Fellows Talks

Fellow’s Talk: Geoffrey Hedges-Knyrim on Iron Age Politics and Agriculture

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2023–23 UCHI fellow's talk. Political Power during the Iron Age of the Southern Levant Through the Lens of Agricultural Production. Ph.D Candidate, Anthrpology department, Geoffrey Hedges-Knyrim. with a response by Xu Pen. October 11, 12:15pm. Humanities Institute Conference Room. Homer Babbidge Library 4th Floor.

Political Power during the Iron Age of the Southern Levant Through the Lens of Agricultural Production

Geoffrey Hedges-Knyrim (Anthropology, UConn)

with a response by Xu Peng (LCL, UConn)

Wednesday, October 11, 2023, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

The mundane agricultural practices of the Iron Age (c.1200—c.600 BCE) southern Levant (modern Jordan, Palestine, and Israel) are less understood and appreciated relative to larger historical narratives. Understanding the mundane through the archaeological record can exemplify the daily lives of people often ignored or marginalized in the historical record. Using a political ecology framework and plant data, we can determine how state-level societies controlled their agricultural base within their specific environmental and social constraints. This presentation will discuss the current understanding of Iron Age southern Levantine agriculture from an integrated and regional archaeological perspective, focusing on the contribution of archaeological plant remains. This will show how integrating mundane data within a regional perspective using political ecology is preferable to a subregional, siloed perspective.

Geoffrey Hedges-Knyrim is an archaeologist and doctoral candidate in the Anthropology Department. He received his BS in Anthropology from The College at Brockport, SUNY in 2013 and his MA in Anthropology from the University at Buffalo, SUNY in 2015. His research interests include archaeobotany, Bronze and Iron Age archaeology of Southwest Asia, and ancient subsistence practices.

Xu Peng is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut. His research focuses on the articulation of Asianness, and Chineseness in particular, in Latin America and the Caribbean. He will work on his dissertation, “From History to the Future: Chineseness in Contemporary Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Dominican Literatures and Cultures,” as a dissertation fellow at UCHI. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in College Literature, Hispanic American Historical Review, Caribbean Quarterly, and Journal of Asian 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: David Evans on the Human Right to Food

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2023–24 UCHI fellow's talk. Rediscovering Hunger: The Human Right to Food and US Politics in the 1970s. Ph.D. candidate, history, David Evans. With a response by Kathryn Angelica. october 4, 12:15 pm. Humanities Institute conference room, fourth floor Homer Babbidge Library.

Rediscovering Hunger: The Human Right to Food and US Politics in the 1970s

David Evans (History, UConn)

with a response by Kathryn Angelica (History, UConn)

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

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

“Rediscovering Hunger” examines the political struggle surrounding the effort to embed the human right to food into US foreign and domestic policy in the mid-1970s. Following a disastrous world food crisis that lasted from 1973-1974, US citizens and political leaders re-awoke to the ethical problem that hunger presented. The promise of the modernization projects of the 1960s gave way to a reality in which wealthy countries remained well-fed, the global poor starved and suffered. Therefore in 1976, various US Congressional leaders, supported by a broad coalition of religious and secular activists, sought to establish the human right to food in US policy. The effort represented one of the earliest efforts in a wider human rights project that came to dominate US politics by the end of the decade. The episode also illustrated the constraints of effectively achieving human rights, as food producers and market fundamentalists contested the meaning and viability of the human right to food despite its moral universality.

David Evans is a doctoral candidate at the University of Connecticut where he studies the history of human rights, US foreign relations, and agricultural diplomacy. His dissertation “Hunger for Rights: Establishing the Human Right to Food, 1933–1988” explores how politicians, internationalists, and activists envisioned the human right to food, first within the discourse of international economic development, and then as a point of contention between advocates for social justice and supporters of deregulatory market policies. David is a husband and father to two children. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Before pursuing his academic career, David served eight years in the United States Marine Corps.

Kathryn Angelica is Ph.D. candidate in the History Department. Her research interests include gender & sexuality, women’s activism, and African American history in the nineteenth-century United States. While at UCHI, Kathryn will complete her dissertation “An Uneasy Alliance: Cooperation and Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Black and White Women’s Activism.”

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: Kathryn Angelica on Black Women’s Activism

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2023–24 UCHI Fellow's Talk. Public Patriotism: The United States Sanitary Commission and Black Women's Interregional Grassroots Activism During the Civil War. Kathryn Angelica, Ph.D. Candidate in history, with a response by Geoffrey Hedges-Knyrim. September 27, 12:15pm. Humanities Institute Conference Room, HBL Fourth Floor.

