Mirroring, Recalibrating, Reimagining Stories of the Past: Twenty-First Century African Historical Fiction

Eleni Coundouriotis (Professor, English, UConn)

with a response by Surya Parekh (English, University of Binghamton)

Wednesday, December 2, 2026, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

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This talk draws from a monograph in progress (“History for the Future: Twenty-First Century African Historical Fiction”) that explores why the historical novel has become a dominant form in recent African fiction. Although wide-ranging, these works share common features: they are epic in scale, they cover long chronologies that tend to decenter the colonial period, they are mostly written by women, and their authors are transnational subjects. The talk distills distinct ways in which the novels orient themselves in relation to an existing historiography by mirroring, recalibrating, or reimagining the argument. As a whole, this evolving corpus is breaking with two constraints that have shaped the novel in Africa since independence: a) the expectation that its historical imagination must be shaped in reaction to the colonial archive and b) the understanding that history in the novel is always rendered by depicting characters making history in the present and thus by adhering to a socio-realist mode that reveals characters’ representativeness. The examples discussed are Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness (2000), Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love (2010), and Leila Aboulela’s River Spirit (2023).

Eleni Coundouriotis is professor of English and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut where she is also an affiliate of the Department of Social and Critical Inquiry and the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute. Her research is focused on the novel (nineteenth-century to the present) with an emphasis on realism, historical fiction, empire, and postcolonialism (especially African literature). In addition, she has published on the intersection of human rights and literature with a focus on critical humanitarianism, refugee narratives/statelessness, and the narration and documentation of war. She is the author of Claiming History: Colonialism, Ethnography, and the Novel (1999), The People’s Right to the Novel: War Fiction in the Postcolony (2014), and Narrating Human Rights in Africa (2021, paperback 2023).

Surya Parekh is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Binghamton University and affiliate faculty in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. He is the author of Black Enlightenment (Duke University Press, 2023) and co-editor of Living Translation (Seagull, 2022) and Ritwik Ghatak: Occasional Essays for a 100th Birthday (Seagull, 2026). He has published in Paragraph, CR: The New Centennial Review, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Media Theory, and Postcolonial Directions in Education.

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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.

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For twenty-five years the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute has served as the hub for the study of human society and culture at UConn. Help us celebrate UCHI at 25 with a gift to the Institute. Every gift will help us promote innovation and creativity in humanities research for the next twenty-five years.

Reading (in) the Age of AI

Surya Parekh (Associate Professor of English & affiliate faculty in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, University of Binghamton)

with a response by Kali Simmons (English & Social and Critical Inquiry, UConn)

Wednesday, November 4, 2026, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

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The advent of large language models has forced humanists to confront a question first raised in the 1960s: how to read texts without presuming an author or creative force as the source or origin of meaning? The post-World War II emergence of electronic computing and corresponding discourses of informatics and cybernetics had prompted philosopher Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology (1967) to formulate this question as a task of reading otherwise. For Derrida, reading that “escaped the classical categories” involved a deconstruction of the binaries of humanism, a deconstruction that took into account new developments in biology, paleontology, and cybernetics. A good deal of contemporary theorizing of artificial intelligence seems to be relying instead on older paradigms of humanism, paradigms within which LLMs are determined in a binary fashion as either intelligent and humanlike or non-intelligent and akin to calculators. Taking Derrida’s Of Grammatology as a point of departure, I ask whether there is space for a critical embrace of the new technologies by rethinking the human. I consider how some of the fields that have leveled the strongest criticisms of humanism—Black Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Women and Gender Studies, among others—might be particularly well-positioned to theorize about “artificial intelligence.”

Surya Parekh is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Binghamton University and affiliate faculty in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. He is the author of Black Enlightenment (Duke University Press, 2023) and co-editor of Living Translation (Seagull, 2022) and Ritwik Ghatak: Occasional Essays for a 100th Birthday (Seagull, 2026). He has published in Paragraph, CR: The New Centennial Review, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Media Theory, and Postcolonial Directions in Education.

Kali Simmons is an assistant professor of English and Social and Critical Inquiry at the University of Connecticut where she serves on the executive committee for Native American and Indigenous Studies. Prior to joining UConn, Dr. Simmons was an assistant professor of Indigenous Nations Studies at Portland State University. As a 2026–2027 fellow at UCHI she will complete a manuscript for her forthcoming book project, The Savage Screen: Indigeneity in the Modern American Horror Film. The Savage Screen documents, analyzes, and historicizes how Indigenous Peoples have been represented in contemporary American cinema.

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.

Photography disclaimer

Photographs may be taken at this event and posted on social media or otherwise used for communication purposes.

Support UCHI

For twenty-five years the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute has served as the hub for the study of human society and culture at UConn. Help us celebrate UCHI at 25 with a gift to the Institute. Every gift will help us promote innovation and creativity in humanities research for the next twenty-five years.

