Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Collaborative Humanities Events

Events and seminars foster an expanded sense of intellectual community for scholars and students dedicated to thinking together across disciplines, frameworks, and locations.

Upcoming Events

  • What does it mean to work through archival silences? What archival methods are necessary to tend to the gaps? Building on the Collaborative Humanities seminar “Archive Theory: Imagining Absence Otherwise,” this symposium showcases research that considers the methods, contradictions, and possibilities of archival studies.

    The symposium brings together an interdisciplinary set of projects on a range of topics, including: reading with and alongside ephemera, coloniality and institutional power, artistic responses to archival materials, embracing methodological failures, and the beauty of storytelling and personal archives, among others. Each speaker will complicate the assumptions of the “gaps” and “losses” in the archive in search for other modes of thinking with and alongside a range of archival artifacts.

    Free and open to the public. For questions or to request special services, accommodations, or assistance, please contact humanities-institute@brown.edu or (401) 863-6070.


    Speakers

    Student Presenters:

    • Justina Blanco (Africana Studies)
    • Alexander Chun (American Studies)
    • Macie Clerkley (Anthropology)
    • Brian Dang (Theatre Arts and Performance Studies)
    • Nelarí Figueroa Torres (Africana Studies, English)
    • Jordan Good (Music)
    • Erin Hardnett (History)
    • Amber Hawk Swanson (Theatre Arts and Performance Studies)
    • Brooke Johnson (Africana Studies)
    • Lucas Joshi (Comparative Literature)
    • Joyce Matos (Modern Culture and Media)
    • Claudia Ojeda (History)
    • Gery Vargas (RISD)
    • Shuang Wang (Music)
    • K Yin (American Studies)

    Faculty Moderators/Hosts:

    • Kiana Murphy (American Studies)
    • Alejandra Rosenberg Navarro (Hispanic Studies)

    Schedule

    9:15 am – 10:45 am

    Welcome / Session 1 — Archival Failure: Ethics and Methods

    10:45 am – 11:15 am

    Break

    11:15 am – 12:30 pm

    Session 2 — Fragments and Ephemera: Loss and Abundance in the Archive

    1:30 pm – 2:45 pm

    Session 3 — Mediated Archives: Language and Authenticity

    2:45 pm – 3:15 pm

    Break

    3:15 pm – 4:30 pm

    Session 4 — Archive as Home: The Politics of the Personal

    5:00 pm – 6:30 pm

    Keynote Lecture — Ahmad Greene-Hayes, “Quadrants and Marginalia: Mapping Black Religion in the Archive”


    Image: A piece of art that has been altered to look like a collage, Heather Green, 2003

  • This lecture considers the role of the dead in the historical study of Black religion. In the lecture, scholar Ahmad Greene-Hayes embraces viscerality and archival mediumship as modes of interpretation of the archival ancestor, to reckon with the how and why behind historical approaches in the study of Black religion and culture in the afterlife of slavery. In so doing, he focuses in on the interventions and mapping strategies of one archival ancestor from the early 20th century: Robert Athlyi Rogers, the founder of the United Home and Bank of the Negroes and the Afro-Athlican Constructive Church.

    Greene-Hayes provides a critical examination of Rogers’ “The Negro Map of Life” (1917) and his self-constructed mapping practice to show how his religious and political orientations contributed to his production of an otherworldly cartography of Black religion in the early 20th century. In so doing, Greene-Hayes thinks with Rogers as both archivist and archival subject and theorizes how his methods of interpretation might be instructive for contemporary scholars.

    This keynote lecture concludes the conference “Tending the Gap: Storytelling as Archival Method,” which builds on the Collaborative Humanities seminar “Archive Theory: Imagining Absence Otherwise.”

    Free and open to the public. For questions or to request special services, accommodations, or assistance, please contact humanities-institute@brown.edu or (401) 863-6070.


    About the Speaker

    Ahmad Greene-Hayes is an assistant professor of African American religious studies at Harvard Divinity School and a member of the Standing Committee for the Study of Religion and the Standing Committee on Advanced Degrees in American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. His research interests include critical Black studies, Black Atlantic religions in the Americas, and race, queerness, and sexuality in the context of African American and Caribbean religious histories. He is the author of Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion-Making in Jim Crow New Orleans (University of Chicago Press, 2025). He has published essays in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the Journal of Africana Religions, Nova Religio, GLQ, and the Journal of African American History, among others. He has held fellowships from Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music and LGBT studies program, the American Society of Church History, and Princeton’s “The Crossroads Project: Black Religious Histories, Communities, and Cultures,” to name a few. In 2022, he was inducted into the Martin Luther King Jr. Collegium of Scholars at Morehouse College, and in 2023, he was inducted into the historic Society for the Study of Black Religion.

Past Events

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Andrews HouseRoom: 110

    This conversation features Indigenous artists Olinda Yawar Tupinambá and Ziel Karapotó, who both exhibited work in the Brazil Pavilion of the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024. Leila Lehnen, Chair of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, and Jamille Pinheiro Dias, Fall 2024 Craig M. Cogut Visiting Professor in the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, will moderate. The conversation emerges from the graduate collaborative humanities seminar “Decolonial Futurities,” led by Lehnen and Macarena Gómez-Barris, which explores artistic responses to legacies of (neo)colonialism, racial capitalism, and extractivist exploitation.

    In Portuguese with English translation provided by headset.

    Free and open the public. For questions or to request special services, accommodations, or assistance, please contact humanities-institute@brown.edu or (401) 863-6070.


    About the Speakers

    Olinda Yawar Tupinambá, who belongs to the Tupinambá and Pataxó Hãhãhãe peoples, is a multi-talented journalist, photographer, screenwriter, director, curator, performance artist, filmmaker, and environmental activist. Her work “Equilíbrio” [“Balance”] was showcased at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024. She has curated several festivals and film exhibitions, including the Cine Kurumin Indigenous Film Festival, Mostra Lugar de Mulher é no Cinema, and the first Indigenous Film and Culture Festival — FeCCI 2022. She also produced two film exhibitions: Mostra Paraguaçu de Cinema Indígena and Amotara — Olhares das Mulheres Indígenas (2021). In 2015, she earned a degree in social communication with a specialization in journalism from Faculdades Integradas Ipitanga (FACIIP). Through her artistic endeavors, she challenges and dispels racialized and stereotypical perceptions of Indigenous peoples. Her work serves to amplify ancestral voices, condemning historical and contemporary anti-Indigenous violence while also asserting the significance of Indigenous territories, bodies, existences, and expressions, underscoring the enduring presence of Indigenous peoples across time. Her work emphasizes that Indigenous individuals, cultures, and knowledges are integral to the contemporary world, drawing from the Indigenous past to redefine and update narratives of Indigeneity.

    Ziel Karapotó is a visual multimedia artist, filmmaker, actor, and cultural producer hailing from the Karapotó community of Terra Nova, São Sebastião in the Brazilian state of Alagoas and currently residing in the Indigenous territory of Marataro Kaetés, Igarassu in the state of Pernambuco. His work has garnered recognition on both national and international platforms. Notably, his artwork “Cardume II” (2024) was showcased at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024. His short film “The verb became flesh” [“O verbo se fez carne”] (2019) received the prestigious “From Another Sky” [“De um outro céu”] prize in 2020. He has actively contributed to the research groups Ciência e Arte indígena no Nordeste [Indigenous Science and Art in the Northeast] (CAIN-UFPE) and Culturas de Antirracismo na América Latina [Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America] (CARLA-UFBA). Since 2021, he has served as the general coordinator of the Associação de Indígena em Contexto Urbano Karaxuwanassu [Association of Indigenous Peoples in Urban Contexts] (ASSICUKA). His artistic practice and knowledge-making are deeply rooted in the traditions of his ancestors, serving as a form of resistance and anticolonial strength, aligning with his belief in the enduring power of Indigenous art and science.


    Presented by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities as part of the Decolonial Futurities Speaker Series, and the Brown Arts Institute as part of the IGNITE series, with the support of the Department of Modern Culture and Media, the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, and the Brazil Initiative at the Watson Institute.

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Andrews HouseRoom: 110

    In this public session of the graduate seminar “Decolonial Futurities: Submerged Perspectives from and within the Americas,“ team-taught by Macarena Gómez-Barris and Leila Lehnen, participants will discuss with author Rita Indiana her novel Tentacle (And Other Stories, 2019), translated by Achy Obejas. The novel won the 2017 Grand Prize of the Association of Caribbean Writers. It is the first Spanish-language book to have won the prize.

    Open to Brown University students, faculty, and staff. RSVP by September 23.

    For questions or to request special services, accommodations, or assistance, please contact humanities-institute@brown.edu or (401) 863-6070.


