UConn-created dialogue model “Encounters,” the dialogue competency of the new Core Curriculum, and the practice of speaking across difference in communities and archives alike.

Brendan Kane is Professor of History with a courtesy appointment in Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. He is Co-Director of the Democracy and Dialogues Initiative of the Dodd Human Rights Impact Programs of UConn’s Human Rights Institute. A scholar of early modern Europe and Celtic languages with a focus on Ireland and England, Kane is a founding co-director of the digital project Léamh.org: Learn Early Modern Irish (c. 1200-1650).

Nana Amos is Co-Director of the University’s Democracy and Dialogues Initiative and serves as Director of Community Outreach and Engagement for Dodd Human Rights Impact Programs at the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute. Previously, she worked with the UNESCO Chair and the Institute of Comparative Human Rights, where she managed UConn’s ANC Partnership Project, which included programs in Oral History, Archives, and Comparative Human Rights. She currently serves as President of the Connecticut Chapter of the American Association of University Women (AAUW).

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

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.

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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

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.

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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.

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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.