Events from Prior Years

Fall 2010

Spring 2011

February

Wednesday, February 16, 5:30pm
Center for the Humanities
48 Professors Row
*Q&A and reception to follow

Alumni Lecture Series- Distinguished Writers
Darin Strauss
Tufts Alum and acclaimed bestselling author of Chang and Eng will read from and discuss his memoir Half a Life, which is nominated for a 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award. His work has appeared in Esquire, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek and many other publications.

March

Thursday, March 3, 7:00pm
Pearson Hall
Room 104

A Film Unfinished
A special screening of award-winning Israeli filmmaker Yael Hersonski’s documentary, A Film Unfinished, which critically examines a 1942 Nazi propaganda film about the Warsaw ghetto. Co-sponsored with Communications and Media Studies.

Tuesday, March 29, 5:30pm
Aidekman Arts Center
Alumnae Lounge
*Q&A and reception to follow

Bead and Thread: Aspects of Lyric Narrative in the Poetic Sequence
Rita Dove
Pulitzer Prize winning poet and former Poet Laureate of the United States. Author of The Yellow House on the Corner,Thomas and Beulah, and On the Bus with Rosa Parks. Co-Sponsored with the Africana Center, the Diversity Fund and the Toupin Bolwell Fund.

Wednesday, March 30, 4:30pm
Tufts Hillel Center
220 Packard Avenue
*Q&A and reception to follow

Promised Lands
An evening with editor Derek Rubin, and authors Tova Mirvis, Rebecca Goldstein, Adam Wilson, Rachel Kadish and others introducing and reading from the new anthology Promised Lands: New Jewish American Fiction on Longing and Belonging. Co-sponsored with Tufts Hillel.

April

Monday, April 4, 4:30pm
Center for the Humanities
48 Professors Row
*Q&A and reception to follow

A Film Unfinished – Director’s Discussion
Yael Hersonski
Award winning Israeli filmmaker Yael will lead a follow-up discussion on her documentary A Film Unfinished. Co-sponsored with Communications and Media Studies.

Thursday, April 7, 4:30pm
Center for the Humanities
48 Professors Row
*Q&A and reception to follow

Saul Bellow: Letters
Professor Janis Bellow and Benjamin Taylor
A panel discussion with Professor Janis Bellow and Benjamin Taylor, editor of Saul Bellow: Letters.

Fall 2011

September

Friday, Sept. 16, 12pm
Center for the Humanities
48 Professors Row
*Q&A and Luncheon

A Conversation with Richard Bell
Aboriginal Australian artist and political activist, his dot art application and traditional hand stencils and cross hatching styles are used to address controversial issues in religion, politics and art.

October

Thursday, Oct 6, 5pm
Center for the Humanities
48 Professors Row
*Q&A and reception to follow

The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism
Deborah Baker
Acclaimed Pulitzer Prize nominated biographer and author of In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding; A Blue Hand: The Beats in India; and The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism published this past May.

Thursday, Oct 20, 5:30pm
Pearson Hall, Room 104
62 Talbot, Avenue, Somerville
*Q&A and reception to follow

Reading and In Conversation with Ha Jin
Distinguished novelist and recipient of numerous awards, including the National Book Award for Waiting. His latest novel, Nanking Requiem, will be released in October 2011.

Thursday, Oct 27, 5pm
Center for the Humanities
48 Professors Row
*Q&A and reception to follow

In Conversation with Sugata Bose
Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs at Harvard University and author of His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle Against Empire.

November

Thursday, Nov 3, 5:30pm
Cohen Auditorium, Aidekman Arts Center
40 Talbot Avenue
*Q&A and reception to follow

Kenzaburō Ōe In Conversation with Professor Susan Napier
Japanese novelist, essayist, and winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize for literature.

December

Thursday, Dec 1, 4:30pm
Center for the Humanities
Fung House-48 Professors Row
*Q&A and reception to follow

I Am a Memory Come Alive: Nahum N. Glatzer and the Transmission of German-Jewish Learning (film)
Judith Wechsler:
Tufts Professor Emerita, former Department Chair and National Endowment for the Humanities Professor in Art and Art History, Wechsler will present a special screening of her film I Am a Memory Come Alive: Nahum N. Glatzer and the Transmission of German-Jewish Learning.

Monday, Dec 5, 10:30am
Center for the Humanities
Fung House-48 Professors Row

How the Jews Invented Jesus and Muhammad: the History of Jewish Scholarship in Islam
Susannah Heschel
Former Visiting Fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT), Susannah Heschel is the Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. Her scholarship focuses on Jewish-Christian relations in Germany during the 19th and 20th centuries, the history of biblical scholarship, and the history of anti-Semitism.

Spring 2012

February

Tuesday, Feb. 28, 5:30 pm
Coolidge Room, Ballou Hall
*Q&A and Reception to follow

Distinguished Writer’s Series: Martin Amis
Martin Amis is the author of more than twenty books including the novels Money (1984), London Fields (1989), The Information (1995) and, most recently, The Pregnant Widow (2010), an autobiography Experience (2000), three collections of short stories, three books of essays and a meditation on Stalin Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (2002).

March

Book Into Film and Documentary Film Week:
Monday, March 5 – Thursday, March 8
*Q&A and Reception to follow all events

Monday, March 5, 6:00 pm
Cabot Intercultural Center Auditorium

Tom Perrotta and Albert Berger
Moderated by Professor Julie Dobrow

Tom Perrotta is the author of seven novels, including Election and Little Children both of which were made into critically acclaimed, Academy Award® nominated films. Albert Berger produced the Academy Award® nominated films Little Miss Sunshine (2006) and Little Children (2006). His film credits also include King of the Hill (1993), Election(1999), The Wood (1999), Cold Mountain (2003), and the award-winning documentary Crumb (1994). He is a Tufts alumnus, class of 1979.

* CANCELLED *
Tuesday, March 6, 5:30 pm
Barnum Hall, Room 008

Wham! Bam! Islam!
Isaac Solotaroff and Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa

Wednesday, March 7, 5:30 pm
Tisch Library, Room 304
“Documenting the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”

A Visual Clash
Yael Hersonski

Yael Hersonski is an Israeli director and editor whose new documentary in progress, A Visual Clash, uses archival material relating to the March 2012 Gaza Freedom Flotilla to explore the gap between the unrepeatable event itself and the virtual media event that followed.

Degrees of Incarceration
Amahl Bishara and Nidal Al-Azraq

Amahl Bishara is an assistant professor of anthropology at Tufts University, and her husband Nidal Al-Azraq teaches Arabic in Boston and is a long-time activist with youth in Aida Refugee Camp, Bethlehem. Their documentary, Degrees of Incarceration, examines how Palestinian refugees manage the heavy toll political prison takes on young and old under Israeli occupation.

Thursday, March 8, 7:00 pm
Barnum Hall, Room 104

My Perestroika
Robin Hessman

Robin Hessman’s feature-length documentary directing debut, My Perestroika, which focuses on five young Russians coming of age in the shifting political landscape of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival as part of the US Documentary competition and was screened in New York as part of the prestigious film series, New Directors/New Films, curated by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Monday, March 12, 5:30 pm
Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT)
Fung House-48 Professors Row

Beautiful Thing: Book talk and Discussion
Sonia Faleiro
Co-Sponsored by CHAT and the Tufts Center for South Asian and Indian Ocean Studies

Sonia Faleiro, in this masterful work of non-fiction, follows Leela into the underworld of Bombay’s dance bars: a world of glamorous women, of fierce love, sex and violence, of customers and gangsters, of police, prostitutes and pimps. When an ambitious politician cashed in on a tide of false morality, and had Bombay’s dance bars wiped out, Leela’s proud independence faced its greatest test. In a city where almost everyone is certain that someone, somewhere, is worse off than them, Leela fights to survive, and to win.

Tuesday, March 13, 7:00 pm
School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Room B311
Boston, MA 02115

Mao-sur-Seine: The Chairman’s Influence on the French Posters of 1968
Dr. Victoria H.F. Scott
Co-Sponsored by CHAT and the Department of Visual and Critical Studies

Dr. Victoria H.F. Scott is the Visiting Instructor of Art History at Emory University. She is an art historian and curator specializing in modern and contemporary American and European art with a focus on transnational visual economies and points of intercultural exchange. Her scholarship combines close visual analysis and scrutiny of primary sources with an interdisciplinary approach to art production and institutions throughout the modern period up until the twenty-first century.

Tuesday, March 27, 5:30 pm
Coolidge Room, Ballou Hall
*Q&A and Reception to follow

Distinguished Writer’s Series: Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith is the author of three novels, White Teeth (2000), which won the Guardian First Book Award, the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and the Orange Prize for Fiction; The Autograph Man (2002); and On Beauty (2005). Her essays, collected in Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (2009), have appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, Harpers, and The Believer. Co-Sponsored by the Toupin-Bolwell Fund and the Diversity Fund.

New Russian-American Writing
(In Conjunction with Wellesley College)

Reading at Wellesley College
Wednesday, March 28, 4:30 pm
Newhouse Center, Green Hall
Moderated by Professor Anna Wexler-Katsnelson, Princeton University

Panel and Discussion at Tufts
Thursday, March 29, 4:00 pm
Coolidge Room, Ballou Hall
Moderated by Professor Adrian J. Wanner, Penn State
*Q&A and Reception to follow

David Bezmozgis, Anya Ulinich, and Lara Vapnyar
Anya Ulinich is the author of Petropolis (2008). She was awarded the Goldberg Prize for Emerging Writers of Jewish Fiction (2008), named a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature Finalist (2008), and included in the National Book Foundation’s “5 under 35” (2007).

Lara Vapnyar emigrated from Russia to New York in 1994. She is the critically-acclaimed author of the novel Memoirs of a Muse (2006), and two short-story collections, Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love (2008) and There Are Jews in My House (2004) and She teaches creative writing at New York University.

Thursday, March 29, 4:00 pm
Alumnae Lounge, Aidekman Arts Center
Moderated by Rosemary Hicks, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
*Q&A and Reception to follow

Religion and Politics in the USA
This two-hour panel discussion features experts on evangelicals in office, American-Israeli politics, State Department outreach programs to Muslims abroad, and the internal politics within American Muslim, Jewish, and Christian communities over gender, sexuality, and foreign policy. Speakers include Hishaam Aidi, Lecturer in Discipline of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University; Juliane Hammer, Assistant Professor, Kenan Rifai Fellow in Islamic Studies at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Laura Levitt, Professor of Religion, Jewish Studies and Gender at Temple University; Darnell L. Moore, Visiting Scholar at New York University, Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality; Josef Sorett, Assistant Professor of Religion and African-American Studies at Columbia University; and David Harrington Watt, Associate Professor of History at Temple University.

