Fellows Talks

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 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.

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.

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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.

Register to attend virtually

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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.