Simpson Center for the Humanities at UW

Symposium: From Film Festivals to Songbooks

Centered around a private collection of film memorabilia accumulated over five decades of travel through South Asian film festivals, this symposium features invited scholars who reflect on the collection’s research value for South Asian film history, film archives, and visual culture. The symposium is accompanied by an exhibition of the memorabilia in the Allen Library North Lobby and takes place October 24-25.

RSVP encouraged.: https://bit.ly/RSVPIndianCinema

Film Screening: The Long Walk of Carlos Guerrero - Henry Art Gallery Simpson Center for the Humanities, Latin American & Caribbean Studies, the Latinx Faculty & Staff Association, the department of Comparative History of Ideas, and the Seattle Latino Film Festival.

Join us on Monday, September 23 at 9:00 am (Smith Room, Suzzallo Library) for a symposium that will engage Indigenous concerns around land and environment through a series of roundtables grounded in Coast Salish territories.

More info: https://bit.ly/GroundingRelations

PANEL | Join us Thursday, April 25 for Modern Abortion Around the World, featuring Lina-Maria Murillo, Mytheli Sreenivas, Lynn M. Thomas, Sarah Mellors Rodriguez, and Natalie Kimball.

3:00-4:30 p.m. in-person at Husky Union Building rm 214. Free and open to the public.

Details: bit.ly/3IFwyv1

Co-sponsors:
African Studies Program / JSIS / University of Washington
China Studies University of Washington
University of Washington College of Arts & Sciences
Simpson Center for the Humanities at UW
UW Department of History
Latin American and Caribbean Studies, University of Washington
South Asia Center UW

Please join us this Friday, January 19, from 11:30am to 1:00pm for a Translation Studies Hub colloquium featuring two presentations:
“Erasure in Efficient Translations: Locating Gender in Bengali Rhetorical Practice” with Sylvia Nasreen Chowdhury (UW English Department) and "The Perilous World of Afghan Fixers" with Aria Fani (UW Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures - MELC) and Reza Pedram

More info: http://tinyurl.com/uwxl8

Join us at the HUB on January 13th for a special conference in honor of labor legend Jack O’Dell!

O’Dell helped shaped the course of the Black Freedom Movement in the 20th century with his labor activism and political mobilization. This conference will feature 3 plenaries and a series of panels and roundtables led by 40+ activists and scholars holding discussions about the Black Radical Tradition.

This event is free and open to the public! (Due to space limitations registration is required for the plenaries, please register here by 1/4/24: tinyurl.com/44ze2dvu)

Hope to see you there!📚
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Please join us on January 10th, 5:00-6:30pm (PT), for Dorothy Roberts' lecture, "The Urgency of Reproductive Justice After Dobbs." Full detail: https://bit.ly/3TMAReS

Please join us for Katherine McKittrick's Katz Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities, "Twenty Dreams," from 6:30-8pm on Thursday, November 30, in UW Husky Union Building (HUB) 334. Free & open to the public. Full details: https://bit.ly/3GhvlbZ

In this episode of Going Public, Charles Johnson addresses his personal journey in finding his passion as an artist, writer, and scholar. Johnson discusses how various interrelated factors such as race, culture, faith, and history converged to shape his work.

From his creative beginnings as a political cartoonist and journalist to his acclaim as a novelist, essayist, short story writer, screen- and teleplay writer, and university professor, Charles Johnson’s life is a model of interdisciplinarity. ​​He is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Washington and is the author of Middle Passage, published 1990 and winner of the 1990 National Book Award. He is co-author with Patricia Smith of Africans in America: America’s Journey through Slavery (1998), the companion book for the 1998 PBS series of the same name. Johnson was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1998 and received the Academy Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2002.

The 2023-2024 season of Going Public features select Katz Distinguished Lectures from our archive. Learn more about the lecture series and peruse the archive: https://bit.ly/3QB3UPa

Jack O’Dell (1923-2019) was a visionary intellectual and an astute organizer who helped shape the course of the Black freedom movement in the second half of the twentieth century. Though driven out of the spotlight by anticommunism, O’Dell worked creatively and tirelessly to advance the Black Radical Tradition through labor activism, piercing analysis, and political mobilization.

In anticipation of the Reckoning with the Black Radical Tradition Conference in January 2023, the UW Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies is hosting a monthly reading group focused on the writings of Jack O'Dell. Join us for the next meeting on Tuesday, November 14.

Full details: https://bit.ly/3u0Udlo

Please join us from 3-4:30p on Friday, November 17, in the Ethnic Cultural Center (206/208) for a Seattle Participatory Arts Network event, "Roundtable Discussion on Participatory Arts" featuring Quetzal Flores (), Martha Gonzalez (), and Jade Power Sotomayor ().

More details: https://bit.ly/40q0LpX

Recommended reading: Helen of Troy in Hollywood (Princeton, 2023) examines the figure of the mythic Helen in film and television, showing how storytellers from different Hollywood eras have used Helen to grapple with the problems and dynamics of gender and idealized femininity. Paying careful attention to how the image of Helen is embodied by the actors who have portrayed her, Ruby Blondell provides close readings of such works as Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy and the Star Trek episode “Elaan of Troyius,” going beyond contextualization to lead the reader through a fundamental rethinking of how we understand and interpret the classic tradition.

Explore our publications gallery to learn more about works & scholars supported by the Simpson Center: https://simpsoncenter.org/publications

Please join us at 3:30 on November 13 in CMU 202 for "Large Language Models for Humanists: A Hands-On Introduction," a workshop featuring Melanie Walsh () and Maria Antoniak (Allen Institute for AI).

Full details: https://simpsoncenter.org/events/event-detail?eventid=170344533&trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D170344533

To prepare for her upcoming Katz Distinguished Lecture, we encourage you to read Katherine McKittrick's Dear Science and Other Stories. In this book, McKittrick draws on black studies, studies of race, cultural geography, and black feminism as well as a mix of methods, citational practices, and theoretical frameworks to position black storytelling and stories as strategies of invention and collaboration - suggesting that black life and black livingness are, in themselves, rebellious methodologies.

Please join us for McKittrick's lecture "Twenty Dreams" at 6:30pm on Thursday, November 30, in UW Husky Union Building (HUB) 334. Free & open to the public.

Call to Poetry Translators: Second Cycle of Mo Habib Translation Prize | Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures | University of Washington MELC enthusiastically calls for submissions for the second cycle of the Mo Habib Translation Prize in Persian Literature.