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May 17, 2024- CHAT congratulaties our dissertation fellows, Mia Levenson and Rebekah Waalkes, now graduates of Tufts University! Well done to both of you. It has been a pleasure having you as our fellows.
April 29, 2024-
On April 12, Tufts hosted the Greater Boston Digital Humanities Symposium in Tisch Library. The keynote speaker was K.J. Rawson, of Co-Director of NULab at Northeastern University. His keynote address, “Curating Digital Archives with Care: The Ethics of Representation, Description, and Access” is available online here.
Speakers came from many different universities to discuss topics related to the humanities and the new questions that new technology poses for the humanities, representation, and equity. Among the institutions represented were Stonehill College, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Northeastern University, the Boston Public Library, University of Connecticut, Smith College, Harvard University, Boston College, University of Connecticut, Signum University, University of Georgia, Wentworth Institute of Technology, Brandeis University, and Tufts University, among others.
The full program of speakers and topics is available here.
April 17, 2024- The trailer for "Ellen Garrison: Scenes from an Activist's Life" is now on YouTube. The Half the History Project is excited to announce the trailer for "Ellen Garrison: Scenes from an Activist's Life" is now on YouTube! Check it out
April 8, 2024- CHAT was delighted to partner with the Department of International Literary and Cultural Studies, the Charles Smith Endowment Fund, Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the Arabic Program to host the "Gothic Now!" Symposium in the Aidekman Arts Center. The keynote speaker was author Elizabeth Hand, New York Times bestelling author.
This event also featured panels hosted by various Tufts faculty, including Alessandro Carleton, Dingru Huang, Sarah Mass, Susan Napier, Tasha Oren, Alexandra Shraytekh, Malcolm Turvey, and Jennifer Yoo.
Elizabeth Hand's lecture, which included a reading from her newest book, A Haunting on the Hill, and a discussion with Professor Susan Napier about the themes and influences of her gothic novel. This lecture was CHAT's Coit-Phelps annual lecture.
March 7, 2024- CHAT was happy to host an Open House event on March 6th, featuring new publications, performances, exhibits, films, and artistic endeavors created by our Tufts faculty in the humanities. Submissions were voluntary, and came from a wide variety of faculty. The various works were displayed as slides on a screen in the CHAT conference room, as well as hard copies generously donated by various departments. Heather Curtis gave a toast thanking faculty for their contributions to the display and for their intellectual contributions to Tufts.
Some pictures of the event are available here. Copyright of the Center for the Humanities and Tufts University.
The slideshow is available here. Copyright of the Center for the Humanities and Tufts University.
March 4, 2024- On February 29, CHAT was honored to screen the documentary film "Gone to the Village," in conjunction with the Music Department at Tufts. This event was attended by chiefs and queens of the Asante Tribe, as well as various departmental guests. The event was preceded by a traditional drum performance and there was a special procession of the Ghanian guests and their families.
Heather Curtis and Kwasi Ampene introduced the film and special guests provided their own introductions with context for the film.
See photos from the event here.
Photos are copyright of Oluwanimofe Akinyanmi and the Tufts Music Department
February 16, 2024- The Center for the Humanities, in conjunction with the departments of History, RCD, and Religion, as well as with the CSRD and the Slavery, Colonialism and their Legacies Initiative, hosted a roundtable discussion on February 8th featuring special guest, Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh, from Stanford University. She was joined by panelists Nicholas Andersen, Chance Bonar, and Kyera Singleton. The conversation drew upon Dr. Wells-Oghoghomeh's recent book, The Souls of Womenfolk, which examines the religious traditions and practices of enslaved women in America.
The panelists discussed the various ways enslaved black women have been addressed in scholarly work. Each panelist brought their own expertise to the topic and Professor Wells drew upon her own research and expertise to expand upon the topics of enslavement, women's narratives, and the practice of historical writing.
The event took place February 8th in Alumnae Lounge at the Aidekman Arts Center. Photos from the event available here.
January 29, 2024- CHAT is delighted to announce our Faculty Fellows for 2024-2025. Congratulations to Modhumita Roy (English), Melinda Latour (Music), Malcolm Turvey (History of Art and Architecture) and Mary McNeil (RCD). We look forward to welcoming you.
January 17, 2024- Congratulations to CHAT Fellow, Dr. Diego Luis, on his new book out this month, The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History, available now from Harvard University Press!