Public Patriotism: The United States Sanitary Commission and Black Women’s Interregional Grassroots Activism During the Civil War

Kathryn Angelica (History, UConn)

with a response by Geoffrey Hedges-Knyrim (Anthropology, UConn)

Wednesday, September 27, 2023, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

This talk examines how histories of the Civil War have neglected the contributions of African American women within and beyond the United States Sanitary Commission during the Civil War. Exploring African American laborers as janitors, clerks, waiters, and cooks, Black women’s contributions to the Sanitary Commission, and African American women’s independent patriotic organizations this talk considers the many ways women of color claimed their rightful place under the banner of patriotic Northern womanhood. Importantly, it also demonstrates how African American women’s organizations diverged from the centralized goals of the Sanitary Commission to encompass Black community support, aid for refugees, and medical relief for disabled soldiers.

Kathryn Angelica is Ph.D. candidate in the History Department. Her research interests include gender & sexuality, women’s activism, and African American history in the nineteenth-century United States. While at UCHI, Kathryn will complete her dissertation “An Uneasy Alliance: Cooperation and Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Black and White Women’s Activism.”

Geoffrey Hedges-Knyrim is an archaeologist and doctoral candidate in the Anthropology Department. He received his BS in Anthropology from The College at Brockport, SUNY in 2013 and his MA in Anthropology from the University at Buffalo, SUNY in 2015. His research interests include archaeobotany, Bronze and Iron Age archaeology of Southwest Asia, and ancient subsistence practices.

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: Xu Peng on Caribbean Chineseness

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2023–24 Fellow's Talk. Reading Caribbean Literature: A Literary Migration. Xu Peng, Ph.D. Candidate, Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. with a response by David Evans. September 20, 12:15pm. Humanities Institute Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library, 4th Floor.

Reading Caribbean Chineseness: A Literary Migration

Xu Peng (LCL, UConn)

with a response by David Evans (History, UConn)

Wednesday, September 20, 2023, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

Since the first wave of indentured Chinese laborers arrived in the Caribbean in the mid- nineteenth century amid the abolition of slavery, Chinese migrants have appeared repeatedly in Caribbean histories and literatures. While historians of the Caribbean have unearthed the Chinese presence from government decrees, census records, local newspapers and magazines, nuanced articulations of Chineseness have also been rehearsed yet remained understudied in Caribbean literature and culture. Drawing on fictional and artistic representations of Sino-Caribbean experiences, this talk proposes a framework that Peng terms “literary migration” to study Caribbean Chineseness. Attentive to the fact that the Chinese not just physically crossed national borders in the past, they have also metaphorically “migrated” into contemporary Caribbean narratives of nation-building and people-making, Peng illuminates the literary functionality of Sino-Caribbean relationality. Using Cuban writer Lourdes Casal’s 1972 short story “Los Fundadores: Alfonso” as an example, this talk demonstrates how Chineseness is narrativized and repurposed in Caribbean literature to reconsider national histories, reconstruct national identities, and envision national futures.

Xu Peng is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut. His research focuses on the articulation of Asianness, and Chineseness in particular, in Latin America and the Caribbean. He will work on his dissertation, “From History to the Future: Chineseness in Contemporary Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Dominican Literatures and Cultures,” as a dissertation fellow at UCHI. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in College Literature, Hispanic American Historical Review, Caribbean Quarterly, and Journal of Asian American Studies.

David Evans is a doctoral candidate in the history department whose research focuses on the history of the human right to food and United States foreign relations. Prior to entering academia, he served eight years in the United States Marine Corps as an infantry, reconnaissance, and special operations leader and deployed to Southeast Asia, Iraq and Afghanistan. David went on to earn his B.A. and M.A. degrees at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Since starting his studies at University of Connecticut he has presented his work at several conferences, most recently the 2022 Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Annual Conference. In 2020, David received the UConn Human Rights Institute Dissertation Research Fellowship, and the Gerald R. Ford Scholar Dissertation Award from the Ford Presidential 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: Karen Lau and Rylee Thomas

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2022-23 UCHI Fellow's Talk. Undergraduate Humanities Research Fellows. Karen Lau, “Soup Dumplings for the Soul: Ethnic Studies and Social-Emotional Learning” and Rylee Thomas, “The Ghostly Dynasty: Victim-Blaming, the Gothic Novel, and the Modern True-Crime Drama”. Wednesday April 19, 2023, 5:00pm, UCHI Conference room, Homer Babbidge Library. This event will also be livestreamed.

