Julian C. Chambliss
Professor of English and Val Berryman Curator of History
Michigan State University

Monday, September 25, 2023
3:30 P.M. (ET)
Lindsay Young Auditorium (rm. 101), John C. Hodges Library
or via Zoom livestream – register for the link here.

Talk Title: “Afrofuturism and Digital Humanities: Some Considerations on Digital Public Record and the Black Experience”

The case for Black Digital Humanities advocates for the transformative potential offered by the intersections of black studies and digital humanities. In this talk, I will discuss the implication of Afrofuturism 2.0 ideology offered by Afrofuturist thinkers such as Drs. Lonny Brooks and Reynaldo Anderson and how we might use their Afrofuturist framing to create digital humanities methodologies that address post-Reconstruction activism by African Americans. 

About the Speaker:

Julian C. Chambliss is a professor of English and the Val Berryman Curator of History at the MSU Museum at Michigan State University. In addition, he is the faculty lead for the Department of English Graphic Possibilities Research Workshop and a core participant in the MSU College of Arts & Letters’ Consortium for Critical Diversity in a Digital Age Research (CEDAR). His research focuses on race, culture, and power in real and imagined spaces. His recent writing has appeared in Scholarly Editing, Genealogy, KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies, and The Conversation US.

Julian Chambliss was invited to campus by Hilary Havens and Joshua Ortiz Baco.

Xiaofei Kang
Associate Professor in the Department of Religion
George Washington University

Monday, October 23, 2023
3:30 P.M. (ET)
Tiered Seminar Room (rm. 169), UT Student Union
or via Zoom livestream – register for the link here.

Talk Title: “Mobilizing Ghosts for the Revolution”

Religion has been commonly upheld as the archenemy of Communist revolutions around the world. This talk goes beyond the familiar stories of suppression and resistance to examines how Chinese Communist propaganda deployed traditional tropes of demonology, ritual exorcism, and other religious resources to construct a new gendered narrative of salvation for the Maoist revolution. 

About the Speaker:

Xiaofei Kang is a professor of religion at The George Washington University. She has a Ph.D. in Chinese history from Columbia University (2000) and has published books and articles on gender, ethnicity, and Chinese religions. Her current work focuses on the intertwined discourses of religion, gender and revolutionary propaganda in the Chinese Communist revolution. Her new book is entitled Enchanted Revolution: Ghosts, Shamans, and Gender Politics in Chinese Communist Propaganda, 1942-1953.

Xiaofei Kang was invited to campus by Megan Bryson.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Professor of English and Director of Digital Humanities
Michigan State University

Monday, November 6, 2023
3:30 PM (ET)
Lindsay Young Auditorium (rm. 101), John C. Hodges Library
or via Zoom livestream – register for the link here.

Talk Title: “Open Infrastructure and the Future of Knowledge Production”

New platforms for online scholarly communication have been designed to return control of the processes of knowledge dissemination to scholars and their institutions, breaking the corporate stranglehold on the publishing. Those platforms, however, frequently depend on infrastructures that are themselves corporate-owned and controlled. As a result, the long-term sustainability of scholarly work relies at the deepest levels on the continued interest and goodwill of infrastructure providers (such as Amazon Web Services) whose goals and values are radically different from our own. This talk will explore what our dependence on corporate communications infrastructure may mean for the future of scholarly communication, as well as ways that academic institutions might become better able to take control of their own infrastructure needs. 

About the Speaker:

Kathleen Fitzpatrick is Director of Digital Humanities and Professor of English at Michigan State University, where she also directs MESH, a research and development unit focused on the future of scholarly communication. She is project director of Humanities Commons, an open-access, open-source network serving nearly 40,000 scholars and practitioners across the humanities and around the world, and she is author of several books, including Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019) and Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy (NYU Press, 2011). She is president of the board of directors of the Educopia Institute, and she is past president of the Association for Computers and the Humanities. 

Kathleen Fitzpatrick was invited to campus by Hilary Havens and Joshua Ortiz Baco.

Leonora Neville
John W. and Jeanne M. Rowe Chair of Byzantine History and Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Monday, February 5, 2024
3:30 PM (ET)
Location TBA

Talk Title: “Political Religion in the Long Roman Empire”

In the ancient Roman Empire political and religious action were inseparably intertwined and Roman success was considered a consequence of their expertise in religion. Centuries after the Christianization of the Empire, religion remained an aspect of nearly all government action. Considering later Roman political religion in light of the categories used to study ancient religion helps us understand medieval eastern Christianity in strikingly new ways. 

Leonora Neville was invited to campus by Felege Yirga.

Mari Hatavara
Chair Professor of Finnish Literature and director of Narrare: Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies 
Tampere University, Finland

Monday, February 19, 2024
3:30 PM (ET)
Location TBA

Title: “Computational Recognition of Narratives: Analyzing Large Datasets with Natural Language Processing”

About the Talk:

Narrative is a key resource for mediating experience and making sense of time and change. Therefore, the study of narratives across time and narrative environments is crucial for any discipline working with human action. As digitalization of large data sets keeps accumulating the materials available for study, computational recognition of the key narrative passages enables targeting the interpretative effort of humanities and social sciences experts without having to do all labor-intensive reading manually. This paper discusses an approach to extract narratives from two datasets, Finnish parliamentary records (1980–2021) and oral history interviews with former Finnish MPs (1988–2018). The study compares the results of a rule-based, computational approach with annotated samples of the materials. It is part of the interdisciplinary project Political Temporalities combines theoretical approaches from transdisciplinary narrative studies, the study of political rhetoric and conceptual history, and computational modeling based on linguistic features.

About the Speaker:

Mari Hatavara is Chair Professor of Finnish Literature and director of Narrare. Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies at Tampere University, Finland. She has published extensively on interdisciplinary narrative theory and analysis, fictionality studies, narrative minds and voices, intermediality and the poetics of historical fiction and metafiction. She specializes in the analysis of narratives across fictional and non-fictional narrative environments, also with the help of computational approaches to natural language processing. Hatavara is coeditor of The Travelling Concepts of Narrative (2013), Narrative Theory, Literature, and New Media (2015), and special issues on Narrating Selves in Everyday Contexts (Style 2017), Narrating Selves from the Bible to Social Media (Partial Answers 2019) and Real Fictions. Fictionality, Factuality and Narrative Strategies in Contemporary Storytelling(Narrative Inquiry 2019). Currently, she is the consortium PI for the project Political Temporalities. Narrating Continuity and Change in the Finnish Parliament from the Cold War to Covid-19 (funded by Academy of Finland).

Mari Hatavara is the UT Humanities Center’s Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence during Spring 2024.

Ardis Butterfield
Marie Borroff Professor of English, and (by courtesy) Professor of French and Music
Yale University

Monday, March 4, 2024
3:30 PM (ET)
Location TBA

Title: “Reading Medieval Song”

Songs can bring together music and words in powerful and lastingly memorable ways. Our records of song from the medieval period are tantalizingly incomplete, yet this does not prevent medieval song from captivating modern audiences and performers. Taking examples of songs with English, French, and Latin texts from the 13^th to the 15^th centuries, this lecture will investigate the strange arts of turning sound into written shape. 

About the Speaker:

Ardis Butterfield is Marie Borroff Professor of English, Professor of French and Music, at Yale. Her books include Poetry and Music in Medieval France (2002), and The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford, 2009). Most recently, she has co-edited with Andrew Kraebel and Ian Johnson, Literary Theory and Criticism in the Later Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of Alastair Minnis (Cambridge 2003). She is currently completing an edition of medieval English lyrics for Norton, and a book on medieval song: Medieval SongWriting, along with work on untranslatability and medieval global multilingualism. 

Ardis Butterfield was invited to campus by Anne-Hélène Miller.

Erin McGlothlin
Vice Dean of Undergraduate Affairs, College of Arts & Sciences and Professor of German and Jewish Studies
Washington University in St. Louis

Monday, March 18, 2024
3:30 P.M. (ET)
Location TBA

Talk Title: “Imagining Operation Reinhard in Contemporary Holocaust Fiction”

This presentation focuses on the mechanisms by which the canon of Holocaust literature has come to posit the Auschwitz killing center and labor camp as the dominant site of Jewish suffering during the Holocaust.  While the specific horror of the Auschwitz experience is without question of central importance to the history and representation of the genocide, the cultural proclivity to reduce the complexity of the Holocaust to Auschwitz has left little space for the literary imagination of other important sites and experiences of the Holocaust, particularly the Operation Reinhard killing centers Treblinka, Sobibór and Bełźec, at which collectively around 1.7 million mostly Polish Jews were murdered. This presentation will examine how the genocide manifested differently at those sites and consider the ways in which the historical experience of the Operation Reinhard killing centers brings distinct challenges to the project of literary representation. 

About the Speaker:

Erin McGlothlin is a professor of German and Jewish Studies and vice dean of Undergraduate Affairs at Washington University in St. Louis.  She has published widely on fictional and non-fictional representations of the Holocaust, focusing on such topics as the narrative structure of Holocaust literature and film, perpetrator representation and perpetrator trauma, ethical questions related to Holocaust representation, and generational discourse.  She is the author of Second-Generation Holocaust Literature: Legacies of Survival and Perpetration (2006) and The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction (2021) and co-editor of four volumes: After the Digital Divide?: German Aesthetic Theory in the Age of New Digital Media (2009, with Lutz Koepnick), Persistent Legacy: The Holocaust and German Studies (2016, with Jennifer Kapczynski), The Construction of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and its Outtakes (2020, with Brad Prager and Markus Zisselsberger), and Lessons and Legacies of the Holocaust 15: The Holocaust: Global Perspectives and National Narratives (2023, with Avinoam Patt). Together with Stuart Taberner, she is also co-editor of the forthcoming Cambridge History of Holocaust Literature, which aims to set the path of the scholarly discourse on the literature of the Holocaust for the next twenty-five years. 

Erin McGlothlin was invited to campus by Daniel Magilow.

Lauren Klein
Associate Professor in the Departments of English and Quantitative Theory & Methods
Emory University

Monday, April 15, 2024
3:30 P.M. (ET)
Location TBA

Talk Title: “A Counterhistory of Data Visualization”

In the world today, when we encounter a line graph or a pie chart, we tend to think of the role of visualization—if we think of it at all—as simply revealing the meaning of the data underneath. The reality, however, is that the act of visualizing data generates meaning in and of itself. This talk will return to the origins of modern data visualization in order excavate this meaning, showing how data visualization always carries a set of implicit assumptions—and, at times, explicit arguments—about how knowledge is produced, and who is authorized to produce it. 

About the Speaker:

Lauren Klein is Winship Distinguished Research Professor and Associate Professor in the departments of Quantitative Theory & Methods and English at Emory University, where she also directs the Digital Humanities Lab. She works at the intersection of data, AI, and the humanities, with an emphasis on questions of gender and race. Klein is coauthor (with Catherine D’Ignazio) of the award-winning Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020), and coeditor (with Matthew K. Gold) of Debates in the Digital Humanities (Univ. of Minnesota Press), among other volumes. She is currently completing Data by Design: An Interactive History of Data Visualization, forthcoming from the MIT Press, and envisioning the Atlanta Interdisciplinary AI Network, which will launch in Fall 2023. 

Lauren Klein was invited to campus by Hilary Havens and Joshua Ortiz Baco.