    About the Author

    Rita Indiana is a Dominican-born New York–based music composer, and a key figure in contemporary Latin American literature. She is the author of five novels and is a driving force in experimental Caribbean popular music. She writes about queer outsiders in possible and impossible worlds and teaches storytelling to people of all ages and backgrounds. She is a Global Distinguished Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at New York University and the interim director of the MFA Creative Writing in Spanish Program.


    Presented by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities as part of the Decolonial Futurities Speaker Series.

    RSVP by September 23
  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    The Collaborative Public Workshop features seven Brown University doctoral candidates presenting papers developed over the course of the semester in the capstone seminar of the Doctoral Certificate in Collaborative Humanities:

    • Istifaa Ahmed (American Studies)
    • Kamari Carter (Music and Multimedia Composition)
    • Sneha Chowdhury (Comparative Literature)
    • Yannick Etoundi (History of Art and Architecture)
    • Will Johnson (Music and Multimedia Composition)
    • Jay Loomis (Musicology and Ethnomusicology)
    • Prudence Ross (English)

    Free and open to the public. For questions or to request special services, accommodations, or assistance, please contact humanities-institute@brown.edu or (401) 863-6070.


    Schedule

    9:30 am – 10:00 am

    Coffee

    10:00 am – 11:45 am

    Introduction by Amanda Anderson

    Session 1

    • Prudence Ross, “‘Space May Produce New Worlds’: Architecture as Resistance in Paradise Lost
      Commentators: Caroline Levine and Peter Szendy
    • Yannick Etoundi, “Abolishing Slavery, Building French Colonialism: Guadeloupe and Martinique, 1848–1900”
      Commentators: Caroline Levine and Alexander Weheliye
    • Moderator: Shahzad Bashir
    1:00 pm – 2:45 pm

    Session 2

    • Istifaa Ahmed, “Touch Me After the End of the World: Touch, Dehiscence, and Inhuman Intimacies in Octavia Butler’s ‘Bloodchild’”
      Commentators: Uri McMillan and Peter Szendy
    • Sneha Chowdhury, “Hölderlin, Agyeya, and the Third Step of Poetry”
      Commentators: Caroline Levine and Peter Szendy
    • Moderator: Shahzad Bashir
    2:45 pm – 3:15 pm

    Coffee

    3:15 pm – 5:30 pm

    Session 3

    • Will Johnson, “Listening and Processing: The Ghetto Riots as Sound, Score, and Interpellative Media”
      Commentators: Uri McMillan and Peter Szendy
    • Jay Loomis, “Son Jarocho Communities and Fandango Culture: The Black Atlantic in Southern Veracruz”
      Commentators: Uri McMillan and Alexander Weheliye
    • Kamari Carter, “Black Artists, Protest Practices, and Activist Exhibitions: An Analysis of Institutional Exhibiting and Protest Art in New York City”
      Commentators: Uri McMillan and Alexander Weheliye
    • Moderator: Amanda Anderson

    About the Seminar

    The spring 2024 Project Development Workshop (HMAN 2500) is led by Amanda Anderson, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English and Director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, and Shahzad Bashir, Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Humanities and Professor of History. Over the course of the semester, students each develop and workshop a paper while performing a number of collateral academic roles: they nominate and introduce a text to the seminar that was formative for their scholarly development; they serve as first questioners for papers workshopped by others; and they interview one of their peers and prepare an introduction to their work. By providing training and preparation for roles that are crucial to the practice and fabric of academic life, yet are seldom the object of formal study and reflection, the seminar reimagines the conditions and extends the limits of an interdisciplinary and collaborative research space.

    About the Doctoral Certificate

    The Doctoral Certificate in Collaborative Humanities promotes cross-disciplinary work oriented toward the most challenging questions facing humanities research today. Collaboration is built through research practices dedicated to thinking together across disciplines and geographical locations. Participants pursue these forms of inquiry through teaching models and student practices that experiment with group presentations, collaborative online discussions, coauthored seminar papers, and other forms of intellectual partnership.

    Abstracts and bios
  •  Location: Watson Institute for International and Public AffairsRoom: Joukowsky Forum (Room 155)

    How, why, when, and where do novel writing systems come into being? The inception of Mesopotamian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Chinese Oracle Bone graphs receive merited attention. Yet, by ample evidence, scripts appear at many other times and places, usually through contact with earlier systems of recording. To this day, writing continues to be devised under varied conditions of social, linguistic, religious, and aesthetic tumult and possibility, need and amusement. “Guided Inventions” looks at how scripts coalesce in response to prior scripts. A breadth of examples attests to the importance of this process, ranging from Africa to Indigenous America, the ancient Aegean to Scandinavian runes, Hollywood fabulations to the results of encounters with spirits. But the topic remains under-explored. Addressing that need, “Guided Inventions” seeks to find what these inventions share and how they differ. Joining the debate will be archaeologists, linguists, and anthropologists, each intent on understanding how, from the makers’ viewpoint, systems of imaginative marking help to graft meaning, language, and practice.

    Schedule of Events

    12:00-12:30 Welcome and Opening Remarks by Stephen Houston & Felipe Rojas (Brown University)

    12:30-1:00 Silvia Ferrara (University of Bologna), “Leading the way? Cretan Hieroglyphic and Rongorongo (Rapa Nui)”

    1:00-1:30 Yoolim Kim (Wellesley College), “Writing and cognition: Distinctiveness, complexity, and informativeness of letter shapes”

    1:30-2:00 Coffee Break

    2:00-2:30 Piers Kelly (University of New England), “Signs and wonders: Miraculous revelation and recuperation as recurring motifs in global origin stories about writing”

    2:30-3:00 Bérénice Gaillemin (Getty Research Institute), “On some glotografic inventions from the Florentine Codex (Mexico, 16th century)”

    3:00 Discussion & Closing Remarks by Stephen Houston & Felipe Rojas (Brown University)

    Organized by Stephen Houston (Anthropology / History of Art and Architecture) &  Felipe Rojas (JIAAW / Egyptology & Assyriology)

     

    Event Poster

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    Since the dawn of the modern environmental movement, one of the greatest difficulties has been in finding effective modes of communication to prompt vigilant attention and appropriate action. Rachel Carson’s “A Fable for Tomorrow” ( Silent Spring , 1962) is a particularly notable example of an environmental warning, but it fits into a long tradition of environmental warnings — or jeremiads — in American literature, which continues, with increasing urgency, to the present.

    This talk used ideas from cognitive psychology and communication studies to trace the discourse of environmental warning from John Muir to the ongoing “World Scientists’ Warning[s] to Humanity” and also addressed the challenge of crafting poignant warnings for busy, complacent, anxious, and/or “infowhelmed” audiences.


    About the Speaker

    Scott Slovic is University Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Environmental Humanities at the University of Idaho and senior scientist at the Oregon Research Institute. He has been particularly devoted to charting the historical development of environmental literary studies, encouraging the international development of this scholarly approach, and exploring the intersections between ecocriticism and such disciplines as environmental communication studies, the medical humanities, and cognitive psychology.

    A prolific author and editor in the environmental humanities, Slovic’s most recent publications include the coedited volumes Nature and Literary Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2022), The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Medical-Environmental Humanities (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), and Ecodisaster Imaginaries in India: Essays in Critical Perspectives (Lexington Books, 2023). He was the founding president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) in the early 1990s, and from 1995 to 2020, he served as editor-in-chief of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment , the central journal in the field of ecocriticism. He is currently coeditor of the book series Routledge Studies in World Literatures and the Environment and Routledge Environmental Humanities and a contributing editor for www.arithmeticofcompassion.org.


    Presented by the Environmental Humanities at Brown initiative at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities.

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    Through a case study of Zora Neale Hurston’s methods, cultural anthropologist Roshanak Kheshti explored how synesthesia functions as both a methodology and a praxis in Hurston’s work. She looked to Hurston’s vast archive of films, plays, audio recordings, performances (including choreography, drumming, and singing), and essays as early experiments in performance ethnography.

    Roshanak Kheshti is the author of Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music (NYU Press, 2015), Switched-on Bach (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), and We See with the Skin: Zora Neale Hurston’s Synesthetic Theory (Duke University Press, forthcoming 2024). Her articles have appeared in American Anthropologist, Radical History Review, American Quarterly, Current Musicology, Feminist Media Histories, Hypatia, Feminist Studies, GLQ, Theatre Survey, and Sounding Out! She has presented performance works in collaboration with Salar Mameni and Helen Cammock.

    Presented by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities as part of the “Experimental Ethnographies” series. The series, curated by anthropologist Rebecca Louise Carter, emerges from the Collaborative Humanities seminar “Experimental Ethnography for the Masses” and highlights creative and multi-modal ethnographic approaches and their relevance and application to humanistic social inquiry.

