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Humanities Undergraduate Research Symposium

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The fourth-annual Humanities Undergraduate Research Symposium (HURS) will take place on April 4th, 2025 from 9:00am–5:30pm in the Humanities Institute Conference Room (Homer Babbidge Library, 4th floor).

The Humanities Undergraduate Research Symposium (HURS) celebrates the contributions of UConn’s undergraduate students to an ever-evolving dialogue of thought by providing a platform to share new knowledge and encourage the pursuit of advanced research in the humanities, social sciences, and the arts.

This year’s symposium features students from a wide variety of majors—history, education, acting, sociology, biology, anthropology, english, and more. And their talks cover topics from the evolution of language, to the significance of maize found in archeological sites, to historical memory.

See the HURS website for a full schedule of talks.

Breakfast and lunch will be provided for all attendees and participants. The event will be followed by a reception with refreshments.

Undergraduate Humanities Research Fellows Colloquium

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Undergraduate Humanities Research Fellowship Colloquium. Kathryn Andronowitz (The Business of Domesticity: A Study on Homemaker Influencer Content on Instagram), Kanny Salike (The Evolution of Black American Sign Language (BASL) and African American English (AAE)), and Evan Wolfgang (Resurrecting Frances: Creating Going to the Lordy). April 2, 3:30pm. Humanities Institute Conference Room, HBL 4th floor.

Undergraduate Humanities Research Fellows Colloquium

Kathryn Andronowitz (Sociology & English), Kanny Salike (Anthropology & Linguistics), Evan Wolfgang (Dramatic Arts)

Wednesday, April 2, 2025, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

Kathryn Andronowitz | “The Business of Domesticity: A Study on Homemaker Influencer Content on Instagram”

Project advisor: Bhoomi Thakore

Kathryn Andronowitz’s fellowship project examines how homemaker influencers present their identities on social media, and how they function as economic actors by promoting certain lifestyle choices or products in a way that aligns with their values. In this presentation, Kathryn will discuss one of the themes of her findings, “happiest at home.” In this aestheticized Instagram content, homemaker influencers emphasize their happiness with their lifestyle in the home, which is rendered as a peaceful option for retreat from the dangers and immoralities of the mainstream outside world. The content evokes a sense of nostalgia for an idealistic collective past, which can be mobilized to urge viewers to reject feminist goals and instead revitalize conservative traditional values. Overall, these depictions that link femininity and domesticity, presented alongside a neoliberal celebration of female choice and “empowerment,” creates dizzying discourses on progress towards gender equality.

Kanny Salike | “The Evolution of Black American Sign Language (BASL) and African American English (AAE)”

Project advisor: Diane Lillo-Martin

This talk will focus on the ways in which an early American society excluded Black hearing and Black Deaf people from white hearing and white Deaf spaces, respectively, and delving into how this exclusion resulted in the evolution of AAE and BASL as languages that are distinctly different from standard American English and ASL.

Evan Wolfgang | “Resurrecting Frances: Creating Going to the Lordy”

Project advisor: Gary English
“Resurrecting Frances: Creating Going to the Lordy,” discusses the development of Evan Wolfgang’s original play, Going to the Lordy, which was written through participation as an Undergraduate Research Fellow at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute and opened in February with the support of UConn Dramatic Arts.

As the title of the talk suggests, the presentation will focus on how the key figure of Frances Howe, sister to Charles Guiteau, was brought from historical obscurity to the center of the story, drastically informing how the play was written. The talk, not dissimilar to the play itself, focuses on the importance of resurrecting lost and marginalized historical voices and how by doing so we can learn more about our own humanity.

Kathryn Andronowitz, from Monroe, Connecticut, is a junior pursuing dual degrees in English and Sociology. Her research interests include examining identity formation in online networked communities, analyzing consumer culture and the rise of self-branding, and exploring the historical roots of current social movements. Kathryn works as the public relations student coordinator at UConn Community Outreach and was a 2023 Holster Scholar. In her free time, she enjoys traveling, doing trivia, and spending time outdoors. Kathryn plans to earn her J.D. for a career in public policy emphasizing community-based solutions. At UCHI, Kathryn’s project will examine how homemaker influencers present their identities on social media, and how they function as economic actors by promoting certain lifestyle choices or products in a way that aligns with their values.

