Fall 2026
Remaining Scholar Talks are scheduled as follows; stay tuned for more information.
- Elizabeth Kadetsky: November 3
- Graduate Student Resident Talks: November 17
Faculty Resident Talks
Tuesday, October 27 at Noon-1:00 p.m. 124 Sparks Building. Lunch will be provided.
Samuel Kolawole
Assistant Professor of English (Creative Writing) and Africana Studies
The Wakandization of Africa: Unity, Black Power and the problem of Utopia
What does it mean to imagine Africa as a futuristic, technologically superior, and self-sufficient continent? Because of the cultural phenomenon that was Black Panther, together with the growing influence of Afrofuturist literature, there has been a growing tendency to imagine the continent through the lens of Wakanda, a powerful utopia untouched by colonial and imperial domination as a model for imagining African futures. What might this vision obscure? Can an imagined Africa escape the imperial logic if its prosperity depends on the forms of technological, military, and territorial power that resemble those of the empire it seeks to transcend?
In this lecture, I will draw a connection between the Wakandization of Africa and the political and intellectual tradition that took shape in the early twentieth century, imagining Africa as a unified single nation. I will explore how a continent comprising 54 countries with a population of 1:4 billion people, thousands of ethnic groups, and a landmass of 30 million square kilometers can function as a single nation. This conversation will take place within the framework of my new novel in progress, Blackland, set in a future where climate and technological collapse leave Africa as a refuge until two Caucasian refugees arrive on a fortified island and unleash a crisis that threatens the continent.
Faculty Resident Talks
Tuesday, October 20 at Noon-1:00 p.m. 124 Sparks Building. Lunch will be provided.
Ariana Steele
Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
What’s it giving? Nonbinary “they” and the fight to queer meaning
Language is part and parcel to the social world, and the social world births language. But what happens when we want our language to change the social world in specific, intentional ways? In this talk, I discuss the queer practice of nonbinary self-identification – calling oneself nonbinary or declaring that one uses they/them pronouns – and the social meanings that have emerged due in part to these declarations. While nonbinary discourses of self-identification seem to situate nonbinary identity within the said, conservative discourses dismiss nonbinary as only words. And yet, a widespread stereotype that has emerged over the past ten years has been the nonbinary person with “blue hair and pronouns.” I argue that both of these seemingly divergent discourses are troubled by misappropriations of gender constructivism while also leading to the construction of stereotypes from nonbinary identity work. Ultimately, I discuss the capabilities of language to develop queer meanings and the implications of relying on language to do so, particularly for trans and queer communities.
Faculty Resident Talks
Tuesday, October 6 at Noon-1:00 p.m. 124 Sparks Building. Lunch will be provided.
Kris Sealey
Department of Philosophy
Partus and Property: Reading Black Mothering into the Black Radical Tradition
In this talk, I read Black mothering, in the context of Atlantic slavery and its long afterlife, as central to the terrain of Black oppositional struggle that is theorized under the Black Radical Tradition. By the second half of the seventeenth century, Partus sequitur ventrem (“that which is born follows the womb”) legally codified the transfer of chattel slave status from enslaved Black women to their offspring. Out of this legalized property relation to plantation masters, Partus enacted the social death necessary for the ‘person to chattel’ transformation at the heart of Atlantic slavery. If (as I show, using the work of scholars like Jennifer Morgan and Orlando Patterson) the core violation of Atlantic slavery is not primarily the theft of freedom, but rather this more foundational social death (via Partus), then it follows that the struggle/resistance against social death is similarly foundational to a complete archive of Black oppositional struggle. This places Black mothering practices – of stealing back the kinship and care connections stolen by Partus and its property claims – on the front lines of Black Atlantic world-making against slavery’s final condemnations
Graduate Student Summer Resident Talks
Tuesday, September 15 at Noon-1:00 p.m. 124 Sparks Building. Lunch will be provided.
Genevieve Gordon
Department of English
Visionary Gleam: The Prophetic Child and Environmental Feeling in Romanticism and Contemporary Youth Climate Rhetoric
In this talk, I describe the rhetorical figuration of the “prophetic child,” which centers on the idea that young people can access special kinds of sensation, understanding, and rhetorical expression–especially in relation to the natural world–that their adult counterparts cannot. I trace this figuration across two contexts: the British Romantic movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, where the child served as both a symbol and rhetorical model for re-attuning with nature amid industrialization, and the recent influx of youth activism in response to the climate crisis, where the idea of a special, clear-sighted “youth voice” is often invoked as a rhetorical antidote to pessimism or legislative stagnation. Looking at these contexts in tandem prompts important questions about the historical relationship between youth, temporality, and environmental feeling that young people must navigate as they step into public discourses.
Amy Orner
Department of Art History
An Enliven’d Isle: Politics, Class, and Empire in Edinburgh’s New Town, 1752-1802
This talk examines Edinburgh’s eighteenth-century New Town as a representation of Scotland’s position within Great Britain, as well as a demonstration of Scotland’s participation in the British Empire. While the New Town planned by the Edinburgh Town Council represents Edinburgh as the “Capital of North Britain,” the built environment of the city is shaped by competing political interests, class-based concerns, and the Scottish involvement in the British East India Company. Buildings and urban spaces are important objects of material culture that communicate the values and ideologies of empire both internally, through the imposition of an overarching British identity, and externally, through the accumulation of colonial wealth.
