2020-2021
Thursday, October 1st at 7pm
"Historical Fiction—A Novelist’s Approach to Researching and Writing 19th Century Cuba"
Chantel Acevedo is a Professor of English, Director of Creative Writing, and novelist. In this talk, Acevedo will share her experiences writing and researching her latest novels The Distant Marvels and The Living Infinite, which are set in Cuba during the War of Independence from Spain, and were both published by Europa Editions.
View the recording here!
Tuesday, October 13 at 7pm
"Slavery's Emancipation: A Rashomon Effect"
Scott Heerman is a scholar of eighteenth and nineteenth century U.S. history. His research focuses on slavery and emancipation in the U.S. and Atlantic World. Taking its inspiration from the 1950 film Masterpiece, Rashamon, this talk will tell a poly-vocal history of emancipation. Following a few biographies of men and women who escaped slavery, the talk tries to pin down what the lived realities were after slavery's emancipation. Heerman concludes by asking if we might be better off letting the fearful precarity of emancipation stand in our narratives, rather than trying to settle on a single outcome of these transformative events.
Thursday, April 8th at 7pm
"The Spirit Writing of Lucille Clifton"
This talk will use unpublished archives to discuss the poet Lucille Clifton's little-known practice of automatic writing and spirit communication. Her spirit communication spanned decades and encompassed everything from past life regressions to conversations with departed spirits as diverse as Langston Hughes, Beethoven, Billie Holiday, and Jesus. Magloire argues that throughout Clifton’s poetry, she insists upon the primacy and specificity of her black woman’s body as a site of spiritual encounter, even as her spirit communication complicates the notion of black feminist embodiment by presenting the black woman’s body as one transitory incarnation among many.
Marina Magloire is a black feminist scholar of African American and diasporic literature. Her current book project explores the influence of Afro-Caribbean spirituality on black American women writers and performers in the twentieth century.
Join Professor Lillian Manzor for our first Humanities Hour talk of the year. The role of Latines has been mostly absent from Off-Off-Broadway’s historiography. In this talk, Manzor will reconstruct various performances by reading not only the manuscripts but also photographs, stage and costume designs, musical scores, documentary videos, theater reviews, and other archival ephemera. Thus, she will bring back key Latine theater artists and put them into dialogue with their Off-Off-Broadway contemporaries to demonstrate how they shaped what Manzor names Latine-Off-Off-Broadway.