Fellows Talks

Fellow’s Talk: Fumilayo Showers on Aspiring Migrants and the Afropolitan Imaginary

Posted on by

2025-26 UCHI Fellow's Talk. "The Afropolitan Imaginary and Migrant Aspirations in a Migrant Sending Nation." Fumilayo Showers, assistant professor of sociology, with a response by Anna Mae Duane. November 19, 3:30 pm. UCHI Conference Room.

The “Afropolitan Imaginary” and Migration Aspirations in a Migrant Sending Nation

Fumilayo Showers (Assistant Professor, Sociology, UConn)

with a response by Anna Mae Duane (English, UConn)

Wednesday, November 5, 2025, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend

International migration conjures up high hopes and deep fears. Hopes for the migrants themselves, for those they leave behind in the sending nations from which they derive, and sometimes, fears for the receiving nations to which they arrive.

In this talk, I draw attention to migration aspirations—the first, but often understudied stage, in migration projects. I illuminate the experiences of a group of migrants that have received lesser attention in international migration/mobility scholarship—aspiring migrants (people who have yet to leave the home country). Drawing from a case study of medical students in Ghana, West Africa, (a group invisible in studies and depictions of the hypermobile and cosmopolitan international student), allows for engagement with articulations of Afropolitanism. Afropolitanism as an analytic concept, a cultural discourse, and a mode being in the world, highlights a subset of African-origin individuals as global citizens who are making claims to a cosmopolitanism that its proponents argue has previously been denied to Africans.

I provide a rich alternative to popular understandings of migrants as feverishly leaving at all costs in search of a “better life,” and neo-classical economic models of migration where migratory movements are narrowly attributed to rational economic cost-and-benefit analyses among individual actors. I argue that migration may be imagined as temporary and inspired by factors other than economic and socio-political ones, including affective, emotional, and cosmopolitan desires. I reveal migration desires that are imagined as part of a transient stage in the life course, to escape under resourced educational environments, build human capital, broaden life goals, and to return to contribute to the homeland.

Fumilayo Showers is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut. Her research interests center on international migration; immigrant labor and entrepreneurship; African immigrants in the US; and health professions (medicine and nursing). She is the author of Migrants Who Care: West Africans Working and Building Lives in US Health Care (Rutgers University Press, 2023).

Anna Mae Duane is Professor of English and Director of the UConn Humanities Institute. She teaches and writes in the fields of American Studies, African American Literature, and the Medical Humanities. She’s particularly interested in how definitions of youth and childhood shape culture and policy in ways that require the abdication of rights in order to claim care. She is the author or editor of six books including Educated for Freedom: The Incredible Story of Two Fugitive Schoolboys who Grew Up to Change a Nation, and Child Slavery Before and After Emancipation: An Argument for Child-Centered Slavery Studies. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Japan-US Friendship Commission.

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

Fellow’s Talk: Jennifer Cazenave on Wiseman’s Deaf and Blind series

Posted on by

2025–26 UCHI Fellow's Talk. "Memories of Public Television: Revisiting Frederick Wiseman’s Deaf and Blind Series." Jennifer Cazenave, French and Cinema Studies, Boston University. With a response by Fiona Somerset. November 5, 3:30pm. UCHI Conference Room, Fourth Floor.

Memories of Public Television: Revisiting Frederick Wiseman’s Deaf and Blind Series

Jennifer Cazenave (Associate Professor, French and Cinema & Media Studies, Boston University)

with a response by Fiona Somerset (Literatures, Cultures, and Languages & Social and Critical Inquiry, UConn)

Wednesday, November 5, 2025, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend

In September 1984, Frederick Wiseman undertook the Deaf and Blind series, a four-part documentary about the Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind in Talladega. At the time, Wiseman was already a veteran of public television: he had made more than a dozen documentaries for PBS, establishing a reputation as an auteur who achieved access inside myriad American institutions. The Deaf and Blind series was broadcast on PBS in 1988, two years before the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Several decades later, this four-part documentary remains a marginalized media object in Wiseman’s archive of American life. This talk reconsiders the Deaf and Blind series through the lens of overlooked histories and perspectives, including issues of access and mainstreaming debates that harken back to the 19th century.

Jennifer Cazenave is Associate Professor of French and Cinema & Media Studies at Boston University. She is currently a Visiting Residential Fellow at UCHI. Her research interests include documentary cinema, disability studies, archive and memory studies, Holocaust and genocide studies, and gender studies. She is the author of An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah.” Her work has also appeared in edited volumes, journals, and magazines including SubStance, Cinema Journal, and Los Angeles Review of Books.

Fiona Somerset is Professor of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies as well as Social and Critical Inquiry at the University of Connecticut, where she has served as Codirector of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies and Interim Director of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is finishing work on a book on the medieval history of consent through silence, and preparing to write another book on personhood in the Middle Ages.

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

Fellow’s Talk: Asmita Aasaavari on Aging in Connecticut

Posted on by

UCHI Fellow's Talk 2025-26. Aging and Care Sans Rights: Portraits of Later Life from Northeast Connecticut. Asmita Aasaavari, PhD Canadidate, Sociology. with a response by Christopher Vials. October 29, 3:30pm. UCHI Conference Room, HBL fourth floor.

Aging and Care sans Rights: Portraits of Later Life from Northeast Connecticut

Asmita Aasaavari (Ph.D. Candidate, Sociology, UConn)

with a response by Christopher Vials (English & Social and Critical Inquiry, UConn)

Wednesday, October 29, 2025, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend

Compared to the last three decades, people today spend more of their lives caring for elderly parents or ill spouses than ever before, due to longer lifespans, advancements in medical technology, and an increasing number of disabled adults. Most academic and policy discussions of these trends focus on the challenges this creates for the “sandwich generation,” caregivers who balance employment with care for children and aging parents. Yet 34% of older adults also care for others, including spouses, grandchildren, and parents (AARP 2015). In this talk, I present narratives of aging and care from an ethnography set in Northeast Connecticut. Centering the role of race, class, and gender-based negotiations, I discuss how older adults approach later life, especially in situations where they are expected to care for others alongside their own aging needs. I also highlight the value of rights-informed perspectives in studying later life and discuss how class status, social supports, and life-course developments complicate our understanding of economic disadvantage.

Asmita Aasaavari is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at UConn. In her research, she uses interdisciplinary methods and sociological lenses to shed light on how aging and the social organization of care intersect with systems of inequality such as race, class, gender, and disability. Her research and teaching have been recognized and funded by the American Sociological Association, Social and Economic Rights Association, The Hastings Center, UConn Human Rights Institute, among others. Professionally, beyond academia, Asmita has worked with social science research institutions in India and the US in the fields of aging, gender, education, poverty alleviation, politics, and volunteered with rights-based social movements.

Chris Vials is a Professor in English and the School of Social and Critical Inquiry at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of Haunted by Hitler: Liberals, the Left, and the Fight against Fascism in the United States (2014) and Realism for the Masses: Aesthetics, Popular Front Pluralism, and US Culture, 1935-1947 (2009). He is also the editor, with Bill Mullen, of The US Antifascism Reader, published by Verso Press in 2020, and the sole editor of American Literature in Transition: 1940-1950 (Cambridge, 2017).

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

Fellow’s Talk: Catalina Alvarado-Cañuta on Creative Mapuche Spirits

Posted on by

UCHI Fellow's Talk, 2025-26. "Collective Healings from Wallmapu in Creative Mapuche Spirits," Catalina Alvarado-Cañuta (Phd Candidate, Anthropology, UConn), with a response by Harry van der Hulst. October 22, 3:30pm. Virtual.

Collective Healings from Wallmapu in Creative Mapuche Spirits

Catalina Alvarado-Cañuta (Ph.D. Candidate, Anthropology, UConn)

with a response by Harry van der Hulst (Linguistics, UConn)

Wednesday, October 22, 2025, 3:30pm, Virtual

This virtual event will include automated captioning.

Register to attend

This talk explores the role of contemporary Mapuche art in healing colonial trauma. Understanding colonial trauma as a historical and transgenerational process that continues to produce violence through modern state structures, the research proposes indigenous art as a decolonial methodology capable of transforming narratives of defeat into stories of dignity and resistance.

Based on the work of four renowned Mapuche creators—a jeweler, two visual artists, and a weaver—the talk analyzes creative experiences that not only rescue memory and traditional knowledge but also generate new forms of political and cultural representation. Art is conceived here as a means of collective healing, in which healing goes beyond the individual dimension to include territories, spiritualities, and intergenerational bonds.

From this perspective, indigenous art becomes a practice of re-existence and affirmation of autonomy, allowing for the restoration of Küme Mongen (Good Living) and opening spaces for historical, cultural, and spiritual reparation for the Mapuche people.

