Past Events - Spring '23
January 27, 2023
How do we say our names, or better yet, what do our names say about us?
Join Angelica Maria Aguilera for a spoken word presentation, poetry workshop, and open mic night focusing on topics surrounding Latinidad, machismo, womanhood, and immigration.
Hosted by the Brandeis Latinx Student Organization and cosponsored by creative writing, among others.
February 3, 2023
12:45-2 p.m.
Mandel G03
Everyone is welcome to this open session of Literature in the Age of Mass Incarceration (ENG 121b), featuring Sashi James of the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls. For more information, contact Prof. David Sherman.
February 3, 2023
2-3:30 p.m.
Professor Sophia Hsu, Lehman College (CUNY)
Part of the Challenging Anti-Blackness in Literary Studies series.
February 7, 2023
5:30 p.m.
Harlan Chapel
“A dance of self-discovery, subverting our assumptions of gender and the body... Both innovative and sensual.” — San Francisco Chronicle
Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, Apocalyptic Swing (a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize), and Rocket Fantastic, winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Calvocoressi is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships and their poems have been published or are forthcoming in numerous magazines and journals including The New York Times, POETRY, Boston Review, and The New Yorker. Currently the Beatrice Shepherd Blane Fellow at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute, Calvocoressi teaches at UNC Chapel Hill and lives in Old East Durham, NC, where joy, compassion, and social justice are at the center of their personal and poetic practice.
This event is made possible by the Grossbardt Memorial Fund.
February 10, 2023
2:20-3:50 p.m.
Schwartz 103 — refreshments served
Professor Émilie Diouf (English), Professor Elizabeth Ferry (Anthropology), Professor Sara Shostak (Sociology), and Gowthaman Ranganathan (Anthropology), with Angel Queentus.
Co-sponsored by Mandel Center for the Humanities, COMPACT and the Department of Anthropology.
February 13, 2023
5-6 p.m.
Geller Conference Room, Hassenfeld
Write love letters and share your stories at the mic.
Featuring: love letters, stand-up, poetry, diary entries, candy, hot chocolate, friends.
Presented by the English and Creative Writing UDRs.
February 28, 2023
Note: This Critical Conversation will first be held on Feb. 28, and will repeat March 1.
5:30-6:30 p.m.
Levin Ballroom, Usdan
Some objects are simple, such as a block of ice or a glass of water. One is a solid that holds its shape, and the other is a liquid that flows. But other in-between objects force the question: "What is it, exactly?" Scientists and artists ask this question in different ways, using diverse methods and seeking distinctive results to unravel their mystery. This conversation focuses on how scholars from different disciplines engage the puzzle of "transitional states." Beginning with things that are neither liquid nor solid — or perhaps both — we will use interactive exercises that enable students to participate in the workings of such transitional states. We will explore how the “in between" cannot be neatly categorized. Making use of professor Chakraborty’s work on sand, poetry by Yeats and immersive sculptures by artists such as Yayoi Kusama and James Turrell, we will invite students to reflect on how poets, artists and physicists may all approach such in-between objects with wonder and curiosity.
Participants
Bulbul Chakraborty, Enid and Nate Ancell Professor of Physics
Tory Fair, professor of sculpture
Moderator
John Plotz, professor of English and Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities
March 3, 2023
2-3:30 p.m.
Professor Cassander Smith, University of Alabama
Part of the Challenging Anti-Blackness in Literary Studies series.
March 13, 2023
(Note date change from 3/6 to 3/13)
12-1:30 p.m.
Dark Fictions of Blood: A Conversation about Blackness and Vampires with Tananarive Due, Brandon Massey, and Lisa Marie Wood
Moderated by Professor Brandon Callender
Hosted by the Mandel Center for the Humanities
March 16, 2023
5:30 p.m.
Mandel Center for the Humanities Forum
“Mecca Jamilah Sullivan gives voice to girls and women with unruly bodies who dare to take up space in a world that shames them for being hungry for more. A tender and sumptuous offering of beauty.” ― Janet Mock
"A gift as big, beautiful, and complicated as living itself." ― Jacqueline Woodson
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s fiction explores the intellectual, emotional, and bodily lives of young black women through voice, music, and hip-hop inflected magical realist techniques. She is the author of the short story collection Blue Talk and Love, winner of the Judith Markowitz Award for Fiction from Lambda Literary; The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora; and the highly anticipated debut novel Big Girl, which was shortlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize.
This event is cosponsored by the Mandel Center for the Humanities and the Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies. It is made possible by the Dafna Zamarripa-Gesundheit Endowment.
March 24, 2023
2-3:30 p.m.
Professor Kyle Grady, University of California, Irvine
Part of the Challenging Anti-Blackness in Literary Studies series.
March 28, 2023
12:45-2 p.m.
Mandel Center for the Humanities Reading Room (303)
Join us for this talk by Jordan B. Kinder, a settler-British and Métis scholar of environmental humanities and media studies from a resource town in what is now called northern British Columbia, Canada. He is an incoming 2022-23 Postdoctoral Fellow with the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University.
Lunch will be served.
This event is part of the Year of Climate Action.
March 29, 2023
Noon-1 p.m.
Zoom
This event will be hosted by Director of Graduate Studies in English Dave Sherman and Dean Wendy Cadge. PhD candidates Miranda Peery and Sungkyung Cho will speak about their research.
Hosted by English and GSAS. Part of the GSAS 70th anniversary.
March 31, 2023
2023 Brandeis English Graduate Conference
9:30 a.m.- 4:30 p.m.
Mandel Center for the Humanities Reading Room (303)
"If a lion could talk, we wouldn’t be able to understand it,"” Wittgenstein famously remarked. This conference will ask, why not? What would be required to understand a lion? What does it mean to 'understand' another? Is shared language necessary for understanding? What kind of understanding is possible in the absence of language? What kind of understanding do literary representations of animal subjectivity (of non-human consciousness) offer? Are they merely anthropomorphic projections — the fantasy of illuminability belying an unbridgeable chasm? Or does imaginative work foster genuine insight?
The conference will be held in person at Brandeis University on March 31, 2023. Our keynote speaker will be Professor Kari Weil of Wesleyan University.
Morning refreshments and an afternoon lunch will be provided.
More information
April 21, 2023
12:30 p.m.
Olin-Sang 101
Moderated by Professor V. Chaudhry
Hosted by the Mandel Center for the Humanities
April 28, 2023
2-3:30 p.m.
Zoom registration
Professor Manu Chander, Rutgers University
Part of the Challenging Anti-Blackness in Literary Studies series.
May 1, 2023
2:30-3:50 p.m.
Olin-Sang 201 and Zoom
Jeff Nunokawa, of Princeton University, will visit William Flesch's Victorian Poetry class to talk about Oscar Wilde. This visit, sponsored by the School of Arts and Sciences and the English Department, will be open to the public. Professor Nunokawa, a specialist in Victorian literature, is the author of two books on Wilde.
photo: hotchkiss.org
May 4, 2023
5:30 p.m.
Women's Studies Research Center (515 South Street) and Zoom
Come toast graduating creative writing majors! This event will celebrate the work of all our seniors and will include presentations by Mattie Doherty, Meg Rock, and Henry Rouslin ahead of a featured reading by Autumn Bellan (poetry) and Lindsey Odorizzi (fiction), who will read from their honors projects. We'll end with a catered gathering for families, friends, and faculty. All are welcome!
May 8, 2023
2-3:30 p.m.
Women's Studies Research Center (515 South Street)
English honors students will present their work, and then we'll celebrate over delicious refreshments. This is a celebration of ALL graduating English majors — please attend and invite your family and friends. All are welcome!