Undergraduate Humanities Research Fellows

Karen Lau, “Soup Dumplings for the Soul: Ethnic Studies and Social-Emotional Learning”

and Rylee Thomas, “The Ghostly Dynasty: Victim-Blaming, the Gothic Novel, and the Modern True-Crime Drama”

Wednesday, April 19, 2023, 5:00pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

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The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

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“Soup Dumplings for the Soul: Ethnic Studies and Social-Emotional Learning”

Karen’s public humanities project examines the link between ethnic studies and social-emotional learning. She will share conclusions from a series of Asian American history workshops she led at EO Smith High School and their impact on students’ mental health and sense of identity.

Karen Lau, from Norwich, CT, is a Day of Pride Scholar majoring in political science and economics with a minor in Asian American studies. As an inaugural UCHI Undergraduate Research Fellow, her project’s aims are two-fold: 1) pilot a qualitative study that implements a novel Asian American history curriculum at a local high school and 2) investigate how the curriculum affects students’ mental health, social-emotional learning, and sense of identity. With funding from UCHI, the UNH Center for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation, her fellowship will produce publicly engaged humanities scholarship, culminating in a student-curated exhibit and a journal publication. Karen’s research interests include ethnic studies, curriculum development, digital humanities, and education policy. She pursues these interests as an intern for Make Us Visible, a member of the Humanities Undergraduate Research Symposium, and the Secretary of the Human Rights Symposium. Karen is also a 2022 Holster Scholar, a UConn@COP27 Fellow, a Campaign Fellow for Joe Courtney for Congress, and a member of the Special Program in Law. She aspires to serve the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund as a public interest attorney. In her free time, Karen enjoys curating Spotify playlists, exploring trails, visiting farmers’ markets, and shopping for corduroy pants.

“The Ghostly Dynasty: Victim-Blaming, the Gothic Novel, and the Modern True-Crime Drama”

Throughout history, a disturbing trend in social perceptions of domestic abuse and violence against women is a tendency to blame the victim. While feminist movements have changed this culture for the better, contemporary society continually criticizes women for behaving in ways that bring tragedy upon themselves. To explore this dichotomy, Rylee is writing a contemporary young adult horror novel that plays upon the conventions of both the gothic novel and the modern true-crime drama. Her novel, titled The Ghostly Dynasty, will explore the double standards that society places on women in both literary and criminal justice.

Rylee Thomas is a junior at UConn double majoring in English and communication with a creative writing concentration. After graduation, Rylee plans to get her masters in English and pursue a career in publishing. She’s incredibly grateful to have won the Wallace Stevens Poetry Contest, the Collins Prize in Poetry, and the Aetna Prize for Creative Writing for Children. When not writing, she can be found figure skating, drinking matcha lattes, and rereading Austen novels. For her project, Rylee wants to explore the culture of victim-blaming double standards that contemporary society continues to place on women through tropes of nineteenth-century gothic novels. She hopes to explore this dichotomy by writing a contemporary young adult fantasy novel that plays upon the conventions of both the gothic novel and modern true-crime drama.

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: Anna Mae Duane on Contested Meanings of Slavery

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2022–23 Fellow's Talk. “God can sometimes Make a Prison a Palace:” Unexpected Engagements in the Contested Meanings of Slavery from the Nineteenth Century to the Present Moment. Professor of English, UConn, Anna Mae Duane, with a response by Hassanaly Ladha. Wednesday April 12, 3:30pm. UCHI Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library. This event will also be livestreamed.

“God can sometimes Make a Prison a Palace:” Unexpected Engagements in the Contested Meanings of Slavery from the Nineteenth Century to the Present Moment

Anna Mae Duane (Professor, English, UConn)

with a response by Hassanaly Ladha (LCL, UConn)

Wednesday, April 12, 2023, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

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The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