Keisha Oliver
Departments of Art Education and Africana Studies
Historical Genealogies of African Diasporic Fiber Craft Traditions
This talk traces the historical genealogies of African diasporic fiber craft traditions from precolonial Africa to the contemporary Black coastal geographies of The Bahamas and South Carolina. Rather than treating Afro-Bahamian straw craft and Gullah Geechee sweetgrass basketry as isolated survivals of African traditions, the chapter understands genealogy as a process of movement, rupture, adaptation, and renewal. It follows the circulation of botanicals and ecological knowledge through enslavement, plantation economies, migration, and changing coastal environments, examining how fiber-making traditions were reconstituted in the South Carolina Lowcountry and transported through diasporic networks to the islands of The Bahamas. The talk then considers how gendered labor, Black women’s craft economies, tourism, and market formation transformed the social and economic conditions of making. I argue that the continuity of African diasporic fiber craft resides not in the preservation of identical materials or forms, but in the transmission and continual reconfiguration of relationships among people, plants, and places.
Daniel Oni
Department of Philosophy
Haslanger’s Example, or, What’s The Social in The Social Ontology of Race?
This talk introduces one strand of my dissertation research by focusing on Sally Haslanger’s philosophical account of race and gender as socially constructed. Haslanger holds that racial and gender categories are objective social kinds, constituted by patterns of structural advantage and disadvantage organized around presumed bodily features, rather than by any natural essence. Her project is a debunking one: she wants to explain the “staying power” of these categories, their capacity to resist revision even once we know their history. I focus on her account of social structures, which tends to treat structures like labor markets and families as separately instituted, loosely “cooked together” without a theory of the social whole to explain their coordination or the tenacity of naturalization. I turn instead to Theodor Adorno’s account of “second nature,” wherein historically produced relations necessarily appear as facts of nature; together with a Marxian tradition in which value mediation supplies the schema holding otherwise disparate social structures together. My aims in this talk are less to settle the matter outright and more so to lay out the problem and sketch what a different, more compelling approach could look like.
Graduate Student Summer Resident Talks
Tuesday, September 22 at Noon-1:00 p.m. 124 Sparks Building. Lunch will be provided.
Jules Kossowska
Department of History
The Ideal Statesman: Rome in Seventeenth-Century Education of Polish Elites
In the wake of the sixteenth-century Polish humanism and the confessional conflicts, Rome – ancient and papal – fully established itself as symbol of politics, religion, and cultural heritage. In this talk, I will address the place of Rome in the education of Polish nobility (szlachta) in the first half of the seventeenth century, from the increasingly popular histories of ancient Rome, through the plethora of travel guides, to the early examples of the Grand Tour. Whereas previously the focus of educational travels to Italy was Padua and its famous university, beginning in the late 1500s and into the 1600s, Rome and its institutions became central to noble education, serving as models of statecraft and religion, and as networking spaces. Noble families, such as the renowned Zamoyski, committed to these educational pilgrimages while also studying Roman history, law, and philosophy in the academies back home, building the foundation for their work as statesmen of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Sam Otieno
Department of Comparative Literature
The Averted Gaze: Photography, Autobiography, and the Politics of Visibility in Kenya
My talk focuses on the question of self-representation in the African anglophone autobiographical narrative. Its intellectual histories considered, and focusing on Unbounded–Boniface Mwangi’s memoir–I ask what does it mean to make oneself visible within state and social institutions established solely for the erasure of the autobiographical self, and on what terms does the autobiographical self make themselves visible? The averted gaze becomes a conception through which I attempt to answer these questions.
Ankolika De
Department of Information Sciences and Technology
Towards Sustained Appropriation
This talk introduces sustained appropriation, a framework for thinking about what platforms owe the communities who build their lives and livelihoods around them, especially as they benefit from this appropriation. Drawing on past empirical work, I show how platform change, however it is framed by companies as improvement or innovation, repeatedly unsettles practices users have carefully built, often leaving them to blame themselves rather than the platform. Against this, I propose four conditions, legibility, stability, recognition, and recourse, that would need to hold for appropriation to remain durable rather than something users must continually fight to sustain.
Ege Altan
Department of Comparative Literature and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Lubunya Lineages: Trans Inheritance and Literary Transmission
This talk examines how queer and trans writing in Turkey transforms the Marxist realist tradition’s effort to make collective life and historical struggle visible. I theorize the genre of lubunyazın to name a literary culture emerging from the language, social worlds, and activist histories of Turkey’s queer and trans communities. While Turkish socialist realism brought the working class into literature as agents of history, lubunyazın reworks how historical continuity itself is imagined for those denied inheritance by the family, archive, and nation. Focusing on Arslan Yüzgün’s late-1980s stories and Ceyhan Fırat’s autobiographical novel Bacak Böcek Oyunu [The Leg-Bug Play], I examine two forms of literary transmission. Yüzgün’s stories sustain relations between the living and the forgotten dead, while Fırat’s alternative kinship plot formalizes care-giving practices as the formal technique of the novel. I theorize this literary work of transmission as “trans inheritance”: the production of lineages that memories, relations, and practices of survival travel beyond biological descent and the heteronormative family. Trans inheritance therefore shows how lubunyazın rearranges narrative worlds attuned to the complexity of trans lives.
