Fellows Talks

Fellow’s Talk: Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann on Virgilio Piñera and Aimé Césaire

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2023–24 UCHI Fellow's Talk. "Solidarity in Translation: Virgilio Piñera's Love Letters to Aimé Césaire." Associate Professor LCL and EL Instituto, Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann, with a response by Serkan Görkemli. February 14, 12:15pm. Humanities Institute Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library, 4th floor.

Solidarity in Translation: Virgilio Piñera’s Love Letters to Aimé Césaire

Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann (Associate Professor, LCL & El Instituto, UConn)

with a response by Serkan Görkemli (English, UConn)

Wednesday February 14, 2024, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

The final verse of Virgilio Piñera’s famous poem La isla en peso (The Weight of the Island), has become an ambivalent Cuban national refrain. Piñera ends his poem asserting “el peso de una isla en el amor de un pueblo” (the weight of an island in the love of a people). The verse conveys an island weighed down in the love of its people. This structuring ambivalence between love and weight tempers the redemptive possibility of erotic desire against colonial histories and presents that is also Piñera’s signature offering in the poem. This ambivalence recalls the structure of another highly influential poetic signature: Aimé Césaire’s. Piñera self-published La isla en peso the very same year that Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Journal of a Homecoming) was published in Havana, 1943. Earlier that year, Piñera also translated Césaire’s poem “Conquête de l’aube” (Conquest of dawn). Both of Césaire’s poems leave obvious residues in Piñera’s own poem; Césaire’s influence also marks Piñera’s controversial reception in both public and private among Cuban poet-critics. In this presentation, I consider Piñera’s almost-ideal work translating Césaire and his innovative dialogue with Césaire in La isla en peso as love letters to Césaire. I read the weight of Césaire in Piñera’s poetics as the weight of a love that is both personal and aesthetic—towards Césaire the poet—and social—towards Cuba as a part of the Caribbean, and I reconsider Piñera’s poetics through his loving and productive literary submission to Césaire.

Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann (they or she pronouns) is a scholar of Caribbean literature and intellectual history, a literary translator, and the author of Writing the Caribbean in Magazine Time (Rutgers University Press, 2021). Seligmann is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Caribbean Studies at the University of Connecticut in the Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages and El Instituto: Institute of Latina/o, Caribbean, and Latin American Studies. Seligmann’s essays on Caribbean literary magazines, literary infrastructure, translation, and other forms of intellectual travel appear in MLN, Small Axe, South Atlantic Quarterly, The Global South, The Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Continents manuscrits, and more. Their translated books include José Ramón Sánchez’s The Black Arrow (Linkgua 2023, translated with Esther Whitfield) and Legna Rodríguez Iglesias’s Spinning Mill (Cardboard House Press, 2019). As a fellow at the Humanities Institute, Seligmann advances a book-length study of the dynamics of solidarity and translation that comprise Aimé Césaire’s Spanish-language legacy called “Solidarity in Translation: Aimé Césaire and His Cuban Comrades in Art.”

Serkan Görkemli (he/him) is originally from Türkiye and is an associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut in Stamford. His research and publications focus on LGBTQ+ literacies and storytelling. He is the author of two books: Sweet Tooth and Other Stories, a collection of interconnected LGBTQ+ short stories set in Turkey (University Press of Kentucky, 2024; 2022 prose selection for UPK’s New Poetry and Prose Series), and Grassroots Literacies: Lesbian and Gay Activism and the Internet in Turkey (SUNY Press, 2014; 2015 Conference on College Composition and Communication Lavender Rhetorics Book Award). Serkan has a PhD in English with a concentration in Rhetoric and Composition from Purdue University. While at UCHI, he will complete his third book, You’re Always Welcome Here.

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: Tracy Llanera on Misfits of Extremism

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2023–24 Fellow's Talk. The Misfits of Extremism: Brides, Moms, and Daughters. Assistant Professor of Philosophy Tracy Llanera, with a response by Jordan Camp. February 7, 12:15pm. Humanities Institute Conference Room, HBL Library 4th floor.

