A research talk by UCHI visiting scholar Jesse Olsavsky (Assistant Professor of History, Co-Director of Gender Studies Initiative, Duke Kunshan University) on his project, “In the Tradition: The Abolitionist Tradition and the Routes of Pan-Africanism,” with a response by Janet Pritchard.

Since its 2005 launch, YouTube has been the premier site for long-form video content. Even within the sea of social media entertainment, YouTube has maintained its significant influence on society and culture. Users have found opportunities to develop their interests and communities. Amateur creators have a platform to showcase their identities and creativity, with the potential for profit. In this talk, I will present findings from a sample of amateur YouTube content creators highlighting the experiences of fun and play in content creation, and YouTube’s commercial influences on creativity.

Bhoomi K. Thakore (she/her) is an Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, and Faculty Affiliate, Department of Social and Critical Inquiry, at the University of Connecticut. Her research areas include inequalities, media sociology, and the scholarship of teaching and learning.

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.

In this presentation, Heather Ostman will discuss her UCHI project, which seeks to find the links between the representations of religion and selected texts from America’s nineteenth-century, a time in the nation’s history when it sought to assert a distinctive culture and national identity—attempts challenged particularly by the Civil War. The New Testament notion of “grace” shapes the direction of this study, as it points to multiple writers’ concerns with ideas of “mercy,” “salvation,” and/or “redemption”—all of which lend themselves to the developing mythos of the American self-made individual, as shaped by earlier narratives, such as Benjamin Franklin’s eighteenth-century autobiography. The texts studied in this project, which include those by Emerson, Walt Whitman, Sojourner Truth, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Pierton Dooner, and Kate Chopin, present a complex picture of American letters, the contours and constraints of religious practice, and the search for grace—and ultimately, for meaning itself—amid the political, religious, and social constructs of nineteenth-century America. After a broad introduction to the study, this presentation will particularly focus on the intersections between fiction and religion through the lens of “grace” as they emerge in the work of Kate Chopin and in comparison to other texts studied in this project.

Heather Ostman is Professor of English, Director of the Humanities Institute, and Humanities Curriculum Chair at SUNY Westchester Community College in Valhalla, New York. She is the author/editor of eleven books, including, recently, Kate Chopin and the City: the New Orleans Stories (2024). She is the recipient of two NEH grants and a SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities, and she is the co-founder and president of the Kate Chopin International Society. The UCHI Visiting Fellowship will enable Heather the time and space to work on her next book project, which is titled “Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Religion, and the Search for Grace.” As Christian idea, “grace” speaks to acts of mercy, salvation, and redemption.

Julia Wold Julia Wold is a doctoral candidate in the English Department specializing in Early Modern drama, primarily Shakespeare, and adaptation theory, focusing on video game adaptations. She received her MA in English from the University of North Dakota and her BA in English from Northern State University. Her work focuses on early modern philosophies of choice in both contemporaneous works (Hamlet, Paradise Lost) and modern video game adaptations of these works (Elsinore, The Talos Principle). She is also the co-host and editor of the Star Wars English Class podcast, exploring concepts ranging from literary theory to creative writing via Star Wars. At UCHI, Julia will complete her dissertation, “Adapting Choice: Shakespeare, Video Games, and Early Modern Thought,” which explores the connection between early modern conceptions of decision-making (“right reason”), theorized as “thoughtful choice” and video games adaptations of early modern texts.

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.

Programme (in EST)

09:00 - 09:10 Welcome and Introduction

09:10 - 10:15 Keynote: Elisabeth Pacherie (institut Jean Nicod; Institute for the Study of Cognition at Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris)
“Motoric Representational Format”

10:20 - 10:50 Emma Otterski
“(In)directly perceiving others’ emotions and the object analogy”

10:55 - 11:25 Iwan Williams (Monash University)
” Proto-asserters?: The case of chatbot speech meets the case of toddler speech “

11:30 - 12:05 Frederik T. Junker (University of Copenhagen)
“From Daydreams to Decisions”

12:10 - 12:40 Georgina Brighouse (University of Liverpool)
“Rethinking aphantasia: A genuine lack of capacity but not a disorder or disability

12:40 - 1:20 Lunch

1:20 - 1:50 Mica Rapstine (University of Michigan)
“Moral Epiphany and Insight in Problem Solving”

1:55 - 2:25 Joachim Nicolodi (University of Cambridge)
“Consciousness in the Creative Process and the Problem for AI”

2:30 - 3:00 Mona Fazeli (University of California, Los Angeles)
“Does Metareasoning Contribute to Epistemic Rationality?”

3:05 - 3:35 Juan Murillo Vargas (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
“How Language-Like is the Language of Thought?”

3:40 - 4:35 Keynote: Cameron Buckner (University of Florida)
“Large Language Models as models of human reasoning”

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.

Written by UCHI Fellow Evan Wolfgang through his Undergraduate Fellowship, Going to the Lordy is an original play that examines the real-life assassination of President James Garfield through the eyes of the assassin’s sister as she attempts to contend with her past. Going to the Lordy will run at the Nafe Katter Theatre on February 28 at 8pm, March 1 at 8pm, and March 2 at 2pm, where it will run as a double bill alongside her sister production, I am the Seagull.

The play is free and does not require registration or rsvp.