Kanny Salike is a junior at UConn, double majoring in Linguistics/Philosophy and Anthropology with a minor in American Sign Language and Deaf culture. She is a Connecticut native who grew up in Naugatuck. Her research interests include exploring the ways in which migration, globalization, and colonization influence the way language evolves and develops. Outside of her fellowship, she is a 2024 summer IDEA grant recipient. After finishing her undergraduate degree, she plans on pursuing a Phd in Linguistic Anthropology. Her fellowship project, “The Evolution of African American English (AAE) and Black American Sign Language (BASL) in the United States” aims to explore how racism and audism have shaped the evolution of AAE and BASL through time. This project will focus on the ways in which an early American society excluded Black hearing and Black Deaf people from white hearing and white Deaf spaces, respectively, and delving into how this exclusion resulted in the evolution of AAE and BASL as languages that are distinctly different from standard American English and ASL. She also plans on exploring how racism and audism embed themselves into systems of oppression that continue to affect Black and Black Deaf people to this day.

Evan Wolfgang is a senior at UConn, completing his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Acting. In the fall semester of 2023, he studied abroad at Theatre Academy London, where he was taught by some of the most eminent theatrical artists in the world. Last year, Evan debuted a fully staged production of his original adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice Stories at UConn, entitled Alice’s Adventures. Evan works professionally in the theatre as an actor, director, playwright, and youth theatre teacher. He has also started his own production company, Jump the Creek Productions, through which he produces his and his company members’ original work. Evan’s project, “Going to the Lordy: A Dramatic Parable about the Life and Death of Charles Julius Guiteau,” is a play that will examine the life of presidential assassin Charles Guiteau, and the absurd story and complex social-political circumstances that lead to him murdering President James Garfield. Guiteau’s story is a story of radicalization, abuse, and sensationalism, topics as relevant today as they were 150 years ago.

Access note

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities. Requests should be made at least five business days in advance whenever possible.

Story Slam

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Story Slam. March 27, 3:30pm. Ballard Black Box Theatre. Six students will perform their personal stories in an intimate show reflecting on issues of social isolation and connection.

Story Slam

featuring David Cabeceiras (English), Hannah Dang (English), Aisha Hashimi (Allied Health Sciences), Natasha Khetan (Allied Health Sciences and Disability Studies), Martine August Remi (Digital Media and Design), and Myles Tate-Alsgaard (General Studies)

Thursday, March 27, 2025, 3:30pm, Ballard Museum Black Box Theatre

Six students will perform their personal stories in an intimate show reflecting on issues of social isolation and connection.

Stories stick with us. They connect us to each other. In a world where we are more disconnected from each other than ever, stories can be healing. They help us see new perspectives and share ideas, building identity and community.

From finding connection in the boxing ring to understanding identity through language, six students will share their unique perspectives on what it means to find connection. UCHI Student Ambassadors worked with Story Slam coaches Jon Adler and Gillian Epstein to craft their stories into a performance, culminating in the UConn Story Slam where they will tell their stories in front of a live audience.

Learn more about our storytellers and coaches.

Access note

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities. Requests should be made at least five business days in advance whenever possible.

Fellow’s Talk: Sara Matthiesen on Reproductive Justice

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“Free Abortion on Demand” After Roe: A Reproductive Justice History of Abortion Organizing in the United States. Sara Matthiessen, Associate Professor of History and WGSS, George Washington University. With a response by Peter Zarrow. March 26, 3:30pm, UCHI Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library, 4th floor.

“Free Abortion on Demand” After Roe: A Reproductive Justice History of Abortion Organizing in the United States

Sara Matthiesen (Associate Professor of History and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, George Washington University)

with a response by Peter Zarrow (History, UConn)

Wednesday March 26, 2025, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

When the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade (1973) in 2022, many abortion rights activists responded with the slogan “Roe was never enough!” The phrase invoked a reality that had long defined legal abortion in the U.S.: Roe’s standing did not translate into widespread access to the procedure. But exactly how long have supporters of abortion rights wielded this criticism of Roe, and what would the feminist movement for legalization have thought about this rallying cry? In this talk, Professor Sara Matthiesen recovers feminist responses to the legalization of abortion in 1973, and asks what their varied assessments can teach us about the contemporary struggle over bodily autonomy.