The Misfits of Extremism: Brides, Moms, and Daughters

Tracy Llanera (Assistant Professor, Philosophy, UConn)

with a response by Jordan T. Camp (American Studies, Trinity College)

Wednesday February 7, 2024, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

While patriarchal hate and terror ideologies assign subordinative and domestic roles to women, contemporary research shows the women participate as political agents in Islamic terror and white supremacist movements. This situation raises complex issues about agency and political accountability. In debates on gender, extremism, and terrorism, for example, women are described either as merely having a “façade of agency” (Lahoud 2018) or as exercising “active agency” (Termeer & Duyvesteyn 2022). Both approaches are problematic: the former insinuates that women, encumbered by their oppressed gender status, are less blameworthy than men even if they follow the same directives; the latter, meanwhile, sidesteps the impact of hierarchical patriarchal dynamics, making men and women equal in terms of liability and blame.

In light of these two unsatisfactory approaches, I develop a more nuanced conception of women’s agency in patriarchal hate and terror groups in this talk. I offer a philosophical account of “women’s hate agency,” detailing its three enabling conditions: first, it is inspired by a ressentiment-fostering narrative perpetuated by their terrorist or hate group; second, the group licenses women to defy gender norms for expedient political action; and third, the group calls on women to perform special duties that bring them fame, praise, honor, and prestige as women. I conclude by linking this work with my UCHI book project, The Misfits of Extremism.

Tracy Llanera is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut-Storrs. She is author of Richard Rorty: Outgrowing Modern Nihilism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), co-author of A Defence of Nihilism (Routledge, 2021), and editor of Resilience and the Brown Babe’s Burden: Writings by Filipina Philosophers (Routledge, forthcoming). Llanera works at the intersection of social and political philosophy, philosophy of religion, feminist philosophy, and pragmatism, specializing on the topics of nihilism, extremism, conversion, and the politics of language and resilience. She is affiliated with the UConn Asian and Asian American Studies Institute and the UConn Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. Llanera is also a core member of Women Doing Philosophy, a global feminist organization of Filipina philosophers.

Jordan T. Camp is an Associate Professor of American Studies and founding Co-Director of the Social Justice Institute at Trinity College, and a Visiting Fellow in the UConn Humanities Institute. He is the author of Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State (University of California Press, 2016); co-editor (with Christina Heatherton) of Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (Verso, 2016); and co-editor (with Laura Pulido) of the late Clyde Woods’ Development Drowned and Reborn: The Blues and Bourbon Restorations in Post-Katrina New Orleans (University of Georgia Press, 2017). He is the co-host and co-producer of the Conjuncture podcast and web series. He is currently working on a new book entitled, The Southern Question.

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: Zehra Arat on Human Rights Norms in Turkey

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2023–24 UCHI Fellow's Talk. "Human Rights Norms in Turkey: A Historical Analysis of Political Party Programs," Professof of Political Science, UConn, Zehra Kabaskal Arat, with a response by Tracy Llanera. January 31, 12:15pm. Humanities Institute Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library 4th floor.

Human Rights Norms in Turkey: A Historical Analysis of Political Party Programs

Zehra Kabasakal Arat (Professor, Political Science, UConn)

with a response by Tracy Llanera (Philosophy, UConn)

Wednesday January 31, 2024, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

Starting with the Charter of the United Nations (UN), which included the promotion of human rights as a goal of the organization, international human rights norms have been advancing. The current studies on human rights norms tend to explore how international norms have been developed and how they have been adopted or challenged by states. The tendency is to treat international human rights norms as external to societies, especially to developing countries. Since some elements of the contemporary international human rights norms have existed in practically all societies (usually articulated as duties), the project is designed with an interest in examining human rights norm development at the intersection of domestic and international politics. It involves a longitudinal study of Türkiye—a country that has been engaged in the UN and European human rights regimes since their beginnings but maintained an inconsistent and problematic human rights record. Focusing on political parties, which play critical roles in agenda setting and policy formulation but neglected in human rights scholarship, it examines the articulation of human rights norms in political party programs issued since the 1920s.

Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat is Professor of Political Science at the University of Connecticut. She studies human rights, with an emphasis on women’s rights, as well as processes of democratization, globalization, and development. In addition to her scholarship, she has been active in professional organizations in various capacities (e.g., Founding President, Human Rights Section of APSA); she has served on the editorial boards of several journals and book series and is currently the editor of the book series “Power and Human Rights” by the Lynne Rienner Publishers. Her work is recognized by several awards, including the APSA Award of Distinguished Scholar in Human Rights (2010). She is also engaged in human rights activism and a founding member of the Women’s Platform for Equality. For more information, please see https://polisci.uconn.edu/person/zehra-arat/

Tracy Llanera is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut-Storrs. She is author of Richard Rorty: Outgrowing Modern Nihilism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), co-author of A Defence of Nihilism (Routledge, 2021), and editor of Resilience and the Brown Babe’s Burden: Writings by Filipina Philosophers (Routledge, forthcoming). Llanera works at the intersection of social and political philosophy, philosophy of religion, feminist philosophy, and pragmatism, specializing on the topics of nihilism, extremism, conversion, and the politics of language and resilience. She is affiliated with the UConn Asian and Asian American Studies Institute and the UConn Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. Llanera is also a core member of Women Doing Philosophy, a global feminist organization of Filipina philosophers.

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: Victor Zatsepine on the Eurasian Borderland

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2023–24 UCHI Fellow's Talk. "To the Gobi Desert: Exploration and Changing Political Landscape in the Eurasian Borderlan." Associate Professor, History and Asian and Asian American Studies, UConn, Victor Zatsepine. with a response by Alexander Diener. January 24, 12:15pm. UCHI Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library, 4-209.

To the Gobi Desert: Exploration and Changing Political Landscape in the Eurasian Borderland

Victor Zatsepine (Associate Professor, History & AAASI, UConn)

with a response by Alexander Diener (Geography, University of Kansas)

Wednesday January 24, 2024, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

During the 1920s, many international explorers and scientists visited the border regions of the newly established Republic of China, Mongolian People’s Republic and Soviet Russia. These expeditions took place at a time of profound sociopolitical change in this region and of growing international rivalry. This talk analyzes the role of these expeditions in transmitting ideas, education, and scientific knowledge about the Gobi Desert. It also questions the purpose of these expeditions, as well as the relationship between modern archaeology, geology and paleontology and Eurasian politics.

This talk is part of my larger project “Unsettling the Sino-Mongol-Russian Borderlands” which investigates the dramatic transformation of the borderland communities between the emerging nation-states of China, Mongolia and Soviet Russia in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Victor Zatsepine is an associate professor appointed jointly to the Department of History and the Asian and Asian American Studies Institute at UConn. His research is focused on the history of modern China, the Russian Far East, and Northeast Asian frontier lands. He embraces transnational and trans-regional approaches to examine the movement of people, ideas, and goods across borders. After the publication of Beyond the Amur: Frontier Encounters Between China and Russia, 1850–1930 (UBC Press, 2017), he has continued research on East Asian frontiers, regionalism, border towns, the Chinese and Russian diaspora, migration and Western Imperialism. Over the past decade he has presented his research at major international conferences and workshops and in published articles.

Alexander Diener is a Professor of Geography at the University of Kansas. His interests include borders, urban landscape, place attachment, axial development, migration, and diaspora. He possesses area studies expertise in Central Eurasia and Northeast Asia, having worked extensively in Russian borderlands. Alex has authored and edited nine books, most recently Borders: A Very Short Introduction (2023), The Power of Place in Place Attachment (2023), Invisible Borders: Geographies of Power, Mobility, and Belonging (2022), and Cities as Power: Urban Space, Place, and National Identity (2019). His work has been funded by the NSF, SSRC, IREX, AAG, and the MacArthur Foundation. He has held fellowships at the Kennan Institute of the Wilson Center, the American University of Central Asia, Mongolia National University, George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, Harvard University’s Davis Center, and Fulbright’s Regional Research Scholar for Central Asia. At UCHI, Alex is writing The Middle of Somewhere, a book about the extensive but understudied effects of place attachment on the human condition.

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: Richard Ashby Wilson on Racial Violence and the Law

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Historical Consciousness, Racial Violence, and the Law

Richard Wilson (Professor, Law, Anthropology, and Human Rights, UConn)

with a response by Birgit Brander Rasmussen (English, Binghamton University SUNY)

Wednesday January 17, 2024, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

In the aftermath of 2020 and nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, states and municipalities in the United States implemented a range of new policies to reform the relationship between law enforcement and historically marginalized groups. These measures acknowledge the role of the law in racial oppression and seek to reorient policing towards protecting groups from hate crimes, or crimes motivated in whole or in part by bias or bigotry. This talk draws on Bourdieu’s notion of the “juridical field” to evaluate the implications of such reform initiatives for how actors in the criminal justice system address the history of racially motivated violence and the implications for the enforcement of hate crimes.

