Distinguished Lecture Series
Distinguished Lecture Series
The Denbo Center’s Distinguished Lecture Series brings acclaimed humanities scholars and renowned artists to the Knoxville campus and connects UT faculty and graduate students to the best researchers in their fields. Speakers are nominated and hosted by faculty from our affiliated arts and humanities departments. Because only speakers with exceptional records of publication and research activity are eligible to receive a nomination as a visiting scholar, the program brings to campus some of the most cutting-edge and prolific intellectuals in the arts and humanities today.
Lectures are free and open to the public. For information about visiting our Cherokee Mills location, please visit the Find Us page on our website. Public parking for our on-campus events is available in the Volunteer Hall parking garage or via on-street parking around campus. Everyone is welcome!
Follow our Bluesky, X, Facebook, and Instagram accounts for updates on our events. Details about our Distinguished Lectures are also available on the UT Calendar.
2025–2026 Distinguished Lecture Series
September 29, 2025 – Riley Snorton
Plant Pedagogy and Peripheral Movements
Riley Snorton
Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender
Columbia University
Time & Location:
3:30–5:00 p.m.
Monday, September 29, 2025
Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts
Talk Title: Plant Pedagogy and Peripheral Movements
About the Talk:
In this talk, C. Riley Snorton explores trans ecological practices of becoming in territories defined as hostile environments for human life. In close engagement with the films, Uyra: The Rising Forest (Dir. Curi, 2022), an experimental documentary set in the Amazon forest and the northern Brazilian municipality of Manaus, and Neptune Frost (Dirs. Uzeyman and Williams, 2022), an Afrofuturist musical set in a coltan mining site and an e-waste dump in the hilltops of Burundi, Snorton traces a mycorrhizal network among “pioneer species” plant life and people across the racial capitalocene. Moving through questions of form and aesthetics, social and ecological constructions of difference, and matters of praxis in both films, this talk dwells with the pedagogical life of plants and the motility of peripheries.
About the Speaker:
C. Riley Snorton is a professor of English and Comparative Literature and jointly appointed with the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender at Columbia University. He is the author of Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (2017) and Nobody is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (2014). Snorton is also the co-editor of Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value (2020) and The Flesh of the Matter: A Critical Forum on Hortense Spillers (2024). A Black Queer History of the United States, which Snorton co-authored with Darius Bost, is scheduled for release in January 2026.
Prof. Snorton was invited to campus by Prof. Danielle Procope Bell (Africana Studies).
October 20, 2025 – Andrew Laird
Rhetoric and Symbolic Power in the Early Atlantic World
Andrew Laird
John Rowe Workman Distinguished Professor of Classics and Humanities
Brown University
Time & Location:
3:30–5:00 p.m.
Monday, October 20, 2025
Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts
Talk Title: Rhetoric and Symbolic Power in the Early Atlantic World
About the Talk:
Rhetoric, the art of effective speaking and writing, had a vital practical role in debates about the humanity of the peoples of the New World. But did rhetoric have a more fundamental connection with the idea of humanity? What part did it play in the wake of encounters with populations of whom Europeans had had no previous knowledge?
In this talk, Dr. Andrew Laird will show how rhetoric acquired a new symbolic value in the Americas, as an element in some foundational accounts and representations of newly encountered societies – including texts by native authors – from Brazil, Peru, and Mexico. Missionaries maintained that peoples of the Indies possessed their own innate forms of eloquence, while some indigenous scholars made use of European classical rhetoric to compose texts in Amerindian languages.
About the Speaker:
Andrew Laird is John Rowe Workman Distinguished Professor of Classics and Humanities at Brown University, Rhode Island, having previously held positions at Oxford University and Warwick University in the UK. His publications include Powers of Expression, Expressions of Power (1999), Ancient Literary Criticism (2006), The Epic of America (2006), Italy and the Classical Tradition: Language, Thought and Poetry 1300-1600 (2009), Antiquities and Classical Traditions in Latin America (2018), and Aztec Latin: Renaissance Learning and Nahuatl Traditions in Early Colonial Mexico (2024), a historical study of sixteenth-century New Spain focusing on the accomplishments of indigenous scholars in the first decades after the Spanish conquest.
