Fellows Talks

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

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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.

Fellow’s Talk: César Abadía-Barrero on Sugary Industries and the Body

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2024-25 UCHI Fellow's Talk. Sweetness and Disease: How Capitalist Sugary Industries Have Destroyed Human Biology. César Abadía-Barrero, Professor of Anthropology and Human Rights, UConn. WIth a response by Yusuf Mansoor. February 26, 3:30pm, UCHI Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library, 4th floor.

Sweetness and Disease: How Capitalist Sugary Industries Have Destroyed Human Biology

César Abadía-Barrero (Associate Professor of Anthropology and Human Rights, UConn)

with a response by Yusuf Mansoor (History, UConn)

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

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

In 400+ years of history (from early XVII to early XXI centuries) sugar went from being used primarily by the European royalty and their criminal imperial associates to being consumed in large amounts by all inhabitants of the planet. In this talk, I draw from Sidney Mintz’s classic Sweetness and Power to briefly present the history of sugar. Then, I update this history by presenting the incredible growth and profits of the sugary drinks and ultra-processed food industries. By asking what has happened to our human biology as we have replaced real food with more free sugars and processed substances, I develop connections with several diseases, primarily diabetes and obesity that have reached pandemic proportions. I present how the efforts to curb down consumption and enforce regulations have been met with strategies to co-opt and influence policy makers, aggressively market their products to vulnerable populations, and fund and promote biased research. By naming some of the capitalists of the largest transnational “food” industries and their enormous wealth and profit rates, and by connecting their business success with the progressive destruction of our biology, this first chapter of a larger book project intends to test if we can present a material history of our deteriorating human biology for broad audiences; a material history that argues that to understand human biology we need to understand the history of capitalism.

César Abadía-Barrero is a Colombian activist/scholar and associate professor of anthropology and human rights at the University of Connecticut. His research approach is grounded in activist, collaborative, and participatory action research frameworks and integrates critical perspectives to study interconnections among capitalism, human rights, and communities of care. He has been a member of or collaborated with collectives and social movements in Brazil, Colombia, Cameroon, Spain and the United States examining how for-profit interests transform access, continuity, and quality of health care, and how communities resist forms of oppression and create and maintain alternative ways of living and caring.

He is the author or editor of several books and articles, including I Have AIDS but I am Happy: Children’s Subjectivities, AIDS, and Social Responses in Brazil (2011 in English and 2022 in Portuguese), Health in Ruins: The Capitalist Destruction of Medical Care (2022, English and Spanish editions), and Countering Modernity: Communal and Cooperative Models from Indigenous Peoples (2024).

His current collaborative research in Colombia follows decolonial proposals in health and wellbeing after Colombia’s 2016 peace accord, focusing on Indigenous peoples’ conceptions of Buen Vivir, collective healings, medicinal plants, and peace building. His other research line centers on the dysregulation of human bodies due to the capitalist transformation of labor, consumption, and the environment. He is the director of the Buen Vivir and Collective Healings Initiative at the University of Connecticut, and co-director of the Global Health & Human Rights Research Program at the Human Rights Institute, University of Connecticut.

Yusuf Mansoor is a PhD candidate in the History Department, and the Draper Dissertation Fellow at the UCHI. His research focuses on Native Americans and the Atlantic World in the seventeenth century, with a focus on New England. He has received research fellowships from the Massachusetts Historical Society, the John Carter Brown Library, the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture, the American Philosophical Society, and the Folger Shakespeare Library.

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: Heather Ostman on Literature and the Search for Grace

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2024–25 Fellow's Talk. Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Religion, and the Search for Grace. Heather Ostman (Professor of English, Director of the Humanities Institute, and Humanities Curriculum Chair at SUNY Westchester Community College) with a response by Julia Wold. February 19, 3:30pm. UCHI Conference Room.

Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Religion, and the Search for Grace

Heather Ostman (Professor of English, SUNY Westchester Community College)

with a response by Julia Wold (English, UConn)

Wednesday February 19, 2025, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

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In this presentation, Heather Ostman will discuss her UCHI project, which seeks to find the links between the representations of religion and selected texts from America’s nineteenth-century, a time in the nation’s history when it sought to assert a distinctive culture and national identity—attempts challenged particularly by the Civil War. The New Testament notion of “grace” shapes the direction of this study, as it points to multiple writers’ concerns with ideas of “mercy,” “salvation,” and/or “redemption”—all of which lend themselves to the developing mythos of the American self-made individual, as shaped by earlier narratives, such as Benjamin Franklin’s eighteenth-century autobiography. The texts studied in this project, which include those by Emerson, Walt Whitman, Sojourner Truth, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Pierton Dooner, and Kate Chopin, present a complex picture of American letters, the contours and constraints of religious practice, and the search for grace—and ultimately, for meaning itself—amid the political, religious, and social constructs of nineteenth-century America. After a broad introduction to the study, this presentation will particularly focus on the intersections between fiction and religion through the lens of “grace” as they emerge in the work of Kate Chopin and in comparison to other texts studied in this project.