Catalina Alvarado-Cañuta is a Fulbright scholar of Mapuche origin who is currently a PhD candidate in Medical Anthropology at the University of Connecticut. She has a master’s degree in Social Anthropology from the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS), Oaxaca, Mexico. Catalina has worked in public service as a manager of health programs for the indigenous population in Chile, and she has worked as an academic at universities in Chile. Alvarado-Cañuta’s main focus is on colonial trauma and the processes of collective healings of indigenous peoples, and indigenous art as a decolonial methodology. Her latest co-authored work is the chapter “Trig Metawe: Restoring the cracks of dispossession for Küme Mongen,” in which she and Mapuche artist Francisco Huichaqueo analyze the plundering of Mapuche archaeological heritage distributed among museums in Chile and around the world as part of the processes that generate Colonial Trauma and how its possible restitution or accompaniment to Mapuche archaeological heritage contributes to the restitution of the collective well-being of Mapuche people. Alvarado- Cañuta is an activist scholar who maintains family ties with her Mapuche community in Ercilla, where she is the community coordinator for Mapuche heritage restitution issues. She is currently a member of the Buen Vivir and Collective Healings Initiative, a research group that uses participatory action methodologies led by Dr. César Abadía-Barrero at the University of Connecticut. Catalina has recently taken on the role of Co-Coordinator of the Abiayala Working Group section of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA).

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. His most recent books include, Asymmetries in Vowel Harmony – A Representational Account (Oxford, 2018); Radical CV Phonology – A Theory of Segmental and Syllabic Structure (Edinburgh, 2020), A Mind for Language (Cambridge, 2024) and Genes, Brains and Evolution (Cambridge, forthcoming).

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

Fellow’s Talk: Ashmita Mukherjee on Amusement in Post/Colonial India

Posted on by

Amusement and Affect in Post/Colonial India. Ashmita Mukherjee, PhD Candidate in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies. With a response by Peter Constantine. September 17, 3:30pm, UCHI Conference Room, Fourth Floor of Homer Babbidge Library.

Amusement and Affect in Post/Colonial India

Ashmita Mukherjee (Ph.D. Candidate, Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, UConn)

with a response by Peter Constantine (Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, UConn)

Wednesday September 17, 2025, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

Can resistance be fun? Doctoral researcher Ashmita Mukherjee argues for a new approach to understanding anti-colonial resistance in South Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Rather than focusing solely on traditional political and military histories, she examines the power of literary amusement and its emotive impact. She defines amusement as a transient, light, bright, and sparkling emotion that, despite its fleeting nature, has proven to be an enduring method of exposition, critique, subversion, and community building.

Her work is guided by the affective turn in literary studies, drawing on the methodologies of scholars like Rita Felski and Sara Ahmed as well as concepts from classical Indian aesthetics, particularly “rasa theory”, to uncover how shared pleasure could create a sense of collective identity. She uses examples from several genres, including editorial articles and longer works by British, Anglo-Indian, and Indian-origin writers spanning a century up to Indian independence from British rule. Editorial satire, science writing and speculative fiction, children’s literature, and amusing sketches illustrate how printed texts expressed the complex emotional landscape of a nation in the making, and became a fundamental part of shaping national consciousness.

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.

Peter Constantine is professor of translation studies and director of the program in literary translation in the Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at the University of Connecticut. He is the publisher of World Poetry Books and the literary magazine World Poetry Review. His translations include works by Rousseau, Machiavelli, Gogol and Tolstoy for Random House, Modern Library. He co-edited A Century of Greek Poetry: 1900–2000, and the anthology The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present, which W.W. Norton published in 2010. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, a recipient of two NEAs, and was awarded the PEN Translation Prize for Six Early Stories by Thomas Mann and the National Translation Award for The Undiscovered Chekhov. His translation of the complete works of Isaac Babel received the Koret Jewish Literature Award and a National Jewish Book Award citation.

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

Fellow’s Talk: Ahmed AboHamad on Political (Dis)engagement

Posted on by

2025–26 UCHI Fellow's talk. "The Inward Turn and the Vices of Political (Dis)engagement" Ahmed AboHamad, PhD Candidate, Philosophy, with a response by Julia Smachylo. September 10, 2025, 3:30PM, UCHI Conference Room, HBL fourth floor.