Prof. Laird was invited to campus by Prof. Anne-Helene Miller (World Languages & Culture; Marco) and Prof. Gina Di Salvo (Theatre; Marco). His visit is co-sponsored by the Marco Institute for Medieval & Renaissance Studies.
October 27, 2025 – Lauren Craig Tilton
Viewing Images Through AI
Lauren Craig Tilton
E. Claiborne Robins Professor of Liberal Arts and Digital Humanities
The University of Richmond
Time & Location:
3:30–5:00 p.m.
Monday, October 27, 2025
Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts
Talk Title: Viewing Images Through AI
About the Talk:
How do computers see images? How can we analyze images through AI? And how can the humanities help us use, interpret, and create AI?
This talk by Dr. Lauren Craig Tilton explores these three questions through the study of 20th century media such as US photography and television. We’ll explore how machine vision isn’t neutral—it reflects the human decisions and assumptions we’ve built into these systems. The ways computers “see” are our choices, and can be interpreted in expected and unexpected ways. We will then turn to how humanistic thinking and questions can impact how we can think creatively about these systems—questioning their purposes, reimagining their applications, and using humanities perspectives to harness AI’s possibilities.
About the Speaker:
Lauren Tilton is the E. Claiborne Robins Professor of Liberal Arts and Digital Humanities at the University of Richmond, where she directs the Center for Liberal Arts and AI (CLAAI). Her recent books include Distant Viewing (MIT Press) and Computational Humanities (Minnesota). Her digital projects such as Photogrammar.org and DigitalDocumerica.org have received funding from ACLS, Mellon, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is President of the Association for Computers and the Humanities and the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations.
Prof. Tilton was invited to campus by Prof. Hilary Havens (English; Digital Humanities).
February 02, 2026 – Edward Ayers
Digital History and Democratic History
Edward Ayers
Tucker-Boatwright Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus
The University of Richmond
Time & Location:
3:30–5:00 p.m.
Monday, February 2, 2026
Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts
Talk Title: Digital History and Democratic History
About the Talk:
Thirty years ago, digital history shared in the hopeful vision of the early internet. Today, that vision is clouded as the possibilities of history broaden but curricula narrow, as artificial intelligence offers new tools that hold out new insights but also threaten to engulf scholarship and teaching. In this talk, Prof. Edward Ayers will grapple with these challenges and suggest that digital history still holds promise.
About the Speaker:
Edward Ayers (BA, 1974) received the National Humanities Medal at the White House for making our nation’s history available in new ways. He has won major prizes for his books, been named National Professor of the Year, and served as the president of the Organization of American Historians. Ayers currently heads two digital projects at the University of Richmond, where he is president emeritus: New American History and Bunk. He graduated from UT summa cum laude and in 2021 received the Distinguished Alumni Award from UT’s College of Arts and Sciences.
Prof. Ayers was invited to campus by Prof. Amy Elias (English; Executive Director, Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts).
February 16, 2026 – Benjamin Brose
From History to Myth and Back Again: Xuanzang and the Journey to the West
Benjamin Brose
Professor of Buddhist and Chinese Studies
The University of Michigan
Time & Location:
3:30–5:00 p.m.
Monday, February 16, 2026
Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts
Talk Title: From History to Myth and Back Again: Xuanzang and the Journey to the West
About the Talk:
In the seventh century, the Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang embarked on a seventeen-year pilgrimage from China through Central Asia to India and back again. That epic journey, which altered the course of East Asian Buddhism, later became the basis for one of China’s most famous novels: The Journey to the West. The characters and narratives portrayed in the novel went on to play pivotal roles in religious rituals and rebellions of modern China. This talk considers the transformation of Xuanzang’s biography from historical account to mythic fantasy and the subsequent reification of those same mythic narratives into historical realities.
About the Speaker:
Benjamin Brose is Professor of Buddhist and Chinese Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan.
Prof. Brose was invited to campus by Prof. Megan Bryson (Religious Studies).
March 02, 2026 – Susan Brown
Cyborg Identities in the Cultural Data Ecosystem
Susan Brown
Canada Research Chair in Collaborative Digital Scholarship
Professor of English
The University of Guelph
Time & Location:
3:30–5:00 p.m.
