Fellows Talks

Fellow’s Talk: Daniel Hershenzon on the Enslavement of Muslims in Early Modern Spain

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

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

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.

Fellow’s Talk: Yusuf Mansoor on Indigenous Slavery

2024–25 UCHI Fellow's Talk: "From New England to Tangier: Indigenous Slavery and the English Atlantic at the beginning of King Philip's War." Yusuf Mansoor, PhD Candidate, History, with a response by Heather Ostman. September 25, 3:30pm, UCHI Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library fourth floor.

From New England to Tangier: Indigenous Slavery and the English Atlantic at the beginning of King Philip’s War

Yusuf Mansoor (Ph.D. Candidate, History, UConn)

with a response by Heather Ostman (English, SUNY Westchester Community College)

Wednesday September 25, 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 group of Native Americans who were enslaved and sent to English Tangier in the 1670s. It will contextualize this enslavement by detailing the beginning of King Philip’s War to examine more closely who these captives were, where they came from, and how they came to be enslaved by English colonists. From there, the presentation will track their passage from New England to Tangier, as well as the transatlantic imperial connections that fueled this unusual path.

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.

Heather Ostman 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 ten books, including 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.”

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: Joscha Jelitzki on Rethinking Viennese Jewish Literature

2024–25 UCHI Fellow's Talk, Rethinking Vienna: Jewish Difference, the Evil Inclination, and the Study of Culture. Joscha Jelitzki, Ph.D. Candidate, LCL, with a response by Sara Matthiesen. September 11, 3:30pm, UCHI Conference Room.

Rethinking Vienna: Jewish Difference, the Evil Inclination, and the Study of Culture

Joscha Jelitzki (Ph.D. Candidate, LCL, UConn)

with a response by Sara Matthiesen (History & Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, George Washington University)

Wednesday September 11, 2024, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

Inside the prolific scholarship on the cultural history of fin-de-siècle Vienna, there is a methodological debate on what to make of the high percentage of Jewish authors, artists, and thinkers on its forefront. Methodologically, the challenge is how to give an account of secularized Jewish culture without falling into the essentialism of constructs like “the Jewish mind.” The challenge becomes even more delicate when we turn to the prominent subject of sexuality and desire in Viennese cultural productions, as that field of association was historically strongly exploited by antisemitism. Jelitzki’s dissertation studies Viennese Jewish literature on sexual desire at this fraught intersection of antisemitic attribution and Jewish self-representation.

This presentation, “Rethinking Vienna: Jewish Difference, the Evil Inclination, and the Study of Culture,” will take specifically the Jewish concept of the Evil Inclination, the “Yetzer Hara,” as a starting point and make it into a case study in these larger methodological questions. The Evil Inclination goes back to Talmudic sources, and, handed down by Jewish folk traditions, worked as a shorthand for sexual drive. Interestingly, this remnant of religious culture was secularized and taken up by a number of Viennese and Habsburg Jewish writers when addressing sexuality and Jewish-Catholic differences. This talk will survey these sources and discuss their implications for the study of Jewish Vienna.

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.

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.

Access note

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

Welcome to Fall 2024 at UCHI

Dear Colleagues,

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

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

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

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

Anna Mae Duane
Director, UCHI


Fall 2024 events

Fellow’s Talk: Joscha Jelitzki

September 11, 2024

3:30pm

UCHI Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

Details

Fellow’s Talk: Yusuf Mansoor

September 25, 2024

3:30pm

UCHI Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

Details

Getting the Grant Started: Turning Ideas into Action

September 26, 2024

2:00pm

UCHI Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

Details

Connections/Disconnections: A Conversation on the Loneliness Epidemic

October 1, 2024

3:30pm

Wilbur Cross Reading Room

Details

Fellow’s Talk: Julia Wold

October 9, 2024

3:30pm

UCHI Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

Details

Faculty Talk: Sara Johnson

October 30, 2024

12:30pm

UCHI Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

Details

Fellow’s Talk: Danielle Pieratti

October 30, 2024

3:30pm

UCHI Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

Details

Fellow’s Talk: Daniel Hershenzon

November 6, 2024

3:30pm

UCHI Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

Details

Fellow’s Talk: Hana Maruyama

November 13, 2024

3:30pm

UCHI Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

Details

Faculty Talk: Gary English

November 20, 2024

12:15pm

UCHI Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

Details

Fellow’s Talk: Janet Pritchard

December 4, 2024

3:30pm

UCHI Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

Details

Undergraduate Fellows Talk: Anabelle Bergstrom and Brent Freed

Humanities Undergraduate Research Fellows. "The Self in a Hyperconnected World," Anabelle Bergstrom. “Vietnam in their Factories, Immigrant workers and the Global South during May 1968” Brent Freed. April 10, 1:00pm. Humanities Institute Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library, 4th Floor.

Undergraduate Humanities Research Fellows

Anabelle Bergstrom, “Minds Among Minds: The Self in the Hyperconnected World”

and Brent Freed, “Vietnam in their Factories, Immigrant workers and the Global South during May 1968”

Wednesday April 10, 2024, 1:00pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

Undergraduate Humanities Research Fellows Anabelle Bergstrom and Brent Freed will present on their fellowship projects.

