HFA Days: Faculty Lightning Talks

Location: Bernie Dallas Room 507, Goodell Hall, 140 Hicks Way

Welcome and introduction

Speaker: Dean Davidson
Time: 11–11:10 a.m.

All Things Already Lost: A short narrative on AI and memory

Speaker: Jenny Vogel
Time: 11:10–11:20 a.m.

"All Things Already Lost" is an introduction to a longer narrative experiment attempting to speak of memory in the age of AI. The narrative gathers anecdotes, fragmented notes, and scattered recollections—worn thin, imprecise, half-forgotten. Some stories are true, some stretched by time, others are memories that demand to be questioned, and some are pure inventions, stitched together by algorithmic predictions. Together, they form a portrait of my efforts to navigate a world that both records everything and yet, somehow, continues to slip through my fingers.

Stories in Soil: Mapping the relationships between water, power, and landscape in Phoenix, the Black Mesa, and the Sonoran Desert.

Speaker: Jordan Kanter
Time: 11:20–11:30 a.m.

This project examines the intertwined relationships between water and power in Arizona through three small, situated patches of soil: a suburban lawn in Phoenix sustained by the Central Arizona Project (CAP), a 335-mile system delivering Colorado River water to central Arizona; the Kayenta Mine in Black Mesa, a sacred landscape for the Diné and Hopi people, where coal extraction once powered the CAP pumps; and a site along the CAP aqueduct, where engineered geometry has produced a nascent riparian zone. Though geographically distant, these sites are connected through water, energy, and processes of remediation. Rather than treating them as representative samples, the project uses each patch as a precise anchor for design inquiry—places where material, ecological, and infrastructural forces become legible at human scale. Through drawing, modeling, and sectioning across scales, the work traces energy, water, labor, and landscape as a single, entangled system grounded in lived landscapes.

Shakespeare Unlearned: Pedantry, Nonsense, and the Philology of Stupidity

Speaker: Adam Zucker
Time: 11:30–11:40 a.m.

This talk introduces my recently published book (of the same title). Shakespeare Unlearned pursues a self-knowing, gently ironic study of the lexicon and scripting of words and acts related to what has been called 'stupidity' in work by Shakespeare and other early modern authors. It centers significant, often comic situations that emerge—on stage, in print, and in the critical and editorial tradition pertaining to the period—when rigorous scholars and teachers meet language, characters, or plotlines that exceed, and at times entirely undermine, the goals and premises of scholarly rigor. And it suggests that a framing of putative 'stupidity' pursued through lexicography, editorial glossing, literary criticism, and pedagogical practice can help us put Shakespeare and semantically obscure historical literature more generally to new communal ends.

"Impressive Politics: Print before the Press in Late Medieval England"

Speaker: Sonja Drimmer
Time: 11:40–11:50 a.m.

This talk introduces my forthcoming book, which considers the impact of print before the alleged revolution set in motion by Gutenberg's press, offering a full-throated challenge to teleological arguments about print as a steppingstone toward political modernity. The book is grounded in two questions that, when put into conversation, mutually illuminate one another: the first is why four classes of replicable objects—coins, badges, seals, and heraldic insignia—took on a heightened prominence in late medieval England's political conflicts. The second was why, during this same period, the word "print" and the concept of impression featured so conspicuously in political discourse. In answering these questions, this book issues a fundamental revision to the way that we understand the category of “print” itself: not as a technology bound to the so-called printing revolution but instead as a process that engenders thought about representation, value, and trust.

Topographies of the Lyric: Presence and Eye-Witness Experience in Early Modern Iberian Poetry

Speaker: Albert Lloret
Time: 11:50 a.m.–12 p.m.

In this talk, I will present ideas from a chapter of my monograph in progress on the spatial dimensions of late medieval and early modern Iberian lyric. I will discuss the effects of presence in lyric texts, that is to say, the ways in which the language of poetic texts manifests beyond conveying meaning. I will argue that these effects of presence often involve space-defining features through devices that are commonly considered characteristic of the genre today, such as apostrophe and deixis. A third defining feature I identify in this lyric, however, is its documentary aura, a dimension that seems to counter the claims to universal or transcendental meanings modernly tied to the genre. I will show how these presence-conveying and space-making qualities appear in poems on one of the most epochal themes of early modern poetry: the ruins from the ancient world. I will argue that what was often at stake in the poetry about ruins was the production of presence effects to convey a first-person experience of these tokens of the revered past, much like other texts and art forms devoted to ruins, such as maps, guidebooks, or paintings.