Monday, March 02, 2026
Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts
Talk Title: Cyborg Identities in the Cultural Data Ecosystem
About the Talk:
Human culture increasingly takes machine-readable forms. Identifying and categorizing people and cultural works is endemic to digital representation and yet both individual identities and cultural understandings of those identities change over time and with different contexts. Cyborg identities produced by humans and machines arise from connecting data across multiple online sites. Such identities can interlink meaningfully the large cultural heritage collections of galleries, libraries, archives and museums with scholarship needed to make sense of those materials. They can enable trustworthy alternatives to the capitalist-driven systems that dominate our information landscape. Such identities can also be weaponized. In this talk, Susan Brown highlights how we categorize and represent people and cultural materials online has profound implications in an increasingly politicized knowledge environment that requires unambiguous identification.
About the Speaker:
Susan Brown is Canada Research Chair in Collaborative Digital Scholarship and Professor of English at the University of Guelph. Her research focuses on semantic technologies, intersectional feminism, and literary history. She is a founder of the ongoing Orlando Project on women’s writing in the British Isles, two online infrastructures for creating and linking digital scholarship, and The Humanities Interdisciplinary Collaboration (THINC) Lab. She was awarded the Roberto Busa Prize for digital humanities in 2024.
Prof. Brown was invited to campus by Prof. Mariam Thalos (Philosophy).
April 06, 2026 – Justene Hill Edwards
The Freedman’s Bank and the (Un)Making of Reconstruction
Justene Hill Edwards
Associate Professor of History
The University of Virginia
Time & Location:
3:30–5:00 p.m.
Monday, April 06, 2026
Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts
Talk Title: The Freedman’s Bank and the (Un)Making of Reconstruction
About the Talk:
On July 2, 1874, a bank closed its doors. The 61,144 depositors, many of whom poured their life’s savings into this financial institution, collectively lost almost $3 million. In the nineteenth century, a single bank failure did not typically garner national attention. However, this bank was no ordinary financial institution. It served a particularly vulnerable population of people: African Americans recently freed from slavery. The bank that closed was the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company, also known as the Freedman’s Bank. It was a private financial institution founded by white bankers and philanthropists at the end of the Civil War to introduce formerly enslaved people to the basic tenets of American banking. When it failed in 1874, its Black depositors lost access to the hard-earned savings that would have helped them climb out of slavery. They also lost faith in the promise of banking to build wealth and economic security.
About the Speaker:
Justene Hill Edwards is an associate professor of history at the University of Virginia. She is a specialist in African American history and her research examines Black economic life in America. She is the author of Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank and Unfree Markets: The Slaves’ Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina. She has won numerous fellowships and awards, most recently the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship and the Mellon New Directions Fellowship. She received her BA from Swarthmore College, MA from Florida International University, and PhD from Princeton University.
Prof. Edwards was invited to campus by Prof. Brandon Winford (History).
April 13, 2026 – Aaron Landsman
Perfect City Primer: Theater as Civic Action
Aaron Landsman
Multidisciplinary Artist
Time & Location:
3:30–5:00 p.m.
Monday, April 13, 2026
Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts
Talk Title: Perfect City Primer: Theater as Civic Action
About the Talk:
How is a government meeting a performance of power? What can we learn and achieve by performing it differently? How do the maps we carry in our body lead us toward new approaches to policy? What happens if we make maps together and then share our different experiences of navigating the same space?
Aaron Landsman shares examples from a body of work called Perfect City, that includes the participatory theatrical work City Council Meeting, the curriculum and toolkit for civic action that arises from that work, and the book The City We Make Together, co-authored with Mallory Catlett, and published by the University of Iowa Press.
About the Speaker:
Aaron Landsman is a multidisciplinary artist. His new and recent work includes Night Keeper, an immersive performance and vinyl LP about insomnia as urban communion, All the Time in the World, a cooperative card game that turns social media into an ensemble performance, and the ongoing body of work Perfect City, at the intersection of art, civic engagement, and urban planning. Landsman is a Lecturer at Princeton’s Lewis Center for the Arts.
Prof. Landsman was invited to campus by Prof. Amy Elias (English; Executive Director, Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts).
April 20, 2026 – Avinoam Patt
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Calendar of Holocaust Memory
Avinoam Patt
Maurice Greenberg Professor of Holocaust Studies
Director of the Center for the Study of Antisemitism
New York University
Time & Location:
3:30–5:00 p.m.