The Inward Turn and the Vices of Political (Dis)engagement

Ahmed AboHamad (Ph.D. Candidate, Philosophy, UConn)

with a response by Julia Smachylo (Landscape Architecture, UConn)

Wednesday September 10, 2025, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

Quietism and extremism may appear to occupy opposite ends of the political engagement spectrum, yet I argue that they share more in common than one might initially assume. They can spring from the same philosophical ground and be facilitated through turning inward: embracing philosophies which maintain that individuals already possess within themselves all that is necessary for Happiness. Sufism offers a particularly instructive case study. In this talk, I critique the romanticization of Sufism by U.S. think tanks, foreign policy actors, and authoritarian regimes, which rests on the essentialist assumption that Sufism counters extremism and promotes peace. Such political instrumentalization of Sufism is troubling because it overlooks how the asceticism and emotional detachment associated with turning inward can either foster passivity toward unjust power or serve as enabling conditions for violent extremism.

Ahmed AboHamad is a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy at the University of Connecticut, where he also earned his M.A. in Philosophy and completed graduate certificates in Human Rights and in Intersectional Indigeneity, Race, Ethnicity, and Politics (IIREP). Prior to joining UConn, he graduated summa cum laude with honors from Connecticut College, majoring in Biological Sciences and Philosophy. His areas of interest include Political Philosophy, Ethics, the History of Philosophy, and Moral Psychology.

Julia Smachylo is a Canadian urban designer and planner, and an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Connecticut. Julia’s research is grounded in critical urban and landscape theory, political ecology and media studies, and traces the rise of neoliberal forms of natural resource management that have set in motion larger aggregate impacts bearing direct relation to environmental conservation, ecological design, and the organization of cities. Working across disciplines, her research connects urban landscapes with multi-scalar processes of environmental stewardship, with the goal of contributing to ongoing efforts to generate more holistic and socially responsible approaches to planning and design intervention.

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

Undergraduate Humanities Research Fellows Colloquium

Posted on by

Undergraduate Humanities Research Fellowship Colloquium. Kathryn Andronowitz (The Business of Domesticity: A Study on Homemaker Influencer Content on Instagram), Kanny Salike (The Evolution of Black American Sign Language (BASL) and African American English (AAE)), and Evan Wolfgang (Resurrecting Frances: Creating Going to the Lordy). April 2, 3:30pm. Humanities Institute Conference Room, HBL 4th floor.

Undergraduate Humanities Research Fellows Colloquium

Kathryn Andronowitz (Sociology & English), Kanny Salike (Anthropology & Linguistics), Evan Wolfgang (Dramatic Arts)

Wednesday, April 2, 2025, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

Kathryn Andronowitz | “The Business of Domesticity: A Study on Homemaker Influencer Content on Instagram”

Project advisor: Bhoomi Thakore

Kathryn Andronowitz’s fellowship project examines how homemaker influencers present their identities on social media, and how they function as economic actors by promoting certain lifestyle choices or products in a way that aligns with their values. In this presentation, Kathryn will discuss one of the themes of her findings, “happiest at home.” In this aestheticized Instagram content, homemaker influencers emphasize their happiness with their lifestyle in the home, which is rendered as a peaceful option for retreat from the dangers and immoralities of the mainstream outside world. The content evokes a sense of nostalgia for an idealistic collective past, which can be mobilized to urge viewers to reject feminist goals and instead revitalize conservative traditional values. Overall, these depictions that link femininity and domesticity, presented alongside a neoliberal celebration of female choice and “empowerment,” creates dizzying discourses on progress towards gender equality.

Kanny Salike | “The Evolution of Black American Sign Language (BASL) and African American English (AAE)”

Project advisor: Diane Lillo-Martin

This talk looks at the histories of BASL (Black American Sign Language) and AAE (African American English). Kanny will compare these histories to see how racism and audism have influenced the divergence of BASL and AAE from ASL and SAE (Standard American English) respectively.

Evan Wolfgang | “Resurrecting Frances: Creating Going to the Lordy”

Project advisor: Gary English
“Resurrecting Frances: Creating Going to the Lordy,” discusses the development of Evan Wolfgang’s original play, Going to the Lordy, which was written through participation as an Undergraduate Research Fellow at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute and opened in February with the support of UConn Dramatic Arts.

As the title of the talk suggests, the presentation will focus on how the key figure of Frances Howe, sister to Charles Guiteau, was brought from historical obscurity to the center of the story, drastically informing how the play was written. The talk, not dissimilar to the play itself, focuses on the importance of resurrecting lost and marginalized historical voices and how by doing so we can learn more about our own humanity.

