Andrew K. Sandoval-Strausz, Director of Latina/o Studies and Professor of History

Tuesday, March 4th, 2024, Noon-1:00pm. 124 Sparks Building

Lunch will be provided.

Latino communities in eastern Pennsylvania cities are key to understanding the national political realignment that is currently underway—a realignment that began in a part of the state with fast-growing Puerto Rican, Dominican, and other Latino colonias. This has to do with three processes: the arrival of Latin American migrants, deindustrialization, and subsequent political struggles between anti-Hispanic agitators and Latino residents.

John Eicher, Associate Professor of History, Penn State Altoona

Tuesday, March 18, 2025, Noon-1:00pm. 124 Sparks Building

Lunch will be provided.

The paper argues that a pulmonary plague theory about the “Spanish” flu arose locally and intuitively across Europe among both laypeople and leaders in 1918. Their suspicion rested on the disease’s sudden appearance, bizarre symptoms, and the assumption that apocalyptic “plagues” inevitably accompany apocalyptic wars. Contemporaries’ fears of pneumonic plague were especially validated by their direct observations of the flu’s sudden and bizzare symptoms, which included profuse or projectile bleeding from the mouth and nose; heliotrope cyanosis, which resembled plague sepsis; and the presence of black or “rotten” blood. Added to this, for nearly a half decade Europe’s officials and experts had lied to their populations about a wide range of war-related matters including the conditions at the front, enemy actions, the possibility of victory, and the nation’s food security. Contemporaries’ diagnoses were therefore the products of fear, fatalism, cynicism, and suspicion—feelings that were in abundance at the end of the First World War.

This paper is based on findings from a research project that represents the first transnational, cultural history of the 1918 influenza pandemic in Europe. The project focuses on a unique source base of 1,000 survivors’ memories gathered from across ten European countries and its methodology rests on a searchable database of the testimonies, which I created with the help of Penn State undergraduate students.

Our Spring graduate scholars, Daniela Farkas and Tashi Namgyal will be presenting their work on Tuesday, February 11 from Noon to 1:00 p.m, in 124 Sparks Building. Read more about their projects by clicking on their photos below:

The Graduate Scholars in Residence program provides students in the humanities with a one-course teaching release or summer funding, enabling them to devote an entire semester to work on their dissertations.

Episode 9 of HumIn Focus, “Teaching Humanity: The Social Value of Higher Education” premiered on WPSU on October 24th, 2024, at 9:00 p.m. 📰 Click here to read more about this episode.

HumIn Focus is a multi-part web series centering on pressing social issues through the lens of the work of humanities scholars. To learn more about the web series, visit the HumIn Focus website.

Talk: “A Kind of Resistance: Illustrating Holocaust Survivor Stories”

Tuesday, February 25th at 2:00 pm. Dewey Room, W-043 Paterno Library*

In this session, Libicki will show a detailed deconstruction of the process of building a graphic novel out of interviews and active collaboration with survivors, historians and researchers. She will discuss the unique strengths, as well as challenges, of using comics to depict the Holocaust, and to depict subjective memory in the absence of photographic documentation. A short observational drawing exercise during the lecture will allow participants to experience drawing as an act of memory, of observation, of communication and creation.

Workshop: “Inking the Unthinkable: A sense-memory writing and cartooning workshop”

Wednesday, February 26th at 2:00 pm. 133 Sparks Building

A hands-on memoir comix workshop inspired by educator/cartoonist Lynda Barry’s theories of creative concentration as “deep play,” and writing as “delivering an image.” No drawing experience is needed– we all have more drawing experience than we admit. As Barry says, “People tell me I can’t draw and I say, so what have I been doing for 30 years?”

“The Last Puritan: Norman Holmes Pearson in the American Century”

February 25th at 3:30 pm Foster Auditorium, 124 Sparks Building

As a student and, eventually, professor, Norman Holmes Pearson changed the story of American literature, putting modernist poetry (especially by women) at its center. He was one of the founders of the discipline of American studies, and helped forge the alliance between universities, foundations and professional societies, and the national-security state in the 1950s and 1960s. And he was a spy. During World War II he created and headed X-2, the OSS’s counterintelligence branch, and helped design (and recruit for) the Central Intelligence Agency. In this talk, Greg Barnhisel will give an overview of Pearson’s unique career as a literary fixer, secret agent, cultural diplomat, academic bureaucrat, and one of the architects of the American Century.

This keynote event is co-sponsored by the Department of English