  • How can we create anthropological knowledge through creative strategies where the sensorial and emotional experience arises? Multimodal anthropology proposes a diversity of methodologies to think about the intersections between art and ethnography. In this lecture, anthropologist and filmmaker Mariana Rivera shared her ethnographic experience around weaving as a means of political resistance, showing how textile practices have become narratives of memory that speak aloud about violence, pain, and social injustice, particularly considering blackstrap loom weavers in the native community of Xochistlahuaca in Mexico. In her research, she uses diverse narrative practices such as cinema, workshops, and curatorial displays as co-creative and experimental methodologies to study the language of textiles and to comprehend the worldview around the weaving experience.

    Mariana Rivera is an academic researcher in the ethnology and social anthropology division of the National Institute of Anthropology and History. She is a cofounder of the production company Urdimbre Audiovisual, where she works as a film director and photographer. She has been a programmer for the Ethnographic Film Forum and a curator of textile exhibits. She has written on documentary and ethnographic film, visual anthropology, weaving, memory and transmedia narratives, taught courses on visual anthropology, and taken part in workshops for the development of film projects. Since 2022, she has coordinated the seminar “Poetics of Imagination.”

    Presented by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities as part of the “Experimental Ethnographies” series. The series, curated by anthropologist Rebecca Louise Carter, emerges from the Collaborative Humanities seminar “Experimental Ethnography for the Masses” and highlights creative and multi-modal ethnographic approaches and their relevance and application to humanistic social inquiry.

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    Artist and filmmaker Jonathan Thunder hosted a screening of several of his short films, including Maamawi. Afterward, there was a conversation and Q&A around the films.

    Maamawi (2020, 5 min.) takes as its title an Ojibwe word that means “together.” This experimental film explores connections between a young man and unfamiliar relatives from a not-so-long-ago time. The content reflects a link between our current era and the impact of the 1956 Indian Relocation Act. The story is inspired by Jonathan Thunder’s father, whose family was relocated multiple times during his childhood.

    Jonathan Thunder is an artist who infuses his personal lens with real-time world experiences using a wide range of mediums. He is known for his surreal paintings, digitally animated films, and installations in which he addresses subject matter of personal experience and social commentary. He is an enrolled member of the Red Lake Band of Ojibwe and makes his home and studio in Duluth, MN. He has attended the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, NM, and studied visual effects and motion graphics at the Art Institutes International Minnesota. His work has been featured in many state, regional, and national exhibitions, as well as local and international publications. He is the recipient of a 2020–21 Pollock-Krasner Foundation award for his risk-taking in painting. Since his first solo exhibit in 2004, he has won several awards for his short films in national and international competitions. He is a McKnight Artist Fellow for 2022–23. Visit jonthunder.com and https://www.youtube.com/@jonthunder_movies to learn more.

    Presented by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities as part of the “Experimental Ethnographies” series, and coponsored by the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative. The series, curated by anthropologist Rebecca Louise Carter, emerges from the Collaborative Humanities seminar “Experimental Ethnography for the Masses” and highlights creative and multimodal ethnographic approaches and their relevance and application to humanistic social inquiry.

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    Jonathan Thunder is an artist who infuses his personal lens with real-time world experiences using a wide range of mediums. He is known for his surreal paintings, digitally animated films, and installations in which he addresses subject matter of personal experience and social commentary.

    In his art, interpretive figures representing identity, situations, and socio-political commentary are often the leaping point for imagery that incorporate masks, humanistic animals, and animalistic humans. Balancing the deliberate with the experimental, each work aims to convey a moment or vignette that is not entirely spelled out to the viewer. The topic of environmental issues is especially present, reflecting part of his identity as a steward of this planet with our future in mind.

    Thunder is an enrolled member of the Red Lake Band of Ojibwe and makes his home and studio in Duluth, MN. He has attended the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, NM, and studied visual effects and motion graphics at the Art Institutes International Minnesota. His work has been featured in many state, regional, and national exhibitions, as well as in local and international publications. He is the recipient of a 2020–21 Pollock-Krasner Foundation award for his risk-taking in painting. Since his first solo exhibit in 2004, he has won several awards for his short films in national and international competitions. He is a McKnight Artist Fellow for 2022–23. Visit jonthunder.com and https://www.youtube.com/@jonthunder_movies to learn more.

    Presented by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities as part of the “Experimental Ethnographies” series, and cosponsored by the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative. The series, curated by anthropologist Rebecca Louise Carter, emerges from the Collaborative Humanities seminar “Experimental Ethnography for the Masses” and highlights creative and multimodal ethnographic approaches and their relevance and application to humanistic social inquiry.

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    This seminar lecture featured theatre director and playwright Melissa Moschitto.

    Melissa Moschitto’s work encompasses research, expressive movement, and rigorous dramaturgy to pursue new approaches to storytelling. Her company, the Anthropologists, activates archives to ask “How can we recover obscured histories in order to recontextualize the present and catalyze conversation?” Through collaborative theatre-making that elevates play and curiosity, the Anthropologists’ methodology offers research-based theatre as an ideal mechanism for social inquiry.

    Presented by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities as part of the “Experimental Ethnographies” series. The series, curated by anthropologist Rebecca Louise Carter, emerges from the Collaborative Humanities seminar “Experimental Ethnography for the Masses” and highlights creative and multi-modal ethnographic approaches and their relevance and application to humanistic social inquiry.

  •  Location: Watson Institute for International and Public AffairsRoom: Joukowsky Forum

    Join us for a Book AddaHow Secular is Art? with subject matter experts Vazira Zamindar & Tapati Guha-Thakurta. This event is presented by the Saxena Center and co-sponsored by the Cogut Institute of the Humanities.

    About the book:
    As an invitation to interrogate the secular modality of art, the book unsettles both the categories of ‘art’ and ‘secular’ in their theoretical and historical implications. It questions the temporal, spatial and cultural binaries between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘secular’ that have shaped art historical scholarship as well as artistic practice. All the essays here are anchored in a conception of a region, whether we call it South Asia or the Indian subcontinent – one, fissured by histories of partition, state formations and religious nationalisms, but still offering a collective site from which to speak to the disciplines of art and the knowledge worlds in which they are embedded. The book asks: How do we complicate the religious designations of pre-modern art and architecture and the new forms of their resurgence in contemporary iconographies and monuments? How do we re-conceptualize the public and the political, as fiery contestations and new curatorial practices reconfigure the meaning of art in the proliferating spaces of museums, galleries, biennales and festivals? How do we understand South Asian art’s deep entanglements with the politics of the present?

    Learn More
  • How and where do worlds collide as disintegrations after globalization and the legacies of the Cold War are remaking the Pacific once again?

    This talk by Jerry Zee explored China and its Pacific through two near-miss overlapping geographies of the Eastern Hemisphere: the Pacific Rim, a globalization-era spatialization of the emergence of a new transpacific economy in the 1990s, and the Ring of Fire, the tectonic formation that merges and splits the Pacific. Zee thought over the geopolitical and geophysical matters of the Pacific through the “geo,” not as a site of integration, but as the minor estrangements of what can count as the earth and the Earth. In three “orogenies,” or scenes of crustal and atmospheric deformation, he proposed China’s Pacific as a site of generative and curious “un-meetings,” following Ada Smailbegovic (Brown University, English). In dust, mud, and debris fields, we make sense of war, migration, and technoscience through the land- and airscapes they force into torque.

    Jerry Zee is an assistant professor of anthropology and the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University. He is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research explores geophysical and environmental emergence as sites of political experiment. He is the author of Continent in Dust: Experiments in a Chinese Weather System (University of California Press, 2022) and coeditor of the “Writing Matters!” series at Duke University Press. His work has appeared in Cultural Anthropology, American Anthropologist, HAU, English Language Notes, Environmental Humanities, Black Warrior Review, Made in China, and Scapegoat.

    This event was the plenary talk concluding the daylong symposium “In the Wake of War: Ecologies of Displacement.”

    Presented by the Cogut Institute’s Collaborative Humanities Initiative and Environmental Humanities at Brown.

    Read more about the symposium “In the Wake of War”
  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    Processes of ecological transformation, such as climate change, often occur at timescales that are both too minute and too vast to be easily perceived by human beings. In this sense, they differ from the seemingly more easily graspable temporalities of human history. However, even the temporal scales of human history are often nonlinear and lacking in discrete edges, creating complex palimpsests between past, present, and future. This is particularly true when it comes to racial and colonial histories of extraction and violence, or refugee experiences of displacement as a kind of suspension of time or a form of waiting. How might we mediate between rhythms of ecological transformation that register what environmental humanities scholar Rob Nixon has termed “slow violence” and ones attuned to such punctual events of mass destruction as military conflict or war?