Thursday, March 29, 6:30 pm
Coolidge Room, Ballou Hall

Distinguished Writer’s Series: David Bezmozgis
David Bezmozgis is an award-winning writer and filmmaker whose stories have appeared in numerous publications including The New Yorker, Harpers, Zoetrope All-Story, and The Walrus. His first book, Natasha and Other Stories, was published in 2004 in the US and Canada and was translated into fifteen languages. In 2006, he developed his first feature film, Victoria Day.

Friday, March 30, 5:00 pm
Cabot Intercultural Center Auditorium
*Q&A to follow

Distinguished Writer’s Series: Gary Shteyngart
Gary Shteyngart is the author of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (2002), Absurdistan (2006), and Super Sad True Love Story (2010). His writing has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, and Slate. He is the winner of the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction, the Book-of-the-Month Club First Fiction Award, the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction, and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Literature. Shteyngart teaches in the graduate writing program at Columbia University.

April

Wednesday, April 18, 4:00 – 7:00 pm
Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT)
Fung House- 48 Professors Row

CHAT Open House: Music, Poetry, and Refreshments
The Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT) is celebrating its 5th anniversary with an afternoon of music, poetry, and refreshments.
Our Open House will allow you to meet our accomplished faculty and staff, and explore how our Center promotes innovative, collaborative study in the humanities and arts.

Wednesday, April 18, 7:00 pm
Coolidge Room, Ballou Hall*Q&A and Reception to follow

Provost’s Lecture: Professor Lee Edelman
Occupy Wall Street: Bartleby and the (In)Humanities
Professor Edelman’s talk will read Melville’s text in relation to the culture of the Humanities at the beginning of the 21st century, focusing in particular on the logical connection between the concept of corporations as people and the current corporate vision of the Humanities.

Points East
Events Co-Sponsored by the Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT)

Wednesday, March 7, 4:30 pm
Rabb Room, Lincoln Filene Center

A Mixture of Pure Waters: Thoreau Reads the Gita at Walden Pond
Richard Davis
Bard College, Professor and Chair of Religion and Asian Studies

Wednesday, April 4, 12:00 pm
Center for the Humanities
Fung House – 48 Professors Row

The Ottoman Self-Image: Multi-Culturalism and the Photograph in Les Costumes Populaires de la Turquie en 1873
Erin Hyde Nolan
Boston University, History of Photography
Tufts Alumna

Tuesday, April 17, 6:00 pm
The Granoff Family Hillel Center, Room 002
220 Packard Ave.

Second Person Singular
Sayed Kashua

Sayed Kashua, a Palestinian Arab living in Jerusalem, is an author and journalist and the creator of the critically acclaimed TV series Arab Labor. His weekly column in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz satirically describes the challenges faced by Israeli Arabs, who navigate between two worlds. He is the author of Dancing Arabs (2002), Let it Be Morning (2006), and Second Person Singular (2012). Sayed Kashua has received the Grinzane Cavour Award for First Novel 2004 (Italy), The Prime Minister’s Prize 2005 (Israel) and the Lessing Prize for Critic 2006 (Germany). SFJFF Freedom of Expression Award winner in 2010 (USA). Co-Sponsored by CHAT, The Diversity Fund, Fares Center, GRALL, Tufts Hillel, Hebrew Program, International Relations Program, Judaic Studies Program, and Middle Eastern Studies Program.

Fall 2012

September

Thursday, September 27, 4:30 pm
Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT)
Fung House – 48 Professors Row
*Q&A and Reception to follow

The Tolstoy Family Story Contest
Michael Katz

Leo Tolstoy’s short story “The Kreutzer Sonata” aroused a storm of controversy and created a tremendous scandal when it was published in 1889. A tale of sexual jealousy, adultery, and murder, it was rejected many times by the Russian censor, revised by the author, and then copied over by his faithful wife, Sofiya Andreevna. Meanwhile she wrote two “counter-stories” of her own in which she dared disagree with the views of her eminent husband. Her stories were sequestered in her archive for over 100 years and were recently published in Russian. Michael Katz is retranslating “The Kreutzer Sonata,” translating his wife’s stories into English for the first time, as well another “counter-story” by their son Lev Lvovich in which he disagrees with both of his parents, thus resulting in an extraordinary Tolstoy family “story contest.”

Michael Katz is the author of The Literary Ballad in Early Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature and Dreams and the Unconscious in Nineteenth-Century Russian Fiction. He has translated and edited the Norton Critical Editions of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Children. He has also translated, among other works, Dostoevsky’s Devils, Alexander Herzen’s Who Is to Blame?, and N. G. Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?.

October

Thursday, October 18, 4:30 pm
Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT)
Fung House – 48 Professors Row
*Q&A and Reception to follow

CENTENNIAL OF A JOURNEY: Two Western Feminists in Africa and Asia, 1911-12
Harriet Feinberg

One hundred years ago United States suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt and Dutch Jewish physician, suffrage leader, and peace activist Aletta Jacobs traveled in Africa and Asia, looking into the condition of women and encouraging them to organize on their own behalf. The two realized that the struggle for women’s empowerment could not be limited to white Western women but needed to be worldwide. The ‘travel letters’ Jacobs wrote regularly for a Dutch newspaper, together with Catt’s diary and her reports to several feminist publications, provide a window into their bold venture as well as a perspective on today’s struggles.

Harriet Feinberg edited the English translation of Aletta Jacobs’s autobiography MEMORIES: MY LIFE AS AN INTERNATIONAL LEADER IN HEALTH, SUFFRAGE, AND PEACE (The Feminist Press, 1996). She formerly taught English at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. She holds an Ed.D. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Wednesday, October 31, 4:30 pm
Coolidge Room, Ballou Hall
*Q&A and Reception to follow
*To be rescheduled – details will be posted soon

Poetry Reading and Book Signing
Tracy K. Smith

Tracy K. Smith is the author of numerous works, including Life on Mars (2011), which won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Duende, winner of the James Laughlin Award and the Essence Literary Award; and The Body’s Question, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She is also the recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and a Whiting Writers’ Award, and was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work. Smith is currently a member of the Creative Writing Faculty at Princeton University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

November

Wednesday, November 28, 5:00 pm
Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT)
Fung House -48 Professors Row
*Q&A and Reception to follow

The Critical Archive: Materials, Models and Methods
Moderated by Noit Banai, Lecturer, Modern and Contemporary Art, Visual and Critical Studies Department, Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Co-sponsored by CHAT and the Department of Visual and Critical Studies, Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

A multidisciplinary exploration of the function, definition, and role of the ‘archive’ as an apparatus through which individual and collective histories, memories, and identities are mediated in the 20th and 21st centuries.

If one of the defining characteristics of the traditional archive is its existence as a physical repository of knowledge, many other models and methods have reinvented the system through which verbal, visual, and aural materials are conceptualized, categorized and catalogued. This active questioning of what constitutes the archive — and how the archive constitutes ‘the commons’ — has been accompanied by a recognition of its role as an ‘authority’ governing relations of power. This symposium asks whether we can define what a ‘critical archive’ might be by examining practices from different disciplines, cultural contexts, and time periods.

Program
5pm-5:15pm: Welcome and Introductory Remarks

5:15-5:35pm: What is an Archive?
Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Faculty Director, metaLAB(at)Harvard
Professor of Romance Languages & Literature / Graduate School of Design, Harvard University
Faculty co-director, Berkman Center for Internet and Society

5:35-5:55pm: Beyond History, Beyond Memory? The Novel as Archive in the New Century
Richard J. Golsan
University Distinguished Professor and Director of the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research and the France/TAMU Institute (Centre Pluridisciplinaire) at Texas A & M University

5:55-6:15pm: Trauma’s Archive: Photography, Amnesia and the Failure to Document
Eric Rosenberg, Associate Professor, Department of Art and Art History, Tufts University

6:15-6:35pm: Unhinged Time in the Digital Archive
Tina Wasserman, Lecturer, Visual and Critical Studies Department, Tufts University/The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

6:35-6:55pm: Memory Hack: Taking Archives into One’s Own Hands
Gediminas Urbonas, Associate Professor in Visual Arts, Mitsui Career Development Chair, MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology

6:55-7:30pm: Roundtable discussion and Q&A

7:30-8:00pm: Public Reception

Spring 2013

February

Tuesday, February 19, 4:00 pm
Coolidge Room, Ballou Hall
*Q&A and Reception to follow
(This event was rescheduled from October 2012)

Poetry Reading and Book Signing
Tracy K. Smith
Tracy K. Smith is the author of numerous works, including Life on Mars (2011), which won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Duende, winner of the James Laughlin Award and the Essence Literary Award; andThe Body’s Question, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She is also the recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and a Whiting Writers’ Award, and was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work. Smith is currently a member of the Creative Writing Faculty at Princeton University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Tuesday, February 26, 7:00pm
Coolidge Room, Ballou Hall
*Reception and Book Signing to follow

From Babies to Gender Identity
Dr. Anne Fausto-Sterling
Dr. Anne Fausto-Sterling is one of the world’s leading researchers on the biology of gender difference and sexual identity. Her ground-breaking work challenges entrenched arguments about human development, using dynamic systems theory to understand how cultural difference becomes bodily difference. She is the author of Myths of Gender: Biological Theories About Women and Men (1992), Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (2000), and Sex/Gender: Biology in a Social World (2012), as well as many other articles and essays.
Organized by the Tufts University Women’s Studies Program in collaboration with the Department of Biology and the Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT), with additional support from the LGBT Center, and the Women’s Center.
Dinner (By RSVP Only)
4:30pm
Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT)
Fung House – 48 Professors Row

Small Group Conversation with Prof. Anne Fausto-Sterling on “The Five Sexes, Revisited”, with dinner after. Faculty and Students may attend only by Email RSVP to Sonia Hofkosh, Director of Women’s Studies at Sonia.Hofkosh@tufts.edu.