Sara Matthiesen is Associate Professor of History and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at George Washington University. Her first book, Reproduction Reconceived: Family Making and the Limits of Choice after Roe v. Wade (University of California Press, 2021), shows how incarceration, for-profit and racist healthcare, HIV/AIDS, parentage laws, and poverty were worsened by state neglect in the decades following Roe. In 2022, Reproduction Reconceived received the Sara A. Whaley Prize for best monograph on gender and labor from National Women’s Studies Association. Professor Matthiesen’s current project, “‘Free Abortion on Demand’ after Roe: A Reproductive Justice History of Abortion Organizing in the United States,” traces the multi-racial feminist activism that opposed state and medical control of abortion throughout the era of choice. At GWU, she regularly teaches Introduction to Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, for which she was awarded the Kenny Teaching Prize in 2022.

Peter Zarrow’s research focuses on modern Chinese thought and culture. He has written on major intellectual figures and political movements in the late Qing and Republican periods (1880s–1949), such as Liang Qichao, Hu Shi, Cai Yuanpei, Kang Youwei, and others, as well as anarchism, Marxism, and conservatism. His most recent monograph is Abolishing Boundaries: Global Utopias in the Formation of Modern Chinese Political Thought, 1880-1940 (SUNY Press, 2021), and he recently published a translation of essay by Liang Qichao, Thoughts from the Ice-Drinker’s Studio: Essays on China and the World (Penguin Random House, 2023).

Access note

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities. Requests should be made at least five business days in advance whenever possible.

Fellow’s Talk: Grégory Pierrot on Ronald L. Fair and Malcolm X

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2024-25 UCHI Fellow's Talk. The Fire This Time: Ronald L Fair's Many Thousand Gone, a forgotten Fable. Grégory Pierrot, Associate profess of English, UConn, with a response by Danielle Pieratti. March 12, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library, 4th floor.

The Fire This Time: Ronald L. Fair’s Many Thousand Gone, a Forgotten Fable

Grégory Pierrot (Associate Professor of English, UConn)

with a response by Danielle Pieratti (English, UConn)

Wednesday March 12, 2025, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

In the wake of the Civil Rights Act and before the advent of the Black Power Movement, the year 1965 was a turning point for African American politics and culture, embodied in the radical turn taken by Malcolm X in the months leading up to his assassination. This talk reads Ronald L. Fair’s 1965 novel Many Thousand Gone: An American Fable as a counterpoint to Malcolm X, in the light of the globalization of Black politics.

Grégory Pierrot is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut at Stamford where he teaches American and African American literature. His research bears on the cultural networks of the Black Atlantic. He is the author of The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture (UGA, 2019) and Decolonize Hipsters (OR Books, 2021). He is co-editor with Marlene L. Daut and Marion Rohrleitner of Haitian Revolutionary Fictions: An Anthology (UVA, 2021), and co-author with Paul Youngquist of a scholarly edition of Marcus Rainsford’s An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti (Duke 2013). He is also part of a team of researchers led by Dr. Maria Baelieva Solomon (UMD) working on a digital edition of the 19th-century, French-language abolitionist review La Revue des colonies, recipient of a NHPRC grant. He will be spending his fellowship year working on his next project, a French-language monograph tentatively titled “Le Temps d’une nation noire: fictions révolutionnaires du Black Power” that will explore how American writers imagined imminent African American revolution through fiction during the Black Power era.

Danielle Pieratti (she/her) is a doctoral candidate in the English Department. She holds degrees from Carnegie Mellon University, SUNY at Albany, and Columbia University, where she earned an MFA in poetry. She is the author of two poetry collections: Approximate Body (2023), and Connecticut Book Award winner Fugitives (2016). Transparencies, her translated volume of works by Italian poet Maria Borio, was published by World Poetry Books in 2022. Danielle was a 2023 poetry and translation fellow of the Connecticut Office of the Arts, and currently serves as poetry editor for the international literary journal Asymptote.

Access note

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

Faculty Talk: Diane Lillo-Martin on Bimodal Bilingualism

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Faculty Talk 2024-25. How Bimodal Bilingualism Coutners Audism and Linguicism. with Diane Lillo-Marting, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor and Head of the Department of Linguistics. March 12, 12:15pm. UCHI Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library, 4th floor. ASL-English interpretation will be provided.

How Bimodal Bilingualism Counters Audism and Linguicism

Diane Lillo-Martin (Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor, Linguistics, UConn)

Wednesday March 12, 2025, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning and CART.

