Mandel Center for the Humanities

Dr. Sami Schalk is a full professor in the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies at UW-Madison. Her research focuses on disability, race, and gender in contemporary American literature and culture. Dr. Schalk’s books, Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (2018) and Black Disability Politics (2022) are both published free open access by Duke University Press with audiobooks also available. Dr. Schalk’s work has also appeared in a variety of journals such as Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Journal of Modern Literature, Journal of Popular Culture, Girlhood Studies, and African American Review. She teaches courses on disability studies, intersectionality, and literature such as “Feminist Disability Studies,” “Gender, Disability & Sexuality,” and “Visionary & Speculative Fiction.”

Lecture 1
Monday, March 9 | 4:05–5:25 PM | Mandel Atrium
“The Pleasures of Process and Product in Collaborative Artwork”

Sami Schalk and Sam Waldron are queer disabled women creatives who have been collaborating on boudoir, fantasy, and other forms of creative photoshoots for five years. Together they have created a large body of work that centers fat, queer, disabled, and racialized subjects, primarily Schalk herself. Their work has been featured at the Ford Foundation Gallery in New York City and at Art + Literature Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin. This talk will discuss how Sami and Sam's queercrip collaboration developed over time and explore how the pleasures of creativity, play, and access intimacy shape both the process and the product of their art practice together.

Lecture 2
Wednesday, March 11 | 5:40–7:00 PM | Mandel Reading Room (303)
“‘I Didn’t Feel Tokenized Here At All’: QueerCrip Boudoir and the Power of Disabled Pleasure Spaces”

This talk will focus on observations of and participant interviews from a 2024 queercrip boudoir photography event in Madison, Wisconsin which was organized as part of a larger study on pleasure spaces for multiply marginalized people. Drawing on the politics of pleasure activism and disability justice, Dr. Schalk theorizes why pleasure spaces like the queercrip boudoir event are particularly important for disabled people who are too often desexualized and excluded for the realm of the sensual and desirable in contemporary culture.

Lecture 3
Thursday, March 12 | 11:15 AM–12:05 PM | Liberman-Miller Hall WSRC
“I Have a Right to Pleasure: A Pleasure Activism Workshop”

This interactive workshop will introduce participants to the concept of pleasure activism and ask them to explore their own relationship to pleasure especially in relationship to their identities and lived experiences. Participants will journal, share in small groups, and set goals for themselves on how they can better connect with, prioritize and embrace pleasure in positive ways in their lives.

Rokhaya Diallo is an award-winning film-maker, writer and journalist, recognized for her commitment to racial equality. According to The New York Times, Rokhaya Diallo is “one of France’s most prominent anti-racisim activist(s).” 

Lecture 1 - “Afro Paris: City of Lights and Darkness”

Lecture 2 - “Universalism Reimagined: Framing a Grounded Universality”

Lecture 3 - “Surveillance and Assimilation: Policing Bodies Under Universal Pretense” 

For more information on these lectures please see Mandel Stories. 

 

Jackie Wang is a scholar, multimedia artist, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, and an American Democracy Fellow at Harvard’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. She is the author of the critical essay collection Carceral Capitalism (Semiotext(e), 2018), the poetry collection The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void (2021), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; and the essay collection Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun (Semiotext(e), 2023). Her research is on racial capitalism, surveillance technology, and the political economy of prisons and police.

Lecture 1 - The Deep Sea as the New Frontier of Accumulation

Lecture 2 - Poetry and Tidalectics

Lecture 3 - Oceanic Feeling and the Politics of Mysticism

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.

Lecture 1 - Dragademia — Dressing Up the University

Lecture 2 - Lessons in Drag with LaWhore Vagistan

Lecture 3 - Divas, Drag Queens, Aunties and Other Academic Personas

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)