Kathryn Andronowitz, from Monroe, Connecticut, is a junior pursuing dual degrees in English and Sociology. Her research interests include examining identity formation in online networked communities, analyzing consumer culture and the rise of self-branding, and exploring the historical roots of current social movements. Kathryn works as the public relations student coordinator at UConn Community Outreach and was a 2023 Holster Scholar. In her free time, she enjoys traveling, doing trivia, and spending time outdoors. Kathryn plans to earn her J.D. for a career in public policy emphasizing community-based solutions. At UCHI, Kathryn’s project will examine how homemaker influencers present their identities on social media, and how they function as economic actors by promoting certain lifestyle choices or products in a way that aligns with their values.

Kanny Salike is a junior at UConn, double majoring in Linguistics/Philosophy and Anthropology with a minor in American Sign Language and Deaf culture. She is a Connecticut native who grew up in Naugatuck. Her research interests include exploring the ways in which migration, globalization, and colonization influence the way language evolves and develops. Outside of her fellowship, she is a 2024 summer IDEA grant recipient. After finishing her undergraduate degree, she plans on pursuing a Phd in Linguistic Anthropology. Her fellowship project, “The Evolution of African American English (AAE) and Black American Sign Language (BASL) in the United States” aims to explore how racism and audism have shaped the evolution of AAE and BASL through time. This project will focus on the ways in which an early American society excluded Black hearing and Black Deaf people from white hearing and white Deaf spaces, respectively, and delving into how this exclusion resulted in the evolution of AAE and BASL as languages that are distinctly different from standard American English and ASL. She also plans on exploring how racism and audism embed themselves into systems of oppression that continue to affect Black and Black Deaf people to this day.

Evan Wolfgang is a senior at UConn, completing his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Acting. In the fall semester of 2023, he studied abroad at Theatre Academy London, where he was taught by some of the most eminent theatrical artists in the world. Last year, Evan debuted a fully staged production of his original adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice Stories at UConn, entitled Alice’s Adventures. Evan works professionally in the theatre as an actor, director, playwright, and youth theatre teacher. He has also started his own production company, Jump the Creek Productions, through which he produces his and his company members’ original work. Evan’s project, “Going to the Lordy: A Dramatic Parable about the Life and Death of Charles Julius Guiteau,” is a play that will examine the life of presidential assassin Charles Guiteau, and the absurd story and complex social-political circumstances that lead to him murdering President James Garfield. Guiteau’s story is a story of radicalization, abuse, and sensationalism, topics as relevant today as they were 150 years ago.

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.

Fellow’s Talk: Sara Matthiesen on Reproductive Justice

Posted on by

“Free Abortion on Demand” After Roe: A Reproductive Justice History of Abortion Organizing in the United States. Sara Matthiessen, Associate Professor of History and WGSS, George Washington University. With a response by Peter Zarrow. March 26, 3:30pm, UCHI Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library, 4th floor.

“Free Abortion on Demand” After Roe: A Reproductive Justice History of Abortion Organizing in the United States

Sara Matthiesen (Associate Professor of History and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, George Washington University)

with a response by Peter Zarrow (History, UConn)

Wednesday March 26, 2025, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

When the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade (1973) in 2022, many abortion rights activists responded with the slogan “Roe was never enough!” The phrase invoked a reality that had long defined legal abortion in the U.S.: Roe’s standing did not translate into widespread access to the procedure. But exactly how long have supporters of abortion rights wielded this criticism of Roe, and what would the feminist movement for legalization have thought about this rallying cry? In this talk, Professor Sara Matthiesen recovers feminist responses to the legalization of abortion in 1973, and asks what their varied assessments can teach us about the contemporary struggle over bodily autonomy.

Sara Matthiesen is Associate Professor of History and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at George Washington University. Her first book, Reproduction Reconceived: Family Making and the Limits of Choice after Roe v. Wade (University of California Press, 2021), shows how incarceration, for-profit and racist healthcare, HIV/AIDS, parentage laws, and poverty were worsened by state neglect in the decades following Roe. In 2022, Reproduction Reconceived received the Sara A. Whaley Prize for best monograph on gender and labor from National Women’s Studies Association. Professor Matthiesen’s current project, “‘Free Abortion on Demand’ after Roe: A Reproductive Justice History of Abortion Organizing in the United States,” traces the multi-racial feminist activism that opposed state and medical control of abortion throughout the era of choice. At GWU, she regularly teaches Introduction to Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, for which she was awarded the Kenny Teaching Prize in 2022.