    This daylong symposium featured presentations by seven Brown University graduate students in the collaborative humanities seminar “In the Wake of War: Ecologies of Displacement” (ENGL 2761V), taught by Ada Smailbegovic and Daniel Y. Kim. The symposium concluded with a plenary talk, “Unmeeting: China in Three Transpacific Orogenies,” by Jerry Zee, assistant professor of anthropology and the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University.

    Student Presenters

    • Choa Choi (English)
    • Thomas Dai (American Studies)
    • Isaac Essex (American Studies)
    • Aislinn Kelly (English)
    • Olivia Anne Lafferty (English)
    • Chi Le (English)
    • Shaonan Xi (Theatre Arts and Performance Studies)

    Sessions

    Session 1: Remnants/Residues

    Isaac Essex, “Dis/Place; In Place: the Woven Threads of Grief, Duration, and Place in Aida Begić’s Snijeg [Snow]”
    Chi Le, “‘The Mesh We Are Netted in’: Spatiotemporal Residues and the Ground of Social Life in Daphne Marlatt’s Steveston

    Respondent: Ada Smailbegovic

    Session 2: Sonic/Synesthetic Witnessing

    Choa Choi, “The Severance Package: Listening to the Drift in Narratives of Displacement”
    Olivia Lafferty, “Transpacific Vibrancy: Sounding out Filipinx American Space-Time in the Wake of the Galleon Trade”

    Respondent: Daniel Y. Kim

    Session 3: Ecologies of Form: Bugs and Branches

    Aislinn Kelly, “Moths, Text(ile) Memory, and Partakers in Life in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan
    Thomas Dai, “Racial Form, Entomological Endurance”
    Shaonan Xi, “Ruth Asawa’s Biomorphism and Ecology of Form”

    Respondent: Jerry Zee

    Plenary Talk

    Jerry Zee, “Unmeeting: China in Three Transpacific Orogenies”

    Presented by the Cogut Institute’s Collaborative Humanities Initiative and Environmental Humanities at Brown.

    Read more about the plenary talk by Jerry Zee
  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    The Collaborative Public Workshop features 12 Brown University doctoral candidates presenting papers developed over the course of the semester in the capstone seminar of the Doctoral Certificate in Collaborative Humanities:

    • Ahmad Abu Ahmad (Comparative Literature)
    • Arnav Adhikari (English)
    • Fabrizio Ciccone (English)
    • Chanelle Dupuis (French and Francophone Studies)
    • Matthew Kateb Goldman (American Studies)
    • Andrés Emil González (Comparative Literature)
    • Bonnie Jones (Music and Multimedia Composition)
    • Helene Nguyen (Modern Culture and Media)
    • Henry Osman (Modern Culture and Media)
    • Jack Quirk (English)
    • JD Stokely (Theatre Arts and Performance Studies)
    • Anna Wright (Musicology and Ethnomusicology)

    Each session includes commentaries from scholars Banu Bargu (University of California, Santa Cruz), William T.S. Mazzarella (University of Chicago), Adi Ophir (Brown University), and Rebecca Schneider (Brown University), as well as a Q&A.

    Free and open to the public. For questions or to request special services, accommodations, or assistance, please contact humanities-institute@brown.edu or (401) 863-6070.

    Presented by the Collaborative Humanities Initiatives at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities.

    Schedule

    Friday, May 5 see Friday schedule

    Saturday, May 6

    9:30 am – 10 am Coffee
    10:00 am – 11:30 am

    Session 5

    Arnav Adhikari
    Commentaries: Adi Ophir, William T.S. Mazzarella

    Helene Nguyen
    Commentaries: Adi Ophir, Banu Bargu

    1:00 pm – 2:30 pm

    Session 6

    Chanelle Dupuis
    Commentaries: Adi Ophir, Banu Bargu

    Jack Quirk
    Commentaries: Adi Ophir, William T.S. Mazzarella

    About the Seminar

    The spring 2023 Project Development Workshop (HMAN 2500) was led by Amanda Anderson, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English and Director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, and Shahzad Bashir, Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Humanities and Professor of History. Over the course of the semester, students each developed and workshopped a paper while performing a number of collateral academic roles: they nominated and introduced a text to the seminar that was formative for their scholarly development; they served as first questioners for papers workshopped by others; and they interviewed one of their peers and prepared an introduction to their work. By providing training and preparation for roles that are crucial to the practice and fabric of academic life, yet are seldom the object of formal study and reflection, the seminar reimagines the conditions and extends the limits of an interdisciplinary and collaborative research space.

    About the Doctoral Certificate

    The Doctoral Certificate in Collaborative Humanities promotes cross-disciplinary work oriented toward the most challenging questions facing humanities research today. Collaboration is built through research practices dedicated to thinking together across disciplines and geographical locations. Participants pursue these forms of inquiry through teaching models and student practices that experiment with group presentations, collaborative online discussions, coauthored seminar papers, and other forms of intellectual partnership.

    See full schedule, bios, etc.
  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    The Collaborative Public Workshop features 12 Brown University doctoral candidates presenting papers developed over the course of the semester in the capstone seminar of the Doctoral Certificate in Collaborative Humanities:

    • Ahmad Abu Ahmad (Comparative Literature)
    • Arnav Adhikari (English)
    • Fabrizio Ciccone (English)
    • Chanelle Dupuis (French and Francophone Studies)
    • Matthew Kateb Goldman (American Studies)
    • Andrés Emil González (Comparative Literature)
    • Bonnie Jones (Music and Multimedia Composition)
    • Helene Nguyen (Modern Culture and Media)
    • Henry Osman (Modern Culture and Media)
    • Jack Quirk (English)
    • JD Stokely (Theatre Arts and Performance Studies)
    • Anna Wright (Musicology and Ethnomusicology)

    Each session includes commentaries from scholars Banu Bargu (University of California, Santa Cruz), William T.S. Mazzarella (University of Chicago), Adi Ophir (Brown University), and Rebecca Schneider (Brown University), as well as a Q&A.

    Free and open to the public. For questions or to request special services, accommodations, or assistance, please contact humanities-institute@brown.edu or (401) 863-6070.

    Presented by the Collaborative Humanities Initiative at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities.

    Schedule

    Friday, May 5

    8:30 am – 9:00 am

    Coffee

    9:00 am – 10:30 am

    Introduction / Session 1

    Bonnie Jones
    Commentaries: Rebecca Schneider, Banu Bargu

    Anna Wright
    Commentaries: Rebecca Schneider, William T.S. Mazzarella

    10:30 am – 11:00 am

    Break

    11:00 am – 12:30 pm

    Session 2

    Henry Osman
    Commentaries: Rebecca Schneider, Banu Bargu

    Ahmad Abu Ahmad
    Commentaries: Adi Ophir, Banu Bargu

    2:00 pm – 3:30 pm

    Session 3

    Matthew Kateb Goldman
    Commentaries: Rebecca Schneider, William T.S. Mazzarella

    JD Stokely
    Commentaries: Rebecca Schneider, Banu Bargu

    3:30 pm – 4:00 pm

    Coffee

    4:00 pm – 5:30 pm

    Session 4

    Andrés Emil González
    Commentaries: Rebecca Schneider, William T.S. Mazzarella

    Fabrizio Ciccone
    Commentaries: Adi Ophir, William T.S. Mazzarella

    Saturday, May 6see Saturday schedule

    About the Seminar

    The spring 2023 Project Development Workshop (HMAN 2500) was led by Amanda Anderson, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English and Director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, and Shahzad Bashir, Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Humanities and Professor of History. Over the course of the semester, students each developed and workshopped a paper while performing a number of collateral academic roles: they nominated and introduced a text to the seminar that was formative for their scholarly development; they served as first questioners for papers workshopped by others; and they interviewed one of their peers and prepared an introduction to their work. By providing training and preparation for roles that are crucial to the practice and fabric of academic life, yet are seldom the object of formal study and reflection, the seminar reimagines the conditions and extends the limits of an interdisciplinary and collaborative research space.

    About the Doctoral Certificate

    The Doctoral Certificate in Collaborative Humanities promotes cross-disciplinary work oriented toward the most challenging questions facing humanities research today. Collaboration is built through research practices dedicated to thinking together across disciplines and geographical locations. Participants pursue these forms of inquiry through teaching models and student practices that experiment with group presentations, collaborative online discussions, coauthored seminar papers, and other forms of intellectual partnership.