Monday, April 20, 2026
Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts
Talk Title: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Calendar of Holocaust Memory
About the Talk:
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (April 19, 1943–May 16, 1943), the largest mass revolt in a major city in Nazi-occupied Europe, is the defining symbol of Jewish resistance to Nazi oppression during World War II. In the days and weeks after the uprising broke out, the news of the revolt captivated the Jewish world, and was seized upon by Jews from diverse ideological backgrounds and movements in locations around the world as the news they had been waiting and wanting to hear for almost four years. Even at the time of the Uprising, the ghetto fighters who organized the revolt were aware of the historic significance of their actions. Described by historian Israel Gutman, who himself was a participant in the revolt, as “literally a revolution in Jewish history (whose) importance was understood all too well by those who fought,” the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising quickly became the focal point of commemorative activities both during and immediately after the war, appropriated by Holocaust survivors in Europe as the basis for commemoration activities in the DP camps, by leaders in the Yishuv as confirmation of the Zionist worldview, and in the American context, as the “prism through which American Jews performed the memory of the six million” in commemorative activities in the first two decades after World War II. By 1953, Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, would designate the 27th of Nisan as the date for Yom HaShoah ve-haGevruah (The Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust and Heroism) to correspond with the timing of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
In this talk, Avinoam Patt will reflect on how and why April 19 became the focal point of Jewish memory of the Holocaust, and how the calendar of Holocaust memory has evolved since then.
About the Speaker:
Avinoam Patt is the Maurice Greenberg Professor of Holocaust Studies at New York University where he also serves as Director of the Center for the Study of Antisemitism. He is the author of multiple books on Jewish responses to the Holocaust, including Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth and Zionism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust (2009) and The Jewish Heroes of Warsaw: The Afterlife of the Revolt (2021). He is also co-editor of Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust (2020) and Understanding and Teaching the Holocaust (2020). His newest books include Israel and the Holocaust (2024) and the document collection, The Surviving Remnant: Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (2024).
Prof. Patt was invited to campus by Prof. Daniel Magilow (World Languages and Culture [German]; Jewish Studies).
Past Lecture Details
September 16, 2024 – Althea Murphy-Price, Karen Revis, and Tanekeya Word
Panel Discussion: Black Women of Print
Althea Murphy-Price, Karen Revis, and Tanekeya Word
In partnership with the UT School of Art and UT Downtown Gallery
Time & Location:
5:30–7:00 p.m.
Monday, September 16, 2024
UT School of Art, AA109
Talk Title: Panel Discussion: Black Women of Print
About the Talk:
UT’s Downtown Gallery will be hosting an exhibition of new triptychs by Black Women of Print featuring work by Deborah Grayson, Karen J. Revis, Stephanie Santana, LaToya Hobbs, Althea Murphy-Price, and Tanekeya Word. Join us for a special panel discussion with Black Women of Print members Althea Murphy-Price, Karen J. Revis, and Tanekeya Word as they discuss the personal, familial, and spiritual creative legacies behind their work.
This panel discussion is held in conjunction with the UT Downtown Galleries’ exhibition, Lore: What We Were Told | What We Saw | What We Tell Ourselves, on display from August 30 – October 17, 2024. Details here. The exhibition is supported by a Haines-Morris Grant from UT’s College of Arts & Sciences.
About Black Women of Print:
Black Women of Print was founded in October 2018 by Tanekeya Word, a Black woman, visual artist, art educator, scholar and fine art printmaker who resides in Milwaukee, WI. Word was interested in creating an equitable, safe place for Black women printmakers who were underrepresented in the discipline of printmaking, a space that is eulogized as democratic.
Black Women of Print offers a counternarrative that decolonizes our highest proficiency level title from the traditional Eurocentric usage of the term master, rooted in trade/union print labor, to the term Established. Established Black women printmakers have brought into being an expansive body of work—personal or through artistic collaboration. We understand that our praxis is not superior to our peers. We are representations of one way to expand knowledge in the discipline of printmaking.
Learn more about Black Women of Print here.
September 30, 2024 – Cecelia Condit
Cecelia Condit: Video Works from 1981 to the Present
Cecelia Condit
Film Artist
Professor Emerita in the Department of Film, Video, Animation & New Genres at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Time & Location:
5:30–7:00 p.m.