Heather Ostman is Professor of English, Director of the Humanities Institute, and Humanities Curriculum Chair at SUNY Westchester Community College in Valhalla, New York. She is the author/editor of eleven books, including, recently, Kate Chopin and the City: the New Orleans Stories (2024). She is the recipient of two NEH grants and a SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities, and she is the co-founder and president of the Kate Chopin International Society. The UCHI Visiting Fellowship will enable Heather the time and space to work on her next book project, which is titled “Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Religion, and the Search for Grace.” As Christian idea, “grace” speaks to acts of mercy, salvation, and redemption.

Julia Wold is a doctoral candidate in the English Department specializing in Early Modern drama, primarily Shakespeare, and adaptation theory, focusing on video game adaptations. She received her MA in English from the University of North Dakota and her BA in English from Northern State University. Her work focuses on early modern philosophies of choice in both contemporaneous works (Hamlet, Paradise Lost) and modern video game adaptations of these works (Elsinore, The Talos Principle). She is also the co-host and editor of the Star Wars English Class podcast, exploring concepts ranging from literary theory to creative writing via Star Wars. At UCHI, Julia will complete her dissertation, “Adapting Choice: Shakespeare, Video Games, and Early Modern Thought,” which explores the connection between early modern conceptions of decision-making (“right reason”), theorized as “thoughtful choice” and video games adaptations of early modern texts.

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: Jesse Olsavsky on Frederick Douglass and Pan-Africanism

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2024-25 Fellow's Talk. Frederick Douglass, Emigration, Empire, and the Beginnings of Pan-Africanism, 1850-1920. Jesse Olsavsky, assistant professor of History and a co-director of the Gender Studies Initiative at Duke Kunshan University. with a response by Janet Pritchard. February 12, 3:30pm. Humanities institute conference room, homer babbidge library, fourth floor.

Frederick Douglass, Emigration, Empire, and the Beginnings of Pan-Africanism, 1850–1920

Jesse Olsavsky (History & Gender Studies, Duke Kunshan University)

with a response by Janet Pritchard (Art and Art History, UConn)

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

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

This talk will explore the influence Frederick Douglass had upon the development of Pan-Africanism. Though Douglass is often viewed as an American nationalist with little interest in Africa, this talk will contrarily show the ways that intellectuals in West Africa, the West Indies and the US circulated and reinterpreted Douglass’s thought in order to understand the horrendous changes in the world resulting from the overthrow of Reconstruction and the partition of Africa. Out of these transatlantic discussions, in which Douglass figured heavily, emerged the ideas and practices of Pan-Africanism, which eventually became the principal ideology of African decolonization in the twentieth century

Jesse Olsavsky is an assistant professor of history at Duke Kunshan University, Jiangsu Province, China. He is author of The Most Absolute Abolition: Runaways, Vigilance Committees, and the Rise of Revolutionary Abolitionism, 1835-1861.

Janet L. Pritchard is a Professor of Art, Photography/Video Area Coordinator, and Affiliated Faculty Member of the Center for Environmental Sciences & Engineering and Institute of the Environment at the University of Connecticut. Her creative research interests focus on landscape photography, using a methodology described as historical empathy. She is the author of More than Scenery: Yellowstone, an American Love Story.

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: Peter Zarrow on Heritage and History

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2024-25 UCHI fellow's talk. "Hertiage of Kings: France–England–China–Japan." Peter Zarrow, Professor of History, UConn, with a response by Jesse Olsavsky. January 29, 3:30pm. UCHI Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library, 4th floor.

Heritage of Kings: France–England–China–Japan

Peter Zarrow (Professor, History, UConn)

with a response by Jesse Olsavsky (History & Gender Studies, Duke Kunshan University)

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

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

My talk “Heritage of Kings: France–England–China–Japan” examines how major heritage sites in four countries shape their views of the past.  I focus on palaces and temples associated with the monarchy, suggesting that national identity in each case today is formed partly in relationship to views of the earlier kingdom. I ask whether a comparative approach is useful in understanding how different societies memorialize the past. In theory at least, by highlighting similarities and differences we can determine if there are common patterns in the process of national heritagization and determine what cultural properties are unique to each national culture.

