UConn’s Well-Being Collective and the UConn Humanities Institute will be hosting a post-election connection event on Wednesday, November 6th from 11am to 1pm at Dove Tower on the Storrs campus. All members of the UConn community are encouraged to join in this moment of pause and inclusivity. Come share a cup of cider or hot chocolate, relax in pop-up seating, and speak with faculty experts who will help facilitate conversations. A collective fiber arts project will be taking place, representing the thread that weaves us all together; materials will be provided should you feel called to learn or contribute to the endeavor.

A final note of gratitude to Student Health and Wellness for supporting this event.

This talk focuses on a barely perceptible local custom practiced by enslaved and enslavers in the port city of Malaga (Spain) during much of the 17th century—the right pregnant cortada slaves had to free their child in utero, and in so doing to free them of their enslavers’ dominium. Hershenzon argues that the practice, alongside labor and residence, was one of the foundations of the local enslavement regime. In this system, enslaved Maghrebis negotiated a cortado (literally ‘cut’) agreement with their enslavers as part of which they were allowed to labor and reside outside their enslavers’ household in return for a daily or weekly payments until they paid the ransom fee upon which the parties agreed. Ransom in utero entailed protection from forced conversion, breaking the chain of status inheritability, that slavery lasted one generation, no more, and that these children ransomed in utero were allowed to return to the Maghrib, right which converted Muslims did not possess.

Daniel Hershenzon is an associate professor in the Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at the University of Connecticut. His awards-winning book, The Captive Sea: Slavery, Commerce, and Communication in Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), explores the 17th century entangled histories of Spain, Morocco, and Ottoman Algiers. Hershenzon has published articles in Past and Present, Annales-HSS, Journal of Early Modern History, African Economic History, History Compass, Philological Encounters, and in edited volumes. His research has been supported by the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, the ACLS, NEH, and other grant foundations. While at UCHI, he will work on “The Maghrib in Spain: Enslavement, Citizenship, and Belonging in the Early Modern Spanish Mediterranean.” Revising the dominant historiographic narratives about early modern Spain, “The Maghrib in Spain” offers the first comprehensive account of North Africans in post-expulsion Spain..

Fumilayo Showers is an assistant professor with a joint appointment in the Sociology department, where she directs the Health Professions, Health Care, and Social Inequality Lab, and the Africana Studies Institute. Her research centers on race, gender, and US immigration; the social organization of health and long-term care; health professions; care work; and immigrant workers. Her book, Migrants Who Care: West Africans Working and Building Lives in US Health Care (Rutgers University Press, 2023) is the first book to document the experiences of recent West African immigrants in a range of health care occupations in the US (nursing, disability support, elderly care). Her current research projects focus on tracing changes to US health care systems and the experiences of frontline health care workers as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic; the study and practice of biomedicine in non-western contexts; and the global migration of health professionals.

Bio: Viorica Marian is a cognitive scientist at Northwestern University, where she is the Sundin Endowed Professor and Director of the Bilingualism Lab. She studies the relationship between language and mind, with a focus on the psycholinguistics of bilingualism and multilingualism. Dr. Marian received her PhD in Psychology from Cornell University and previously served as Chair of the National Institutes of Health Study Section on Language and Communication and as Chair of the Northwestern Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders. She is the recipient of the American Association for the Advancement of Science John McGovern Award, The Psychonomic Society Mid-Career Award, the Clarence Simon Award for Outstanding Teaching and Mentoring, and the Editor’s Award for best paper from JSLHR. Marian’s new popular science book “The Power of Language” is being translated into 12 languages and counting.

Talk Title: The Power of Language: How the Codes We Use to Think, Speak, and Live Transform Our Minds

Abstract: Bilingualism and multilingualism have profound consequences for individuals and societies. Learning multiple languages changes not only how we use language, but also how we perceive the world, what we remember, how we learn, our creativity, decision making, and identity. I will present eye-tracking, mouse-tracking, and neuroimaging evidence showing that multiple languages continuously interact in the mind. I will conclude with a call for placing the study of language-mind interaction and multilingualism among the core areas of scientific investigation if we are to gain an accurate understanding of humanity’s potential.

Meetings: If you are interested in meeting with Dr. Marian during the day or attending dinner in the evening on Friday, please email crystal.mills@uconn.edu.

Thinking about graduate study in the humanities or social sciences? Come learn from faculty who make the decisions about admitting students into graduate programs in Philosophy, History, and the Law School about what they look for in applicants, and what mistakes you should avoid. There will be ample time for questions.