Peter Zarrow’s research focuses on modern Chinese thought and culture. He has written on major intellectual figures and political movements in the late Qing and Republican periods (1880s–1949), such as Liang Qichao, Hu Shi, Cai Yuanpei, Kang Youwei, and others, as well as anarchism, Marxism, and conservatism. His most recent monograph is Abolishing Boundaries: Global Utopias in the Formation of Modern Chinese Political Thought, 1880-1940 (SUNY Press, 2021), and he recently published a translation of essay by Liang Qichao, Thoughts from the Ice-Drinker’s Studio: Essays on China and the World (Penguin Random House, 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. Requests should be made at least five business days in advance whenever possible.

Fellow’s Talk: Grégory Pierrot on Ronald L. Fair and Malcolm X

Posted on by

2024-25 UCHI Fellow's Talk. The Fire This Time: Ronald L Fair's Many Thousand Gone, a forgotten Fable. Grégory Pierrot, Associate profess of English, UConn, with a response by Danielle Pieratti. March 12, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library, 4th floor.

The Fire This Time: Ronald L. Fair’s Many Thousand Gone, a Forgotten Fable

Grégory Pierrot (Associate Professor of English, UConn)

with a response by Danielle Pieratti (English, UConn)

Wednesday March 12, 2025, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

In the wake of the Civil Rights Act and before the advent of the Black Power Movement, the year 1965 was a turning point for African American politics and culture, embodied in the radical turn taken by Malcolm X in the months leading up to his assassination. This talk reads Ronald L. Fair’s 1965 novel Many Thousand Gone: An American Fable as a counterpoint to Malcolm X, in the light of the globalization of Black politics.

Grégory Pierrot is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut at Stamford where he teaches American and African American literature. His research bears on the cultural networks of the Black Atlantic. He is the author of The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture (UGA, 2019) and Decolonize Hipsters (OR Books, 2021). He is co-editor with Marlene L. Daut and Marion Rohrleitner of Haitian Revolutionary Fictions: An Anthology (UVA, 2021), and co-author with Paul Youngquist of a scholarly edition of Marcus Rainsford’s An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti (Duke 2013). He is also part of a team of researchers led by Dr. Maria Baelieva Solomon (UMD) working on a digital edition of the 19th-century, French-language abolitionist review La Revue des colonies, recipient of a NHPRC grant. He will be spending his fellowship year working on his next project, a French-language monograph tentatively titled “Le Temps d’une nation noire: fictions révolutionnaires du Black Power” that will explore how American writers imagined imminent African American revolution through fiction during the Black Power era.

Danielle Pieratti (she/her) is a doctoral candidate in the English Department. She holds degrees from Carnegie Mellon University, SUNY at Albany, and Columbia University, where she earned an MFA in poetry. She is the author of two poetry collections: Approximate Body (2023), and Connecticut Book Award winner Fugitives (2016). Transparencies, her translated volume of works by Italian poet Maria Borio, was published by World Poetry Books in 2022. Danielle was a 2023 poetry and translation fellow of the Connecticut Office of the Arts, and currently serves as poetry editor for the international literary journal Asymptote.

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.

Fellow’s Talk: Yohei Igarashi on the Emergence of Literary Data Processing

Posted on by

2024-25 UCHI Fellow's Talk. "Autonomy and Automata: Objecthood, the Dramatic Monologue, and the Emergence of Literary Data Processing" Yohei Igarashi, Associate Professor of English, UConn. With a response by Hana Maruyama. March 5th, 3:30pm, UCHI Conference Room.

Autonomy and Automata: Objecthood, the Dramatic Monologue, and the Emergence of Literary Data Processing

Yohei Igarashi (Associate Professor of English, UConn)

with a response by Hana Maruyama (History, UConn)

Wednesday March 5, 2025, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

We should understand better the histories of computing in humanities disciplines. Focusing on literary studies, this talk offers an explanation of a particular event: the emergence of a practice called “literary data processing” around 1960, and the methodological revolution which—while projected from this practice—did not quite happen. Working outward from the writing of the literary scholar Stephen Parrish (1921–2012), this talk uncovers the questions that exercised literary computing and literary criticism alike at this historical moment, questions about humans, machines, language, and minds.

Yohei Igarashi is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of The Connected Condition: Romanticism and the Dream of Communication (2020) and other writing, most recently a chapter on literary data in the Cambridge Companion to Literature in a Digital Age (2024). In 2023–2024, he was the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Fellow at the National Humanities Center.

Hana Maruyama is an assistant professor in history and social and critical inquiry at the University of Connecticut. Her current manuscript discusses how the federal government exploited Japanese Americans’ World War II incarceration to dispossess American Indians and Alaska Natives and advance U.S. settler colonialism.

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.