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.

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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.

Unfenceable: Ecofascism, Literary Genre, and Native American Environmental Justice

April Anson (Assistant Professor, English & Social and Critical Inquiry, UConn)

with a response by Kathleen Tonry (English, UConn)

Wednesday, April 1, 2026, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

Dr. Anson will be discussing her book-in-progress, tentatively titled Unfenceable: Ecofascism, Literary Genre, and Indigenous American Environmental Justice, forthcoming with University of Minnesota Press. Unfenceable traces today’s rise of ecofascist climate rhetoric to a long tradition of American ecofascist storytelling while also unearthing resistance strategies in Indigenous American authors infrequently studied, especially in relation to environmental issues. Anson analyzes 19th C American ecofascist fictions as a literary tradition that clarifies the blood and soil logic uniting stages of settler capitalism. Most importantly, she shows that Native American tribal specificity, sovereignty, and literary production have been and continue to be crucial to environmental concerns. In nineteenth-century America, as in today, Unfencable finds ecofascism lurks in the stories we tell and our individual places within, and responsibility for, systems of oppression. Ultimately, Anson argues that the realities of climate change demand ​reckoning with the politics of literary genre and prioritizing land return.

Dr. April Anson is an assistant professor of English and Social and Critical Inquiry and the 2025-26 Justice, Equity and Repair Fellow at the University of Connecticut’s Humanities Institute. She is also current co-president of the Association for Literature and the Environment, with Dr. Alex Menrisky. Dr. Anson works in the environmental humanities, American studies, and Native American and Indigenous studies. Her current book project uses literary analysis to trace the historical and ongoing relationship between climate change, white supremacy, and American environmental thought as well as the Indigenous American environmental justice traditions that eclipse those relations. Examples of her public-facing work include “No One is a Virus,” Against the Ecofascist Creep, and “Water Justice and Technology.” Her scholarship has appeared in boundary 2, Resilience, American Quarterly, Environmental History, Western American Literature, and more.

Kathleen Tonry is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. Her work focuses on the history of the premodern book, and especially on the intertwined transitions in literary and material textual histories that took place over the fifteenth century. She has published on forms of history-writing, the place of leisure, and on the formal tensions evident in writing across the fifteenth century. Her work has won an NEH grant and the Beatrice White prize, and in 2023, she was a Visiting Scholar with Harvard’s Medieval Studies Program. Her current monograph project, Books, Labor, and Time: Experiments and Ambitions in Premodern English Texts, foregrounds the preoccupation with temporality among book readers and makers over the course of the fifteenth century.

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.

A New Ecology for Old Books

Kathleen Tonry (Associate Professor, English, UConn)

with a response by Asmita Aasaavari (Sociology, UConn)

Wednesday, March 25, 2026, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

Medieval literary studies have increasingly centered methodologies that think across past and present concerns about the environment, ecological change, and the agency of the other-than-human. Emerging in the field of book history as the practice of “ecocodicology,” this turn emphasizes the materiality of the book as it participates in non-human systems legible through the skins of sheep, the soils and grains of the land, the composition of inks and paper.

Yet premodern books are also products of human labor and, I suggest, trace the structures of our time-centered relationship to the natural world as a resource. This talk, taken from my larger project on time and the late-medieval book, looks toward a Marxist reading of political ecology through the terms posed recently by Kohei Saito, who emphasizes the human capacity to strategically shift temporalities—to slow down—as a way to heal a world damaged by the destructive tempos of ever-quickening capitalist metabolisms. I explore a remarkable tradition of fifteenth-century English almanacs that refract a transforming rural political economy, strategic ways of laboring, and new modes of representing time, proposing that these almanacs offer one example of reading and book-making in the “slowed time” of engagement and resistance.