March

Friday, March 1, 9:00am–7:00pm
Coolidge Room, Ballou Hall
*Refreshments, Lunch, and Reception included

Music and Diplomacy
A Conference at Tufts and Harvard Universities, providing a forum for interdisciplinary dialogue among scholars and practitioners from various historical standpoints and diverse disciplines, including musicology, ethnomusicology, political science, and literary studies.
Organized by Rebekah Ahrendt (Tufts University), Mark Ferraguto (The Hartt School), and Damien Mahiet (Harvard University/Denison University).
Download complete event program >
Keynote Speakers:
March 1 at Tufts University: Frédéric Ramel (Sciences Po Paris)
“The Idea of the Concert in 18th-century Political Theory: Music and Perpetual Peace”
March 2 at Harvard University: Danielle Fosler-Lussier (The Ohio State University)
“Music, Mediated Diplomacy, and Globalization in the Cold War Era”
Special Guest:
US Ambassador Laurence Pope II
Hosted by the Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT) and the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University, and made possible by the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT), the Tufts University Department of Music, and the Harvard University Department of Music.

Wednesday, March 6, 5:00pm
Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT)
Fung House – 48 Professors Row
*Q&A and Reception to follow

The Perils and Paradoxes of Remembrance: Dissecting France’s Duty to Memory
Richard J. Golsan
Introduced and moderated by Noit Banai, Lecturer, Modern and Contemporary Art, Department of Visual and Critical Studies, Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Do remembrance, commemoration and other efforts to come to terms with past traumas always serve a healing and binding function in national communities? As French efforts to deal with the Vichy period, the Algerian war, and other traumatic moments in the nation’s past have shown, the answer is sometimes “yes” and sometimes “no.” Through a discussion of the 1990s trials for crimes against humanity, political scandals, as well as recent fiction, Richard J. Golsan will explore the perils and paradoxes of what the French call “le devoir de mémoire”–“the duty to memory.”
Richard J. Golsan is University Distinguished Professor and Director of the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University. He is the author of “Vichy’s Afterlife: History and Counterhistory in France” (Nebraska, 2000) and “French Writers and the Politics of Complicity” (Johns Hopkins, 2006), among other works.

Friday, March 29, 12:00pm
Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT)
Fung House – 48 Professors Row
*Q&A and Luncheon

A Conversation with Stacey Steers
Artist Stacey Steers talks to Nancy Bauer, Dean of Academic Affairs and Professor of Philosophy. Stacey Steers makes labor-intensive films composed of thousands of individual, handmade works on paper. Her animations have screened at the Sundance Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, New Directors New Films in NYC and the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., along with numerous other screenings worldwide, winning national and international awards. Steers, who teaches film studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, creates rich, timeless, and imaginative environments through the combination of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century engravings, illustrations, photographs, and early silent films. Her short film, Night Hunter is currently on exhibition at the Tufts University Art Gallery until April 21.
Space for this luncheon is limited; please RSVP by March 26 to Khalilah.Tyre@tufts.edu

April

Thursday, April 4, 4:30 pm
Pearson Hall, Room 104
*Q&A and Reception to follow:
Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT) – Fung House – 48 Professors Row

Reading and Book Signing
Lydia Davis
Lydia Davis is the author of one novel and seven story collections, one of which was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. She is the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship and was named a Chevalier of the Order of the Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and her translations of modern writers, including Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, and Marcel Proust. Davis recently released The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (2010), which includes stories from the groundbreaking Break It Down(1986) to the 2007 National Book Award nominee Varieties of Disturbance.

Wednesday, April 10, 4:30 pm
Cabot Intercultural Center Auditorium
170 Packard Ave.
*Q&A and Reception to follow:
Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT) – Fung House – 48 Professors Row

Carifesta Redux: A Conversation Among Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars
Angie Cruz, M. NourbeSe Philip, Faith Smith, Donette Francis, and Leah Rosenberg

Moderated by Natalie M. Léger, Mellon Postdoctoral Scholar

Join the conversation concerning Carifesta’s 1976 landmark discussion of history in the Caribbean literary imaginary with Caribbean women writers and scholars, who will address how contemporary Caribbean writers and thinkers, female in particular, have continued to “quarrel with the past” but moved forward now to critically contend with colonialism’s afterlife in the region. Featured writers include: the award winning Dominican-American novelist, Angie Cruz, and the critically-acclaimed Tobagonian poet, playwright and novelist, M. NourbeSe Philip. This event is co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Diversity Fund, American Studies, the Department of English, the Africana Center, and Women’s Studies.

Program Schedule:

4:30 pm – Opening Remarks by Natalie M. Léger
4:45 pm – Panel: Faith Smith, Donette Francis, and
Leah Rosenberg
5:45 pm – Break
6:00pm – Cruz and Philip
7:00pm – Reception

Thursday, April 11, 4:30
Pearson Hall, Room 104
*Q&A and Reception to follow:
Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT) – Fung House – 48 Professors Row

Adventures in translation: the attraction of impossibility
Michael Wood
Michael Wood is the Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English and Professor of comparative literature at Princeton University. He was Director of the Gauss Seminars in Criticism at Princeton from 1995–2001, and chaired Princeton’s English department from 1998 to 2004. He writes regularly for The New York Review of Books and on film for the London Review of Books. Wood is the author of numerous works, including American in the Movies (1975); The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction (1995); The Road to Delphi: the Life and Afterlife of Oracles (2003); and Film: A Very Short Invitation (2010).

Wednesday, April 17, 4:30
Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT)
Fung House – 48 Professors Row
*Q&A and Reception to follow

Egyptian Echoes: Nazik al-Mala’ika and the Poetics of Pan-Arabism
Robyn Creswell
Robyn Creswell is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University and poetry editor of The Paris Review. He is the translator of Sonallah Ibrahim’s That Smell and Notes from Prison (New Directions, 2013), as well as Abdelfattah Kilito’s The Clash of Images (New Directions, 2010). His articles and reviews have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, and Modernism/Modernity, among other publications.

Fall 2013

October

Thursday, October 3, 2013 | 4:30pm
Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT)
Fung House – 48 Professors Row
*Q&A and Reception to follow

Shopping for a Better Country
Josip Novakovich and Lara Vapnyar

Josip Novakovich, a 2013 Finalist for the Man Booker International Prize, was born in Croatia and studied medicine in Serbia before moving to America where he began his career as a writer. He is the author of the novel April Fool’s Day (2004) three short story collections, Yolk (1995) Salvation and Other Disasters(1998), and Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust (2005), and four collections of narrative essays including most recently Shopping for a Better Country (2012).

Lara Vapnyar is the critically-acclaimed author of the novel Memoirs of a Muse (2006). And two short-story collections, Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love (2008), and There Are Jews in My House (2004). Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and elsewhere. Her novel, The Scent of Pine will be published by Simon & Schuster in January 2014.

Wednesday, October 9, 2013 | 4:30pm
Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT)
Fung House – 48 Professors Row
*Q&A and Reception to follow

The Way We Wait Now: Reflections on the Ambiguous Gift of Time
Andrea Köhler
Introduction by Yoon Choi, Ph.D., Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow

Andrea Köhleris the U.S. cultural correspondent for the Swiss daily newspaper Neue Züricher Zeitung.Among her awards are the 2003 Berlin Book Critics Prize and a Max Kade Fellowship (2004). She is the author of The Waiting Game: An Essay on the Gift of Time (2012), and (together with Rainer Moritz) Kleines Glossar des Verschwindens [A Small Glossary of Disappearance] (2003) and Maulhelden und Königskinder (1998).

Thursday, October 17, 2013 | 4:30pm
Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT)
Fung House – 48 Professors Row
*Q&A and Reception to follow

Spending Time or How I Won the Cold War: Reflections on Innocence and Revolution
Péter Zilahy
Introduction by Margareta Ingrid Christian, Ph.D., Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow

Péter Zilahy is the author of four books. His collection of poems, Statue Under a White Sheet Ready to Jump (1993) won the Móricz Zsigmond Prize. His dictionary novel, The Last Window Giraffe (1998) has been translated into 22 languages. It won ‘The Book of the Year Prize’ in Ukraine in 2003 and influenced the Orange Revolution in 2004.

Thursday, October 24, 2013 | 4:00pm
Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT)
Fung House – 48 Professors Row
*Q&A and Reception to follow

Distinguished Poets Series
Jerome Rothenberg
Co-Sponsored by the Tufts Department of Anthropology

Jerome Rothenberg is an internationally known poet, translator, performance artist, and anthologist with over eighty books of poetry and essays. His anthologies include Technicians of the Sacred (1968), Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry of the Indian North Americas (1972), and the three-volume Poems for the Millennium (1995, 1998).

Friday, October 25, 2013 | 2:00-7:00pm
Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT)
Fung House – 48 Professors Row
Reception to follow

First Transatlantic Poetry Summit
Co-Sponsored by the Tufts Department of Anthropology

Poetry readings and a dialogue about the current state of poetry on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Guest speakers include: Clayton Eshleman (USA); Pedro Ángel Palou (Mexico); Benito del Pliego (Spain); Roger Santiváñez (Peru); Jerome Rothenberg (USA); Maurizio Medo (Peru); Eduardo Espina (Uruguay); Tamara Kamenszain (Argentina); and José Kozer (Cuba). Moderated by José Antonio Mazzotti, Professor of Latin American Literature and CHAT Faculty Fellow.
View full program >

November

Tuesday, November 5, 2013 | 4:00pm
Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT)
Fung House – 48 Professors Row
*Q&A and Reception to follow

Translating Into the Language of Language on the Swiss-Russian Border
Mikhail Shishkin
Introduction by Professor Greg Carleton, Tufts Department of German, Russian & Asian Languages and Literature

Mikhail Shishkin is the first author to win all three of the major Russian literary prizes – the Russian Booker, the Big Book Award, and the National Bestseller Award. His work has been translated into twenty five languages. In fall 2012, Open Letter published Marian Schwartz’s English translation of his 2006 novelMaidenhair, and in 2013 the British house Quercus published Letter-Book in translation by Andrew Bromfield. For the last seventeen years he has lived in Zurich, Switzerland.

Friday, November 8, 2013 | 5:30pm
Cohen Auditorium, Aidekman Arts Center
40 Talbot Avenue
*Free and Open to the Public

Special Boston Screening: The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology
Slavoj Žižek & Sophie Fiennes

Film Screening followed by Q&A Discussion
Moderated by Professor Lee Edelman, Tufts Department of English

In The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, philosopher Slavoj Žižek and filmmaker Sophie Fiennes use their interpretation of moving pictures to present a compelling cinematic journey into the heart of ideology – the dreams that shape our collective beliefs and practices. One of the world’s foremost philosophers and cultural critics, Slavoj Žižek is the author of more than fifty books on diverse subjects ranging from opera to religion, film, and the war in Iraq.

Sophie Fiennes’ films have screened theatrically, on television and in festivals around the world, including Cannes, Sundance, Telluride, Locarno, Toronto, Rotterdam, Edinburgh, Sydney and London.