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How is that one word—slavery—can be deployed to completely opposite ends? Even as it evokes divisive racial and colonial histories, the term slavery has the capacity to accommodate an incredibly diverse, and often paradoxical, set of political arguments and legal practices. This talk, taken from Duane’s book in progress, Like A Slave: Slavery’s Appropriation from The Revolution to QAnon, explores how slavery has been deployed as a metaphor, and in the process, the ways Americans have continually reshaped the collective memory and historical meaning accorded to the most brutal—and central—institution in the history of the United States. Duane contends that slavery’s shifting meanings have emerged as an ongoing dialogue between white supremacist appropriations of slavery’s threat and Black authors’ insistent rewritings of slavery’s meanings. As white writers imagined everything from seduction, to drunkenness, to imprisonment as a form of “slavery,” they were also implicitly shifting the parameters of what constituted freedom. Thus, when nineteenth-century Black writers insisted on alternate ways of defining and remembering slavery, they are offering rhetorical, legal and imaginative redefinitions of not only the crime of enslavement, but also the possibilities of freedom. This talk will focus on how literary depictions of prison—the very status that animates slavery analogies for prison abolitionists today—were sometimes imagined by nineteenth-century African American authors as sites of respite and resistance from the alleged freedom offered by the white household.

Anna Mae Duane is a Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Connecticut. She has written or edited six books, including Suffering Childhood in Early America: Violence Race and the Making of the Child Victim; The Children’s Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities; Child Slavery before and after Emancipation: An Argument for Child Centered Slavery Studies. She co-edited Who Writes for Black Children: African American Children’s Literature before 1800 with Kate Capshaw. She is the co-host, along with Victoria Ford Smith and Kate Capshaw, of the Children’s Table Podcast. Her work has been supported by the NEH, the Fulbright Foundation, and by the Yale Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition. Her latest book, Educated for Freedom: The Incredible Story of How Two Fugitive Schoolboys Grew Up to Change a Nation, was supported by a UCHI Faculty Fellowship. During her fellowship year, Professor Duane will be working on a book project entitled, “Like a Slave: Slavery’s Appropriation from the American Revolution to QAnon.”

Hassanaly Ladha is an Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature and the Graduate Advisor in French and Francophone Studies at the University of Connecticut. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Yale University and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. He taught at Harvard University before joining the faculty in Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at UConn. His first book, The Architecture of Freedom: Hegel, Subjectivity, and the Postcolonial State (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), which was supported by a 2015–2016 Humanities Institute Fellowship, offers a new reading of Hegel’s related theories of Africa and the dialectic, language and the aesthetic, and mastery and slavery, tracing the implications of these concepts for postcolonial studies and political theory.

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 Cassano on The Fate of Human Beings

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2022–2023 UCHI Fellow's Talk. "Stories from State Hospital Cemeteries: Work-in-progress scenes from The Fate of Human Beings. Assistant Professor, Digital Media and Design, Heather Cassano, with a response by Cornelia Dayton. March 1, 2023, 3:30pm. UCHI Conference Room and livestreamed on Zoom.

Stories from State Hospital Cemeteries: Work-in-Progress Scenes from The Fate of Human Beings

Heather Cassano (Assistant Professor, DMD, UConn)

with a response by Cornelia Dayton (History, UConn)

Wednesday, March 1, 2023, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

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The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

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THE FATE OF HUMAN BEINGS is a feature-length documentary film uncovering the stories of people with disabilities and mental illnesses who are buried in unnamed graves in mental institution cemeteries across the United States. Through a multiple narrative approach utilizing archival and present-day material, the film unpacks the ramifications of these cemeteries, seeking to understand our past and present relationships with the “otherness” of those interred. This talk will present work-in-progress scenes from the film and discuss the research behind the project. The selected scenes will include characters from multiple narratives featuring stories of improper burials, activism, and memorialization; all relating to mental institution cemeteries across the country.

Heather Cassano is a documentary filmmaker and Assistant Professor of Film/Video at the University of Connecticut. Her films blend an observational style with deeply personal narratives, striving to tell authentic stories through her personal experiences. Heather’s first feature documentary THE LIMITS OF MY WORLD (2018), followed her severely autistic brother Brian as he transitioned from the school system into adulthood. The film screened at numerous festivals internationally, winning three Best Documentary awards and a Jury Prize. Heather is now working on her second feature documentary THE FATE OF HUMAN BEINGS, which uncovers the stories of people with disabilities and mental illnesses who are buried in unnamed graves in mental institution cemeteries across the United States.

Cornelia H. Dayton is a Professor of History at the University of Connecticut. Her research and teaching interests include law and society; women, gender, and sexuality; Black lives in the northeast and Atlantic world; Revolutionary-era Boston; marital elopement notices; the poor relief practice of warning newcomers; and New Englanders’ responses to mental health challenges prior to 1840. She is a co-editor of Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, heading into its 10th edition; author of Women before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639–1789; Robert Love’s Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston (with Sharon V. Salinger); “Taking the Trade: Abortion and Gender Relations in an 18th-Century New England Village” (William and Mary Quarterly); and, most recently, “Lost Years Recovered: John Peters and Phillis Wheatley Peters in Middleton,” in The New England Quarterly.