Kathleen Tonry is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. Her work focuses on the history of the premodern book, and especially on the intertwined transitions in literary and material textual histories that took place over the fifteenth century. She has published on forms of history-writing, the place of leisure, and on the formal tensions evident in writing across the fifteenth century. Her work has won an NEH grant and the Beatrice White prize, and in 2023, she was a Visiting Scholar with Harvard’s Medieval Studies Program. Her current monograph project, Books, Labor, and Time: Experiments and Ambitions in Premodern English Texts, foregrounds the preoccupation with temporality among book readers and makers over the course of the fifteenth century.

Asmita Aasaavari is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of sociology at UConn. Her scholarly interests lie at the intersection of feminist gerontology, the sociology of care work, gender, and the political economy of aging. In her research, she uses interdisciplinary methods, and feminist, and sociological lenses to shed light on how aging and the social organization of care intersect with systems of inequality such as race, class, gender, disability and caste.

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.

War after Liberalism: Violence, Right-Wing Authoritarianism, and the Long Shadow of Carl Schmitt

Christopher Vials (Professor, English & Social and Critical Inquiry, UConn)

with a response by Catalina Alvarado-Cañuta (Anthropology, UConn)

Wednesday, March 11, 2026, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

Militarism was the beating heart of the successful, historical fascist movements of interwar Europe and Asia. Yet since the birth of fascism in the 1920s, US fascist and fascist-adjacent currents have perennially espoused a deep skepticism to military adventures abroad.  This talk examines this paradox primarily looking at the America First Committee (1940–41), Pat Buchanan and paleoconservatism, and the contemporary Patriot Front.  What the US far right really rejects when it claims “no foreign wars” is not military deployments, per se, but liberal universalism as the principle of global order.  It has instead preferred an alternative rationale for military violence: an amalgam of Schmittian geography, settler colonialism, and brute force in the defense of race.

Chris Vials is a Professor in the Departments of English and Social and Critical Inquiry at UConn. Most of his work has examined the impact of left and right wing movements on US culture. He is the author of Haunted by Hitler: Liberals, the Left, and the Fight against Fascism in United States (2014), and, with Bill Mullen, co-editor of The US Antifascism Reader (2020)

Catalina Alvarado-Cañuta is a Fulbright scholar of Mapuche origin who is currently a PhD candidate in Medical Anthropology at the University of Connecticut. Alvarado-Cañuta’s main focus is on colonial trauma and the processes of collective healing of indigenous peoples, and indigenous art as a decolonial methodology.

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.

Silvic Stewardship: Incentivizing Environmental Care

Julia Smachylo (Assistant Professor, Landscape Architecture, UConn)

with a response by Jennifer Cazenave (French and Cinema & Media Studies, Boston University)

Virtual, with automated captioning.

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This talk examines how environmental incentive programs, with a focus on those shaping private land management in forested landscapes, function as powerful spatial and political tools. By reframing these programs under the framework of incentivized landscapes, the presentation highlights how legal and fiscal policies actively produce socio‑ecological space, shaping both environmental outcomes and design possibilities. I explore how these landscapes operate as state spatial strategies, how they influence patterns and processes across ecosystems, and why their design consequences matter for planning in the Anthropocene. The talk introduces a conceptual framework for understanding incentivized landscapes as hybrid socio-political and socio-ecological systems, and discusses emerging perspectives that reveal new directions for landscape planning and design practice in this context.

Dr. Smachylo’s research and practice are situated at the intersection of critical urban theory, political ecology and landscape design, and focus on making visible largely unseen processes that shape both our interactions with, and physical form of, our environment. Working across disciplines, her research connects landscapes with multi-scalar processes of environmental stewardship, with the goal of contributing to ongoing efforts to develop more holistic and socially responsible approaches to design intervention.

Jennifer Cazenave is an Associate Professor of French and Cinema & Media Studies at Boston University. Her first book, An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’ (SUNY Press, 2019), offers a chronicle of overlooked aspects of the film’s making, while also framing broader questions about trauma and mediation, audiovisual testimonies, gendered memories, and digital archives. An Archive of the Catastrophe received an Honorable Mention for the 2020 Best First Book Award presented by the Society for Cinema & Media Studies. A French translation is forthcoming in 2026.

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.