Peter Zarrow is professor of History at UConn. His research focuses on modern Chinese thought and culture, and his current project explores national heritage in China and Japan. He is the author of China in War and Revolution, 1895-1949 (2005) and since coming to UConn in 2014 has published Educating China: Knowledge, Society and Textbooks in a Modernizing World, 1902–1937 (2015) and Abolishing Boundaries: Global Utopias in the Formation of Modern Chinese Political Thought, 1880-1940 (2021).

Jesse Olsavsky is an assistant professor of History and a co-director of the Gender Studies Initiative at Duke Kunshan University, Jiangsu Province, China. He is a scholar of Abolitionism, Pan-Africanism and their legacies. He is the author of The Most Absolute Abolition: Runaways, Vigilance Committees, and the Rise of Revolutionary Abolitionism, 1835–1861 (2022), which was a finalist for the Harriet Tubman book prize. His research has been supported by such institutions as the Schomburg Center for research in Black Culture, the NEH, the ACLS, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Massachusetts Historical Society. He will spend his fellowship year working on his second book project titled “In The Tradition: The Abolitionist Tradition and the Routes of Pan-Africanism.” The project will explore the ways numerous intellectuals and movements in the US, West Africa, and the West Indies, from the late 19th century to the mid-20th century, re-invoked and reinterpreted the history of the struggle to abolish slavery during their own struggles for African unity and decolonization.

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: Janet Pritchard on Connecticut River Views

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2024-25 UCHI Fellow's Talk. "Abiding River: Connecticut River Views and Stories," Janet Pritchard, Professor of Art and Art History, UConn. With a response by Josha Jelitzki. December 4, 3:30pm. UCHI Conference Room.

Abiding River: Connecticut River Views & Stories

Janet Pritchard (Professor, Art and Art History, UConn)

with a response by Joscha Jelitzki (LCL, UConn)

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

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

Janet L. Pritchard will discuss her current creative research project in landscape photography, Abiding River: Connecticut River Views & Stories. As a landscape photographer, her reliance on research sets her work apart. As a UCHI Fellow this year, Pritchard is drafting her project as a book. Fellowship time allows her to keep more balls in the air as she mentally juggles thousands of photographs to decide which to include against what she needs to finish. The nature of this landscape is different than that of her previous project on Yellowstone National Park; thus, the river book’s structure must reflect that. Her presentation will trace work this fall as she immerses herself in the process.

Before photography, Janet L. Pritchard was an outdoor education instructor and spent her youth between the Northeast and Rocky Mountain West in the US. She describes herself as geographically bilingual. Her methodology, described as historical empathy, relies on archival materials to guide her depictions of complex landscapes as expressions of time and place, situating landscapes at the intersection of nature and culture. Pritchard was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019. She exhibits widely, and her recent project on Yellowstone National Park, titled More than Scenery: Yellowstone, an American Love Story, was published in 2022. She is a professor and graduate advisor in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of Connecticut.

Joscha Jelitzki is a scholar of German Jewish literature, and a PhD candidate in German and Judaic Studies at UConn at the Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. Before joining UCHI as the Richard Brown Dissertation Fellow, he completed his research in Vienna as the 2024 Franz Werfel Fellow. He previously studied in Berlin, Frankfurt (Oder), and Jerusalem, and worked as an assistant from 2016–2019 for the critical edition of the works of Hannah Arendt. His focus is on modern German and Austrian Jewish literature and thought, theories of sexuality and secularization. He has published articles on Martin Buber and literature, the biblical figure of Job in modern Jewish literature, and on German-Jewish gangsta-rap.

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: Hana Maruyama on Alaska Native Indigeneity

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2024-25 UCHI Fellow's Talk. "I Class Myself": Racial Classification and Alaska Native Indigeneity. Hana Maruyama, Assistant Professor of History and Asian and Asian American Studies, with a response by Gregory Pierrot, November 13, 3:30pm UCHI Conference room.