“Minds Among Minds: The Self in the Hyperconnected World,” Anabelle Bergstrom

“Minds Among Minds: The Self in the Hyperconnected World” seeks to examine how modern modes of connectivity such as social media affects identity and authenticity. By drawing on William James’ three constituents of the Self, the project makes bold claims about the impact the online world has on narratives of the Self. It also attempts to acknowledge and remedy the growing gap between the online and analog worlds.

“Vietnam in their Factories, Immigrant workers and the Global South during May 1968,” Brent Freed

This talk will examine Kadour Naïmi’s memoir Freedom in Solidarity: My Experience with the May 1968 Uprisings. Naïmi, the son of an Algerian immigrant, was a college student in Paris during the spring uprisings in 1968, and his connection to three different important groups of actors in the 1968 uprisings—students, workers, and immigrants—provides a unique window into what relations looked like between these groups. Naïmi’s memoir will be used to explain both the roles of immigrants during the spring riots as well as how anti-colonial ideas were discussed alongside the treatment of immigrants in France.

Anabelle S. Bergstrom is a junior majoring in political science and philosophy with a minor in public policy. Anabelle is a member of the Honors Program, Special Program in Law, BOLD Women’s Leadership Network, and is a Undergraduate Research Fellow for the UConn Humanities Institute. She also works for the Office of Undergraduate Research as a Peer Research Ambassador. After finishing her undergraduate degree, Anabelle plans to attend law school and pursue a career as a legal professional.

Brent Freed is a junior pursuing a double major in History and Statistics. A native of Connecticut, he grew up just 20 minutes away from UConn’s Storrs campus. His main areas of studies include 1960s counter-culture movements and student protests.

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.

Undergraduate Fellows Talk: Breanna Bonner and Nathan Howard

Undergraduate Humanities Research Fellows. Breanna Bonner, “The Space Between Black and Liberation: A Digital Exploration of Intersectional Invisibility" and Nathan Howard, "Homofascism: The Queering of Hate." April 3, 2:30pm. Humanities Institute Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library, 4th floor.

Undergraduate Humanities Research Fellows

Breanna Bonner, “The Space Between Black and Liberation: A Digital Exploration of Intersectional Invisibility

and Nathan Howard, “Homofascism: The Queering of Hate

Wednesday April 3, 2024, 2:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

Undergraduate Humanities Research Fellows Breanna Bonner and Nathan Howard will present on their fellowship projects.

“The Space Between Black and Liberation: A Digital Exploration of Intersectional Invisibility,” Breanna Bonner

“The Space Between Black and Liberation,” aims to conceptualize Black Women’s experiences of Intersectional Invisibility in Social Movements. While Black Women hold two or more marginalized identities and are hyper-visible in the violence that necessitates the creation of social movements (e.g sexual assault, police violence, racial or gender-based discrimination), they are often invisible within the goals and outcomes of social movement advocacy. This research project aims to understand and combat intersectional invisibility through the creation of an educational, interactive website. Considering the guiding question: “how do we physically make invisibility visible,validated, and move towards solutions? ”The website explores historical contexts and interventions in Intersectional Invisibility, amplifies ethnographic research of Black Women students on campus, and creates a crucial guiding framework for future journalists, social movement advocates, and policy-makers.

“Homofascism: The Queering of Hate,” Nathan Howard

Violent homophobia is a core component of white supremacist fascist ideologies, such as white separatist movements and neo-Nazism. How, then, do we make sense of the historical and contemporaneous incidence of gay fascist activism? How do gay fascists make sense of, or even reconcile, their gay identity with the heterosexist expectations endemic to fascist projects? Why would they endorse the abuse of persons like them, or agitate for projects that seek to oppress them? “Homofascism: The Queering of Hate,” is an attempt to answer such questions, highlighting the primacy of gender in fascist and homofascist discourse.

Breanna Bonner, sophomore at the University of Connecticut (UCONN) double-majoring in Human Rights and Political Science. Breanna is a former Student Strategist for Kansas City Defender, a mentor for the Human Rights Close to Home Program, Research Specialist for UConn’s First Year Programing office exploring institutional barriers for students accessing Higher Education , and an Undergraduate Research Fellow for the UConn Humanities Institute. In her free time she enjoys hiking, ice-skating, embroidery, hanging out with friends, and using Twitter.

Nathan Howard is a senior at UConn, majoring in Philosophy with a minor in Music. Nathan is an assistant editorial board member at the undergraduate philosophy journal Stance and an Undergraduate Fellow at the UConn Humanities Institute. His research interests include fascism and extremism, nihilism, feminist and queer theory, and social and political philosophy. In his spare time, he enjoys reading, making music, doomscrolling on social media, and watching bad movies.