Diego Javier Luis chronicles this first sustained wave of Asian mobility to the early Americas. Uncovering how and why Asian peoples crossed the Pacific, he sheds new light on the daily lives of those who disembarked at Acapulco. There, the term “chino” officially racialized diverse ethnolinguistic populations into a single caste, vulnerable to New Spanish policies of colonial control. Yet Asians resisted these strictures, often by forging new connections across ethnic groups. Social adaptation and cultural convergence, Luis argues, defined Asian experiences in the Spanish Americas from the colonial invasions of the sixteenth century to the first cries for Mexican independence in the nineteenth.
The First Asians in the Americas speaks to an important era in the construction of race, vividly unfolding what it meant to be “chino” in the early modern Spanish empire. In so doing, it demonstrates the significance of colonial Latin America to Asian diasporic history and reveals the fundamental role of transpacific connections to the development of colonial societies in the Americas.
This book is available from the Harvard University Press website or on Amazon.
Congratulations Diego!
November 13, 2023- On November 8th, the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, along with the History Department, the Center for the Humanities at Tufts, the Tufts Archival Research Center and the Office of the Provost hosted a symposium at Tufts Dental School in Boston, to introduce the Slavery, Colonialism and Their Legacies at Tufts (SCL) Project. Provost Bernard Arulanandam opened the event and introduced the team who are examining the history of Tufts' ties to slavery, and the legacies of slavery at Tufts and beyond. The SCL team is also exploring the histories of black and native peoples in Boston.
The event was attended by groups ranging from undergraduate students to professors from various disciplines, including speakers from the archives, Tufts Medical School, the History Department and more. The event was held in the Rachel's auditorium at Tufts School of Dental Medicine.
The SCL project is providing systematic, sustained support for interdisciplinary scholarship and public programming focused on Tufts’ historical ties to the African American and Afro-Native communities of West Medford and Somerville; American empire and colonial dispossession; anti-slavery, Universalism, and social movements; and the long presence of African descended and indigenous people and communities on Tufts’ campus.
Future events will be planned for the spring to share more fundings from this group. For more information and updates about this project, visit the new SCL website: https://slaveryandcolonialism.tufts.edu/
October 18, 2023- he Environmental Humanities Symposium drew a crowd of students and professors from many disciplines on September 21 and 22 in Curtis Hall.
The keynote speech by poet Tamiko Beyer surprised the public with a mindfulness exercise that set the tone for the whole talk. It prompted the audience to reconnect with the spaces and people around them in order to acknowledge that each person is a part of a whole, grounded in place and community. The poet read a selection of her works and contextualized them to emphasize the intersectional nature of the environmental crisis.
The morning session made the diversity of approaches and perspectives in the Environmental Humanities very tangible and clearly showed concrete outcomes of eco-art, literature, anthropology, and more. From making jewels with repurposed materials to shifting everyday actions to reconsidering Cold War dynamics as a precedent for some of the phenomena we live through today, the session looked at the micro and the macro. Case studies considered a range of geographies (the Americas, Asia, Africa), pondering institutional responses as well as grassroots activism, Indigenous rights and art/science collaborations, mining, extraction, and consumerism, among other topics.
October 12, 2023- CHAT, TDPS, RCD and the English Department hosted Canadian Poet Laureate and Native Canadian, Louise Halfe, to campus. Also known as Skydancer, Louise Halfe is a social worker and a member of the Cree people. She was born in Two Hills, Alberta, and was raised on the Saddle Lake Reserve. When she was seven years old, Louise was forced to attend Blue Quills Residential School in St. Paul, Alberta; she remained there for nine years. At the age of sixteen, she left home and broke ties with her family. This gave her the opportunity to complete her studies at St. Paul's Regional High School. While Halfe attended high school, she developed an interest in writing. She started a journal to write about her memories and life experiences. At her talk with the Tufts community, she shared some of the poetry she written about her experiences as well as her perspective on our relationship with nature.
September 26, 2023- Audrey Petty visited Tufts for a successful talk in the Crane Room in Paige Hall to an audience of about 50 students and faculty. Her talk focused on her writing and advocacy work around discrimination and racism in public housing and the prison system. Specifically, Ms. Petty spoke about her book High Rise Stories: Voices from Chicago Public Housing (Voice of Witness/Haymarket Press), in which she gave voice to impoverished BIPOC residents of public housing in Chicago. She raised important questions about the history and current practices of housing the poor in U.S. cities and how the prison-industrial complex further harms residents. After she spoke, students and faculty in the room, along with others participating via Zoom, asked questions that resulted in a rich dialogue that was stimulating to those interested in social justice and equity issues in cities. After the presentation, Ms. Petty visited an undergraduate course, Introduction to Urban Studies, and met with graduate students who had follow-up questions for her.