Wednesday, November 13, 2013 | 4:30pm
Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT)
Fung House – 48 Professors Row
*Q&A and Reception to follow

Distinguished Poets Series
Rowan Ricardo Phillips

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is a poet, essayist, and translator. He is the author of The Ground (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012), winner of the 2013 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, 2013 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writer Award in Poetry, a finalist for the 2012 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, and a finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry.

Spring 2014

February

Tuesday, February 4, 2014 | 4:30pm
Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT)
Fung House – 48 Professors Row
*Q&A and Reception to follow

A Reading and Discussion
Rachel Kushner
Rachel Kushner’s novel, The Flamethrowers, a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award was named one of the top five novels of the year by The New York Times and Best Book of The Year by New York Magazine. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Believer, Artforum, Bookforum, Fence, Bomb, and Grand Street. She is the recipient of a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship.

March

Wednesday, March 12, 2014 | 4:30pm
Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT)
Fung House – 48 Professors Row
*Q&A and Reception to follow

A Reading and Discussion
Mary O’Donoghue, Novelist, Poet and Translator
Mary O’Donoghue was born and grew up in Co. Clare. Ireland. She is the author of the novel Before the House Burns and a forthcoming collection of stories The Sweet Forbearance in the Streets. She has received awards for fiction from the Hennessy/Sunday Tribune, New Irish Writer and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her poetry collections include Tulle (Salmon Poetry, 2001) and Among These Winters (Dedalus Press, 2007). Her translations of Irish language poet Seán Ó Ríordáin are forthcoming in a Yale UP volume. She teaches in the Arts and Humanities division at Babson College, Massachusetts, and lives in Boston MA and Tuscaloosa AL.

April

Tuesday, April 8, 2014 | 4:30pm
Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT)
Fung House – 48 Professors Row
*Q&A and Reception to follow

Nonlocality: A Lecture and Discussion
David Albert, Philosopher and Frederick E. Woodbridge Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University
Professor Albert is the author of “Quantum Mechanics and Experience” and “Time and Chance”, both from Harvard University Press. A third book – “After Physics” – will come out this fall, also from Harvard. He has taught physics or philosophy or both at Princeton, Harvard, Rutgers, Tel Aviv University, the Weizmann Institute, and the University of South Carolina.
2014 marks the 50th anniversary of one of the most astonishing discoveries in the entire history of natural science: John Bell’s proof that certain of the predictions of quantum mechanics – predictions which have since been verified by experiment – cannot be reproduced by any “local” description of the world. What’s interesting about all this – aside (of course) from the discovery itself – is the persistent difficulty that much of the scientific community has had, even to this day, in fully taking it in. Professor Albert will discuss both.

Thursday, April 10, 2014 | 4:30pm
Pearson Hall, Room 104

The Promise(s) of Digital Humanities
Neil Fraistat, Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH)
Professor Fraistat chairs the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) and is Co-Founder and Co-Chair of centerNet, an international network of digital humanities centers. He currently serves on the boards of the Society for Textual Scholarship; Project MUSE; INKE; NITLE Digital Humanities Council; Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth Century Electronic Scholarship (NINES); Brown’s Women Writer’s Project; Studies in Romanticism; Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net (RaVoN); and the Keats-Shelley Association. He has been awarded both the Society for Textual Scholarship’s biennial Fredson Bowers Memorial Prize and the biennial Richard J. Finneran Prize, the Keats Shelley Association Distinguished Scholar Award, and honorable mention for the Modern Language Association’s biennial Distinguished Scholarly Edition Prize.

Friday-Saturday, April 11-12, 2014
Cabot Intercultural Center, 7th Floor

Self-Knowledge and the Philosophy of Mind: Kantian Questions and Approaches
A Two-Day Conference
Organized by Yoon Choi, Mellon Postdoctoral Scholar
yoon.choi@tufts.edu
Information and registration at http://kant2014tufts.weebly.com/

Friday, April 11, 2014
Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT)
Fung House – 48 Professors Row

Animations: Image, Movement, Affect
An Interdisciplinary Workshop
Organized by:
Margareta Ingrid Christian (Mellon Postdoctoral Scholar)and Jeremy Melius (Associate Professor, Department of Art and Art History)
Information and Full Conference Program >

Thursday, April 17, 2014
Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT)
Fung House – 48 Professors Row

CHAT Open House: Music, Fiction, Poetry, and Refreshments
The Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT) celebrates Spring with an afternoon of music, fiction, poetry, and refreshments. Our Open House will allow you to meet our accomplished faculty and staff, and explore how our Center promotes innovative, collaborative study in the humanities and arts.

Schedule of Events

4:00pm		Welcome and Reception
4:30pm		Reading by Winners of the student Morse Hamilton Prize in Fiction and the Academy of American Poets Prize in Poetry
5:00pm		Reading by Adam Wilson, (LA ’04) Author of What’s Important Is Feeling: Stories (2014)
5:30pm		Khalilah Imani Tyre Vocal Music Selection

A Reading and Discussion
Adam Wilson

Adam Wilson is the author of What’s Important is Feeling: Stories (Harper Perennial, 2014) and Flatscreen: A novel (Harper Perennial, 2012), which was a National Jewish Book Award Finalist and an Amazon Book of the Month. In 2012, he received the Paris Review’s Terry Southern Prize.

His short stories, essays, journalism and criticism have appeared in many publications including Best American Short Stories 2012, The Paris Review, Tin House, The Literary Review, Washington Square Review, The New York Times, The New Republic, Bookforum, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Observer, and Salon.

He teaches creative writing at New York University and Columbia University.

Fall 2014

September

Tuesday, September 30, 2014 | 6:00pm
Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT)
Fung House – 48 Professors Row
*Refreshments will be served

Poetry Reading
Eileen Myles and Alan Felsenthal

Hosted by Ariana Reines
Co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT) and the English Department
Eileen Myles is the author of 18 books including “Snowflake/ different streets” (poems, 2012) and Inferno (a poet’s novel) (2010). Her new & selected poems “I Must Be Living Twice” will be published in 2015. She’s a Guggenheim fellow and in 2014 she received a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Art.
Alan Felsenthal is a graduate of the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. He is co-editor of a small press called The Song Cave. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fence, The Iowa Review, and Sea Ranch.

October

Wednesday, October 22, 2014 | 5:30pm
ASEAN Auditorium, Cabot Intercultural Center
170 Packard Ave.
*Q&A and Reception to follow

Humanities Lecture Series: Storytelling and the Modern World
Jonathan Franzen, Author

Jonathan Franzen is the author of four novels, including The Corrections, for which he received the National Book Award, Freedom, and a memoir The Discomfort Zone. His short stories and his essays, including political journalism, have most recently appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Essays, The New York Times, and The Guardian. A new collection of his nonfiction, Farther Away, appeared in 2012. His most recent nonfiction book is The Kraus Project, in which he translates and annotates essays by the satirist Karl Kraus.

Monday, October 27, 2014 | 8:00pm
Tisch Library, Room 304
*Q&A and Reception to follow

“Winter, Go Away!” Film Screening
Anna Moiseenko, Documentarian

In early 2012, as the protest movement against Vladimir Putin’s government gained steam, Novaya Gazeta and Moscow’s School for Documentary Film and Theater partnered to send ten young documentarians into the streets to chronicle as much of the movement as they could. The resulting film, “Winter, Go Away!” (Russia, 2012) is a kaleidoscopic vision of the anti-Putin protest movement as it plans, debates, and confronts the authorities. This event is part of the “Counter-Culture and Protest in Contemporary Russia” series, and is co-sponsored by Tisch College and the Institute for Global Leadership.

Tuesday, October 28, 2014 | 6:45pm
Distler Performance Hall
20 Talbot Ave.

Poetry and Music
Kirill Medvedev, Activist

Kirill Medvedev has recently emerged as one of the most exciting, unpredictable voices on the Russian literary and music scenes. Widely published and acclaimed as a poet, he is also is an activist and a member of the Russian Socialist movement “Vpered” [Forward]. This event is part of the “Counter-Culture and Protest in Contemporary Russia” series, and is co-sponsored by Tisch College and the Institute for Global Leadership.

Friday, October 31, 2014 | 9am – 6pm
Coolidge Room, Ballou Hall
Download flyer >

Fear in the Revolutionary Americas, 1776-1865
This conference is sponsored by the Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT), the Department of History, the Center for the Study of Race & Democracy, Latin American Studies, and the Department of Romance Languages.
Program
9:00 Welcome: Jonathan Wilson, Director of CHAT
9:15-11:15 Session 1: Disruptions of Power and the Uses of Fear
Chair: Kendra Field, Tufts University
Edward Rugemer, Yale University, “Fear of Slave Violence in Jamaica and South Carolina during the American Revolution”
Nicole Eustace, New York University, “Republics of Saints? Fear and Virtue in the Age of Revolutions”
Karen Racine, University of Guelph, “Wars to the Death: Annihilation and Identity in Spanish America’s Independence Era”
Break
11:45-12:45 Keynote 1: Alan Taylor, University of Virginia, “Fear and Loathing in the American Revolution”
12:45-1:45 Lunch break
2:00-4:00 Session 2: Fearful Rumors and Wars of Resistance
Chair: Nina Gerassi-Navarro, Tufts University
David Nichols, Indiana State University, “Capitalizing on Fear: Violence, Insecurity, and Negotiation in Native North America, 1750-1830”
Marcela Echeverri, Yale University, “Pasto’s Invincible Liberators”
Anne Eller, Yale University, “‘Tomorrow you will be slaves’: Spanish Annexation (1861-1865) and Popular Discontent on Hispaniola”
Break
4:15-5:15 Keynote 2: David Geggus, University of Florida, “Fear, Greed, and the Haitian Revolution”
5:15-5:45 Roundtable Discussion: Chris Schmidt-Nowara, Tufts University and Ben Carp, Brooklyn College
For more information, contact Chris Schmidt-Nowara: cschmi03@tufts.edu

November

Tuesday, November 18, 2014 | 6:00pm
Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT)
Fung House – 48 Professors Row
*Q&A and Reception to follow

Distinguished Author Series
A Reading by Poet Ariana Reines

Ariana Reines is a poet, playwright, artist, and translator. Her books include The Cow (Alberta Prize, Fence: 2006), Coeur de Lion

(Mal-o-Mar: 2007), Mercury (Fence: 2011), Thursday (Spork: 2012), and The Origin of the World, an essay produced for the 2014 Whitney Biennial (Semiotext(e) 2014). Her OBIE-winning play Telephone (2009) was commissioned & produced by The Foundry Theatre in New York. Other performances and theatrical works include Mortal Kombat, with Jim Fletcher, at Le Mouvement Biel/Bienne in Switzerland and Gallery TPW in Toronto (2014), The Origin of the World at Stuart Shave Modern Art, London (2013). Volumes of translation include The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Real: Days and Nights of an Anarchist Whore by Jean-Luc Hennig (2009) and Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl by TIQQUN (2011), from Semiotext(e).