Register to attend virtually

Many American families with deaf and hard-of-hearing children are unaware of the potential benefits of using a bimodal bilingual approach that embraces the use of both spoken English and American Sign Language (ASL). This can exacerbate detrimental effects that may result when audism and linguicism prioritize the use of spoken language exclusively. This presentation busts some widely-held myths about sign languages, and shows the results of integrating ASL into a family’s language plan.

Diane Lillo-Martin is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor and Head of the Department of Linguistics at UConn. Her research focuses on the acquisition of ASL and its linguistic properties.

Access note

This event will be presented with ASL interpretation and CART. If you require another accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057.

Deadline Extended for Applications to Undergraduate Research Fellowship

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The deadline to submit applications for the CLAS and UCHI Undergraduate Humanities Research Fellowship has been extended to March 14, 2025.

The fellowship supports a year-long research project supervised by a UConn faculty member. Students receive mentorship support, a $2000 scholarship, a desk at the Humanities Institute, and 6 credits through the successful completion of two independent studies. The project should explore big questions about human society and culture and should lead to an original contribution to your area of study.

Learn more about the fellowship program in this video.

For details on eligibility and how to apply, please see the call for applications, also appended below.

The UConn Humanities Institute (UCHI) and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS) are excited to offer year-long fellowships for undergraduate students pursuing innovative research in the humanities.

The fellowship supports a year-long research project supervised by a UConn faculty member. The project should explore big questions about human society and culture and should lead to an original contribution to your area of study. The exact parameters (length, format, etc) will be set by your faculty advisor. Depending on your major and your academic and professional plans, your project may consist of a scholarly research project or a creative product with a significant research component. At the end of the year, students will submit the final project to their faculty advisor, UCHI, and CLAS.

The project should ask questions or explore issues and ideas that feel urgent and exciting to you. We highly encourage proposals for projects that use methods, ideas, and approaches from more than one discipline.

Fellows will be welcomed as members of the Humanities Institute, a lively community of accomplished faculty and graduate student scholars conducting advanced research in the humanities. In addition to immersion in this intellectual community, the fellowship offers:

  • A $2,000 scholarship
  • A desk/work area at UCHI, located conveniently in Homer Babbidge Library for conducting research
  • Bi-weekly check-in meetings
  • A public presentation about the project at UCHI in the spring semester
  • Participation at UCHI’s events (for example, presentations by visiting scholars and artists) and special opportunities to meet with such visiting speakers
  • A field trip or cultural excursion (for example, a visit to a museum or archive) to be announced during the year
  • The opportunity to present your work at the Humanities Undergraduate Research Symposium
  • 6 credits for the academic year, through the successful completion of one 3-credit independent study each semester with the UConn faculty member supervising your project
  • (For non-Honors students) Admission into the Honors Program through the successful completion of this program, if other Honors admissions criteria are met.

Eligibility

Fellowship applicants should be rising sophomores or rising juniors in good academic standing (that is, students who will be sophomores or juniors in Fall 2025). Rising seniors are also eligible to apply, but preference will be given to students earlier in their degrees. Please note that students who applied in previous years and did not receive a fellowship are eligible to apply again.

Fellows from all campuses are welcome. Although the fellowship includes bi-weekly meetings on the Storrs campus, accommodations will be made for fellows unable to attend those meetings in person. However, the public presentation in the spring semester will take place on the Storrs campus.

The proposed project should be humanities research. Broadly speaking, the “humanities” means the study of human society and culture. Humanities majors or minors typically include but are not limited to: Africana Studies; American Studies; Anthropology; Art and Art History; Asian and Asian American Studies; English; History; Human Rights; Journalism; Latino and Latin American Studies; Philosophy; Sociology; Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. If you aren’t sure if your project is humanistic, please email uchi@uconn.edu.

Fellows should check individually with the Office of Student Financial Aid Services to ensure that they are eligible to accept the scholarship.

Application

  1. A Word document with answers to the following questions:
    1. What is your project’s title?
    2. What big question(s) is your project asking, and why are those questions important to you, your community, and society? (maximum 300 words)
    3. What is your plan for the project? What work will you do to try to answer its questions? (maximum 300 words)
    4. How do you think working on this project contributes to your own goals? (maximum 200 words)
    5. Optional question: Are there additional factors in your background or life experience that would help you benefit from this opportunity? Discuss social, economic, educational, or other obstacles, as appropriate. (maximum 300 words)
  2. A writing sample of your best research and writing (for example, your best final paper).
  3. One letter of recommendation from a UConn faculty member that also includes their willingness to supervise the project over the course of an academic year. (The faculty member should email their letter directly to uchi@uconn.edu. There’s no need to wait until the letter is complete to submit the rest of your application.)
  4. An unofficial transcript.

Applications for the 2025-26 fellowship year must be submitted by February 28, 2025 March 14, 2025.

All questions and application materials can be sent to uchi@uconn.edu.

Please know while we will make every effort to review submissions as soon as possible, the materials you submit may not be reviewed immediately upon receipt. Please note that all University employees are mandated reporters of child abuse or child neglect. In addition, UConn employees have responsibilities to report to the Office of Institutional Equity student disclosures of sexual assault and related interpersonal violence; any information you submit in this application is subject to UConn reporting policies. If you feel you need more immediate assistance or support, we encourage you to reach out to the Dean of Students Office and/or Student Health and Wellness- Mental Health. In addition, if you have concerns related to sexual harassment, sexual assault, intimate partner violence and/or stalking, we encourage you to review the resources and reporting options available at: https://titleix.uconn.edu

UConn Humanities Institute Awarded Grant to Build Glossary for AI Research

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The Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI) has awarded the UConn Humanities Institute (UCHI) a grant of $25,000 for their project “Reading Between the Lines: An Interdisciplinary Glossary for Human-Centered AI.” Funded by CHCI’s Human Craft in the Age of Digital Technologies Initiative, this grant will allow UCHI along with our partners at the International University of Rabat (UIR) to create an interdisciplinary glossary that interrogates the meaning of key AI concepts.

This project brings an international cohort of humanists, engineers, and scientists into conversation through an in-person symposium and a series of podcast dialogues illuminating how the definitions of terms associated with Artificial Intelligence vary widely by discipline, location, and language. The symposium and the podcasts will be structured to address the challenges that language and translation (both conceptual and linguistic) pose to collaboration on AI research.

“We often use the same words—like ‘learning’ or ‘intelligence’—when we are talking about AI, but what those words mean depend on our own academic and cultural background and the assumptions that accompany them,” notes Anna Mae Duane, PI and Director of the UConn Humanities Institute. “The humanities bring crucial insights about language and meaning that can help us to engage these gaps in constructive ways. Working with our partners at the International University of Rabat in Morocco, we’ll bring together voices from computer science, medicine, law, and the humanities to develop better ways of understanding each other and this transformative technology.”

This project showcases UCHI’s interdisciplinarity and its growing global connections. “Reading Between the Lines” draws on the expertise of the Humanistic AI Working Group, a cross-disciplinary team of over twenty UConn researchers, who have been meeting monthly since Fall 2024, and deepens UCHI’s pre-existing partnership with AI scholars at UIR. Through CHCI’s Human Craft in the Age of Digital Technologies Initiative, the grant project will bring UCHI and affiliated faculty into conversation with additional humanities centers and institutes all over the world who are launching projects related to AI, digital technologies, and the human.

The project is being led by Anna Mae Duane, UCHI Director and Professor of English, with the support of collaborators including Clarissa J. Ceglio, UCHI Associate Director of Collaborative Research and Associate Professor of Digital Humanities; Nasya Al-Saidy, UCHI Managing Director; Dan Weiner, Vice Provost of UConn Global Affairs; Allison Cassaly, Global Initiatives Coordinator, UConn Global Affairs; and Ihsane Hmamouchi, Vice-Dean at the International Faculty of Medicine at the International University of Rabat.

Fellow’s Talk: Yohei Igarashi on the Emergence of Literary Data Processing

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2024-25 UCHI Fellow's Talk. "Autonomy and Automata: Objecthood, the Dramatic Monologue, and the Emergence of Literary Data Processing" Yohei Igarashi, Associate Professor of English, UConn. With a response by Hana Maruyama. March 5th, 3:30pm, UCHI Conference Room.

Autonomy and Automata: Objecthood, the Dramatic Monologue, and the Emergence of Literary Data Processing

Yohei Igarashi (Associate Professor of English, UConn)

with a response by Hana Maruyama (History, UConn)

Wednesday March 5, 2025, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

We should understand better the histories of computing in humanities disciplines. Focusing on literary studies, this talk offers an explanation of a particular event: the emergence of a practice called “literary data processing” around 1960, and the methodological revolution which—while projected from this practice—did not quite happen. Working outward from the writing of the literary scholar Stephen Parrish (1921–2012), this talk uncovers the questions that exercised literary computing and literary criticism alike at this historical moment, questions about humans, machines, language, and minds.

Yohei Igarashi is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of The Connected Condition: Romanticism and the Dream of Communication (2020) and other writing, most recently a chapter on literary data in the Cambridge Companion to Literature in a Digital Age (2024). In 2023–2024, he was the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Fellow at the National Humanities Center.

Hana Maruyama is an assistant professor in history and social and critical inquiry at the University of Connecticut. Her current manuscript discusses how the federal government exploited Japanese Americans’ World War II incarceration to dispossess American Indians and Alaska Natives and advance U.S. settler colonialism.

Access note

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

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

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2024-25 UCHI Fellow's Talk. Sweetness and Disease: How Capitalist Sugary Industries Have Destroyed Human Biology. César Abadía-Barrero, Professor of Anthropology and Human Rights, UConn. WIth a response by Yusuf Mansoor. February 26, 3:30pm, UCHI Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library, 4th floor.

Sweetness and Disease: How Capitalist Sugary Industries Have Destroyed Human Biology

César Abadía-Barrero (Associate Professor of Anthropology and Human Rights, UConn)

with a response by Yusuf Mansoor (History, UConn)

Wednesday February 26, 2025, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

In 400+ years of history (from early XVII to early XXI centuries) sugar went from being used primarily by the European royalty and their criminal imperial associates to being consumed in large amounts by all inhabitants of the planet. In this talk, I draw from Sidney Mintz’s classic Sweetness and Power to briefly present the history of sugar. Then, I update this history by presenting the incredible growth and profits of the sugary drinks and ultra-processed food industries. By asking what has happened to our human biology as we have replaced real food with more free sugars and processed substances, I develop connections with several diseases, primarily diabetes and obesity that have reached pandemic proportions. I present how the efforts to curb down consumption and enforce regulations have been met with strategies to co-opt and influence policy makers, aggressively market their products to vulnerable populations, and fund and promote biased research. By naming some of the capitalists of the largest transnational “food” industries and their enormous wealth and profit rates, and by connecting their business success with the progressive destruction of our biology, this first chapter of a larger book project intends to test if we can present a material history of our deteriorating human biology for broad audiences; a material history that argues that to understand human biology we need to understand the history of capitalism.

César Abadía-Barrero is a Colombian activist/scholar and associate professor of anthropology and human rights at the University of Connecticut. His research approach is grounded in activist, collaborative, and participatory action research frameworks and integrates critical perspectives to study interconnections among capitalism, human rights, and communities of care. He has been a member of or collaborated with collectives and social movements in Brazil, Colombia, Cameroon, Spain and the United States examining how for-profit interests transform access, continuity, and quality of health care, and how communities resist forms of oppression and create and maintain alternative ways of living and caring.

He is the author or editor of several books and articles, including I Have AIDS but I am Happy: Children’s Subjectivities, AIDS, and Social Responses in Brazil (2011 in English and 2022 in Portuguese), Health in Ruins: The Capitalist Destruction of Medical Care (2022, English and Spanish editions), and Countering Modernity: Communal and Cooperative Models from Indigenous Peoples (2024).

His current collaborative research in Colombia follows decolonial proposals in health and wellbeing after Colombia’s 2016 peace accord, focusing on Indigenous peoples’ conceptions of Buen Vivir, collective healings, medicinal plants, and peace building. His other research line centers on the dysregulation of human bodies due to the capitalist transformation of labor, consumption, and the environment. He is the director of the Buen Vivir and Collective Healings Initiative at the University of Connecticut, and co-director of the Global Health & Human Rights Research Program at the Human Rights Institute, University of Connecticut.

Yusuf Mansoor is a PhD candidate in the History Department, and the Draper Dissertation Fellow at the UCHI. His research focuses on Native Americans and the Atlantic World in the seventeenth century, with a focus on New England. He has received research fellowships from the Massachusetts Historical Society, the John Carter Brown Library, the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture, the American Philosophical Society, and the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Access note

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.