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: Oscar Guerra on Unveiling Migration Trauma

2023–24 Fellow's Talk. Invisible Wounds: Unveiling Migration Trauma. Associate Professor of Film and Video Production, Digital Media and Design, Oscar Guerra. With a response by Ana Maria Diaz-Marcos. March 27, 12:15pm. UCHI Conference Room. Homer Babbidge Library, fourth floor.

Invisible Wounds: Unveiling Migration Trauma

Oscar Guerra (Associate Professor of Film and Video, DMD, UConn)

with a response by Ana María Díaz-Marcos (LCL, UConn)

Wednesday March 27, 2024, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

“Invisible Wounds: Unveiling Migration Trauma” chronicles 15-year-old Ruth’s migration from Honduras to the US upon discovering her pregnancy. Through interviews and home videos, the documentary intimately reveals the struggles of millions of undocumented migrants, emphasizing their contributions to the nation. Beyond the journey’s challenges, it delves into reuniting with family, adapting to new lives, and confronting anti-immigrant sentiments. The film critically examines mental health barriers, offering a timely and empathetic portrayal of the often-overlooked struggles faced by this vulnerable sector of American society.

Oscar Guerra is an Emmy® award-winning director, researcher, and educator. He is an Associate Professor of Film and Video at the University of Connecticut and a producer at PBS FRONTLINE. Dr. Guerra’s focus is storytelling that promotes critical thinking and social investment. He aims to produce media that provides a way for underrepresented groups to share and disseminate counterstories, contradict dominant and potentially stereotypical narratives, and strengthen their voices and identities. Dr. Guerra’s career spans the spectrum of television environments, music, multimedia production, documentaries for social change, promotional video, immersive media, and vast international experience. Follow him @guerraproduction.

Ana María Díaz-Marcos is a Professor of Spanish Literature at the Department of Literatures, Cultures and Languages. Her research interests include Spanish literature and theater, feminism and gender studies, and Hispanic antifascism in the press. She has published a monograph on representations of fashion in modern Spanish literature entitled The Age of Silk (2006). Her book Thinking out of the Box: Spanish Writers and the Quest for Emancipation (2013) examines the rising of a feminist consciousness in Spain. She is the editor of an open-access anthology of plays written by contemporary Spanish women playwrights: Escenarios de crisis: dramaturgas españolas en el nuevo milenio (2018). Her latest Digital Humanities projects include a bilingual exhibition about the history of the antifascist newspaper La voz (1937-1939) that was published in New York, a collection of articles from that newspaper that illustrate the intersections of Pan-Hispanic feminism and antifascism in the thirties, and a collection of cartoons from the press entitled “Sketches of Harlem” by Puerto Rican artist José Valdés Cadilla, that is on display at CUNY this Fall.

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.

NEW DATE: Fellow’s Talk: Martine Granby on a Black American Legacy of Care

2023–24 UCHI Fellow's talk. "Familial Archives and a Black Family Legacy of Care," Assistant Professor of Journalism, Martine Granby, with a response by Richard Ashby Wilson. March 20, 2024, 12:15pm. UCHi Conference room, Homer Babbidge Library, fourth floor.

Familial Archives and a Black American Legacy of Care

Martine Granby (Assistant Professor, Journalism, UConn)

with a response by Richard Ashby Wilson (Law, Anthropolgy, and Human Rights, UConn)

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

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

Spanning decades of familial memories, TEN SECONDS OF SUGAR is a personal essay documentary film chronicling a legacy of caretaking, motherhood, and silence of Black women’s mental health. Reimagining the past as a form of trauma recovery, employing an essayistic approach illustrating the historical relationships between Black American women and the American health system.

SECONDS is a portrait disrupting generational divisions, seeking care, what it means to overcome structural inequalities, and what we pass down. Guided by my narrative voice, captured mainly by an analog tape recorder, the film presents a series of conversations between three generations of women: myself, my mother, and my maternal grandmother. The camera’s presence is a catalyst, paving the way for us to make space to speak openly and without judgment.

Through this talk, I’ll screen excerpts from work-in-progress scenes that render my family’s lineage of caretaking professions, nurses, mental health practitioners, and funeral directors as a form of care reformation and the accompanying research.

Martine Granby is a nonfiction filmmaker and Assistant Professor of Journalism at the University of Connecticut, focusing on documentary filmmaking with a joint appointment in the Africana Studies Institute and an affiliate of UConn’s Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Program. She produces films that weave between documentary, experimental non-fiction, hybrid, and essay forms. Her creative research focuses on interrogations of and material experimentation with family and collective moving image archives, ethical considerations of found footage usage, and discourses around mental health in BIPOC communities.

Dr. Richard Ashby Wilson is Board of Trustees Professor of Law and Anthropology and Gladstein Chair of Human Rights. He is a scholar of transitional justice and his recent scholarship has focused on hate speech and incitement in international and U.S. law. His books include The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa, Writing History in International Criminal Trials, and Incitement on Trial. He is a member of the Hate Crimes Advisory Council of Connecticut and he is writing a book about the challenges in reporting, investigating, and prosecuting bias-motivated crimes in the United States.

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.