Mandel Center for the Humanities

Kareem Khubchandani is an associate professor of theater, dance, and performance studies at Tufts University whose research and creative work centers on queer, feminist, and trans aesthetics, namely in South Asia and its diasporas. Performing under the name LaWhore Vagistan, Kareem utilizes drag performance as a pedagogical tool. He is the author of Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife (University of Michigan Press, 2020), which won the 2021 Association for Theatre in Higher Education Outstanding Book award, 2021 Dance Studies Association de la Torre Bueno book award, and the 2019 CLAGS: Center for LGBTQ Studies Fellowship. He is also co-editor of Queer Nightlife (University of Michigan Press, 2021) and curator of criticalauntystudies.com. 

Dragademia - Dressing Up the University

Thursday, October 28

Lessons in Drag, with LaWhore Vagistan

Friday, October 29

Divas, Drag Queens, Aunties, and Other Academic Personas

Tuesday, November 1

Colm Tóibín, Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities

Columbia University

• Lecture 1: "Between Heaven and Harlem: James Baldwin's Beginnings"
  
• Lecture 2: "Stranger in Each Village: James Baldwin in the World"
  

"We the People": Protest Music in America and the Black Freedom Struggle

Daphne A. Brooks, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of African American Studies, Music, American Studies, and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies
Yale University

• Lecture 1: "Invisible Music: The Sonic Idea of Black Revolution from Captivity to Reconstruction"
• Lecture 2: "Solidarity in Sound: Grassroots Arrangements & Civil Rights Transformation"
• Lecture 3: "'Scratching the Celluloid': Sonic Plotting & Planning while Facing the 21st Century Catastrophe"

Environmental Humanities and the New Mobilities of the Anthropocene: Climate Change and Animal Migrations in the North

Nancy Langston, Distinguished Professor of Environmental History, Member of the Great Lakes Research Center
Michigan Technological University

• Lecture 1: “Ghost Species: The Uncertain Future of Woodland Caribou in the Anthropocene”

• Lecture 2: “Welcoming Back Namao: Indigenous Communities and Restoration of the Great Lakes Sturgeon”

• Lecture 3: “Climate Grief: Toxics, Global Warming, and Loons in the Boreal North”

The Alien, The Ghost, The Post-human: Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China

David Der-Wei Wang, Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature
Harvard University

Resulting Book Publication: “Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China” (forthcoming October 2020)

Provincializing Europe in a Warming World: On the Relevance and Limits of Postcolonial Criticism

Dipesh Chakrabarty, Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College
University of Chicago

Memoirs of a Jewish Girlhood

Wendy Doniger, Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of Religions
University of Chicago Divinity School
also in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, the Committee on Social Thought, and the College

Resulting Book Publication: “The Donigers of Great Neck: A Mythologized Memoir” (2019)

Divine Spark of Syracuse

Ingrid Rowland, Professor of Classical and Renaissance Architecture
University of Notre Dame

Resulting Book Publication: “The Divine Spark of Syracuse” (2018)

Letters to a Young Writer

James Wood
Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism
Harvard University

Resulting Book Publication: “The Nearest Thing to Life” (2015)

Judaizing Aesthetics: Painting, Poetry, Politics

David Nirenberg, Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Distinguished Service Professor of Social Thought, Medieval History, Fundamentals, Middle East Studies, Romance Languages and Literatures, and the College
University of Chicago

Resulting Book Publication: “Aesthetic Theology and its Enemies: Judaism in Christian Painting, Poetry, and Politics” (2015)