    See the full schedule, bios, etc.
  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    May 13 May 14, 2022

    The Collaborative Public Workshop features 14 graduate students presenting papers developed over the course of the semester in the capstone seminar of the Doctoral Certificate in Collaborative Humanities:

    Mariam Abou-Kathir (Religious Studies)
    Osama Ahmad (History)
    Alberto Alcaraz (Political Science)
    Inga Chinilina (Music)
    Tara Dhaliwal (Religious Studies)
    Julie Dind (Theater Arts and Performance Studies)
    Isabel Farías (Comparative Literature)
    Norman L. Frazier (History)
    Lee Gilboa (Music)
    Nabila Islam (Sociology)
    Mariz Kelada (Anthropology)
    Heather Lawrence (Modern Culture and Media)
    Sherena Razek (Modern Culture and Media)
    Stephen Woo (Modern Culture and Media)

    Each panel will include commentaries from guests Webb Keane (Anthropology, University of Michigan), Mara Mills (Media, Culture and Communication, New York University), Kevin Quashie (English, Brown University), and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg (Comparative Literature and Italian Studies, Brown University), as well as a Q&A period.

    Schedule

    Friday, May 13, 2022 — Click here to see schedule.
    Saturday, May 14, 2022
    9:30 am – 10:00 am

    Coffee

    10:00 am – 11:30 am

    Panel 5

    • Inga Chinilina, Music • “Teleology and Time in Music in North America in the 20th Century”
      Commentaries: Mara Mills, Kevin Quashie
    • Nabila Islam, Sociology • “In Search of Sociology’s Lost Times: The Possibilities for Decolonizing Time in Postcolonial Sociology”
      Commentaries: Webb Keane, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg
    12:30 pm – 2:00 pm

    Panel 6

    • Mariz Kelada, Anthropology • “Media’s Extramoral Politics: Infrastructures of Filming in Cairo’s Streets”
      Commentaries: Webb Keane, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg
    • Osama Ahmad, History • “Tarīkh Magazine, 1999–2019: (Re)Producing knowledge in Lahore’s Urdu Bazaar”
      Commentaries: Webb Keane, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg
    2:00 pm – 2:15 pm

    Coffee

    2:15 pm – 3:45 pm

    Panel 7

    • Julie Dind, Theater Arts and Performance Studies • “Voodling, Camérer: Image Is a(n Autistic) Verb”
      Commentaries: Mara Mills, Kevin Quashie
    • Isabel Farías Velasco, Comparative Literature • “Trilingual Hijacking: The Initial Encounter Between Latin, Nahuatl, and Spanish in Early Modern Mexico”
      Commentaries: Webb Keane, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg

    See the event website for abstracts of the talks.

    Free and open to the public. No registration is required. For questions or to request special services, accommodations, or assistance, please contact humanities-institute@brown.edu or (401) 863-6120.

    Brown University abides by public health guidance and health and safety protocols to reduce the risk of transmission of COVID-19. Event attendees, including visitors and guests, must comply with all University policies and protocols in place at the time of the event, including current University policy regarding face masks and coverings (see the University’s COVID-19 Campus Activity Status page for the current policy for both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals).

    About the Seminar

    During the spring of 2022, the Project Development Workshop (HMAN 2500) was led by Amanda Anderson, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English and Director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, and Shahzad Bashir, Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Humanities and Professor of History. Students developed and workshopped a paper over the course of the semester while performing a number of collateral academic roles: they nominated and introduced a text to the seminar that was formative for their scholarly development; they served as first questioners for papers workshopped by others; and they interviewed one of their peers and prepared an introduction to their work. By providing training and preparation for roles that are crucial to the practice and fabric of academic life, yet are seldom the object of formal study and reflection, the course reimagines the conditions and extends the limits of an interdisciplinary and collaborative research space.

    About the Doctoral Certificate

    The Doctoral Certificate in Collaborative Humanities promotes crossdisciplinary work oriented toward the most challenging questions facing humanities research today. Collaboration is built through research practices dedicated to thinking together across disciplines and geographical locations. Participants pursue these forms of inquiry through teaching models and student practices that experiment with group presentations, collaborative online discussions, co-authored seminar papers, and other forms of intellectual partnership.

    Full schedule, abstracts, and bios
  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    May 13 May 14, 2022

    The Collaborative Public Workshop features 14 graduate students presenting papers developed over the course of the semester in the capstone seminar of the Doctoral Certificate in Collaborative Humanities:

    Mariam Abou-Kathir (Religious Studies)
    Osama Ahmad (History)
    Alberto Alcaraz (Political Science)
    Inga Chinilina (Music)
    Tara Dhaliwal (Religious Studies)
    Julie Dind (Theater Arts and Performance Studies)
    Isabel Farías (Comparative Literature)
    Norman L. Frazier (History)
    Lee Gilboa (Music)
    Nabila Islam (Sociology)
    Mariz Kelada (Anthropology)
    Heather Lawrence (Modern Culture and Media)
    Sherena Razek (Modern Culture and Media)
    Stephen Woo (Modern Culture and Media)

    Each panel will include commentaries from guests Webb Keane (Anthropology, University of Michigan), Mara Mills (Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University), Kevin Quashie (English, Brown University), and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg (Comparative Literature and Italian Studies, Brown University), as well as a Q&A period.

    Schedule

    Friday, May 13, 2022
    8:30 am – 9:00 am

    Coffee

    9:00 am – 10:30 am

    Introduction and Panel 1

    • Heather Lawrence, Modern Culture and Media • “Memes on Trial: From Permit Patty to Karen”
      Commentaries: Mara Mills, Kevin Quashie
    • Alberto Alcaraz Escarcega, Political Science • “Notes on Arendt’s Sensorium: Appearance, Metaphor, and Common Sense”
      Commentaries: Mara Mills, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg
    10:30 am – 10:45 am

    Break

    10:45 am – 12:15 pm

    Panel 2

    • Lee Gilboa, Music • “Against the Odds: Listening for Vocality and Heardness in Oral Testimonies
      Commentaries: Mara Mills, Kevin Quashie
    • Stephen Woo, Modern Culture and Media • “Framing Carceral and Cinematic Time
      Commentaries: Mara Mills, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg
    1:35 pm – 3:00 pm

    Panel 3

    • Tara Dhaliwal, Religious Studies • “Dulla Bhatti: Son of the Daughters of Punjab”
      Commentaries: Webb Keane, Kevin Quashie
    • Norman L. Frazier, History • “The Home of Heinrich Zille: Tenements in Working-Class Berlin, 1853–1926”
      Commentaries: Webb Keane, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg
    3:00 pm – 3:30 pm

    Coffee

    3:30 pm – 5:00 pm

    Panel 4

    • Sherena Razek, Modern Culture and Media • “On Seeds and Soil: Palestinian Visual Cultures of the Subterranean”
      Commentaries: Mara Mills, Kevin Quashie
    • Mariam Abou-Kathir, Religious Studies • “‘An Ocean Without a Shore’: Wajd and Wujud in ‘A’isha al-Ba‘uniyyah’s Principles of Sufism
      Commentaries: Webb Keane, Kevin Quashie
    5:00 pm

    Reception

    Saturday, May 14, 2022 — Click here to see schedule.

    See the event website for abstracts of the talks.

    Free and open to the public. No registration is required. For questions or to request special services, accommodations, or assistance, please contact humanities-institute@brown.edu or (401) 863-6120.

    Brown University abides by public health guidance and health and safety protocols to reduce the risk of transmission of COVID-19. Event attendees, including visitors and guests, must comply with all University policies and protocols in place at the time of the event, including current University policy regarding face masks and coverings (see the University’s COVID-19 Campus Activity Status page for the current policy for both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals).

    About the Seminar

    During the spring of 2022, the Project Development Workshop (HMAN 2500) was led by Amanda Anderson, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English and Director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, and Shahzad Bashir, Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Humanities and Professor of History. Students developed and workshopped a paper over the course of the semester while performing a number of collateral academic roles: they nominated and introduced a text to the seminar that was formative for their scholarly development; they served as first questioners for papers workshopped by others; and they interviewed one of their peers and prepared an introduction to their work. By providing training and preparation for roles that are crucial to the practice and fabric of academic life, yet are seldom the object of formal study and reflection, the course reimagines the conditions and extends the limits of an interdisciplinary and collaborative research space.

    About the Doctoral Certificate

    The Doctoral Certificate in Collaborative Humanities promotes crossdisciplinary work oriented toward the most challenging questions facing humanities research today. Collaboration is built through research practices dedicated to thinking together across disciplines and geographical locations. Participants pursue these forms of inquiry through teaching models and student practices that experiment with group presentations, collaborative online discussions, co-authored seminar papers, and other forms of intellectual partnership.

