Happening @ Michigan https://events.umich.edu/list/rss RSS Feed for Happening @ Michigan Events at the University of Michigan. Comp Lit Alumni Panel: Looking Backward, Looking Forward (September 28, 2018 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/54123 54123-13530645@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, September 28, 2018 3:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Comparative Literature

Join alumni Sara Grewal, Ramon Stern, and Bram Acosta as they address diversity, equity, and inclusion within the context of Comparative Literature. By drawing on their own experiences at the University of Michigan and their home institutions, alumni will discuss the obstacles that women and underrepresented students experience to timely completion and develop strategies to support them. To this end, they will address the following questions: What obstacles to your health, wellbeing, and education did you encounter? How did you find allies? How can you be allies to others? How do you foster a collegial environment? What forms of collaboration did you value when you were in grad school? How did your perspectives shift throughout and after your graduate school experience?

This panel is aimed at Comparative Literature graduate students. Refreshments provided.

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Lecture / Discussion Fri, 28 Sep 2018 09:35:31 -0400 2018-09-28T15:00:00-04:00 2018-09-28T17:00:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Comparative Literature Lecture / Discussion Tisch Hall
My Name is Afrika: Keorapetse Kgositsile, Black Arts Movement, and Polyglot Internationalism (November 5, 2018 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/55995 55995-13814269@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, November 5, 2018 12:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Comparative Literature

South African national poet laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile’s work is firmly anchored in the Tswana oral and literary traditions shaped by a strong sense of community, customs and culture. I am interested in how he invigorates those traditions when in exile in the black diaspora (1962 – 1975), making his work stand out in the many black international journals and magazines he published in, thus necessitating a different lens of reading those print cultures previously delineated as African American. I demonstrate how he extends and interweaves the indigenous South African resource base with diasporic artistic traditions, tasking us to rethink genealogies of African knowledge production, their generative value and currency in the black radical imagination, and their translation and influence in black internationalism. My mission is to show how Kgositsile’s transatlantic engagements brought his black diaspora contemporaries into locution with a distinctly Tswana consciousness and epistemologies, transforming his interlocutors and the vision of their social movements. This way I establish a model of reading South Africa’s relationship with African Americans that eschews a “counterculture to modernity” born in the Northern Atlantic, rebutting a vertical North to South influence common in such transnational readings.

Uhuru Phalafala (PhD, University of Cape Town) is a lecturer in the English department at Stellenbosch University. She is the 2018 University of Michigan African Presidential Scholar, and 2019 African Humanities Program fellow. Her research interests are transnationalism, black internationalism, translation, decoloniality, and world literatures. She currently heads a Mellon-funded research project ‘Recovering Subterranean Archives’, which investigates South African culture in exile, with the ultimate goal of repatriating and republishing it. She is currently working on her book project Crossing Borders Without Leaving, a critical biography of South African writer-in-exile Keorapetse Kgositsile.

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 01 Nov 2018 11:05:09 -0400 2018-11-05T12:00:00-05:00 2018-11-05T13:30:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Comparative Literature Lecture / Discussion Uhuru Phalafala poster
The Shape of Knowledge: Moving Blackness Against the Line in Diaspora Studies (November 8, 2018 4:30pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/55994 55994-13814268@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, November 8, 2018 4:30pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Comparative Literature

In this talk Michelle M. Wright will argue that it is the way we tend to frame knowledge--both its formation and its progress--that hinders our ability to both research and represent the contributions not only of marginalized collectives, but those further marginalized within that collective. Drawing from her book Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology, Wright interrogates the linear and explores the possibilities of what she terms "Epiphenomenal" spacetime.

Michelle M. Wright is the Augustus Baldwin Longstreet Professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, where she teaches courses on gender, sexuality and race in the Black and African Diaspora.

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 01 Nov 2018 11:06:44 -0400 2018-11-08T16:30:00-05:00 2018-11-08T18:00:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Comparative Literature Lecture / Discussion Shape of Knowledge Poster
CompLit Alumni Panel (November 9, 2018 10:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/54490 54490-13589891@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, November 9, 2018 10:00am
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Comparative Literature

Join CompLit PhD alumni Başak Çandar, Amr Kamal, Christopher Meade, and Michelle Wright as they reflect on their graduate school experiences.

Başak Çandar is Assistant Professor of English at Appalachian State University.

Amr Kamal is Assistant Professor of French and Arabic at the City College of New York.

Christopher Meade is Assistant Professor of English at Appalachian State University.

Michelle Wright is the Augustus Baldwin Longstreet Professor of English at Emory University.

This event is for CompLit graduate students.

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 01 Nov 2018 11:00:50 -0400 2018-11-09T10:00:00-05:00 2018-11-09T12:00:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Comparative Literature Lecture / Discussion Tisch Hall
Comp Lit Colloquium (February 15, 2019 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/52983 52983-13168221@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, February 15, 2019 3:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Comparative Literature

Prof. Maya Barzilai and 1st-year Júlia Irion Martins will be presenting.