In 2009 she was Roberta C. Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry at UC Berkeley, and has since taught at Columbia University, The New School, and Tufts.

Spring 2015

April

Wednesday, April 8, 2015 | 12:00pm
Center for the Humanities (CHAT), Fung House – 48 Professors Row
*Lunch is provided

War Is Not a Game: The New Antiwar Soldiers and the Movement They Built
Nan Levinson

Nan Levinson is a lecturer in the Department of English. She will discuss her new book, War Is Not a Game, which tells the story of the new soldiers’ antiwar movement, showing why it was born, how it quickly grew, where it has struggled, and what it has already accomplished. She reveals the individuals behind the movement, painting an unforgettable portrait of these predominantly working-class veterans who became leaders of a national organization. Written with sensitivity and humor, War Is Not a Game gives readers an uncensored, grunt’s-eye view of the occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, while conveying the equally dramatic struggles that soldiers face upon returning home.

Friday, April 10 | 1:30-5:30pm and
Saturday, April 11 | 10:00am-5:30pm
Center for the Humanities (CHAT), Fung House – 48 Professors Row
Download flyer >

Narrating Knowledge: Literature, Storytelling, and Epistemology
A workshop organized by Doreen Densky, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow. Sponsored by the Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT), the Department of German, Russian, and Asian Languages and Literatures (Charles Smith Endowment Fund), the Program of International Literary and Visual Studies, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Thursday, April 16, 2015 | 4:30 – 5:30 pm
Center for the Humanities (CHAT), Fung House – 48 Professors Row

Reading by Winners of the student Morse Hamilton Prize in Fiction and the Academy of American Poets Prize in Poetry
Awarded each year to full-time undergraduates, The Morse Hamilton Fiction Prize honors the best short story, while the Academy of American Poets Prize is given for the best poem or group of poems. The Morse Hamilton Fiction Prize, sponsored by the Department of English, recognizes one full-time Tufts undergraduate each year who has excelled at fiction writing. The prize is named after the late Professor Morse Hamilton, who was a memorable and beloved figure in the English department for many years. The Academy of American Poets offers more than 200 prizes each year to college students who have excelled at writing poetry. Founded in 1955, the University and College Poetry Prize has awarded more than $350,000 to nearly 10,000 students since it began.

Thursday, April 16, 2015 | 5:00 – 7:00 pm
Aidekman Arts Center, Remis Sculpture Court

The Arts@Tufts Festival presents
First Steps: Alumni in the Arts
Join a group of Tufts Alumni as they discuss the first steps they took in their careers in the arts, and how they established themselves in their creative fields. Speakers: Richard Jankowsky (Ethnomusicology, Tufts), Nicole Pierce (EgoArt Dance), Joshua Rabinowitz (EVP Director of Music), Irina Rozovsky (Mass College of Art, Photography), and Danna Solomon (The Maiden Phoenix Theatre Company). Moderated by Professor Jonathan Wilson. Dinner will be served at 5:00 pm; the presentation begins at 5:30 pm. Free dinner tickets available at the door for the first 65 people in line. Seating is limited.

Thursday, April 16 – Sunday, April 19, 2015
Spring Festival for the Arts@Tufts

A celebration and exploration of cutting-edge research and creative activity in the arts at Tufts. The Spring Festival will feature the work of Tufts faculty, students, and alumni, including music, drama, dance, film screenings, and exhibitions, along with roundtables and special presentations. Sponsored by the Departments of Art History, Drama and Dance, Music, Communications and Media Studies, the Experimental College, and Creative Writing, along with the Center for the Humanities at Tufts, The Tufts University Art Gallery, the AS&E Diversity Fund, and the office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences. Made possible by the Toupin-Bolwell Fund. All events are free and open to the public unless otherwise indicated. For further information on all events, please visit go.tufts.edu/artsfest.

March

Thursday, March 5, 2015 | 7:00 pm
Pearson Hall, Room 104

Putin’s War Against the West
Masha Gessen

Masha Gessen is the author of several books including Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot(2014), The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (2012), and Blood Matters: From Inherited Illness to Designer Babies, How the World and I Found Ourselves in the Future of the Gene(2008), a New York Times Notable Book of 2008. Co-sponsored by EPIIC. At this event, EPIIC will award Masha Gessen the 2015 Institute for Global Leadership Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award.

Tuesday, March 10, 2015 | 12:00 pm
Center for the Humanities (CHAT), Fung House – 48 Professors Row

A Land of Aching Hearts: The Middle East in the Great War
Leila Fawaz

Leila Fawaz is the Issam M. Fares Professor of Lebanese and Eastern Mediterranean Studies and the Founding Director of the Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean studies at Tufts. Her published works include Transformed Landscapes: Essays on Palestine and the Middle East in Honor of Walid Khalidi (co-editor, 2009) and the newly released A Land of Aching Hearts: The Middle East in the Great War (2014).

Tuesday, March 10, 2015 | 4:00 pm
Center for the Humanities (CHAT), Fung House – 48 Professors Row

The Civilian in Wartime: H. G. Wells and the First World War
Sarah Cole

Sarah Coleis the author of two books, most recently At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland (2012), and Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War (2003). She is a professor of English and Comparative English literature at Columbia University.

Wednesday, March 11, 2015 | 4:30 pm – 6:30 pm
Center for the Humanities (CHAT), Fung House – 48 Professors Row

Great Powers and Conflict Management, 1914 to 2015: War in the Balkans
James Lyon

James Lyon is an Associate Researcher at the University of Graz, Austria. His forthcoming book, Serbia and the Balkan Front, 1914, will be released in August 2015.James Lyon in conversation with Anna Di Lellio
Anna Di Lelliois a journalist, sociologist and policy analyst. She is the co-author of The Battle of Kosovo 1389: An Albanian Epic (2009) and the editor of The Case for Kosova: A Passage to Independence (2006).

Friday, March 27, 2015 | 9:30 am – 4 pm
Center for the Humanities (CHAT), Fung House – 48 Professors Row

Transnational Contacts in the Socialist World: A Workshop at Tufts University
Organized by Rachel Applebaum, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow. Sponsored by the Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT), the Department of History, the Department of German, Russian, and Asian Languages & Literatures, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. * Papers will be pre-circulated. Please contactrachel.applebaum@tufts.edu if you wish to attend.

Download Full Program >

Monday, March 30, 2015 | 5:30 pm
Coolidge Room, Ballou Hall
*Coit-Phelps Lecture in the Humanities
In Celebration of Saul Bellow’s Centenary

My Chicago
Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Lazarus Project (2008), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award, as well as The Question of Bruno (2000); Nowhere Man (2002); Love and Obstacles (2009); and The Book of My Lives (2013).

Tuesday, March 31, 2015 | 4:30 pm
Center for the Humanities (CHAT), Fung House – 48 Professors Row

Buccal Intimacies: On Jean-Luc Nancy & Ann Hamilton
Philip Armstrong

Philip Armstrong is an Associate Professor of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University. He has published widely in the area of contemporary visual arts and culture, as well as essays on contemporary political theory. Recent publications include Reticulations: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Networks of the Political (U of Minnesota P, 2009), Jean-Luc Nancy, Politique et au-delà: Entretien with Jason Smith (Galilée, 2011), and (with Laura Lisbon and Stephen Melville) As Painting: Division and Displacement (MIT Press and Wexner Center, 2001).

Organized by Irving Goh, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow. Sponsored by the Center for the Humanities at Tufts (CHAT), the Department of Romance Languages, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Fall 2015

September

Thursday, September 18, 2015 | 5:00 pm
Aidekman Arts Center, Remis Sculpture Court
15 Lower Campus Road

Last Folio: Public Opening Reception and Panel Discussion (Co-Sponsored with the Tufts Art Gallery)
Katya Krausova and Yuri Dojc

Serendipity led the Canadian-Slovakian photographer Yuri Dojc a decade ago to an abandoned Jewish school in eastern Slovakia, where time had stood still since the day in 1942, when all those attending it were deported to the concentration camps, primarily Auschwitz. Its other contents were still there—untouched—books and notebooks with corrections on desks and shelves, reports, birth certificates, accounting ledgers, even sugar still in the kitchen cupboard… all decaying on dusty shelves, the final witnesses to a once thriving culture.

Dojc treats the abandoned, disintegrating books like the survivors they each are — every one photographed like a portrait, preserved in its decrepit, poignant beauty.

Together with British media producer Katya Krausova and a documentary film team, Dojc traveled across Slovakia and found dozens of similar Jewish schools, synagogues, cemeteries, and concentration camp survivors. Last Folio (an exhibition, film, and book) charts this personal journey in cultural memory and reflects on the universal losses of the Holocaust.

Throughout 2015 Last Folio is part of international commemorations of the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II; it has appeared at the United Nations in New York, the National Library of Germany in Berlin, the Mark Rothko Museum in Latvia, the New Museum of Tolerance in Moscow, and at Tufts.

October

October 6 – 9, 2015

Last Folio Residency Week, with Katya Krausova and Yuri Dojc
Co-Sponsored with the Tufts University Art Gallery

Tuesday, October 6, 2015 | 7:00 pm
Tisch Library, Room 304
35 Professors Row

Last Folio Film Screening and Discussion
Katya Krausova and Yuri Dojc

Thursday, October 8, 2015 | 5:00 pm
Tufts University Art Gallery
40 Talbot Avenue

Panel Discussion, Book Signing & Reception

Panel Discussion moderated by Jonathan Wilson: “The Architecture of Memory,” Book Signing, and Reception. Panelists: Katya Krausova, Yuri Dojc, Diane O’Donohue, and Rachel Applebaum.