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.

Birgit Brander Rasmussen is Associate Professor in the English Department at Binghamton University (SUNY), located on unceded Onandaga land. She wrote the award-winning book Queequeg’s Coffin: Indigenous Literacies and Early American Literature and co-edited The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness.

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: Jordan T. Camp on the Geography of Fascism

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Southern Questions: W.E.B. Du Bois, Antonio Gramsci, and the Geography of Fascism. Jordan Camp, Associate Professor of American Studies, Trinity College. With a response by Victor Zatsepine.

Southern Questions: W.E.B. Du Bois, Antonio Gramsci, and the Geography of Fascism

Jordan T. Camp (Associate Professor, American Studies, Trinity College)

with a response by Victor Zatsepine (History, UConn)

Wednesday, November 15, 2023, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

In this talk, Jordan T. Camp establishes a link between W.E.B. Du Bois and Antonio Gramsci through their respective approaches to the “southern question.” Drawing on Du Bois’ insights about the overthrow of Reconstruction and fascism in the United States and Antonio Gramsci’s writing about the emergence of fascism in post-World War I Italy, Camp traces an alternative geography of fascism and an alternate trajectory of anti-fascist political theory. He demonstrates how both theorists deployed symbolic, geographic, and ideological representations of “the South” in their writings. He further illuminates how they both treated the “southern question” relationally and illustrate the need for comparisons between racist and fascist nationalisms in different historical-geographical contexts. In linking Du Bois and Gramsci, Camp illustrates their ongoing relevance for understanding reactionary populist appeals to racism, nationalism, and xenophobia. In doing so, he suggests how their writing can be “translated” in order to confront the southern question in our own time.

Jordan T. Camp is an Associate Professor of American Studies and founding Co-Director of the Social Justice Institute at Trinity College, and a Visiting Fellow in the UConn Humanities Institute. He is the author of Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State (University of California Press, 2016); co-editor (with Christina Heatherton) of Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (Verso, 2016); and co-editor (with Laura Pulido) of the late Clyde Woods’ Development Drowned and Reborn: The Blues and Bourbon Restorations in Post-Katrina New Orleans (University of Georgia Press, 2017). He is the co-host and co-producer of the Conjuncture podcast and web series. He is currently working on a new book entitled, The Southern Question.

Victor Zatsepine is an associate professor appointed jointly to the Department of History and the Asian and Asian American Studies Institute at UConn. His research is focused on the history of modern China, the Russian Far East, and Northeast Asian frontier lands. He embraces transnational and trans-regional approaches to examine the movement of people, ideas, and goods across borders. After the publication of Beyond the Amur: Frontier Encounters Between China and Russia, 1850–1930 (UBC Press, 2017), he has continued research on East Asian frontiers, regionalism, border towns, the Chinese and Russian diaspora, migration and Western Imperialism. Over the past decade he has presented his research at major international conferences and workshops and in published articles.

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: Ana María Díaz-Marcos on Ernestina G. Fleischman

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UCHI Fellow's Talk 2023–24. Recovering Ernestina G Fleischman's Life and Work. Professor of Spanish Literatures, LCL, Ana Maria Diaz Marcos, with a response by Oscar Guerra. November 8, 12:15pm. Humanities Institute Conference Room. Homer Babbidge Library, fourth floor.

Recovering Ernestina G. Fleischman’s Life and Work

Ana María Díaz-Marcos (Professor, LCL, UConn)

with a response by Oscar Guerra (DMD, UConn)

Wednesday, November 8, 2023, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

Why do so many women vanish from history after leading exceptional lives? Ernestina González Fleischman (1896–1976) is an emblematic case that illustrates the erasure of women´s agency and achievements from historical accounts.