Infrastructures of Belonging: Visible Citizenship and Place in Eliane Caffè’s The Cambridge Hotel (2016), Júlia Irion Martins

Sacred Translations: Geshom Scholem, S. Y. Agnon, and the Unearthed Synagogue, Prof. Maya Barzilai.

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Lecture / Discussion Wed, 13 Feb 2019 08:30:30 -0500 2019-02-15T15:00:00-05:00 2019-02-15T16:30:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Comparative Literature Lecture / Discussion Tisch Hall
Comparative Literature Open House (March 22, 2019 11:30am) https://events.umich.edu/event/61335 61335-15088054@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, March 22, 2019 11:30am
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Comparative Literature

The Department of Comparative Literature is hosting an open house for undergraduate students. Stop by for lunch and to learn more about our programs: Major in Comparative Literature and Minor in Translation Studies.

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Reception / Open House Mon, 18 Feb 2019 10:10:46 -0500 2019-03-22T11:30:00-04:00 2019-03-22T13:30:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Comparative Literature Reception / Open House Open House image
Dialogues in Contemporary Thought V | On Reading (March 25, 2019 2:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/62193 62193-15311067@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, March 25, 2019 2:00pm
Location: Michigan League
Organized By: Department of English Language and Literature

Dialogues in Contemporary Thought V | On Reading, will consist of two lectures. "Alphabetographies," by Prof. Cadava, will consider the photographic work of Susan Meiselas in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Kurdistan, and investigate her claim of being "attracted like a magnet to mass graves, destroyed villages, the missing." Prof. Cadava will then consider why photography is a privileged means of documenting violence, and the forms of resistance made available by it. "We have been misreading the camps," by Prof. Paloff, will re-evaluate the moral claims attached to camp literature, and propose an alternative ethics that embraces the reader's individual experience, and the community's memory of the past. The lectures are open to everyone. Questions - email: srdjan@umich.edu

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 21 Mar 2019 19:10:15 -0400 2019-03-25T14:00:00-04:00 2019-03-25T16:00:00-04:00 Michigan League Department of English Language and Literature Lecture / Discussion Dialogues in Contemporary Thought | On Reading
Workshop | Erasures (March 26, 2019 10:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/62195 62195-15311066@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, March 26, 2019 10:00am
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Department of English Language and Literature

Prof. Cadava will lead a workshop on the Introduction of an unpublished book manuscript, which focuses on Fazal Sheikh's "The Erasure Trilogy," a three-volume photographic project on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Introduction, and two further texts, will be pre-circulated to all who sign up for the workshop. If you are interested, please contact srdjan@umich.edu

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Workshop / Seminar Thu, 21 Mar 2019 18:25:33 -0400 2019-03-26T10:00:00-04:00 2019-03-26T12:00:00-04:00 Off Campus Location Department of English Language and Literature Workshop / Seminar Workshop | Erasures
Comp Lit Colloquium (March 29, 2019 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/52984 52984-13168222@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, March 29, 2019 3:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Comparative Literature

Graham Liddell and Prof. Christopher Hill will present.

Graham Liddell, "Reflections on Translating Habiby’s Sextet of the Six Days"
Palestinian author Emile Habiby’s short story collection Sextet of the Six Days is set in the aftermath of the 1967 war, in which Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights. It is written from the perspective of Palestinians who were able to remain on their land in what became Israel in 1948. Habiby highlights a number of reunions that take place in this period, when some Palestinian refugees are able to visit relatives from whom they have been separated for nearly 20 years, and cities and towns from which were expelled. While these brief and incomplete reunions take place in the shadow of catastrophic circumstances, they nonetheless provide an occasion to take stock of physical, psychological, and spiritual damage, and to assess any hopes of repair. In this short presentation, I will discuss my translation of Habiby’s collection (a work in progress) and propose a theoretical framework for understanding the impact of national displacement on modes of storytelling. Habiby’s style offers readers a close look at the ways his characters experience the sensations of everyday life amid national trauma. The striking dialogism at play within the text is not only indicative of rifts in individual psyches, but also of the utterance’s inherent inclination toward others.


Prof. Christopher Hill, "Toward a Chronogeography of the Naturalist Novel"
In the decades after the variety of literary realism known as naturalism emerged in France in the 1860s, in the work of Emile Zola and the Goncourt brothers, it was widely adopted by writers around the world. By the turn of the twentieth century self-described naturalists were working from the Americas to East Asia. As it traveled, the topics, themes, and techniques of naturalist fiction changed in ways that could not have been predicted from its origins. Current paradigms for explaining literary history on a large scale rely on categories derived from the literary history of a handful of European countries and are unable to treat works that differ from the categorical norms as anything but deviations. My talk uses examples from the history of the naturalist novel to propose alternative approaches to large-scale literary history.