Friday, October 9, 2015 | 6:15 pm
Services at 6:15pm | Dinner at 7pm | Storytelling Program at 8pm
Granoff Family Hillel Center
220 Packard Ave

Shabbat Stories: What’s Your Narrative?
Co-Sponsored with Tufts Hillel

Shabbat Dinner, followed by an intriguing program with storyteller Norah Dooley. This is the final event of the Last Folio residency week. Register >

Tuesday, October 13, 2015 | 6:00 pm
Barnum Hall, Room 104 (*UPDATED LOCATION)
163 Packard Avenue

Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution
Mona Eltahawy

Mona Eltahawy is an award-winning Egyptian American feminist writer and commentator. Her essays and op-eds on Egypt, the Islamic world, and women’s rights have appeared in various publications, including The Washington Post and The New York Times. She has appeared as a guest commentator on MSNBC, the BBC, CNN, PBS, Al-Jazeera, NPR, and dozens of other television and radio networks, and is a contributing opinion writer for the International New York Times. She lives in Cairo and New York City.

Tuesday, October 27, 2015 | 7:00 pm
Lincoln Filene Hall, Rabb Room
10 Upper Campus Road

Alexandra Fuller

Alexandra Fuller has written five books of non-fiction. Her debut book, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (Random House, 2001), was a New York Times Notable Book for 2002, the 2002 Booksense Best Non-fiction book, a finalist for the Guardian‘s First Book Award and the winner of the 2002 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize. Her 2004 Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier (Penguin Press) won the Ulysses Prize for Art of Reportage. In 2008, Fuller’s The Legend of Colton H. Bryant told the story of a modern-day Wyoming cowboy working on that state’s oil rigs (Penguin Press). She contributed the essay on Wyoming in the 2008 book State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America. The New York TimesBest Selling, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness (August, 2011), is a prequel/sequel to Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. Her latest book, a memoir of marriage and divorce, is entitled Leaving Before the Rains Come (January, 2015). Fuller has written for The New Yorker, Vogue, and is a frequent contributor to National Geographic Magazine.

November

Tuesday, November 17, 2015 | 6:00 pm (*CANCELLED*)

Destinies of Finitude
Alain Badiou

Wednesday, November 18, 2015 | 6:00 pm (*CANCELLED*)

Capitalism/Communism: Reflections on Politics as a Possible Condition for Philosophy
Cécile Winter

Thursday, November 19, 2015 | 7:00 pm (*CANCELLED*)

Cinema in the Contemporary World
Alain Badiou

December

Thursday, December 3, 2015 | 5:00 pm
Center for the Humanities (CHAT), Fung House – 48 Professors Row

Does the Rise of China Threaten the United States?
Andrew J. Nathan

China has quickly become the number two economic power in the world, is rapidly building up its military, and is behaving more assertively in the South China Sea. What is Beijing’s strategy? Does it intend to drive the United States out of Asia, as some commentators believe, or even to replace the U.S. as the number one global power? Or will economic interdependence and shared interests in issues like climate change force the two powers to cooperate? The co-author of China’s Search for Security (2012), Professor Nathan will discuss China’s security strategy and its implications for American interests. Q&A and Reception to follow.

Andrew J. Nathan is Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. His teaching and research interests include Chinese politics and foreign policy, the comparative study of political participation and political culture, and human rights. He is chair of the administrative committee of the Institute for the Study of Human Rights and chair of the Morningside Institutional Review Board (IRB) at Columbia. His books include “The Tiananmen Papers”, co-edited with Perry Link (2001); “Negotiating Culture and Human Rights: Beyond Universalism and Relativism”, co-edited with Lynda S. Bell and Ilan Peleg (2001); and “China’s Search for Security”, co-authored with Andrew Scobell (2012).

Spring 2016

March

Wednesday, March 30, 2016 | 5:30 pm
Center for the Humanities
Fung House- 48 Professors Row

Coit-Phelps Lecture in the Humanities
The Untold Story of Nazi Stolen Art
Charles Dellheim

Charles Dellheim’s chief publications in modern British history include “The Face of the Past: The Preservation of the Medieval Inheritance in Victorian England”, “The Disenchanted Isle: Mrs. Thatcher’s Capitalist Revolution”, and “The Creation of a Company Culture: Cadburys, 1861-1931.” He is currently writing a book that provides a historical perspective on Nazi art looting by telling the story of a circle of art dealers, collectors, and critics who became pivotal figures in the art world. Between 2001 and 2009 he served as Boston University History Department chair, and in 2010 became Director of the Arvind and Chandan Nandlal Kilachand Honors College at Boston University.

April

Wednesday, April 6, 2016 | 5:30 pm
The Granoff Family Hillel Center
220 Packard Avenue- Medford, MA 02155

Distinguished Writers Series
The Hilltop: A Reading and Discussion
Assaf Gavron

Assaf Gavron is the author of five novels (The Hilltop, Ice, Moving, Almost Dead, and Hydromania); a collection of short stories (Sex in the Cemetery); and a non-fiction collection of Jerusalem falafel-joint reviews (Eating Standing Up). His fiction has been adapted for the stage in Israel’s national theatre, and optioned for movies. He is the recipient of several awards including the Bernstein Prize for The Hilltop, the Israeli Prime Minister’s Creative Award for Authors, the Buch Fur die Stadt in Germany and the Prix Courrier International in France. As a translator of fiction, Gavron is responsible for the highly-regarded English-to-Hebrew translations of J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, and Jonathan Safran Foer’s novels, among others. (Co-Sponsored by Tufts Hillel and the Tufts Hebrew Program).

Fall 2016

Sept 14, 12:00-1:30, Center for Humanities
“No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity”
Sarah Haley, Assistant Professor of Gender Studies, UCLA

Oct 6, 6:00-8:00, Rabb Room
Poets Series
Monica Youn – Reading
Monica Youn is the author of Blackacre, Ignatz, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Barter. Her poems have been widely published in journals and anthologies, including The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and The Best American Poetry. She has been awarded the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University and the Witter Bynner Fellowship of the Library of Congress and has previously taught poetry at Bennington College, Columbia University, Pratt Institute, and the MFA for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Oct 11, 5:00-7:00, Rabb Room
Annual Asian Studies Lecture: “The Cow in the Elevator and Other Stories of Wonder from South Asia”
Tulasi Srinivas, Associate Professor, Interdisciplinary Studies, Emerson College
Tulasi Srinivas is currently a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of Winged Faith: Rethinking Globalization and Religious Pluralism Through the Sathya Sai Movement (Columbia University Press 2010) and the award-winning Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food and South Asia (University of California Press 2012)

Nov 10-11, Center for the Humanities
“The Italian Roots of Modernity: Machiavelli and Galileo
This international conference includes panel presentations by prominent scholars on Machiavelli and Galileo, both protagonists of a conceptual revolution that tried to understand the relationship between the human and scientific worlds without appealing to God’s authority. The conference will probe the meaning of that revolution as well as unanswered questions about it.

Nov 15, 4:30-6:30, Center for Humanities
“Social Justice, Responsibility, and Respect”
Benedetta Giovanola, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Macerata (Italy)

Nov 17, 6:00-8:00 pm, Braker Hall, Room 222
“We Come as Friends” Film Screening
Cécile Winter
Cécile Winter is a medical doctor at the Centre hospitalier intercommunal André Grégoire in the Paris suburb of Montreuil. She specializes in the treatment of HIV/AIDS-related illnesses. In addition to her medical research, she has published essays on Palestinian-Israeli politics, the Chinese cultural revolution, and the novels of Alain Badiou. She has also co-authored and edited numerous tracts and brochures in the context of her work as a political activist. Co-Sponsored by the Tufts Department of English, the Center for the Humanities at Tufts, the Toupin-Bolwell Fund, and the Consortium of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora.

Nov 17, 6:00-8:00 pm, Center for Humanities
Poets Series
Dana Levin – Reading
Dana Levin’s new book of poetry is Banana Palace (Copper Canyon Press, 2016). Previous books include In the Surgical Theatre, which was chosen by Louise Glück for the 1999 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize, and Sky Burial (2011), which The New Yorker called “utterly her own and utterly riveting.” Recent poetry and essays have appeared in Best American Poetry 2015, The New York Times, Boston Review, and Poetry. Her honors include those from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN, the Witter Bynner Foundation and the Library of Congress, as well as the Rona Jaffe, Whiting and Guggenheim Foundations. Levin currently serves each Fall

Nov 17, 8:00-10:00 pm, Cabot ASEAN Auditorium
“Reflections on the Election of Trump”
Alain Badiou, Philosophy, École Normale Supérieure
Alain Badiou is one of the most important and influential philosophers in the world today. Emeritus professor of philosophy at the École normale supérieure in Paris, he is also a novelist, playwright, and political activist. His major books of philosophy are Theory of the Subject (1982; English translation 2009), Being and Event (1988; English translation 2005), Logics of Worlds (2006; English translation 2009), and The Immanence of Truths, now in progress. He has also published dozens of books and innumerable articles on politics, film, literature, music, ethics, mathematics, and many other topics. Co-Sponsored by the Tufts Department of English, the Center for the Humanities at Tufts, and the Toupin-Bolwell Fund.

Nov 18, 4:00-6:00 pm, Braker Hall, Room 001
“Toward a Revival of Pan-Africanism” Public Lecture
Cécile Winter
Co-Sponsored by the Tufts Department of English, the Center for the Humanities at Tufts, the Toupin-Bolwell Fund, and the Consortium of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora.

Nov 19, 6:00-8:00 pm, Cabot ASEAN Auditorium
“‘Modern’ Art and ‘Contemporary’ Art: A False Distinction?”
Alain Badiou, Philosophy, École Normale Supérieure
Co-Sponsored by the Tufts Department of English, the Center for the Humanities at Tufts, and the Toupin-Bolwell Fund.

