“Unfenceable: American Ecofascism, Literary Genre, and Native American Environmental Justice”
Dr. April Anson is an assistant professor of English and Social and Critical Inquiry at the University of Connecticut where she serves on the executive committees for American Studies and Native American and Indigenous Studies. Prior to joining UConn, Dr. Anson was assistant professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Anson works at the intersection of environmental humanities, Indigenous American studies, and political theory. As the 2025–26 Justice, Equity and Repair Fellow at UCHI, Dr. Anson will complete her manuscript Unfenceable: Ecofascism, Literary Genre, and Native American Environmental Justice. Unfenceable uses literary analysis to trace the historical and ongoing relationship between climate change, white supremacy, and American environmental thought as well as the Indigenous American environmental justice traditions that eclipse those relations. Dr. Anson is cofounder of the Anti-Creep Climate Collective, coauthor of Against the Ecofascist Creep, and author of other public-facing work. Her research has appeared in boundary 2, Resilience, American Quarterly, Environmental History, Western American Literature, and more.

“Indigenous Language Reclamation: Reviving Extinct Languages”
Peter Constantine is professor of translation studies and director of the program in literary translation in the Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at the University of Connecticut. He is the publisher of World Poetry Books and the literary magazine World Poetry Review. His translations include works by Rousseau, Machiavelli, Gogol and Tolstoy for Random House, Modern Library. He co-edited A Century of Greek Poetry: 1900–2000, and the anthology The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present, which W.W. Norton published in 2010. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, a recipient of two NEAs, and was awarded the PEN Translation Prize for Six Early Stories by Thomas Mann and the National Translation Award for The Undiscovered Chekhov. His translation of the complete works of Isaac Babel received the Koret Jewish Literature Award and a National Jewish Book Award citation. A heritage speaker of Corinthian Arvanitika, he is involved in translation and documentation efforts for this severely endangered language. His current project at the Humanities Institute is to complete a monograph titled Indigenous Language Reclamation, in which he investigates strategies used by indigenous communities throughout the world to reclaim their extinct heritage languages.

“Recasting the Coolie: Racial Capitalism, Caste, and Indian Indentureship in the Caribbean”
Najnin Islam is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. Her research focuses on post-emancipation labor economies in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean world. Her work has been published in journals such as Small Axe, ARIEL, Interventions, Global South Studies, and Verge. She has also written for Adam Matthew Digital and a pedagogical essay of hers is forthcoming in the edited volume MLA Options for Teaching: Food in Literature. Her research has received support through the NEH and other institutional funding. During her time at the UCHI, she will work on her current book project that examines the entangled histories of race and caste in the Anglophone Caribbean after emancipation, particularly during the era of Indian indentureship. Through appositional readings of the historical archive of indentureship and contemporary literary-cultural productions that engage with this history, the book reflects more broadly on the implications of these connected histories for our understanding of racial capitalism in the Atlantic world.

“Silvic Stewardship: Incentivizing Environmental Care in the Northeast”
Julia Smachylo is a Canadian urban designer and planner, and an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Connecticut. Julia’s research is grounded in critical urban and landscape theory, political ecology and media studies, and traces the rise of neoliberal forms of natural resource management that have set in motion larger aggregate impacts bearing direct relation to environmental conservation, ecological design, and the organization of cities. Working across disciplines, her research connects urban landscapes with multi-scalar processes of environmental stewardship, with the goal of contributing to ongoing efforts to generate more holistic and socially responsible approaches to planning and design intervention. In addition, an essential component of her research engages with media practice and design research through mapping, drawing and video installation. Recent publications include Legible Landscapes: Incentivizing Forest Knowledge and Action in Southern Ontario (2024) and Exploratory Vertical Studio in Landscape Architecture: Building Connection through Peer-to-Peer Design Research (2024). Julia is also engaged in service-based learning activities, competitions, and design research, which further informs her scholarly practice. Current research projects focus on post-capitalism, fallow landscapes, incentivized management, and visualizing forest systems.