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Lecture / Discussion Mon, 25 Mar 2019 13:22:10 -0400 2019-03-29T15:00:00-04:00 2019-03-29T16:30:00-04:00 Tisch Hall Comparative Literature Lecture / Discussion Tisch Hall
Evie Shockley Lecture (April 4, 2019 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/52059 52059-12398895@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, April 4, 2019 4:00pm
Location: Angell Hall
Organized By: Department of English Language and Literature

Please join us for a public lecture by poet, scholar, and 2018 Pulitzer Prize finalist Evie Shockley.

This talk comes from Shockley's project on "Black Graphics," which considers the combined visual-verbal strategies contemporary black artists have used to negotiate problems associated with representations of embodied blackness. Here, she takes up the most recent books by Renee Gladman, reading them alongside work by Hank Willis Thomas and June Jordan, to bring Gladman's black feminist thinking into view.

Evie Shockley is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick and was a 2018 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her books include the critical study "Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry" and three volumes of poetry -- most recently, "semiautomatic," published by Wesleyan in 2017, and "the new black," winner of the 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry. Her creative and critical writing has been published widely and supported by fellowships from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture/NYPL, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Millay Colony for the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. She is currently at work on a project entitled "Black Graphics: Slavery, Colorblindness, and Contemporary Black Aesthetics.”

This event is sponsored by Critical Contemporary Studies, the Poetry and Poetics Workshop, the Helen Zell Writers' Program, and the English Department.

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Lecture / Discussion Mon, 25 Mar 2019 15:11:27 -0400 2019-04-04T16:00:00-04:00 2019-04-04T18:00:00-04:00 Angell Hall Department of English Language and Literature Lecture / Discussion
Comparative Literature Graduation Reception (May 3, 2019 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/54670 54670-13634080@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, May 3, 2019 4:00pm
Location: Michigan League
Organized By: Comparative Literature

The Comparative Literature department is holding its annual graduation reception for Comp Lit faculty, Comp Lit affiliated faculty, graduate students, graduating undergraduates (Majors and Minors), and their families.

The reception will be held on Friday, May 3rd from 4-6 pm in the Vandenberg Room of the Michigan League.

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Reception / Open House Tue, 04 Sep 2018 09:20:35 -0400 2019-05-03T16:00:00-04:00 2019-05-03T18:00:00-04:00 Michigan League Comparative Literature Reception / Open House
Absinthe Launch (May 7, 2019 7:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/63188 63188-15587263@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Tuesday, May 7, 2019 7:00pm
Location: Off Campus Location
Organized By: Comparative Literature

Join us in celebrating the publication of Absinthe: A Journal in World Literature in Translation, Volume 25: Barings // Bearings Contemporary Women's Writing in Catalan, at Literati Bookstore.

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Other Mon, 22 Apr 2019 11:08:37 -0400 2019-05-07T19:00:00-04:00 2019-05-07T20:00:00-04:00 Off Campus Location Comparative Literature Other "Ping" illustration by Elisa Munso
Dialogues in Contemporary Thought VI | On Life (May 30, 2019 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/63805 63805-15888321@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, May 30, 2019 4:00pm
Location: Angell Hall
Organized By: Department of English Language and Literature

Prof. Branka Arsic (Columbia University) will be giving a public lecture on Thursday May 30th, at 4 p.m. QA to follow.

Description: My talk starts out from remarks Melville left in his Encantadas concerning the Galapagos tortoises and goes on to examine the scientific and historical archives to which he had recourse, from Cuvier and Broderip to Porter and Delano. On that basis I seek to reconstruct exactly what, in the early 19th century, prompted scientists, doctors, and naturalists, as well as traders and ordinary seamen, to obsess about the tortoise as a life form, one that was brought to the brink of extinction by the middle of the century. I argue that the reason why both physiologists in Continental scientific laboratories, and whalers traversing Antillean waters in trade ships, chose this particular animal to answer the question of what life is, derived from their ideas about what constituted pain, suffering, and cruelty. By rehearsing such debates over the presumed expressions of suffering, apathy and indifference on the part of the tortoise, I work to suggest that what scientists understood as apathy towards pain licensed the production of a bizarre taxonomy of life forms based on a creaturely capacity to resist violence. I, therefore, pay significant attention to the differences that science advanced between biologically - as opposed to psychologically - rational and irrational life forms, which leads to my concluding analysis of why, as a consequence, the irrational was designated as available for experimentation and vivisection.

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Lecture / Discussion Tue, 28 May 2019 08:31:00 -0400 2019-05-30T16:00:00-04:00 2019-05-30T17:30:00-04:00 Angell Hall Department of English Language and Literature Lecture / Discussion Dialogues in Contemporary Thought | On Life