Mellon-Sawyer Seminar 2016-2017

Mellon Sawyer Seminar 2016-2017Edit"Mellon Sawyer Seminar 2016-2017"

September 21, 2016
“South Sudan: The Road to Civil War”
Mahmood Mamdani, Herbert Lehman Professor of Government, Anthropology, and African Studies,
Columbia University

October 13, 2016
“Migrations, Islands, and the Creative Economy”
Françoise Lionnet, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, and African and African American Studies, Harvard University

November 4, 2016
Colonialism, Slavery, and the Archive: Old and New Practices
Vincent Brown, Warren Professor of History, Harvard University
Elizabeth Dillon, Professor of English, Northeastern University
Vivek Bald, Associate Professor of Media Studies, MIT

December 2, 2016
Plantation Dispossession and the Futures of Black Embodiment
Alexander Weheliye, Professor of African American Studies, Northwestern University
Katherine McKittrick, Professor of Gender Studies, Queen’s University
Demetrius Eudell, Professor of History, Wesleyan University

January 26, 2017
“Comparative Postcolonial Theory and the Question of Chinese Empire”
Shu-mei Shih, Professor of Comparative Literature
Asian Languages and Cultures, and Asian American Studies, UCLA

January 27, 2017
World Studies and Comparative Relation
Shu-mei Shih, Professor of Comparative Literature
Asian Languages and Cultures, and Asian American Studies, UCLA

February 16, 2017
Colonial Memory and Trauma
Debarati Sanyal, Professor of French, UC Berkeley
Stef Craps, Associate Professor of English, University of Ghent

February 23, 2017
“The Social Life of DNA”
Alondra Nelson, Professor of Sociology, Columbia University

March 9, 2017
Rethinking the Human: Life Between Epistemology and Therapeutics
Emily Martin, Professor of Anthropology, NYU
Lawrence Cohen, Professor of Anthropology, UC Berkeley

March 28, 2017
David Chidester, Professor of Comparative Religion, University of Cape Town

March 29, 2017
“Religion’s Imperial Pasts, Global Futures”
David Chidester, Professor of Comparative Religion, University of Cape Town
April 3, 2017
“The Politics of Human Rights”
Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley

April 20, 2017
Sovereignty, Settler Colonialism, Territoriality and Resistance
Audra Simpson, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University
Jessica Cattelino, Associate Professor of Anthropology, UCLA

Spring 2017

March 3, 2017 | 1:30-4:00pm | Alumnae Lounge, Aidekman Arts Center
Time, Memory, and Ethical Inquiry
Professor Rosalind Shaw

A panel of scholars and gathering of Community in celebration of the work of Rosalind Shaw, Associate Professor of Anthropology.
Download flyer >

March 6, 2017 | 6:00-8:00pm | Alumnae Lounge, Aidekman Arts Center
Poets Series
Robin Coste Lewis – Reading

Robin Coste Lewis is the author of Voyage of the Sable Venus, a National Book Award winner. She is a Provost’s Fellow in Poetry and Visual Studies at the University of Southern California, as well as a Cave Canem fellow and a fellow of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities. She received her BA from Hampshire College, her MFA in poetry from NYU, and an MTS in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature from the Divinity School at Harvard University. A previous finalist for the Rita Dove Poetry Award, she has published her work in various journals and anthologies, including The Massachusetts Review, Callaloo, The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, Transition: Women in Literary Arts, VIDA, Phantom Limb, and Lambda Literary Review, among others. She has taught at Wheaton College, Hunter College, Hampshire College, and the NYU Low-Residency MFA in Paris. Co-Sponsored by Toupin-Bolwell fund, the Deans of Arts and Sciences, the Diversity Fund, the departments of English, Drama and Dance, and Education, the programs in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora, and Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the Africana Center.

March 16, 2017 | 5:30-7:00pm | Center for the Humanities
Working Group on “History of the Book”
Anne-Marie Eze – inaugural speaker
“Curating Beyond Words: Italian Renaissance Books“

Anne-Marie Eze is the Houghton Library’s first Director of Scholarly and Public Programs. In this new role, Eze assumes leadership for coordinating and implementing a dynamic vision for Houghton Library’s scholarly communications and public programming initiatives, including exhibitions, print and multimedia publications, fellowships, lectures, symposia, and tours. As Houghton Library’s chief communications officer, she is tasked with promoting increased engagement with and awareness of Houghton’s acclaimed collection of rare books, manuscripts, and archival holdings. In her previous position as Associate Curator of the Collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Eze collaborated with Houghton Library and Boston College’s McMullen Museum on Beyond Words: Illuminated Manuscripts in Boston Collections. The largest exhibition of its kind ever held in North America, Beyond Words showcased 260 outstanding medieval and Renaissance books from 19 Boston-area collections at three venues on both sides of the Charles River. Eze was lead curator for Italian Renaissance Books (closing January 16, 2017), the show’s installation at the Gardner Museum, which has drawn praise for its striking design.

Fall 2017

November 7 | 3:00-4:30 | Tisch 304
“History of the Book Group”
Laura Light
The History of the Book Group involves faculty and librarians from art history, classics, history, music, philosophy and literary studies. Laura Light, of Les Enluminures, will guide us through an examination of our newly acquired Latin Bible (France 1240-1260). We will spend time brainstorming ideas for use in the classroom. Please invite colleagues and advanced graduate students to attend. A special thanks to Dorothy Meaney, Christopher Barbour, and Lisa Lowe for making this event possible.

September 26 | 5:00-7:00 | Tisch 304
“Asmarina”
Medhin Paolos
Medhin Paolos is an Italian photographer, film director, musician and activist. She will screen her film, “Asmarina,” about Eritrean and Ethiopian community in Italy, and following the film, will participate in a discussion.

October 5 | 4:30-6:30 pm | Alumnae Lounge
“Surrogate Humanity”
Neda Atanasoski
Kalindi Vora
Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora speak about their co-authored book project, Surrogate Humanity, elaborating what they call the “surrogate human effect” in both political and cultural imaginaries of civil rights and decolonization movements, and in recent developments in industrial and military robotics. They analyze the raced and gendered social relations between bodies, both machine and human, which are not generally recognized as such, and argue that these relations, too, are part of the fabric of racial liberalism in which practices of reducing the humanity of (racialized) others functions continues to buttress and define the value of the human, and what makes us feel human. By tracking the surrogate human effect, Atanasoski and Vora expose how a seemingly neutral technological modernity is in fact infused with the racial, gender, and sexual politics of political modernity, based as they are in racial slavery, colonial conquest and genocide.

October 16 | 4:30-6:30 pm | Alumnae Lounge
“Art and Immigration: One Artist / Several Paths”
Wen-ti Tsen
Wen-ti Tsen, the Fall 2017 Knaster Artist-in-Residence at Tufts University, will speak about the role of public art in the politics of immigration in contemporary society, and discusses the different ways that his art and art practices communicate immigrant experiences. His visit is made possible by the Martha and Nat R. Knaster Charitable Trust, the Center for the Humanities at Tufts, and the Consortium of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora.
Wen-ti Tsen’s lecture will be followed by a Public Reception, 6:00-8:00 pm, in the Balch Arena Lobby.

October 19 | 4:30-6:00 | CHAT Conference Room
Seminar: “Imperial Debris and Colonial Presence”
Ann Laura Stoler, Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies, The New School for Social Research
In this fellows seminar, Professor Stoler will discuss her work on the politics of knowledge and histories of the present, focusing particularly on the concept of “colonial presence” in her recent book, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (2016) and in her larger body of work. Participation is limited, please contact CHAT director if you would like to obtain the readings to participate in this seminar: lisa.lowe@tufts.edu

October 20 | 2:15-3:30 | Breed Memorial Hall, 51 Winthrop Street
“In Carceral Motion: Disposals of Life and Labor”
The 2017 Tufts Graduate Humanities Conference Reworking Labor Keynote Address
Ann Laura Stoler, Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies, The New School for Social Research

October 25 | 6:00-8:00 | Rabb Room
Poets Series
Kathy Fagan
Kathy Fagan will read from her latest collection of poems, Sycamore (Milkweed Editions, 2017)

November 9 | 4:30-7:00 | Cabot 702
“Aapothkalin-trikalika: the Kali of Emergency”
Ashish Avikunthak
Filmmaker Ashish Avikunthak will screen his film, “Aapothkalin-trikalika: the Kali of Emergency,” and will participate in a discussion following the screening.

November 14 | 4:30-6:30 pm | Alumnae Lounge
“Material Worlds: Genealogies of Race and Nature”
Mel Y. Chen, Associate Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley
Jake Kosek, Associate Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley
Alexander Blanchette, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Tufts
In this symposium, Chen, Kosek, and Blanchette will explore alternative biologies of race and racism, not through the most common routes of blood, skin or gene, but through other material biologies and rethinkings of life, matter, human, nature, and machine.

Spring 2018

January 24 | 4:30-6:00 | Rabb Room
“Mortevivum: Black Photography and Politics of the Visual”
Kimberly Juanita Brown
In this public lecture, Kimberly Juanita Brown will speak about the site of the visual as a way to negotiate the parameters of race, gender, and belonging. Drawing from her current research, Brown will discuss images of the dead from four geographies: South Africa, Rwanda, Sudan, and Haiti, observing that a cartography of the ocular exists in documentary images to normalize global violence, particularly if the victims are black.

January 31 | 5:00-7:00 | Alumnae Lounge
“Readings from The Blue Clerk, ars poetica”
Dionne Brand
Dionne Brand will read from her latest book, The Blue Clerk (McClelland & Stewart and Duke UP, 2018). Dionne Brand is a renowned poet, novelist, and essayist, whose award-winning works include Land to Light On, Ossuaries, Inventory, What We All Long For, and A Map to the Door of No Return, which have been widely taken up in scholarship on Being in the Black Diaspora.

February 13 | 4:30-6:00 | Alumnae Lounge
“Marvelous Extinctions: Melville on Animal Suffering”
Branka Arsic
In this public lecture, Branka Arsic examines the understanding of rational and irrational life forms in 19th century biology and literature. She begins with remarks Melville left in his Encantadas concerning the Galapagos tortoises, and goes on to examine the scientific and historical archives to which he had recourse, from Cuvier and Broderip to Porter and Delano. She seeks to reconstruct exactly what, in the early 19th century, prompted scientists, doctors and naturalists, as well as traders and ordinary seamen, to obsess about the tortoise as life form, one that was brought to the brink of extinction by the middle of the century. She argues that the reason why both physiologists in Continental scientific laboratories, and whalers traversing Antillean waters in trade ships, chose this particular animal to answer the question of what life is, derived from their ideas about what constituted pain, suffering and cruelty. By rehearsing such debates over the presumed expressions of suffering, apathy and indifference on the part of the tortoise, Arsic suggests that what scientists understood as apathy towards pain licensed the production of a bizarre taxonomy of life forms based on a creaturely capacity to resist violence.

February 14 | 12:00-1:30 | Laminan Lounge
Seminar: “Science, Grief, and Vitalism”
Branka Arsic
In this CHAT seminar, Professor Arsic will discuss her work on science, vitalism, mourning, and literature in her book Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau (2016) and in her larger body of work. Participation is limited; please contact Lisa Lowe, CHAT Director, if you would like to obtain the readings to participate in this seminar.

February 21 | 4:30-6:30 | Rabb Room
“Public Amnesias”
Kendra Field, Kerri Greenidge, Aditi Mehta, James Rice
In this public roundtable, panelists discuss the ways that identifying “amnesias” – as dynamic omissions in the narratives of experience – can operationalize critique and activism. Panelists will discuss “forgetting” in sites that include the histories of African-descended and Native families and communities, environmental catastrophes, and as borders of academic disciplines. These inquiries and their implications have a considerable trajectory, extending from the Tufts campus and Boston area to broader regional and transnational locations.

