Early medieval English manuscripts (c. 700-1100) contain a notable number of remedies, personal prayers, incantations, and instructions for ritual acts designed to protect, heal, and make meaningful changes in the reality of their users, from restoring stolen cattle to curing fevers. Of these paraliturgical "charms", 12 contain portions…

Both Walter Benjamin and Cedric Robinson use the term "preservation" to name the nature of European law. For Benjamin, existence names an outside to the law's preservationist nature. In Robinson, survival is the name for that outside. In this talk, I consider these terms of existence and survival, and their difference from what…

Nicolas Boileau is often credited with reintroducing the category of the sublime in 1674, but in fact he writes after nearly 300 years of explicit thought about the sublime in the tradition of Longinus, and still more of its inarticulated practices in performances. Yet despite this long tradition, modern readers of early modern…

this event is a provocation, a loose polemic, that probes into the necessity & place of politics in aesthetics. what forms rise to the occasion of narrating our ongoing post/colonial present? what kind of archives might we invoke & why? Yara Rodrigues Fowler’s novels, Stubborn Archivist & there are more…

This talk will explore two distinctive ways in which lyric poetry can be said to think. First, I will argue that poems think by phenomenalizing concepts, by using mimetic representation to transform abstractions into particulars that appear and, at the same time, reveal how appearance itself is structured. Second, I will argue that poems…

This talk contemplates the ripple effects of a seemingly bizarre episode in American history: the years of U.S. martial law in the territory of Hawai‘i when all residents were required to carry a gas mask. I frame U.S. gas mask policies between 1941-1945 as a means of habituating Hawai‘i civilians to militarized rule rather than as an…

Early Haitian historian, scientist, and poet Charles Hérard-Dumesle’s massive natural history Voyage dans le nord d’Hayti (1824) proposes that colonialism’s best trick was convincing imperialists and almost everyone else that there is only one nature the world over. His book, including its famous poetic account of the 1791 Bwa…

What’s the point of an English degree? Of language and literature? Of life itself? With some people catastrophizing that the humanities are in danger and the world itself in a volatile state, it’s not uncommon to feel a bit existential. We know these are difficult, maybe unsolvable questions, but we’d love for the speakers to help us begin to…

Whereas the historical trauma of the Middle Passage and enslavement has been a prominent subject of Caribbeanist scholarship, there is surprisingly little sustained consideration of how poems and other imaginative works mourn this violent past, even though melancholic grief is a crucial component of the literary response to it. Building on…

CAConrad has worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. Their latest book is Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books / UK Penguin 2024). They received the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize, a PEN Josephine Miles Award, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, and a Lambda Award. The Book…

Among his poetic contemporaries, George Herbert stands out as a virtuoso of containers and containment: The Temple’s strong architectural conceit implies a delimited physical structure, within which lyric poems — often featuring boxes, cases, bags, and other vessels — call attention to their own formal limits of line and…

This talk approaches the Victorian sculptor Edmonia Lewis (1844-1907) as an artist whose neoclassical works and life narrative transform our understanding of art, materiality and racial formations in the 19th century Atlantic world. As among the first professional, colored sculptors in the West (she was of Black and Anishinaabe…

Asian Americans are conventionally described as “middle-man minorities,” outside of dominant racial paradigms of white and Black, adjunct to white privilege and exempt from the brunt of systemic violence directed against Black people. Historical accounts trace the origins of the in-betweenness of Asian Americans to the…

This talk retells the social and environmental upheavals of the Klondike Gold Rush through stories from two kinds of beavers: the furry 50-pound dam building kind, and Beaver — a critical figure in the origin stories and legal ideas of the Han Hwech'in, the Indigenous people of the Klondike region. It asks how thinking with such sources of…

Now and then, humanity shocks itself into brief moments of introspection. We think a bit about the species and the world we have collectively created. For the cultural critic Walter Benjamin, these are moments of danger in which memory flashes up to elucidate — briefly, fleetingly — the violence inherent in everything we tend to touch. Two…

Maureen N. McLane is a poet, scholar, and critic whose work often arises from the conjunction of romanticism and/or now. She has published seven books of poetry: Same Life (FSG, 2008); World Enough (FSG, 2010); This Blue (FSG, 2014); Mz N: the serial (FSG, 2016); Some Say …

Tara Houska, Couchiching First Nation, will present “Reconnection, Resistance, and Land Back.” This is the third talk in the fall 2023 Environmental Humanities and Social Transformation Colloquium.

An Indigenous perspective on climate and frontline action. What can we do, how do we heal, how does connectivity play a role in movement?

As mainstream theater slowly adopts more transgender-informed casting practices, plays like The Roaring Girl, Middleton and Dekker’s city comedy featuring the notorious and historical Moll Frith, become attractive vessels for nonbinary and genderqueer character readings and staging. While infusions of contemporary stakes…

Filipino Time: Affective Worlds and Contracted Labor(2022) explores cultural productions around migrant practices that mark other ways of sensing, making sense of, and feeling time with others. Migrant subjects harness time and the imagination in their creative, life-making capacities to make communal worlds out of one steeped…

In making incarnation a key term for her fiction, George Eliot exemplifies a broader Victorian effort to transmute Christian sentiment into a secular ideal of sympathy and an aesthetic of realism. At the same time, the critical tendency to situate Eliot in relation to a New Testament paradigm has obscured her engagement…