Monday, September 30, 2024
UT School of Art, AA109
Talk Title: Cecelia Condit: Video Works from 1981 to the Present
About the Talk:
Ground-breaking filmmaker, Cecelia Condit, will give an artist talk punctuated by screenings of her video works from 1981-present. Condit’s videos have created heroines whose lives swing between beauty and the grotesque, innocence and cruelty, youth and fragility. Her work puts a subversive spin on the traditional mythology of women in film and the psychology of sexuality and violence. Exploring the dark side of female subjectivity, her “feminist fairy tales” focus on friendships, age, and the natural world. Condit will focus on ways her creative practice has shaped her life and conversely how her biography has shaped these intimate works—making a cohesive thread out of a fractured, disjointed world.
This talk is hosted in partnership with the UT School of Art and UT Ewing Gallery of Art + Architecture. The Ewing Gallery will be exhibiting a rotating selection of Condit’s short films as well as a monumental installation of her latest film, “There are No Words” — a triptych that represents Condit’s reaction to the environmental crisis and our uncertain futures.
About the Speaker:
Cecelia Condit is a filmmaker and storyteller who has created heroines whose lives swing between beauty and the grotesque, innocence and cruelty, youth and age. Her work puts a subversive spin on the mythology of women in film and the psychology of sexuality and violence. She has shown internationally in festivals, museums and alternative spaces, and has received numerous awards and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, American Film Institute, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Mary L. Nohl Foundation. She’s a professor emerita in the Department of Film, Video, Animation & New Genres at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Condit was invited to campus by Janelle VanderKelen (School of Art/Cinema Studies).
October 14, 2024 – Katherine L. Jansen
The Veil of Veronica in Premodern Rome
Katherine L. Jansen
Ordinary Professor of History
The Catholic University of America
Time & Location:
3:30–5:00 p.m.
Monday, October 14, 2024
Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts
Talk Title: The Veil of Veronica in Premodern Rome
About the Talk:
This talk examines the history of the most important relic in the Christian world: the holy sudarium. Known colloquially as “the Veronica,” the relic is the cloth that is believed to have been imbued with the likeness of Christ’s face when Saint Veronica wiped the sweat from his brow as he made his way, carrying the cross, to the crucifixion. Surveying first how the relic arrived in Rome at the basilica of St. Peter, Katherine L. Jansen will demonstrate that attention to one holy object over a long period can reveal patterns of religious practice, papal ceremony and politics, and change over time in the eternal city.
About the Speaker:
Katherine L. Jansen is a historian of the later Middle Ages. She is the author of the award-winning book, The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) and Peace and Penance in late Medieval Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). She has also published three co-edited volumes: Medieval Italy: Texts in Translation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Charisma and Religious Authority: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Preaching, 1200–1500 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010); and Center and Periphery: Essays on Power in the Middle Ages in Honor of William Chester Jordan (Leiden: Brill, 2013). Professor Jansen has held fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, Villa I Tatti (The Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies in Florence), the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, among others. She has taught at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC since 1995 and has been Visiting Professor at the Johns Hopkins University and Princeton University. She was elected Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America in 2020. She is currently editor of Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies. Her current book project is entitled, The Relics of Rome to which this lecture, “The Veil of Veronica in Premodern Rome,” contributes.
Katherine Jansen was invited to campus by Gina Di Salvo (Theatre; Marco Institute). Her visit is co-sponsored by the Marco Institute for Medieval & Renaissance Studies.
October 28, 2024 – Elisa Beshero-Bondar
Visualizing the Frankenstein Variorum
Part of our Dialogues mini-series in Digital Humanities
Elisa Beshero-Bondar
Professor of Digital Humanities at Penn State Behrend
Time & Location:
3:30–5:00 p.m.
Monday, October 28, 2023
Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts
Talk Title: Visualizing the Frankenstein Variorum
About the Talk:
The Frankenstein Variorum team has completed work on a digital scholarly edition that compares five distinct versions of the novel Frankenstein. Working with the Frankenstein Variorum‘s edition files, we can study precisely where and how much the novel changed over five distinct instantiations from 1816 to 1831. Our encoded data invites us to visualize the edition’s moments of alignment, divergence, and gaps where material was missing or removed. This presentation shares a “big picture” view of Frankenstein’s changes over time using two variations of eXtensible Markup Language (XML): images drawn in Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) from our data encoded in TEI, the language of the Text Encoding Initiative.