“I Class Myself”: Racial Classification and Alaska Native Indigeneity

Hana Maruyama (Assistant Professor, History, UConn)

with a response by Grégory Pierrot (English, UConn)

Wednesday November 13, 2024, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

Paul Ozawa (Tlingit) had no Japanese ancestry to speak of—but he did have a Japanese surname. Without a birth certificate, Paul Ozawa could not prove that he was not Japanese, though it was common knowledge in his family and community that he had been adopted as an infant by Henry Ozawa, Sr. to protect his mother’s reputation. Moreover, Ozawa had not seen his adoptive father since age 5, when Paul’s mother had died from tuberculosis. Ozawa Sr. abandoned his three sons shortly thereafter. The three brothers had grown up in orphanages and boarding schools designed to forcibly assimilate Alaska Native children. Nonetheless, less than 24 hours before the ship transporting Japanese Americans from Alaska to Seattle was set to depart, the Alaska Defense Command informed Paul Ozawa that he needed to be onboard. In this talk, I analyze state-based processes of racial classification for Alaska Native prisoners in Japanese American World War 2 incarceration to argue that these served as a mode of what I term “archival elimination,” or the elimination of Indigenous identities, sovereignty, and presence in archives. I discuss how our over-reliance on settler archives undermines Indigenous identities and knowledge. Finally, I turn to a Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study interview with Ozawa and his letters to show how Ozawa took up racial logics to make his Tlingit identity legible to settler administrators.

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. She is co-curating an exhibition on UConn ceramicist Minnie Negoro that launches at the Benton Art Museum in January 2025. Maruyama also directs the Fudeko Project, a digital journaling program for Japanese American former incarcerees. While completing her PhD at the University of Minnesota (UMN), she co-created/produced the Densho podcast Campu. She formerly worked for the UMN Immigration History Research Center, American Public Media’s Order 9066, the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, and the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation.

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 currently working on 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.

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: Daniel Hershenzon on the Enslavement of Muslims in Early Modern Spain

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2024-25 UCHI Fellow's Talk. "Forced Baptism and the Inheritability of Servile Status: The Enslavement of Muslims in Early Modern Spain." Daniel Hershenzon, Associate Professor, LCL. With a response by Fumilayo Showers. November 6, 3:30pm. UCHI Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library 4th floor.

Forced Baptism and the Inheritability of Servile Status: The Enslavement of Muslims in Early Modern Spain

Daniel Hershenzon (Associate Professor, LCL, UConn)

with a response by Fumilayo Showers (Sociology and Africana Studies, UConn)

Wednesday November 6, 2024, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

This talk focuses on a barely perceptible local custom practiced by enslaved and enslavers in the port city of Malaga (Spain) during much of the 17th century—the right pregnant cortada slaves had to free their child in utero, and in so doing to free them of their enslavers’ dominium. Hershenzon argues that the practice, alongside labor and residence, was one of the foundations of the local enslavement regime. In this system, enslaved Maghrebis negotiated a cortado (literally ‘cut’) agreement with their enslavers as part of which they were allowed to labor and reside outside their enslavers’ household in return for a daily or weekly payments until they paid the ransom fee upon which the parties agreed. Ransom in utero entailed protection from forced conversion, breaking the chain of status inheritability, that slavery lasted one generation, no more, and that these children ransomed in utero were allowed to return to the Maghrib, right which converted Muslims did not possess.

Daniel Hershenzon is an associate professor in the Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at the University of Connecticut. His awards-winning book, The Captive Sea: Slavery, Commerce, and Communication in Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), explores the 17th century entangled histories of Spain, Morocco, and Ottoman Algiers. Hershenzon has published articles in Past and Present, Annales-HSS, Journal of Early Modern History, African Economic History, History Compass, Philological Encounters, and in edited volumes. His research has been supported by the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, the ACLS, NEH, and other grant foundations. While at UCHI, he will work on “The Maghrib in Spain: Enslavement, Citizenship, and Belonging in the Early Modern Spanish Mediterranean.” Revising the dominant historiographic narratives about early modern Spain, “The Maghrib in Spain” offers the first comprehensive account of North Africans in post-expulsion Spain.

Fumilayo Showers is an assistant professor with a joint appointment in the Sociology department, where she directs the Health Professions, Health Care, and Social Inequality Lab, and the Africana Studies Institute. Her research centers on race, gender, and US immigration; the social organization of health and long-term care; health professions; care work; and immigrant workers. Her book, Migrants Who Care: West Africans Working and Building Lives in US Health Care (Rutgers University Press, 2023) is the first book to document the experiences of recent West African immigrants in a range of health care occupations in the US (nursing, disability support, elderly care). Her current research projects focus on tracing changes to US health care systems and the experiences of frontline health care workers as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic; the study and practice of biomedicine in non-western contexts; and the global migration of health professionals.