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: Sandy Grande on Indigenous Elders

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2022-2023 UCHI Fellow's talk. Indigenous Elders, Decolonial Futures. Professor of Political Science and NAIS Sandy Grande, with a response by Joseph Darda. February 22, 2023, 3:30pm. UCHI Conference Room. This event will also be livestreamed.

Indigenous Elders, Decolonial Futures

Sandy Grande (Professor, Political Science & NAIS, UConn)

with a response by Joseph Darda (English, Texas Christian University)

Wednesday, February 22, 2023, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

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In this talk, Prof. Sandy Grande troubles the prevailing narrative of global aging as a crisis wherein older adults are conceived as a threat to current systems of governance and infrastructure. Against this narrative she asks: What if instead of crisis, we imagine global aging as a condition of possibility? More specifically, her work considers the rising tide of older adults as providing a portal for reconsidering some of the central dichotomies and contradictions of a settler society built on the exigencies of capital: the conflation of work with existence; the tying of economic growth to production; the limiting of production to wage labor; and association of old age with declining yield. In this work, she centers Indigenous Elders as both subject and analytic, considering how they intervene in and ‘refuse’ the dominant formulations of aging. Her central claim is that Elder ways of being and knowing will become increasingly important as we conceptualize the end of settler hegemony and the possibilities of decolonial futures.

Sandy Grande is a Professor of Political Science and Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Connecticut with affiliations in American Studies, Philosophy, and the Race, Ethnicity and Politics program. Her research and teaching interfaces Native American and Indigenous Studies with critical theory toward the development of more nuanced analyses of the colonial present. She was recently awarded the Ford Foundation, Senior Fellowship (2019–2020) for a project on Indigenous Elders and aging. Her book, Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought was published in a 10th anniversary edition and a Portuguese translation is anticipated to be published in Brazil in 2023.

Joseph Darda is an associate professor of literature at Texas Christian University and the author of three books on the cultural life of race in the United States: The Strange Career of Racial Liberalism (Stanford, 2022), How White Men Won the Culture Wars (California, 2021), and Empire of Defense (Chicago, 2019). He has published articles in American Literary History, American Literature, American Quarterly, and Critical Inquiry, among other journals, and contributed essays to the Los Angeles Review of Books. With the historian Amira Rose Davis, he is coediting a forthcoming special issue of American Quarterly titled “The Body Issue: Sports and the Politics of Embodiment.”

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: Cornelia Dayton on Lawyering while Black in the 18th Century

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2022–23 UCHI Fellow's Talk. Litigating and Lawyering while Black in Late 18th-Century Massachusetts. Professor of History Cornelia Dayton, with a response by Yuhan Liang. February 15, 2023, 3:30pm. UCHI Conference Room. This event will also be livestreamed.

Litigating and Lawyering while Black in Late 18th-Century Massachusetts

Cornelia Dayton (Professor of History, UConn)

with a response by Yuhan Liang (Ph.D. Candidate, Philosophy, UConn)

Wednesday, February 15, 2023, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

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The talk presents an overview of new research findings on the legal activities of John Peters of Boston (ca. 1745–1801). His multi-faceted entwinement with the law may have been the most extensive for any Black person in the Northeast in the 1700s. Peters was a savvy litigator who employed eminent lawyers and called himself a lawyer at one point. As a Black man who aspired to gentility and who married a celebrated Black woman of letters, the poet Phillis Wheatley (d. 1784), Peters drew some Whites’ ire and condescension. My larger aim is to produce a biography of Peters framed for academic, classroom, and general audiences.

Cornelia H. Dayton is a Professor of History at the University of Connecticut. Her research and teaching interests include law and society; women, gender, and sexuality; Black lives in the northeast and Atlantic world; Revolutionary-era Boston; marital elopement notices; the poor relief practice of warning newcomers; and New Englanders’ responses to mental health challenges prior to 1840. She is a co-editor of Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, heading into its 10th edition; author of Women before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639–1789; Robert Love’s Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston (with Sharon V. Salinger); “Taking the Trade: Abortion and Gender Relations in an 18th-Century New England Village” (William and Mary Quarterly); and, most recently, “Lost Years Recovered: John Peters and Phillis Wheatley Peters in Middleton,” in The New England Quarterly.