About the Speaker:
An active member of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), Elisa Beshero-Bondar serves as an elected member and now chair of the TEI Technical Council, an eleven-member international committee that supervises amendments to the TEI Guidelines. She has been teaching humanities in web-savvy ways since the 1990s, and she began teaching markup languages and XML stack processing almost as soon as she began learning them in the 2010s. Before moving to direct the DIGIT program at Penn State Erie, she directed Pitt-Greensburg’s Center for the Digital Text. She has led TEI data modeling of the Frankenstein Variorum project, the Digital Mitford Project and other digital research projects involving TEI XML to build editions and prepare structured analyses of variants and collocations in texts. Find her on GitHub at https://github.com/ebeshero and on her development site named for her pet firebelly newts at https://newtfire.org.
Elisa Beshero-Bondar was invited to campus by Hilary Havens (English).
February 03, 2025 – Dan Sinykin
How We Got Our Books: The Conglomerate Era in Publishing
Dan Sinykin
Associate Professor of English, Emory University
Time & Location:
3:30–5:00 p.m.
Monday, February 3, 2025
Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts
Talk Title: How We Got Our Books: The Conglomerate Era in Publishing
About the Talk:
Why do we have this world of books and not any other? Why are these the books topping Amazon’s lists or sitting prominently on the shelves at Barnes & Noble and our local independent bookstores? In this talk, Dan Sinykin will discuss how the conglomeration of the publishing industry led to the dominance of romantasy, how publishers and prizes shape the kinds of stories that nonwhite writers get to tell, and how independent and nonprofit publishing offers alternatives.
Dan Sinykin was invited to campus by Amy Elias (Denbo Center, English).
March 03, 2025 – Shatema Threadcraft
Black Femicide and Morrisonian Democracy
Shatema Threadcraft
Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies, Philosophy, and Political Science at Vanderbilt University
Time & Location:
3:30–5:00 p.m.
Monday, March 03, 2025
Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts
Talk Title: Black Femicide and Morrisonian Democracy
About the Talk:
Black women are 10% of the U.S. female population yet represent 59% of women murdered. Most of those deaths were instances of intimate partner violence, and thus, a form of Black femicide. More pregnant women are murdered than those who die of the top three pregnancy-related complications, yet Black women account for 44.6 percent of all pregnancy-related fatal intimate partner violence in the United States. Additionally, maternal and abortion related deaths are considered a form of “passive” femicide. Today 57% Black women of reproductive age in the United States live under abortion bans and/or severe abortion restrictions and Black women are three times more likely to die of pregnancy related complications than white women.
Despite the above, more people are mobilized in response to the deaths of Black men than those of Black women. But those who call on Black women to share their stories of private violence must reflect, not only on the complications of sharing publicly these stories of violent intimacy but on how Black political leaders like W. E. B. Du Bois have written spectacular violence, and specifically lynching, into the story of who Blacks are and why they are here. This talk considers the people-making stories of Du Bois alongside Toni Morrison’s stories, the deaths she centers in her work, the ephemeral collectives she sought to build through these stories of intimate violence and death and how she would have the stories shared to argue for an effective method of storytelling to increase mobilization in response to Black women’s deaths.
Shatema Threadcraft was invited to campus by Danielle Procope Bell (Africana Studies).
March 10, 2025 – Olivia C. Harrison
Going Native: Jean Raspail and the Fictions of Indigeneity
Olivia C. Harrison
Professor of French and Comparative Literature
University of Southern California Dornsife
Time & Location:
3:30–5:00 p.m.