Please register for this event in advance at:
https://tinyurl.com/2p825nz8

CARE 2024 UConn Fellows:

YaeYoung Min

Brooke Kvedar

Alyssa Brown

Aeryn Northway

“I Class Myself:” Racial Classification and Alaska Native Indigeneity

Paul Ozawa (Tlingit) had no Japanese ancestry to speak of—but he did have a Japanese surname. Without a birth certificate, Paul Ozawa could not prove that he was not Japanese, though it was common knowledge in his family and community that he had been adopted as an infant by Henry Ozawa, Sr. to protect his mother’s reputation. Moreover, Ozawa had not seen his adoptive father since age 5, when Paul’s mother had died from tuberculosis. Ozawa Sr. abandoned his three sons shortly thereafter. The three brothers had grown up in orphanages and boarding schools designed to forcibly assimilate Alaska Native children. Nonetheless, less than 24 hours before the ship transporting Japanese Americans from Alaska to Seattle was set to depart, the Alaska Defense Command informed Paul Ozawa that he needed to be onboard. In this talk, I analyze state-based processes of racial classification for Alaska Native prisoners in Japanese American World War 2 incarceration to argue that these served as a mode of what I term “archival elimination,” or the elimination of Indigenous identities, sovereignty, and presence in archives. I discuss how our over-reliance on settler archives undermines Indigenous identities and knowledge. Finally, I turn to a Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study interview with Ozawa and his letters to show how Ozawa took up racial logics to make his Tlingit identity legible to settler administrators.

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. She is co-curating an exhibition on UConn ceramicist Minnie Negoro that launches at the Benton Art Museum in January 2025. Maruyama also directs the Fudeko Project, a digital journaling program for Japanese American former incarcerees. While completing her PhD at the University of Minnesota (UMN), she co-created/produced the Densho podcast Campu. She formerly worked for the UMN Immigration History Research Center, American Public Media’s Order 9066, the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, and the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation.

Research presentations by:

Jack Albert

Angélica Giménez Ravanelli

Caitlin Gogulski

Alex Kueny

Santiago Mayochi

Alberto García Maldonado is Associate Professor of History and Director of Undergraduate Studies at San José State University. He is a graduate of UC Davis, Stanford, and UC Berkeley, and the author of Abandoning their Beloved Land: The Politics of Bracero Migration in Mexico (University of California Press, 2023).

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Theatre and other forms of cultural production provide a valuable means to discover how populations respond to forms of oppression and political processes connected to attempts at reconciliation in post-conflict. To attain a renewed national unity in some post-conflict settings, states and international organizations who pursue the dual objectives of peace and reconciliation utilize forms of transitional justice that emphasize the “healing” of victims and the reintegration of perpetrators as a higher priority than criminal accountability through rule of law. A dialectic, or dichotomy, then emerges between the objectives of justice, through accountability, and reconciliation such that imperatives for peace and stability allow one to be sacrificed to achieve the other. Employing research connected to the emerging discourse on irreconciliation and dynamics related to the dualities of “memory and forgetting” and “justice and reconciliation” Gary English explores how theatre production critiques this dichotomy by insisting that justice and a positive peace cannot be achieved without criminal accountability regarding the most egregious violations of international law. In addition, this talk examines how accountability through international law becomes frustrated by the strategic interests of donor states who utilize coercive approaches in development to enforce an unjust, or negative peace that essentially maintains the underlying forms of oppression as historically practiced.

Gary M. English is stage director, designer, and a Distinguished Professor of Drama at the University of Connecticut and Affiliate Faculty with the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute with whom he has taught Theatre and Human Rights for ten years. From 2010 through 2018, he lived and worked in the West Bank for a total of four years, including two years in the Jenin Refugee Camp where he served as Artistic Director of The Freedom Theatre, (2012–13). He also served as Visiting Professor and Head of the Media Studies program at Al/Quds Bard College in Abu Dis, in the West Bank, (2017–18). His research focuses on theatre as a methodology to study human rights, and the use of theatre and cultural production to investigate the political conflict between Israel and Palestinians. His most recent book, Theatre and Human Rights: The Politics of Dramatic Form was published by Routledge in August, 2024. Previous publications include the volume, Stories Under Occupation and other Plays from Palestine, co-edited with Samer Al-Saber, and published by Seagull Press in 2020, and “Artistic Practice and Production at the Jenin Freedom Theatre” within the anthology, Theater in the Middle East: Between Performance and Politics. His most recent essay, “Palestinian Theatre: Alienation, Mediation and Assimilation in Cross Cultural Research” was recently released in the volume, Arabs, Politics and Performance, by Routledge in September, 2024.

Interested in applying for the Humanities Institute Dissertation Fellowship but aren’t sure where to start? Join us for an information session, where we’ll provide general advice, dos and don’ts, and answer all your questions about applying for fellowships.