    Full schedule, abstracts, and bios
  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    May 6 May 7, 2022

    “Capitalism and the Human” begins from two closely related premises: 1) that the category of the human is today inseparable from the dynamics of contemporary capitalism and 2) that 21st-century activism cannot evade a critical encounter with the question of the human in its various guises. Topics will include the persistent allure of concepts such as agency, autonomy, and thought; the philosophical implications of ever more invasive technologies of surveillance and governance; the apparent indispensability of the category of the human in demands for racial justice; and the uncertain prospects of species survival. What future remains for one of the most influential traditions of 20th-century radical thought, the philosophical critique of the human?

    The conference, presented as part of the Collaborative Humanities Initiative, was co-organized by Timothy Bewes, Professor of English at Brown University, and Jeremy Gilbert, Professor of Cultural and Political Theory at the University of East London, who was a visiting professor at the Cogut Institute in spring 2020.

    Sessions

    Session 1: Anthropocene and Futurity

    Claire Colebrook, Pennsylvania State University • “‘Anthropos’ Trumps ‘Homo Economicus’” (video)
    Ashley Dawson, CUNY Graduate Center • “The Human Prospect in an Age of Biocapitalism” (video)

    Moderator: Marah Nagelhout

    Session 2: Bio-Necro-Sociality

    Sophie Lewis, Brooklyn Institute for Social Research • “Antiwork Anthrogenesis” (video)
    Dierdra Reber, University of Kentucky • “Losing Our Minds to Post-Truth: On White Capital, Necroprofit, and Human Futurity” (video)

    Moderator: Connie Scozzaro

    Session 3: Racial Capitalism

    Kathryn Yusoff, Queen Mary University of London • “Decapitalizing the Human in the Epoch of the Inhumanities” (video)
    Richard E. Purcell, Carnegie Mellon University • “Rereading Long ’70s Black Radicalism Against Our Techocapitalist Present” (video)

    Moderator: Rolland Murray

    YouTube playlist and abstracts
  • Join us for a talk and conversation with scholar Jonathan Sterne around his new book, Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment (Duke University Press, January 2022).

    In Diminished Faculties Jonathan Sterne conceives of impairment as a fundamental dimension of human experience, at once political and physical. While some impairments are enshrined as normal in international standards, others are treated as causes or effects of illness or disability. Drawing on his personal history with thyroid cancer and a paralyzed vocal cord, Sterne undertakes a political phenomenology of impairment in which experience is understood from the standpoint of a subject that is not fully able to account for itself. Alongside his fractured account of experience, Sterne provides a tour of alternative vocal technologies and practices, a study of “normal” hearing loss as a cultural practice rather than a medical problem, and an intertwined history and phenomenology of fatigue that follows the concept as it careens from people to materials science to industrial management to spoons. He demonstrates how impairment is a problem, opportunity, and occasion for approaching larger questions about disability, subjectivity, power, technology, and experience in new ways.

    The Q&A will be led and moderated by Emily Lim Rogers.

    Jonathan Sterne teaches in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. He is the author of Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment (Duke University Press, 2022), MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke UP, 2012), The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke UP, 2003), and numerous articles on media, technologies, and the politics of culture. He is also editor of The Sound Studies Reader (Routledge, 2012) and co-editor of The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age (Minnesota University Press, 2016). He is working on a series of essays on artificial intelligence and culture, and with Mara Mills, he is writing Tuning Time: Histories of Sound and Speed. Visit his website at http://sterneworks.org.

    Emily Lim Rogers is the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Disability Studies at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, the Department of American Studies, and the Program in Science, Technology, and Society (STS) at Brown University. Her research interests are at the intersection of disability studies, medical anthropology, the history of medicine, and STS. Broadly, she is interested in the question of what happens when debility exists outside of biomedicine’s ability to apprehend it. Her first book project, “Biomedicine’s Binds: The Politics of ME/CFS,” is an ethnographic and historical study of the incomplete medicalization of chronic fatigue syndrome, also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis or ME/CFS. It demonstrates how the fraught gendered and racialized dynamics that determine who is allowed to be ill places double-binds on chronically ill bodies within the iatrogenic context of the American healthcare system.

    Free and open to the public. For questions or to request special services, accommodations, or assistance, please contact humanities-institute@brown.edu or (401) 863-6120.

    This event is presented as part of the Cogut Institute’s Collaborative Humanities Initiative.

    Register and join the event
  •  Location: Cogut InstituteRoom: Basement and 2nd Floor

    This exhibit showcases projects by graduate students in the collaborative humanities seminar “Decolonial Matters: Thinking from the South” led by Yannis Hamilakis and Vazira Zamindar.

    In the seminar, students have explored colonization as a material condition and focused on decolonial practices from the South. They have engaged with the matter and materiality of things, objects, artifacts, and landscapes — including archaeological remains, museum objects, works of art, and contemporary material traces of migration and border crossing. Students have interrogated the material and racial basis of the South and experimented with modes of thinking and practice, from indigenous perspectives to contemporary art, that can suture the relationship between objects and people.

    Students featured in the exhibit:

    Ahmad Abu Ahmad
    Osama Ahmad
    Yannick Etoundi
    Ana Gonzalez San Martin
    Faraz Haider
    Nabila Islam
    Jay Loomis
    Larissa Nez
    Helene Nguyen
    Shae Omonijo
    Kanha Prasad
    Nadia Ghassan Tadros
    Rachel Thimmig
    Erica Wolencheck

    Opening reception: April 21, 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm | Join us for refreshments and the opportunity to meet the students featured in the exhibit.

    Free and open to the public. For questions or to request special services, accommodations, or assistance, please contact humanities-institute@brown.edu or (401) 863-6120.

    This exhibit is presented as part of the Cogut Institute’s Collaborative Humanities Initiative.

  • Friday, April 9, 2021, 10:00 am – 3:30 pm
    Saturday, April 10, 2021, 10:00 am – 2:30 pm

    The Collaborative Public Workshop concluded the capstone seminar of the Doctoral Certificate in Collaborative Humanities, taught in Spring 2021 by Amanda Anderson, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English, and Tamara Chin, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and East Asian Studies.

    Speakers included Pablo a Marca (Italian Studies) on posthumanist fairy tales, Katherine Contess (Modern Culture and Media) on the gadgetized body, Thomas Dai (American Studies) on entomological aesthetics, Kareem Estefan (Modern Culture and Media) on Palestinian fabulations, Nomaan Hasan (Anthropology) on Sufi ritual life, Andressa Maia (Portuguese and Brazilian Studies) on Black female protagonism in Brazil, Alessandro Moghrabi (Comparative Literature) on ironic materiality, Regina Pieck (Hispanic Studies) on Mexico City’s subterranean poetics, Jake Sokolov-Gonzalez (Music) on vibrational ontology, Katyayni Seth (Anthropology) on ethnography in practice, and Baoli Yang (Comparative Literature) on medieval Asian Sinoscript culture.

    The panels included commentaries from guests Veena Das (Johns Hopkins University) and Macarena Gómez-Barris (Pratt Institute) and from Brown University faculty members Faiz Ahmed (History) and Marc Redfield (Comparative Literature, English, and German Studies), as well as a Q&A period.

    This event, presented as part of the Collaborative Humanities Initiative, was free and open to the public.

    View the full schedule
  • Friday, April 9, 2021, 10:00 am – 3:30 pm
    Saturday, April 10, 2021, 10:00 am – 2:30 pm

    The Collaborative Public Workshop concluded the capstone seminar of the Doctoral Certificate in Collaborative Humanities, taught in Spring 2021 by Amanda Anderson, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English, and Tamara Chin, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and East Asian Studies.

    Speakers included Pablo a Marca (Italian Studies) on posthumanist fairy tales, Katherine Contess (Modern Culture and Media) on the gadgetized body, Thomas Dai (American Studies) on entomological aesthetics, Kareem Estefan (Modern Culture and Media) on Palestinian fabulations, Nomaan Hasan (Anthropology) on Sufi ritual life, Andressa Maia (Portuguese and Brazilian Studies) on Black female protagonism in Brazil, Alessandro Moghrabi (Comparative Literature) on ironic materiality, Regina Pieck (Hispanic Studies) on Mexico City’s subterranean poetics, Jake Sokolov-Gonzalez (Music) on vibrational ontology, Katyayni Seth (Anthropology) on ethnography in practice, and Baoli Yang (Comparative Literature) on medieval Asian Sinoscript culture.

    The panels included commentaries from guests Veena Das (Johns Hopkins University) and Macarena Gómez-Barris (Pratt Institute) and from Brown University faculty members Faiz Ahmed (History) and Marc Redfield (Comparative Literature, English, and German Studies), as well as a Q&A period.