Monday, March 10, 2025
Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts
Talk Title: Going Native: Jean Raspail and the Fictions of Indigeneity
About the Talk:
In 1973, Jean Raspail published a novel that was hailed as prophetic by the far right in France: The Camp of the Saints, a dystopian and openly racist account of the invasion of France by a flotilla of migrants from India. Immediately translated into English, Raspail’s novel has continued to circulate globally as a clarion call for “native” resistance to the counter-colonization of the Global North by migrants from the Global South. Central to the dystopian fantasy that plays out in the novel is the substitution of the roles of colonizer and colonized, settler and native. According to Raspail and his followers, yesterday’s indigènes (natives) are now colonizing France. Fifty years after the end of French empire, the settlers of old have “gone native” in the postcolonial metropole, refashioning indigeneity into an exclusivist claim of native belonging. This talk investigates the settler colonial genealogies of nativism by attending to an often-overlooked aspect of Raspail’s literary career: his longstanding fascination with indigenous Americans, from Patagonia to Turtle Island. Reading Raspail’s Indianist writings against the grain of The Camp of the Saints, Harrison will speculate on the enduring legacies of fictions of indigeneity in nativist discourses in France and beyond.
About the Speaker:
Olivia C. Harrison is professor of French and comparative literature at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on postcolonial North African, Middle Eastern, and French literature and film, with a particular emphasis on transcolonial affiliations between writers and intellectuals from the Global South. Her publications include Natives against Nativism: Antiracism and Indigenous Critique in Postcolonial France (University of Minnesota Press, 2023), Transcolonial Maghreb: Imagining Palestine in the Era of Decolonization (Stanford University Press, 2016), and essays on Maghrebi literature, Beur and banlieue cultural production, and postcolonial theory. With Teresa Villa-Ignacio, she is the editor of Souffles-Anfas: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics (Stanford University Press, 2016) and translator of Hocine Tandjaoui’s proem, Clamor/Clameur (Litmus Press, 2021). She is currently working on a book project titled The White Minority, which tracks the settler colonial genealogies of nativism and anti-immigrant discourse in France.
Olivia Harrison was invited to campus by Matt Brauer (WLC-French).
March 27, 2025 – Fred Moten & Brandon Lopez
“On the run from ownership“: Mackey, Music, Centrifugitivity
In partnership with Big Ears Festival
Fred Moten, Professor of Performance Studies and Comparative Literature, NYU Tisch
Brandon Lopez, Bassist and Composer
This event is held in partnership with Big Ears Festival
Time & Location:
6:00 p.m.
Thursday, March 27, 2025
Knoxville Museum of Art
1050 Worlds Fair Park Dr, Knoxville, TN 37916
Talk Title: On the Run from Ownership: Mackey, Music, Centrifugitivity
About the Talk:
Poet Fred Moten and bassist Brandon Lopez will explore Nathaniel Mackey‘s poetry and music, and will talk about how listening, with big ears, is always a variation on that kind of spooky, distant practicing.
April 07, 2025 – Menno Schilthuizen
Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution
Menno Schilthuizen
Professor of evolution and biodiversity at Leiden University; senior researcher at the National Natural History Museum ‘Naturalis’ in Leiden
Time & Location:
3:30–5:00 p.m.
Monday, April 07, 2025
Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts
Talk Title: Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution
About the Talk:
We are marching towards a future in which three-quarters of humans live in cities, and a large portion of the planet’s landmass is urbanized. With much of the rest covered by human-shaped farms, pasture, and plantations, where can nature still go? One possibility: to the cities. And with more and more wildlife carving out new niches among humans, evolution takes a surprising turn. Urban animals evolve to become more tolerant, curious and resourceful, city pigeons develop “detox”-plumage, and weeds growing from cracks in the pavement adjust their seeds. Some city animals are even on their way of becoming an entirely new species. Thanks to evolutionary adaptation taking place at unprecedented speeds, plants and animals are coming up with new ways of living in the seemingly hostile environments of asphalt and steel that we humans have created. We may be on the verge of a new chapter in the history of life— a chapter in which much old biodiversity is, sadly, disappearing, but also one in which a new and exciting set of life forms is being born.
About the Speaker:
Menno Schilthuizen (1965) is a professor of evolution and biodiversity at Leiden University and a senior researcher at the National Natural History Museum ‘Naturalis’ in Leiden, the Netherlands. He studies the processes by which urbanization promotes rapid evolution in wild organisms. He also runs the Taxon Foundation, a nonprofit for urban biodiversity studies. In his recent books, Darwin Comes to Town (Picador, 2018) and The Urban Naturalist (MIT Press, 2025), he offers a new and optimistic view of cities as places where exciting ecosystems are arising, with community science as a way for city dwellers to be explorers of their own urban neighborhoods.
We would like to thank the Office of Research & Engagement for their generous support.