Managing (Un)Feminine Bodies: Polyendocrine Metabolic Ovarian Syndrome Patients’ Conceptions of Self and Illness

Dunahay Pereyra (Ph.D. Candidate, Sociology, UConn)

with a response by Camilo Ruiz (Anthropology, UConn)

Wednesday, October 28, 2026, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

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What are the social implications and medical narratives surrounding an under-diagnosed and under-studied reproductive chronic illness like polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), newly renamed Polyendocrine Metabolic Ovarian Syndrome (PMOS)? Using the case of PMOS, this dissertation critically examines the connections between societal values and perceived health/ability for those living with chronic illnesses, by drawing on narrative interviews with PMOS patients to illuminate how these patients make sense of the dimensions of their own illnesses in relation to their bodies and social worlds. Employing feminist social constructions of health and gender alongside theories of embodiment, this dissertation examines how medicalized knowledge as a form of power intimately shapes gendered illness identities and dominant meanings about bodies for people living with the chronic illness PMOS.

Dunahay Pereyra is doctoral candidate in Sociology at the University of Connecticut. Her research is situated at the nexus of medical sociology and the sociology of embodiment with a focus on lived experiences of chronic illness and disability, particularly for invisibilized chronic illnesses. Her doctoral dissertation utilizes qualitative narrative interviews with people diagnosed with polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome to understand the ways that social and medical knowledge and meaning are constructed for chronic illness patients, and how their social and reproductive futures are shaped by illness.

Camilo Ruiz is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut whose research bridges medical anthropology, public health, and participatory action research to address health inequities, migration, labor, armed conflict, and environmental justice across the United States and Colombia. His scholarship combines long-term ethnographic research with visual, artistic, and participatory methodologies, advancing community-engaged approaches that generate both academic knowledge and tangible public impact. His current research includes projects examining heroin use and methadone treatment in Colombia, collective healing through community arts, immigrant labor and wage theft in the United States, and participatory environmental research with Indigenous communities in the Colombian Amazon.

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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.

Photography disclaimer

Photographs may be taken at this event and posted on social media or otherwise used for communication purposes.

Support UCHI

For twenty-five years the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute has served as the hub for the study of human society and culture at UConn. Help us celebrate UCHI at 25 with a gift to the Institute. Every gift will help us promote innovation and creativity in humanities research for the next twenty-five years.

Queering the Lone Star State: The Power of Narrative, the Agency of Meaning, and the Effort to Uncover LGBTQ History in Texas

Wesley Phelps (Professor, History, University of North Texas)

with a response by Josh Mayer (Anthropology & Social and Critical Inquiry, UConn)

Wednesday, October 21, 2026, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

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Queering the Lone Star State is a research-based, narrative-driven, documentary-style podcast series tracing LGBTQ history in Texas. Pairing traditional archival materials with oral history interviews, historical audio, and a compelling narrative structure, the podcast series broadens the boundaries of digital history and chronicles a neglected history that is at risk of suppression and erasure. The second season, scheduled to be released in October 2027, will explore twelve critical moments in the struggle for queer equality in Texas. Both individually and collectively, the twelve episodes that make up the new season will ask vital questions about human agency, demonstrate the potential of narrative social history to create a usable past, and highlight the process of meaning-making among individuals struggling to assert their civil rights and their human dignity.

Wesley Phelps is a Professor of History and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of North Texas. His research focuses on how democracy operates at the grassroots level and how marginalized groups of people have struggled to participate in the democratic experiment. His first book, A People’s War on Poverty: Urban Politics and Grassroots Activists in Houston, was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2014. Phelps’ second book, Before Lawrence v. Texas: The Making of a Queer Social Movement, was published by the University of Texas Press in 2023 and was awarded the Coral Horton Tullis Memorial Prize for the Best Book on Texas History by the Texas State Historical Association. He is also the creator of Queering the Lone Star State, a narrative podcast series tracing LGBTQ history in Texas.

Joshua Mayer is an assistant professor of Anthropology and Native American and Indigenous Studies (Department of Social and Critical Inquiry) at the University of Connecticut, where he is also affiliated with the Africana Studies Institute. He is a political anthropologist examining the relationships between settler capitalism, imperialism, territorial governance, and Black and Indigenous freedom. As a UCHI faculty fellow, he will be working on his book manuscript, “Territory as Freedom: Building a Black and Indigenous Future in Nicaragua,” which examines joint Rama and Kriol territory-building efforts amid settler colonial extraction, dispossession, and authoritarianism.

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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.

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Photographs may be taken at this event and posted on social media or otherwise used for communication purposes.

Support UCHI

For twenty-five years the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute has served as the hub for the study of human society and culture at UConn. Help us celebrate UCHI at 25 with a gift to the Institute. Every gift will help us promote innovation and creativity in humanities research for the next twenty-five years.