    This event, presented as part of the Collaborative Humanities Initiative, was free and open to the public.

    View the full schedule
  • What might a decolonial understanding of chemical exposures look like? While concepts like the Anthropocene scale environmental violence up to the planetary level—treating the chemical pollutant and the human body as the same everywhere—this talk took a non-universalizing approach to chemical violence and its relations to land and bodies. Focusing on the history of Canada’s Chemical Valley and the world’s oldest running oil refinery, this talk asked how the specificity of chemical exposures can be understood in relation to colonialism as well as Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee obligations to land on the lower Great Lakes. In so doing, it made the case for the need to rethink the assumptions of universalism and liberal humanism that undergird conventional environmental understandings.

    Michelle Murphy is Professor of History and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada; Research Chair of Science and Technology Studies and Environmental Data Justice; and Director of the Technoscience Research Unit. Her current research looks at chemical pollution and environmental data in Canada’s Chemical Valley, with a focus on the world’s oldest running oil refinery which sits on the land of Aamjiwnaang First Nation. Murphy’s most recent book is The Economization of Life (Duke University Press, 2017). She is Métis from Winnipeg.

    This event was presented as part of the Initiative for Environmental Humanities at Brown as well as the Collaborative Humanities Initiative.

  • Virtual event on May 8 and 9, 2020

    The 2020 Collaborative Public Workshop featured twelve interventions on a variety of topics including, among others, African American and Black history, deforestation and the environment, settler colonialism, the history and theory of political emancipation, ethical and political claims of aesthetic practices, and experiences of life under duress. The speakers are graduate students in Africana Studies, American Studies, Anthropology, German Studies, Music and Multimedia Composition, Political Science, Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, and Religious Studies. Each panel included commentaries from guests Stephen Best (University of California, Berkeley) and Jeremy Gilbert (University of East London) and from Brown University faculty members Andre Willis (Religious Studies) and Patricia Ybarra (Theatre Arts and Performance Studies), as well as a Q&A period.

    Schedule, speaker bios, and presentation abstracts.

    The Collaborative Public Workshop concluded the capstone seminar of the Doctoral Certificate in Collaborative Humanities. Participants developed and workshopped a paper over the course of the semester while studying a number of collateral academic roles: they nominated and introduced a text to the seminar that was formative for their scholarly development; they served as first questioners for papers workshopped by others; and they interviewed one of their peers and prepared an introduction to his or her work. By providing training and preparation for roles that are crucial to the practice and fabric of academic life, yet are seldom the object of formal study and reflection, the course reimagined the conditions and extended the limits of an interdisciplinary and collaborative research space.

    This virtual event was co-organized and moderated by Timothy Bewes, Professor of English and Interim Director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, and Brian Meeks, Professor and Chair of Africana Studies at Brown University.

  •  Location: John Carter Brown Library

    Topography, from topos, is the practice of describing place through language, the features of the land, the inhabitants, and the accumulation of history. Specific to locality and the perspective of the person delineating, describing, or collecting materials, topography counters the worldliness of geography while also offering a potential tool to multiply singular approaches. Over a day-long workshop, approaches to place from Indigenous and European perspectives and interrogate the frame of ‘topography’ in global contexts were examined. Working with special collections, the day included three talks and object viewing sessions that focused  on the Americas, the Middle East, South Asia, and Europe, and included descriptions of military campaigns, fortifications, settlements, urban cartographies, city views, forests and hunts, palaces, religious structures, markets, peoples, coastal views, weather, maps, and more.

    The workshop was organized by Holly Shaffer (History of Art & Architecture, Brown University), Cynthia Roman (The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University), Neil Safier (The John Carter Brown Library, Brown University), and Shahzad Bashir (Religious Studies, Brown University).

    Session 1: 10:00 am – 1:00 pm (John Carter Brown Library)

    John Lopez (Assistant Professor of Art History, University of California-Davis), “Renaissance Cartography and the Mapping of the Environmental Crisis at Viceregal Mexico City”
    When the Spanish founded Mexico City in 1524, they inherited from the Aztec an island site that flooded. After following in the footsteps of their pre-Columbian predecessor, by rebuilding the hydraulic web of causeways, dikes, and floodgates, Spanish colonial authorities sought an alternative solution to the city’s propensity to inundate. In 1607, the cartographer-turned-hydraulic engineer Enrico Martínez implemented the desagüe, an engineering project to drain the lakes that surrounded the city into the Gulf of Mexico. As part of his response to environmental crisis, Martínez produced Descripción de la comarca de México i obra del desagüe de la laguna. Martínez’s map represents a defining moment in Mexico City’s history because it is the first drawing made by a professional mapmaker in the service of flood control. Made under the guise of environmental concern and technological prowess, Descripción de la comarca de México aids understanding how flooding was a problem posed by New World nature to Renaissance cartographic analysis, where science and mathematical abstraction were mobilized to end Mexico City’s centuries-old problem of chronic flooding.

    Samira Sheikh (Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies, Vanderbilt University), “The Languages of Gujarati Maps”
    Terrestrial maps produced in Gujarat in the 18th century drew from and “translated” cartographic vocabularies available in this highly connected and trade-rich province of the Mughal empire. With the extension of the East India Company’s influence over Gujarat, local mapmakers veered towards conventions that often looked European on the surface. In response, Samira Sheikh argued that Gujarati cartography, informed by religious, maritime, scientific, and painterly conventions, was in fact the site of multiple, cross-cutting translation projects.

    Ünver Rüstem (Assistant Professor of History of Art, Johns Hopkins University), “Mapping Cosmopolitanism: An Eighteenth-Century Printed Ottoman Atlas and the Turn to Baroque”
    In 1732, İbrahim Müteferrika — founder in Istanbul of the first Turkish-language Ottoman printing press — published the Cihānnümā, an illustrated world atlas filled with copperplate maps. While in some ways replicating the art of traditional manuscripts, the Cihānnümā’s makers derived their maps from European printed atlases, even adapting the latter’s Baroque cartouches. Ünver Rüstem discussed these cartouches as sites for the emergence of a distinctly Ottoman reinterpretation of the Baroque that anticipated by several years the use of the same mode in Istanbul’s public architecture. Focusing on the plates signed by the Armenian engraver Mıgırdıç, Ünver Rüstem highlighted the special role of non-Muslim Ottomans in mapping this global style onto the empire’s visual culture.

    “Viewing Urban Cartographies” with Bertie Mandelblatt (Curator of Maps and Prints, John Carter Brown Library)

    Lunch break: 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm

    Session 2: 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm, John Hay Library

    “Viewing the Minassian Collection” with Shahzad Bashir (Aga Khan Professor of Islam and the Humanities, Brown University) and Holly Shaffer (Assistant Professor of History of Art & Architecture, Brown University), and graduate students in  Tracing Translations (HMAN 2400R)

    “Viewing the Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection” with Peter Harrington (Curator of the Military Collection, John Hay Library)

    This workshop was sponsored by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, the John Carter Brown Library, the John Hay Library, and the Lewis Walpole Library; it was part of the programming for the Collaborative Humanities course, Tracing Translations: Artistic Migrations and Reinventions in the Early Modern World, and was part of a series on topography organized by the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University.

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 202

    Guest seminar open to Brown University members, presented as part of the collaborative humanities course “The Idea of the University” taught by Gerhard Richter and Peter Szendy. To attend this special seminar please register at this link: https://forms.gle/8Uc822JXVu3v9sxU7  (You must be logged into your Brown University email account to access the form.) Reading material will be pre-circulated to registered attendees.

    Silvia Federici is Emerita Professor of Political Philosophy and International Studies at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. In 1972 she was among the founders of the International Feminist Collective, the organization that launched the Campaign for Wages for Housework in the United States and abroad. She has also been active in the anti-globalization and the anti-death penalty movements and was a founding member of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa, which for more than a decade documented the struggle of African students against the austerity programs imposed by the IMF and the World Bank on their countries.

    Federici is the author of many essays on political philosophy, feminist theory, cultural studies, and education. Among her published works are The New York Wages for Housework Committee: Theory, History, Documents 1972–1977 (Duke University Press, 2017), co-edited with Arlen Austin; Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (PM Press, 2012); and Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (AK Press, 2004).

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 202

    Guest seminar open to Brown University members, presented as part of the collaborative humanities course “The Idea of the University” taught by Gerhard Richter and Peter Szendy. To attend this special seminar please register at this link: https://forms.gle/mVMU3gYeYmTYtcxw7 (You must be logged into your Brown University email account to access the form.) Reading material will be pre-circulated to registered attendees. 