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: Danielle Pieratti on Dante’s Purgatorio

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2023-24 UCHI Fellow's talk. "Unoriginal: Poems after Dante's Purgatorio in Translation." Danielle Pieratti, PhD Candidate English, with a response by César Abadia-Barrero. October 30, 3:30pm, UCHI Conference Room.

Unoriginal: Poems after Dante’s Purgatorio in Translation

Danielle Pieratti (Ph.D. Candidate, English, UConn)

with a response by César Abadia-Barrero (Anthropology, UConn)

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

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

This talk will be a poetry reading with a critical introduction from Danielle Pieratti’s creative dissertation project entitled, “Unoriginal: Poems after Dante’s Purgatorio in Translation.” In addition to reading poems from her manuscript, Danielle will outline a creative and theoretical rationale for the choice of Purgatorio as the point of entry for her work, applying research in literary translation and translingualism. More than eighty English translations of the Purgatorio exist. What lends this work its ongoing relevance for Anglophone readers, and how might a poet derive inspiration from its tradition as a translated translingual text?

Danielle Pieratti is a current UCHI Dissertation Fellow and a PhD Candidate in the department of English. She is the author most recently of the poetry collection Approximate Body (Carnegie Mellon University Press 2023). Her first book, Fugitives (Lost Horse Press 2016), was selected by Kim Addonizio for the Idaho Prize and won the Connecticut Book Award for poetry. Transparencies, her translated volume of works by Italian poet Maria Borio, was released by World Poetry Books in 2022. She currently serves as poetry editor for the international literary journal Asymptote.

César Abadía-Barrero is a Colombian activist/scholar and Associate Professor of Anthropology and Human Rights at the University of Connecticut. His research approach is grounded in activist, collaborative, and participatory action research frameworks and integrates critical perspectives to study interconnections among capitalism, human rights, and communities of care. He has been a member of or collaborated with collectives and social movements in Brazil, Colombia, and Cameroon, examining how for-profit interests transform access, continuity, and quality of health care, and how communities resist forms of oppression and create and maintain alternative ways of living and caring. He is the author of I Have AIDS but I am Happy: Children’s Subjectivities, AIDS, and Social Responses in Brazil (2011 in English and 2022 in Portuguese) and Health in Ruins: The Capitalist Destruction of Medical Care (2022, English and Spanish editions).

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: Julia Wold on Metagaming The Book of the Courtier

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2024-25 UCHI fellow's talk. Metagaming the Book of the Courtier. Julia Wold, PhD English, with a response by Yohei Igarashi. October 9, 3:30pm, UCHI Conference Room.

Metagaming The Book of the Courtier

Julia Wold (Ph.D. Candidate, English, UConn)

with a response by Yohei Igarashi (English, UConn)

Wednesday October 9, 2024, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

This talk will focus on the “ludic” or gamified nature of the 16th century Italian courtly manual, The Book of the Courtier. As this text has long been read in a games studies context, this talk will both present the scholarly consensus on the ludic nature of the text and identify structural similarities (homologies) between the text and video games. In taking this next step, we can better understand not only the gamified structure of such early modern texts, but how and why those features appear and function in video game adaptations and appropriations of those texts.

Julia Wold is a PhD Candidate in the English department and Dissertation Fellow at the UCHI. Her research centers on Shakespeare/early modern drama and adaptation theory, with a focus on new media, specifically video games. Her work has recently been published in Adaptation, and she is the author of a forthcoming essay on Shakespeare as genre marker in Star Wars in a collection on Shakespeare and Science Fiction from Arden Bloomsbury. She is also the co-host and editor of the podcast Star Wars English Class, an ongoing public humanities project that recently started its fourth season.

Yohei Igarashi is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. His writing to date focuses on how literature has historically related to communication, information, and technology. He is the author of The Connected Condition: British Romanticism and the Dream of Communication (Stanford University Press, 2020), a prize-winning essay in Studies in Romanticism, and other writing. In the field of computational literary studies, his work includes collaborative papers on topics ranging from poetic form to plain writing, as well as a magazine piece in Aeon on computer-generated text. He is currently writing an account of the role of computing in the history of literary studies. From 2019–2023, he was Assistant then Associate Director at the UConn Humanities Institute, where he oversaw the Digital Humanities and Media Studies Initiative. In 2023–2024, he was the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Fellow at the National Humanities Center.

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.