Diasporic Group Subjectivity: Distinct Group Identities and Memories of ‘Comfort Women’ in Korean American Communities

Chloe Kwak (Ph.D. Candidate, Political Science, UConn)

with a response by Emma Amador (History, UConn)

Wednesday, October 14, 2026, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

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This talk draws on Chloe Kwak’s dissertation, “Diasporic Group Subjectivity: Distinct Group Identities and Memories of ‘Comfort Women’ in Korean American Communities,” to examine how Korean American community groups construct distinct collective orientations toward themselves, their homeland, and the United States. Through a comparative study of Washington Butterfly for Hope in Virginia and the Connecticut Korean American Action Network, she introduces the concept of diasporic group subjectivity to explain how shared experiences of diaspora shape the ways groups understand who they are and how they relate to historical memory. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, organizational materials, and media sources, Kwak shows that Washington Butterfly members develop a liminal orientation situated between Korean and American belonging, leading them to frame the “comfort women” issue as a universal human rights concern. CTKAAN members, by contrast, remain more strongly oriented toward Korea and approach the issue through a localized Korean historical and ethical framework. The talk demonstrates how diasporic group subjectivity helps explain why communities sharing an ethnic background and historical memory can develop distinct forms of collective identity and memory activism. Ultimately, this research seeks to illuminate why these small diasporic groups matter beyond their immediate communities by examining their roles as pressure groups and local opinion-shaping actors in the United States, and how their activism contributes to the broader domestic environment in which U.S. foreign policy toward South Korea and Japan is debated and formulated.

Chloe M. Kwak is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science and a 2026–2027 Draper Dissertation Fellow at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute. Her research lies at the intersection of international relations, feminist theory, diaspora studies, memory politics, international law, and transitional justice, with a particular focus on the politics and memory of “comfort women.” Her dissertation, “Diasporic Group Subjectivity: Distinct Group Identities and Memories of ‘Comfort Women’ in Korean American Communities,” examines how Korean American community groups develop distinct collective subjectivities and forms of memory activism. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the International Feminist Journal of Politics and The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus.

Emma Amador Assistant Professor of History at the University of Connecticut. Her work focuses on Puerto Ricans, Latinas in the United States, and histories of women and gender. Dr. Amador’s first book, The Politics of Care Work: Puerto Rican Women Organizing for Social Justice (Duke University Press, 2025), received an Honorable Mention for the Sharon Harris Book Award from UCHI. As a Justice, Equity, and Repair fellow at UCHI, Dr. Amador will work on her second book, “Bright Futures: How Antonia Pantoja’s Vision of Community Organizing Sparked Movements for Latina and Puerto Rican Rights,” a biography of trailblazing Afro-Puerto Rican civil rights activist Dr. Antonia Pantoja who became the first Puerto Rican woman to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996.

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.

Photography disclaimer

Photographs may be taken at this event and posted on social media or otherwise used for communication purposes.

Support UCHI

For twenty-five years the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute has served as the hub for the study of human society and culture at UConn. Help us celebrate UCHI at 25 with a gift to the Institute. Every gift will help us promote innovation and creativity in humanities research for the next twenty-five years.

Governing Life on the Ocean: Indentured Laborers’ Voyages to the Caribbean and the Colonial Management of Racial Capital

Najnin Islam (Assistant Professor, English, UConn)

with a response by Ahmed AboHamad (Philosophy, UConn)

Wednesday, April 29, 2026, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually
Scholarship on racial capitalism in the Atlantic world, especially the Caribbean has offered robust ways of understanding the relationship between race, labor, and colonialism. Caste became an equally important factor undergirding the division of labor in the British Caribbean after the emancipation of enslaved Africans in the 1830s and the subsequent recruitment of indentured laborers or “coolies” from India. My book examines the constitutive role of race and caste within the project of Indian indentureship, a task that it undertakes through appositional readings of the colonial archive and literary-cultural productions between the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. In this talk I turn to the oceanic passage of indentured laborers to examine how this site was structured by British perceptions about the racial disposition of Indians and their caste-specific characteristics. Analyzing logbooks and journals kept by captains and doctors on “coolie” ships alongside administrative correspondences and colonial ordinances, I show that the voyages served as testing grounds that at times confirmed racialized discourses about Indians and at other times completely upended such certainties, leading to the production of new racial knowledge.

Najnin Islam is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. Her research focuses on post-emancipation labor economies in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean world. Her current book project examines the entangled histories of race and caste in the Anglophone Caribbean during the era of Indian indentureship. Through appositional readings of the historical archive of indentureship and contemporary literary-cultural productions, the book reflects more broadly on the implications of these connected histories for our understanding of racial capitalism in the Atlantic world. Her research has received support through the NEH and other institutional funding. Her work appears in ARIEL, Interventions, Small Axe, Global South Studies, Verge, and more.

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

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.