    Alexander García Düttmann, an internationally renowned scholar, writer, and critic, is Professor of Philosophy and the Theory of Art at the University of the Arts in Berlin, Germany. He has also taught at the University of Essex (U.K.), Monash University (Australia), New York University, Middlesex University, Goldsmiths College (London, U.K.), and the Royal College of Art. Among his most recent books are Participation: Awareness of Semblance (Konstanz University Press, 2011); Naïve Art: An Essay on Happiness (August Verlag, 2012); What Does Art Know? For an Aesthetics of Resistance (Konstanz University Press, 2015); What Is Contemporary Art? On Political Ideology (Konstanz University Press, 2017); and Love Machine: The Origin of the Work of Art (Konstanz University Press, 2018). He is also the editor of the French edition of Jacques Derrida’s Theory and Practice, a previously unpublished seminar by Derrida on Marx (Éditions Galilée, 2017).

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    This conference took up the intersections between critical race theory, affect theory, and poetics as a way of exploring how the formal innovation and experimentation engaged in by poets of color is connected in complex and myriad ways to the contexts that shape their production and reception — contexts in which structures of race play a significant role. It does so by addressing the soft boundaries that connect aesthetic expressions of racialized affect found in works by poets such as Berssenbrugge and Rankine and the various theoretical frameworks of affect theory associated with thinkers like Ahmed, Deleuze, Fanon, and Tomkins. In so doing, Feeling Its Presence staged an engagement with the powerful argument that Dorothy Wang makes in her book Thinking Its Presence on behalf of a historically sensitive mode of critical formalism attuned to the relationship between poetic form and “the larger social, historical, and political contexts that produced the poet’s subjectivity.”

    The scholars presenting their work were graduate students enrolled in the collaborative humanities seminar “Theories of Affect: Poetics of Expression Through and Beyond Identity” (HMAN 2400K) taught by Daniel Kim and Ada Smailbegovic. The conference concluded, appropriately enough, with a lecture by Dorothy Wang, Professor of American Studies at Williams College and the author of Thinking its Presence: Form, Race and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (Stanford University Press, 2014).

    Schedule

    Thursday, May 9, 2019
    8:30 AM – 9:00 AM Morning Coffee
    9:00 AM – 9:15 AM Opening Remarks
    9:15 AM – 11:00 AM Panel 1: Migrant Orientations: Dislocation, Materiality, Transfiguration

    Thomas Dai • “Vagrant Acts: The Poetics of Jenny Xie and Kai Carlson-Wee”
    MJ Cunniff • “‘Scarlet itself is matter:’ Lyric Perceptibility in Mei-mei Berssenbrugge”
    Katey Preston • “‘Gold or Gold-Coloured:’ Transfiguration in Mercedes Eng’s Prison Industrial Complex Explodes

    11:00 AM – 11:15 AM Break
    11:15 AM – 1:00 PM Panel 2: Dictee

    Ashley Dun • “The Corpus of Exile in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Visual Texts”
    Kelsey-Yichi Ma • “Vulnerability and the Invulnerable Narrative: The Second Person in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee
    Erin Prior • “‘Stand as a run stands:’ Identity as Epistemology in Theresa Cha’s Dictee

    1:00 PM – 2:00 PM Lunch Break
    2:00 PM – 3:45 PM Panel 3: Affective Bodies

    Noah Brooksher • “Poetics, Ethics, Contingency: The Letter of the Future, or the Future as Letter”
    Mariam Abou-Kathir • “‘The Body’s Crime of Living:’ Epic Temporality and Generational Trauma in Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds
    Amber Vistein • “Stuck in the Throat: Theorizing Oral Expressivity in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric

     3:45 pm – 4:00 pm Break 
     4:00 pm – 5:30 pm Dorothy Wang • “English Poetry and the ‘Afterlife’ of Colonialism”
    5:30 pm – 6:30 pm Reception

    This event, presented as part of the Collaborative Humanities Initiative, was co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, the Departments of American Studies, Comparative Literature, English, and Modern Culture and Media, the Malcolm S. Forbes Center for Culture and Media Studies, and the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women.

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    April 26, 2019

    The Collaborative Public Workshop concluded a capstone seminar for the Graduate Certificate in Collaborative Humanities. The seminar, HMAN 2500: Project Development Workshop, was taught in spring 2019 by Amanda Anderson, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English, and Tamara Chin, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and East Asian Studies.

    Over the course of the semester, participants in the seminar developed and workshopped a paper central to their core doctoral work. In addition, all participants performed a number of diverse roles: they nominated and then introduced a text that was formative for their scholarly development; they served as first questioners for papers workshopped by others; and they interviewed one of their peers and prepared a formal introduction of their work. The course provided training for roles that are crucial to the form and quality of academic and public life but that are seldom an object of study and practice in themselves.

    The conference featured talks by anthropologist Rosalind Morris (Columbia University) and political scientist Corey Robin (Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center) as well as Brown University graduate students Chris DiBona (Religious Studies), Aaron Jacobs (History), Nechama Juni (Religious Studies), Irina Kalinka (Modern Culture and Media), Pedro Lopes de Almeida (Portuguese and Brazilian Studies), Stephen Marsh (English), Caleb Murray (Religious Studies), N’Kosi Oates (Africana Studies), Urszula Rutkowska (English) and Jan Tabor (German Studies).

    Brown University faculty Melvin Rogers, Associate Professor of Political Science, and Ellen Rooney, Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in English and Modern Culture and Media, served as respondents along with Rosalind Morris and Corey Robin.

    Read the full program

    This event was presented as part of the Collaborative Humanities Initiative.

     

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 305

    October 26 and 27, 2018

    In South Asian art, the distinction between the “secular” and the “religious,” further complicated by the “spiritual,” has been fraught with contestations. In this symposium, art historians, historians, and philosophers examined the entanglement of art history’s categories and practices with the politics of the present. The symposium positioned itself at the cusp of two dominant discourses: (i) the lingering Orientalist and nationalist projections that emphasize the “religious” nature of South Asian artistic traditions as against Western secularization; (ii) the assertion of the place of art within the modern secular life of nations, which posits the transitions of objects from earlier religious to new artistic denominations.

    Speakers and Participants: Amanda Anderson, Brown University; Ariella Azoulay, Brown University; Akeel Bilgrami, Columbia University; Iftikhar Dadi, Cornell University; Finbarr Barry Flood, New York University; Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, and Cogut Institute; Kajri Jain, University of Toronto; Santhi Kavuri-Bauer, San Francisco State University; Sonal Khullar, University of Washington, Seattle; Jinah Kim, Harvard University; Leora Maltz-Leca, Rhode Island School of Design; Saloni Mathur, UCLA; Sumathi Ramaswamy, Duke University; Tamara Sears, Rutgers University; Kavita Singh, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi; Foad Torshizi, Rhode Island School of Design; Laura Weinstein, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Karin Zitzewitz, Michigan State University.

    The symposium, which took place on October 26 and 27, 2018, was co-organized by Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Vazira Zamindar, the symposium was presented by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities as part of its Collaborative Humanities Initiative and by the Center for Contemporary South Asia of the Watson Institute as part of Art History from the South.

    View Abstracts and Videos
  •  Location: Granoff Center for the Creative ArtsRoom: Martinos Auditorium

    Oct 17, 8:00 pm | FREE
    Martinos Auditorium, Granoff Center for the Creative Arts

    An exploration of historical media featuring groundbreaking works, including Conlon Nancarrow’s Studies for Player Piano, György Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique (for 100 metronomes), John Cage’s Williams Mix (for eight simultaneously played independent magnetic tape machines) and Butch Rovan’s Winding Up

    Presented by Brown Arts Initiative and Cogut Institute for the Humanities.

  •  Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke HallRoom: 003

    Students of the Collaborative Humanities Seminar led by Adi Ophir and Peter Szendy (“It’s About Time: Temporalities of Waiting in Theory, Literature, and Film,” HMAN 2400G), will present a staged collective reading of selected passages from Franz Kafka’s The Castle (trans. Anthea Bell [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009]). By working on the length, speed, and duration of the passages, as well as on the alternating of the reading voices, they will experiment with a performative approach to the analysis of temporality in the novel.

  •  Location: Sidney E. Frank Hall for Life SciencesRoom: Marcuvitz Auditorium

    A screening of Lars von Trier’s 2011 film Melancholia, in which two sisters find their already strained relationship challenged as a mysterious new planet threatens to collide with Earth. The film stars Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Kiefer Sutherland. Peter Szendy, David Herlihy Professor of Humanities and Comparative Literature, will give a short introduction. This screening is presented as part of the collaborative humanities seminar “It’s About Time: Temporalities of Waiting in Theory, Literature, and Film” taught by Peter Szendy and Adi Ophir.