Kelly Hoffer (Chair) | Manan Desai | Jennifer C. Hsieh | Yopie Prins | Isabella Vergara

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"Empire in Stereo"
Manan Desai is an Associate Professor in the Department of American Culture and Program in Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies. He is the author of The United States of India: Anticolonial Literature & Transnational Refraction (2020), and his essays have been published in Comparative Literature, the Journal of Popular Culture, and Asian American Literature in Transition, 1930-1965. He is currently working on a book project entitled Imperial Vinyl that explores the development of the mid-century genre of ersatz "world music" known as Exotica.

"Making Noise”
Jennifer C. Hsieh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She investigates sensory practices in institutional and technological contexts, with an emphasis on urban Taiwan. She is currently completing her book manuscript, Living with Noise: Sonic Socialities in Postauthoritarian Taiwan, and is producing a five-song EP, Taipei Processed, based on field recordings from her research. Dr. Hsieh has held research fellowships at the Fairbank Center at Harvard, the Vossius Center at University of Amsterdam, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

"Sappho Echoes"
Yopie Prins is the Irene Butter Collegiate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Victorian Sappho (1999) and Ladies' Greek (2017), and has published various articles on nineteenth poetry and prosody, comparative poetics and lyric theory, classical reception studies, and critical translation studies. Currently she is working on a collection of essays entitled Voice Inverse: Meter and Music in Victorian Poetry, and preparing a series of lectures on Sappho as an acousmatic figure within the context of contemporary sound studies.

"Sonic Intimacy"
Isabella Vergara C. is LSA Collegiate Fellow and Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on contemporary Latin(x) American experimental poetics, visual and sonic arts, with particular attention to sound, memory, materiality, and feminist and queer aesthetics across the Americas. She received her PhD in Spanish from the University of California, Irvine, and was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Latin American Studies at Princeton University. Her current book project, Poetic Traces: Objects, Archives, Dust, explores undisciplined ways of sensing time and history through a poetics of fragility, ephemerality, and precariousness. She is currently co-editing a special issue on silence in Latin American cultural studies.

Critical Conversations is a monthly lunch series organized by the English Department Associate Chair’s Office. Each Critical Conversations session features panelists who will give flash talks about their current work as related to a broad theme.