February 26 | 4:30-6:30 | CHAT Conference Room
Poetry Reading by Natalie Shapero
Natalie Shapero will read her poems, including work from her recently published collection, Hard Child (Copper Canyon Press, 2017). Shapero is author of No Object (Saturnalia, 2013), and is Professor of the Practice of Poetry here at Tufts.

March 6 | 4:30-6:30 | CHAT Conference Room
Kendra Field Book Launch & Reception
Growing Up With the Country: Family, Race, and Nation After the Civil War (Yale University Press, 2017)Kendra Field will discuss her new book, Growing Up With The Country, which chronicles her family history and their journey out of the South to Indian Territory, where they participated in the development of black and black Indian towns and settlements. Kendra Field is Assistant Professor of History at Tufts, and director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy.

March 7 | 4:30-6:00 | CHAT Conference Room
“Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body”
Ari Heinrich
In this public seminar, Ari Heinrich discusses the politics of the medically commodified body in contemporary Chinese and transnational literature, media, art, visual culture, and popular science. Incorporating both political economy and aesthetics, this examination opens up new ways to thinking about the interrelationship of science, medicine, commodity, and the arts in modern and contemporary environments.

March 9 | 12:00-3:00 | Granoff Music Center Room 75
“Sound Matters: Sound/Sound Studies/Sound Art”
A Tufts Faculty Workshop
Nina Eidsheim will present the keynote lecture at this interdisciplinary campus-wide symposium on sound studies, which explores how we think about sound, music, and listening in musicology, theatre and performance studies, engineering, literary studies, and art history. This workshop is a coproduction of CHAT, The University Gallery, and the Office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences.

March 14 | 1:00-4:00 | Interfaith Center, 58 Winthrop Street
“The Practice of Diaspora: 15 Years Later”
Brent Hayes Edwards
with Adam Lewis, Marina Bilbija, Tzarina Prater, and Kelly Baker Josephs
This afternoon symposium will gather presentations reflecting on 19th- and 20th-century Atlantic print cultures, African Diaspora, and Black internationalism, fields to which Brent Hayes Edwards’s pathbreaking The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism contributed when it first appeared in 2003. The symposium will feature two panels, the first with papers by Adam Lewis (Boston College) and Marina Bilbija (Center for the Humanities at Tufts), and a second with Tzarina Prater (Bentley University) and Kelly Baker Josephs (York College, CUNY). Brent Hayes Edwards will provide commentary and final remarks. This symposium is co-sponsored by CHAT, the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy (CSRD), the programs in Race, Colonialism and Diaspora (RCD), and the University Chaplaincy.

March 28 | 3:00-5:00 | Fletcher C702
Heather Curtis Book Launch & Reception
Holy Humanitarians: American Evangelicals and Global Aid
Heather Curtis will discuss her new book, Holy Humanitarians: American Evangelicals and Global Aid (Harvard University Press, 2018), a study of the emergence of American evangelicalism and global engagements at the turn of the twentieth century. Cosponsored by CHAT, the Fletcher Initiative on Religion, Law and Diplomacy, and the Ginn and Tisch Libraries.

March 29 | 6:30 | Crane Room, Paige Hall
“The Politics of Palestinian Scholarship in Israel”
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury and Nadim Rouhana, moderated by Amahl Bishara
In this discussion, CHAT Postdoctoral Fellow Areej Sabbagh-Khoury and Professor of International Affairs and Conflict Studies Nadim Rouhana will discuss the contribution of Palestinian scholarship in Israel to Zionist history. Cosponsored by Friends of Mada and CHAT.

April 18 | 5:00-7:00 | CHAT Conference Room
“The Work of Reading”
John Lurz, Kevin Ohi, Audrey Wasser
In this roundtable, three literary critics, John Lurz, Kevin Ohi, and Audrey Wasser will discuss the work of reading in contemporary literary criticism, examining styles of reading in the works of Woolf, Proust, Blanchot, and Barthes, and others.

April 25 | 4:30-6:00 | CHAT Conference Room
“Tehran 1979, Damascus 2011: Adonis, Foucault, and Modernity”
Robyn Cresswell
In this lecture, Robyn Cresswell discusses the modernist poetry movement in Beirut in the 1950s and 1060s, focusing on the work of the Syrian poet and critic Adonis. Cresswell teaches modern Arabic and comparative literature at Yale University, and is poetry editor of The Paris Review.

Fall 2018

Spring 2019

Tuesday, May 7th | 12:00pm | Center for the Humanities – Seminar Room
Yizhou Huang (Department of Drama and Dance, Tufts University)
“Local and Global Festivities: A Case Study of Shanghai Amateur Dramatic Club’s Pantomimes”

Thursday, May 2nd | 5:30pm | Rabb Room, Lincoln Filene Center
Rana Barakat (Birzeit University – Palestine)
“A People’s Memory – Ayam Baladna (in the days/time) of our homeland: Lifta and Resisiting the Museumification of Palestine”

Friday, April 19 | 2:00pm | Fares Center, Fletcher School
Special Series: Iran’s Revolution at 40
Neda Maghbouleh (Toronto)
“Cowboys and Iranians: Encounters at the Limits of Whiteness”

Tuesday, April 16 | 12:00 – 1:30PM | Center for the Humanities, Fung House
Ina Baghdiantz McCabe (Tufts)
“Absurd Interpretations: the Socio-economic Impact of Travel Accounts on Early Modern France”

Thursday, April 11 | 5:30pm | Crane Room, Paige Hall
Jason Stanley (Tufts)
“Ignorance in the Age of Information”

Wednesday, April 10 | 12:00 – 1:30pm | Center for the Humanities, Fung House
Elizabeth Foster (Tufts)
“Catholicism and the Decolonization of Africa”

Thursday, April 4, 2019 | 6:00pm – 7:30pm | Rabb Room
Special Series: Iran’s Revolution at 40
Lior Sternfeld (Penn State)
“Revolutionary Jews: the politicization of the Iranian Jewish Communities in the Twentieth Century”

March 28, 2019 | 6:00pm – 7:30pm | Rabb Room
Special Series: Iran’s Revolution at 40
Amir Moosavi (Rutgers)
“Literary Afterlives of 1979: War and Resistance in Arabic and Persian Literatures”
Golnar Nikpour (Dartmouth)
“The Prison is the Struggle: Incarceration and Emancipation in Revolutionary Iran”

March 26, 2019 | 5:30pm – 7:30pm | Interfaith Center, 58 Winthrop Street
Ursula Heise (UCLA)
“Inaugural Phelps-Coit Lecture: “Narrative, Biodiversity, and the Future of the City”

March 14, 2019 | 5:30pm – 7:30pm | CHAT, Fung House
Siraj Ahmed (Lehmann College)
“The Archaeology of Babel: The Colonial Foundation of the Humanities”

March 11, 2019 | 5:30pm – 7:00pm | Crane Room, Paige Hall
Ammiel Alcalay (Queens College/CUNY)
“Finding my way through New and Old Work” – Poetry Reading

February 13, 2019 | 3:00pm – 4:30pm | CHAT, Fung House
Laurie Essig (Wesleyan)
“Love, Inc. Dating Apps and Big White Weddings”

February 7, 2019 | 5:30pm – 7:30pm | CHAT, Fung House
Ebony Coletu (Pennsylvania State):
“The Logistical Turn in African Diaspora Studies: Practicing Political Imagination in Chief Sam’s Back-to-Africa Campaign”

Fall 2019

Spring 2020

Fall 2020

Spring 2021

Fall 2021

Spring 2022

Friday, February 18 | 1:30pm | Zoom
Erin Kelly (Tufts)
“Remembering Winfred Rembert: Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South”

Friday, February 25 | 1:30pm | Zoom
Kerri Greenidge (Tufts)
“Black Is: Race, Reconstruction and its Aftermath 1865-1935”

Friday, March 4 | 1:30pm | Zoom
Claire Cooley (Postdoctoral Fellow)
“Sonic Labor: Female Cine-workers and the First Talkies in Cairo and Bombay”

Tuesday, March 8 | 4:00pm | Zoom
Amitav Ghosh (Award-winning writer)
Coit-Phelps Annual Lecture

Thursday, March 10 | 3:00pm | Zoom
Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil ( Manipal Academy of Higher Education, India)
“The Gulf in Kerala”

Friday, March 11 | 1:30pm | Zoom
Greg Carleton (Tufts)
“A War Neverending: How Putin Turns the Past Into the Present”

Friday, March 18 | 1:30pm | Zoom
Teri Incampo (Dissertation Fellow)
“Curating a Career: A Portrait of Ethel Waters, 1925 – 1939”

Friday, April 1 | 1:30pm | Zoom
Jessie Little Doe Baird (Co-founder and Director, Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project )
“Wôpanâak Language Reclamation; A Journey on a Round Path”

Tuesday, April 5 | 3:00pm | Zoom
Deepak Unnikrishnan (Writer)
“Temporary People: A Conversation with Deepak Unnikrishnan”

Friday, April 8 | 1:30pm | Zoom
Nathan Wolff (Faculty Fellow, Tufts)
“’It’s People in the Swamp’: Du Bois Against the Democracy of Things”

Friday, April 15 | 1:30pm | Zoom
Neela Cathelain (Dissertation Fellow)
“Shame in the Flesh: Bildung and Sentimentalism in the Novel”

Friday, April 15 | 4:00pm | Balch Arena Theatre
Randy Reinholz (Playwright) and Courtney Elkin Mohler (Butler University)
“Under a Big Sky: staged reading by Randy Reinholz”

Tuesday, April 19 | 12:30pm | Zoom
Jokha Alharthi (Writer) in conversation with Mona Kareem (Postdoctoral Fellow)
“The Arabic Novel in the Gulf: Between Documentation and Film”

Friday, April 22 | 1:30pm | Zoom
Mona Kareem (Postdoctoral Fellow)
“What to the Slave is the Arabic Novel?”

Monday, April 25 | 5:30pm | Hybrid
Leila H. Farsakh (Univ. of Massachusetts, Boston)
“Rethinking Statehood in Palestine”

Friday, April 29 | 1:30pm | Zoom
heidi andrea restrepo rhodes (Postdoctoral Fellow)
“In Light of the Future Past: Nation-Building and Settler Colonial Fantasies of a New World Geography”

Fall 2022

News from Prior Years

Video: