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Medical Humanities: A Daughter’s Long Goodbye, Screening and Q&A

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The Medical Humanities & Arts Initiative Presents, A Daughter's Long Goodbye: The Caregivers Journey, screening and discussion with filmmakers Steven G. Smith. October 18, 4:30pm, Homer Babbidge Library, Screening Room 2119A.

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 interpreting, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

The Medical Humanities & Arts Initiative presents:

“A Daughter’s Long Goodbye” Screening & Discussion with filmmaker Steven G. Smith

October 19, 2023, 4:30pm
Homer Babbidge Library, Screening Room 2119A

Leandra Manos has spent nearly three years as the full-time caregiver for her 86-year-old father who is in the late stages of dementia. The award-winning documentary A Daughter’s Long Goodbye (dir. Steven G. Smith) chronicles Leandra’s journey balancing COVID-19, unemployment, and caring for her aging father. Filmmaker and photojournalist Steven G. Smith will join for a discussion and Q&A after the film screening.

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.

Register to attend virtually

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.

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: 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.

The Popular Culture Initiative Presents: Danielle Lindemann on What Reality TV Says about Us

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What Reality TV Says About US: A Live Podcast Recording. Featuring Prof Danielle Lindemann, author of "True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us." September 13, 12–1pm, UCHI Conference Room, Homer Babbidge Library, Fourth Floor.

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 interpreting, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

The Popular Culture Initiative presents:

What Reality TV Says about Us

A Live Podcast Recording

September 13, 2023, 12:00pm
Homer Babbidge Library, Humanities Institute Conference Room

LIVE PODCAST RECORDING: Join us for a live recording of the UConnPopCast featuring Prof. Danielle Lindemann, author of True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us. How do The Bachelor, Survivor, RuPaul’s Drag Race, Project Runway, and other reality shows reinforce and challenge our views of class, race, family, couples, sexuality, and gender?

Participate in this live recording as an audience member—and ask Prof. Lindemann your question about reality TV—from 12-1pm on Wednesday, September 13, 2023 in the UCHI Conference Room (Homer Babbage Library, 4th Floor). FREE FOOD!

Prof. Danielle Lindemann is an associate professor of sociology at Lehigh University. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, and CNN.com. She recently featured in the Amazon Prime documentary Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets.

A Welcome to 2023–2024 from Director Anna Mae Duane

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Dear colleagues,

Love, we have been taught to believe, is a unifying force. Yet we don’t have to look far to see love deployed as a wedge that drives people apart. From local school board meetings to presidential stump speeches, love is too often wielded as a weapon. Adults insist that love for their children means that the outside world should be kept at bay; love for one’s own political community requires viewing opponents as enemies, and love of our own comfort keeps us from taking care of the earth and the generations that will succeed us. The humanities have created the definitions of love that we have inherited, and, we believe, the humanities offer us hope for reaffirming our love for justice, for democracy, and for one another.

Love and its many forms will be a theme this year as our new leadership team welcomes you back for the start of another season of collaboration, creativity, and community here at the Institute. Together we will consider how we can care for one another through works of art, acts of service, and by embracing hope for the future we can create.

We are particularly excited to offer two new initiatives that explore love as it emerges in storytelling and in caretaking. The Popular Culture Initiative (headed by Stephen Dyson) explores the narratives that win the love of wide audiences to ask what these acts of imagination can tell us about our evolving sense of the human. The Medical Humanities and the Arts Initiative (headed by Heather Cassano) insists that we need to consult a humanistic perspective if we are going to determine how we can best care for one another.

In addition to our fellowship opportunities, we are committed to furthering faculty success at every stage as we offer book manuscript workshops, coaching, and other resources designed to help faculty to lean into their strengths as writers and researchers.

Of particular interest in the weeks to come:

This year, we welcome a stellar group of fellows to the Institute, working on projects ranging from documentary films on migration, to legal strategies against hate speech, to monographs on early American literature. We are especially excited to welcome our undergraduate fellows. Under the capable leadership of Elizabeth Della Zazzera, we have doubled the size of this program, and look forward to working with this talented group of successful students.

As always, we continue to accept applications for funding for research, collaboration, and invited speakers all across campus, and we remind you that applications for our residential fellowships are due in February.

Keep up with everything we’re doing by following us on social media and subscribing to our newsletter: s.uconn.edu/subscribe. We suspect you will find much to love about what’s going on at UCHI this year!

Wishing everyone an excellent start to this academic year,

Anna Mae Duane and the UCHI Team.

Virtual Open House

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Please join us for a virtual open house, September 8, 1pm. Online. Registration required.

Please join us for a UCHI Virtual Open House!

September 8, 2023, 1:00 pm

As the new leadership team embarks on our first year at UCHI, we’d like to invite you to a virtual gathering where we can discuss how to build community and enhance the visibility of the remarkable scholarship produced by humanities and social science faculty here at UConn.

We’ll be talking about:

  • Our faculty fellowships—when and where to apply
  • Research funding opportunities—where and when to apply
  • Book Publication Support-—where and when to apply
  • Graduate and Undergraduate Fellowships—where and when to tell your students to apply!
  • We’ll also introduce you to our newer initiatives, including:
  • Book Manuscript Workshops
  • Faculty Research Forums

And we’ll speak briefly about our guiding programming questions for this coming year:

But we don’t want to do all the talking! We’re eager to hear from you, and to learn about how best to support your research and scholarship.

To attend please register at this link.

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.

A Farewell Message from Director Michael P. Lynch

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Over the last decade, it has been my distinct honor to be part of the collective spirit of inquiry here at UCHI. That is a spirit that UCHI embodies by its very nature, and this year manifested it more than any other. Our inaugural undergraduate fellows, Rylee Thomas and Karen Lau, capped off a year of collaborative fellowship by giving two spectacular talks illustrating the value of humanities scholarship and advocacy. We launched two exhibits about the social emergence of knowledge led by Alexis Boylan: Picturing the Pandemic (with Sarah Willen) and Seeing Truth (in partnership with the American Museum of Natural History). And this year saw the launch of a new global initiative in partnership with Rutgers, Design Justice AI, as well as (in partnership with the New England Humanities Consortium or NEHC), the fourth Symposium of the Faculty of Color Working Group.

It has been tremendous to watch UCHI grow in both ambition and in substance. We have gone from a plucky institute housed in a few cozy rooms in the Austin building to an internationally known research center occupying the top floor of the library. Over the years, we’ve hosted dozens of creative minds, our fellowship program has become one of the most competitive anywhere, we founded and led the NEHC, and we’ve been awarded over $8 million in grants for projects on topics such as restoring public discourse, supporting faculty of color, and the future of truth.

None of this could have been possible without the collective work of the best team at the university, which for this year was Nasya Al-Saidy, Mary Volpe, Eric Berg, Nimra Asif, Katrina Kish, Elizabeth Zavodony, Elizabeth Della Zazzera, Yohei Igarashi, and the ever-amazing Alexis Boylan. My deepest thanks to them, and to everyone who has contributed to running this institute for the past nine years, for their hard work, creative insight, and good humor.

As I step away from the director’s seat, I know that UCHI’s spirit of collective inquiry will only grow. I very much look forward to watching the Institute develop under Professor Duane’s dynamic leadership and I’m confident it will remain a focus of creative humanistic inquiry well into the future.

Michael P. Lynch
Provost Professor of the Humanities
Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy