This talk will take you into the process of creating a new, experimental opera based on a historical ghost story from Pu Songling’s seventeenth-century Chinese masterpiece, Liaozhao’s Strange Tales (Liaozhai zhiyi). Entitled Ghost Village, the opera is a creative collaboration between Judith Zeitlin, as scholar...
In this talk, Stephanie McCarter will discuss her recent translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Penguin, 2022). She will first address her tactics for transforming Ovid's poetic and metrical effects into English verse. She will then outline her strategies for interpreting and rendering Ovid's themes of sexual...
Join us for a discussion with Isaac Julien about his process of creating Once Again… (Statues Never Die). Commissioned by the Barnes Foundation on the occasion of its 100th Anniversary in 2022, Julien’s immersive, black-and-white, five-screen, on-site video installation Once Again… (Statues Never Die) brings...
Make a Poem Cry is an anthology from one of California’s high-security prisons brought to us through the creative writing classes of Luis J. Rodríguez. Rodríguez and formerly incarcerated writer Kenneth E. Hartman have selected work penned from 2016 to 2018. These are poems, essays,...
"I sometimes think I was born reading. I can’t remember the time when I didn’t have a book in my hands, my head lost to the world around me." What Vivian Gornick did not say when she wrote these sentences was how often the book in...
The COVID pandemic appeared as a threat to human life, both in the vital sense (a risk to biological life) and in the social sense (a risk to social life: disruption from the suspension of activities, lack of public transport, closure of schools, etc.). It...
THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED Artist and filmmaker, Isaac Julien, and writer and curator, Mark Nash, will screen excerpts from Julien's film "Lessons of the Hour—Frederick Douglass" in a presentation that will explore the importance of looking to history and biography to articulate contemporary cultural movements....
One of the greatest threats against democracy and justice is indolence--defined as a form of militant indifference based on the lack of empathy for the suffering of others. Cristina Rivera Garza will explore how taking part in and contributing to transnational emotional communities in Mexico and the...
SCHEDULE OF EVENTS: 4:00 - 5:15 PM Talks: William Davies King and Rebecca Falkoff 7:00 - 8:00 PM Staged Reading: Collections of Nothing Enough is Enough EVENT DETAILS: Talks: William Davies King and Rebecca Falkoff The Creative Edge of Collecting William Davies King has spent a lifetime collecting nothing in a way he...
Why study the humanities in prison? Why teach them? What is the value of prison humanities programs for communities both inside and outside of prisons? What humanistic texts and skills do we teach? This day-long symposium, hosted by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center of the University...
The poems in Of Great Importance discuss taxes and debts, stocks and flows, citizenship and labor contracts, notaries and accountants, factories and strikes, freedoms and fundamental rights, how to make money and how to win elections, when to declare war and when to found a new state....