“Silence is Consent: The Idea of Complicity in the Middle Ages”
Fiona Somerset is Professor of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies as well as Social and Critical Inquiry at the University of Connecticut, where she has served as Codirector of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies and Interim Director of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is finishing work on a book on the medieval history of consent through silence, and preparing to write another book on personhood in the Middle Ages. Her most recent article “Lady Mede as Entrepreneurial Woman” (Exemplaria, 2024) contributes to a revised understanding of the legal, political, and economic theories that have historically granted personhood to some while denying it to others. She has written and/or edited Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late-Medieval England (Cambridge, 1998), Four Wycliffite Dialogues EETS 333 (Oxford, 2009), and Feeling Like Saints: Lollard Writings after Wyclif (Cornell, 2014, winner of the Margaret Labarge Prize). Her collaborative projects include Wycliffite Spirituality (Paulist, 2013), four edited volumes on vernacularity (2003), the influence of lollardy (2003), medieval media (2015), and objects of belief (2025) and a colloquium in Studies in the Age of Chaucer on Historicizing Consent (2022), as well as the Brill Companion to Lollardy (2016). She has served as editor of the Yearbook of Langland Studies and Director of the International Piers Plowman Society. Her interest in the interface between intellectual thought and popular culture has led her to interdisciplinary research on medieval heresy and political thought, the history of emotions, popular media, political poetry, and most recently, law and literature.

“Time, Work, and Texts in Fifteenth-Century England ”
Kathleen Tonry is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. Her work as a medievalist focuses on the history of premodern book, and especially on the intertwined transitions in literary and material textual histories that took place over the fifteenth century. She has published on premodern forms of history-writing, the place of leisure in an early treatise on fishing, and on the formal tensions evident in writing across the fifteenth century. In her first book, Agency and Intention in English Print, 1476–1526, she argues that the long period of the pre-Reformation press is underrecognized for the innovative moral, ethical and cultural commitments expressed through the new forms of print. Her work has won an NEH grant and the Beatrice White prize. From 2005–2024, she was also the Associate Director of UConn’s Writing Center, where she developed and oversaw the Racism in the Margins initiative; in 2023, she was a Visiting Scholar with Harvard’s Medieval Studies Program. Over the next year, she will be exploring the quirky, innovative traditions of time-telling texts in late-medieval England, pursuing the ways that bookmakers grappled with rapid, concurrent changes in media technologies, definitions of work, and time-keeping knowledge. This past moment provides some provocations for us, she suggests, as we meet our own vexing intersections of AI, labor, and shifting temporalities.

“Why are Sign Languages Real Languages?”
Harry van der Hulst (PhD 1984, Leiden University, Netherlands) specializes in phonology (of spoken and signed languages). He has published 5 books, over 180 articles, (co-)edited 32 books and 6 journal theme issues, among them The Oxford Handbook of Vowel Harmony (with Nancy Ritter) in 2024. He is Editor-in-Chief of The Linguistic Review. He is professor of linguistics at the University of Connecticut. His most recent books include, Asymmetries in Vowel Harmony – A Representational Account (Oxford, 2018); Radical CV Phonology – A Theory of Segmental and Syllabic Structure (Edinburgh, 2020), A Mind for Language (Cambridge, 2024) and Genes, Brains and Evolution (Cambridge, forthcoming).

“Authoritarian Agency: The Far Right and US Culture”
Chris Vials is a Professor in English and the School of Social and Critical Inquiry at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of Haunted by Hitler: Liberals, the Left, and the Fight against Fascism in the United States (2014) and Realism for the Masses: Aesthetics, Popular Front Pluralism, and US Culture, 1935-1947 (2009). He is also the editor, with Bill Mullen, of The US Antifascism Reader, published by Verso Press in 2020, and the sole editor of American Literature in Transition: 1940-1950 (Cambridge, 2017).

He has appeared in numerous media venues in the US and Canada to speak on fascism in the United States, past and present, including National Public Radio, PBS, the CBC, and Jacobin magazine. Vials is currently working on a history of far-right movements in the United States from the 1920s to the present in comparative perspective, paying particularly close attention to their relationships to liberal democracy and to violence. At the University of Connecticut, he served as the President of the UConn-AAUP in 2024–2025 and the Director of American Studies from 2015–2022.