Ernestina led an awe-inspiring life marked by political activism, international visibility, and intellectual relevance. She was a librarian, a Spanish teacher, a writer, and an antifascist leader who tirelessly engaged in public activities. Her voice became a staple for the Spanish-speaking community in New York who listened to her nightly radio program Voice of fighting Spain during the forties. She published in at least three New York-based Spanish newspapers, and delivered public speeches on topics of human rights, antifascism, feminism, anti-imperialism, and peace efforts. Her highly international profile illustrates women’s transnational protests at their best, as she actively participated in women’s antifascist networks in USA, Spain, France and Mexico. It is difficult to explain how such a prominent figure in the arena of the anti-fascist Hispanic hubs in the United States and Spain has been wiped out from history.

This talk documents the archival research that has made possible the recovery of her legacy and her writings and will focus on crucial moments in her biography: a personal tragedy during the Spanish Civil War, two exiles, her leadership and fierce activism in New York arena of civil rights, and the investigation and trial by the Committee on Un-American activities.

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.

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.

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: Serkan Görkemli on the Crisis Aesthetic

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2023–24 UCHI Fellow's Talk. "Queer Immigrants and the Crisis Aesthetic in Short Fiction" Serkan Gorkelmi, Associate Professor, Department of English, UConn. with a response by Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann. November 1, 12:15pm, UCHI conference room, Homer Babbidge Library, fourth floor.

Queer Immigrants and the Crisis Aesthetic in Short Fiction

Serkan Görkemli (Associate Professor, English, UConn)

with a response by Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann (LCL & El Instituto, UConn)

Wednesday, November 1, 2023, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

Tobias Wolff once said, “Good stories thrive on difficulty.” Indeed, conflict and, more broadly, crisis are central to the literary genre of the short story and its characters and plot. In this talk, Görkemli will focus on this “crisis aesthetic” in his discussion of You’re Always Welcome Here, his UCHI fellowship project, a collection of fifteen short stories ranging from traditional character-driven narratives to experimental, mixed-form pieces. Featuring queer immigrant and non-immigrant characters in NYC during the Trump presidency and the COVID pandemic, You’re Always Welcome Here roils with personal, political, and existential crises. Görkemli will discuss the genre of the short story, multiple crises in a narrative, and the importance of storytelling to record and reflect on recent events that continue haunting us. Stepping into the shoes of queer immigrant characters who face seemingly unresolvable crises, the audience will contemplate disidentification and allyship in short fiction.

Serkan Görkemli (he/him) is originally from Türkiye and is an associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut in Stamford. His research and publications focus on LGBTQ+ literacies and storytelling. He is the author of two books: Sweet Tooth and Other Stories, a collection of interconnected LGBTQ+ short stories set in Turkey (University Press of Kentucky, 2024; 2022 prose selection for UPK’s New Poetry and Prose Series), and Grassroots Literacies: Lesbian and Gay Activism and the Internet in Turkey (SUNY Press, 2014; 2015 Conference on College Composition and Communication Lavender Rhetorics Book Award). Serkan has a PhD in English with a concentration in Rhetoric and Composition from Purdue University. While at UCHI, he will complete his third book, You’re Always Welcome Here.

Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann (they or she pronouns) is a scholar of Caribbean literature and intellectual history and the author of Writing the Caribbean in Magazine Time (Rutgers University Press, 2021). Katerina’s essays on literary magazines, literary infrastructure, and Caribbean textual and intellectual circulation also appear in MLN, Small Axe, South Atlantic Quarterly, The Global South, The Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, and Inti. Katerina is also a member of the Aimé Césaire research group of the Francophone manuscripts team at the École normale supérieure in Paris and a translator of contemporary Cuban literature. At UConn, Katerina is associate professor of Spanish and Caribbean Studies in the Literatures, Cultures and Languages Department and El Instituto: Institute for Latina/o, Caribbean, and Latin American Studies.

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: Birgit Brander Rasmussen on Indigenous Literacies

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2023–24 UCHI Fellow's Talk. "Signs of Resistance, Signs of Resurgence: Indigenous Literacies, New Media, and Anti-Colonial Imaginaries in Native American Literature and Culture" Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Associate Professor of English, Binghamton University SUNY. With a response by Zehra Arat. October 25, 12:15pm. UCHI conference room. Homer Babbidge Library, fourth floor.

Signs of Resistance, Signs of Resurgence: Indigenous Literacies, New Media, and Anti-Colonial Imaginaries in Native American Literature and Culture

Birgit Brander Rasmussen (Associate Professor of English, Binghamton University SUNY)

with a response by Zehra Arat (Political Science, UConn)

Wednesday, October 25, 2023, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

What would American literature look like if it began in 901?

Ancient and diverse literary cultures interacted for centuries before Europeans arrived in the Americas. Peoples, corn, stories, and technologies moved along trade and migration routes connecting the continents for millennia.

Many around the world continue to believe, incorrectly, that European settlers brought literacy to these continents. The colonial conflict brought multiple forms of literacy into contact and conflict. In the “textual conflict zone,” indigenous literacies, like pictography, become signs of resistance in the colonial era that are reclaimed as signs of resurgence in the digital present.

Contemporary Native writers, artists, and activists use digital media to connect past and present, pictography and digital media. Digital Indigenous literacies invite new ways of thinking about literature, writing, history, and even time itself.

Birgit Brander Rasmussen is Associate Professor in the English Department at Binghamton University (SUNY), located on unceded Onandaga land. She wrote the award-winning book Queequeg’s Coffin: Indigenous Literacies and Early American Literature and co-edited The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness.

Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat is Professor of Political Science at the University of Connecticut. She studies human rights, with an emphasis on women’s rights, as well as processes of democratization, globalization, and development. In addition to her scholarship, she has been active in professional organizations in various capacities (e.g., Founding President, Human Rights Section of APSA); she has served on the editorial boards of several journals and book series and is currently the editor of the book series “Power and Human Rights” by the Lynne Rienner Publishers. Her work is recognized by several awards, including the APSA Award of Distinguished Scholar in Human Rights (2010).

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: Alexander Diener on Place Attachment

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2023–23 UCHI Fellow's Talk: "The Middle of Somewhere: Place Attachment and the Geographies of Being" Professor of Geography, University of Kansas Alexander Diener. With a response by Martine Granby. October 18, 12:15 pm. UCHI conference room, Homer Babbidge Library, Fourth Floor.

The Middle of Somewhere: Place Attachment and the Geographies of Being

Alexander Diener (Professor of Geography, University of Kansas)

with a response by Martine Granby (Journalism, UConn)

Wednesday, October 18, 2023, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

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Place attachment is a burgeoning field of scholarship maturing in theory, method, and application. The phenomenon obviously relates to concepts of residency, including key questions such as: Who moves and why? Who stays and why? Who returns and why? But place attachment also encompasses broader networks of place and geographic contingency, including questions such as: How do place attachments form? Why do people form attachments to some places and not others? How are concepts of home and homeland negotiated within and across varied conditions of mobility? In this talk, Alexander Diener approaches place attachment as an assemblage of materiality, performance, and narration. Rather than being static or deterministic, this model points to people’s varied capacities to make and remake place attachments, and how this shapes everyday routines (e.g. routes to work, shopping, social interactions), major life choices (e.g. places of residence, education, vacations), and identities (e.g. civic, national, religious).

Alexander Diener is a Professor of Geography at the University of Kansas. His interests include borders, urban landscape, place attachment, axial development, migration, and diaspora. He possesses area studies expertise in Central Eurasia and Northeast Asia, having worked extensively in Russian borderlands. Alex has authored and edited nine books, most recently Borders: A Very Short Introduction (2023), The Power of Place in Place Attachment (2023), Invisible Borders: Geographies of Power, Mobility, and Belonging (2022), and Cities as Power: Urban Space, Place, and National Identity (2019). His work has been funded by the NSF, SSRC, IREX, AAG, and the MacArthur Foundation. He has held fellowships at the Kennan Institute of the Wilson Center, the American University of Central Asia, Mongolia National University, George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, Harvard University’s Davis Center, and Fulbright’s Regional Research Scholar for Central Asia. At UCHI, Alex is writing The Middle of Somewhere, a book about the extensive but understudied effects of place attachment on the human condition.

Martine N. Granby is a nonfiction filmmaker, producer, and video journalist. She is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Connecticut, with a focus on documentary filmmaking. She holds a joint appointment in the Africana Studies Institute and is an affiliate of UConn’s Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Program. Granby 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.

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