Yuhan Liang is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Connecticut. Her research is interdisciplinary and involves Chinese philosophy, virtue epistemology, and moral psychology. At UCHI, she works on the dissertation “Confucian exemplars and Moral Diversity.” This dissertation aims to reconcile moral diversity and consistency via exemplarism approaches. Unlike most Anglo-American philosophies that adopt a top-down approach to studying moral questions in the frame of normative ethics and metaethics, Confucian exemplarism provides a bottom-up pragmatic approach: through reverse engineer exemplars’ everyday practices or instructions, we reconstruct the theoretical commitments based on their moral excellency.

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: Hind Ahmed Zaki on Feminism, Law, and Violence

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UCHI Fellow's Talks 2022–23. Gendered Sovereignty: Feminist Politics, , Law, and Violence in Egypt and Tunisia (2011-2017). Assistant Professor, Political Science & LCL Hind Ahmed Zaki. With a response by Britney Murphy. February 8, 2023, 3:30pm. Humanities Institute Conference Room. This event will also be livestreamed.

Gendered Sovereignty: Feminist Politics, Law, and Violence in Egypt and Tunisia (2011–2017)

Hind Ahmed Zaki (Assistant Professor of Political Science and Literatures, Cultures, & Languages, UConn)

with a response by Britney Murphy (Ph.D. Candidate, History, UConn)

Wednesday, February 8, 2023, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

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The few months following the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia in 2010–2011, more widely known as the first wave of the Arab spring, were an exhilarating time for a diverse set group of feminists. New women-led groups were forming at an astonishing rate, with new feminist initiatives and collectives springing up every day. These initiatives ranged from seeking to influence post-revolutionary constitutions, negotiating women’s safety in public and at home, fighting for increased political participation, and holding state agents accountable for committing acts of gender-based violence. Despite their diversity, these groups shared an engagement with the Law as the main tool for improving the status of women. All saw the uprisings as an opportunity to negotiate laws that had produced the gendered legal categories they had to contest everywhere.

This talk situates feminist activism in the context of the Arab spring within broader political struggles over the limits of state’s authority in the aftermath of uprisings. I theorize outcomes of feminist politics through a new framework that I term gendered sovereignty: the web of attachments, procedurals, and identities that are formed in relation to histories of state sponsored legal feminism that are, in turn, closely tied with longer histories of authoritarian rule. I draw on three years (2013–2017) of multi-cited ethnographic field work, 200 in-depth interviews, archival research, NGO reports, court cases, draft by-laws, transcripts of transitional justice proceedings, to illuminate the ways in which histories of state-sponsored feminist were implicated in the production of local notions and practices of state sovereignty over the long durée, and the ways in which contemporary feminist movements challenged gendered practices of state sovereignty following the uprisings. Applying this framework comparatively to the cases of Egypt and Tunisia, I show how in Tunisia, legal reforms related to combatting gender-based violence played a major role in reinstating state power and authority; while in Egypt sovereignty and prestige were restored through the suspension of juridical and legal state powers, and the use of state-sanctioned gendered violence. Ultimately, I argue that feminist identities created through affective, procedural, and legal attachments to histories of state-sponsored feminism, not only influenced the political outcome for women’s rights, but also reshaped state sovereignty through reproducing, reinforcing, and challenging the prerogative and carceral powers of the authoritarian states. As such, this research project places feminist projects at the heart of broader struggles for democratization, human dignity and rights. It also questions common liberal assumptions about the links between gender justice and the rule of law, especially in transitional political contexts.

Hind Ahmed Zaki an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. She joined UConn in 2019 and received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Washington in Seattle in 2018. Prior to joining UConn, Dr. Ahmed Zaki was the Harold Grinspoon postdoctoral fellow at Brandies University (2018/2019), and Middle East Initiative Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her scholarly interests span feminist political theory and praxis, transnational feminist movements and politics, gender-based violence, and comparative politics of the state, with a special focus on the Middle East and North Africa. Dr. Ahmed Zaki’s research is published in several languages. She has been an elected member at large of the board of the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies (AMEWS) since 2018.

Britney Murphy is a doctoral candidate in the History Department. Her research interests include modern U.S. history, urban history, environmental justice, food access, and volunteerism. While at UCHI, Britney will complete her dissertation, “Outsiders Within: Volunteers in Service to America and the Boundaries of Citizenship, 1962–1971.”

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.