Michelle Byrd-McPhee

Time: 12–12:10 p.m.

Tout Moun Se Moun: Creole Lives, Ontological transformations & Experiments

Speaker: Beaudelaine Pierre
Time: 12:10–12:20 p.m.

Tout moun se moun (every human is a human being)—a Haitian proverb—names a resurgent praxis of collective self-making, critical modes of agency and subjectivity, living-breathing infrastructures that narrate the differential, resistant, cultural, and human dimensions of the collective domain. Tout moun se moun emphasizes what get cast as refuse, unproductive, and waste in the ongoing inscription of political, economic, and colonial power relations; diffractively rethinking the conditions under which human, less-than-human and more-than-human bodies dwell. This presentation (from my book project) draws from Afro-Caribbean scholarship, immigration and border studies, and critical disability scholarship to contemplate accountability, feminist infrastructures of care, and methodologies of repair from the ontology of the refuse.

The British Black Arts Movement, the U.S. Black Arts Movement, and a Black Arts International

Speaker: James Smethurst
Time: 12:20–12:30 p.m.

This project considers how the interplay between Black (and some white) radicals in Britain, the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean drew on these traditions and political and cultural circuits in the creation of Black Arts in the United Kingdom. While the impact of the model and ideas of Black Arts in the United States had an acknowledged, if underexplored, impact on Black Arts in Britain, less attention has been paid to role Black and white British radicals (and Caribbean and African radicals who were resident for considerable periods in Britain) played in the rise of Black Arts and the new Black literature, theater, visual arts, dance, and music of the United States and in the strengthening of the internationalist consciousness and practice of U.S. Black Arts. The project grows out of the work I have done on the Black Arts Movement in the United States, a subject that has been focus of much of my scholarly work for the last twenty years. It was in the course of my research of Black Arts in the U.S. that I came realize the significance of British Black Arts as key node connecting different streams of Black radical art in Africa and its Diaspora.

Mingle and discussions

Time: 12:30–1 p.m.

Location: Lecture Hall, 170, Olver Design Building, 551 North Pleasant

Welcome and introduction

Speaker: Dean Davidson
Time: 11–11:10 a.m.

"The Sappho Epigraph in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée"

Speaker: Melissa Mueller
Time: 11:10–11:20 a.m.

Cha’s Dictée (1982) presents as its epigraph a fragment by the ancient Greek poet Sappho. Although ascribed to Sappho, this epigraph is Cha’s own creation, and it programmatically situates her poetics as outside the normative practices of translation and citation. I consider Cha’s Sappho epigraph from two angles: First, I suggest that in presenting her forgery as authentic Sappho, Cha follows a tradition of imitators from classical antiquity who composed epigrams in the style of Sappho; a few of these are even included in Mary Barnard’s Sappho: A New Translation (1958), the translation Cha was likely reading. Second, I argue that this inauthentic Sappho epigraph signals Cha’s alignment with the poetics of deception, creating literary links in this respect between Cha and Sappho’s own Muse, Aphrodite the “wile-weaver,” and with the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (where Gaia participates in the deception of Persephone).

"Love and War in an Age of Revolution"

Speaker: Jennifer Heuer
Time: 11:20–11:30 a.m.

Drawing on my book, Soldier’s Reward: Love and War in an Age of The Soldier's Reward: Love and War in the Age of the French Revolution and Napoleon, I will explore how more than two decades of warfare intersected with revolution to affect love and family life. Conversely, I also look at how contemporary changes in gender and family could be used to both legitimate prolonged warfare and negotiate transitions to peace.

"Carpet Craze: Oriental Rug Merchants in the West"

Speaker: Aviva Ben-Ur
Time: 11:30–11:40 a.m.

Beginning in the 1860s, thousands of Middle Eastern immigrants arrived in the West in search of new livelihoods and destinies. One of the products they disseminated in their adoptive lands was the Oriental carpet, a trade dominated by Armenian Christians and Sephardic Jews. This talk, based on a chapter from my book manuscript "Being Ottoman at the End of Empire," focuses on a sensational trial in 1930s Scotland that charged a "ring of Jews" with a massive scheme to artificially inflate the prices of imported rugs and defraud unsuspecting collectors and speculators. At the heart of the trial is the relationship between beauty and commerce, the power of capitalism to transform mercantile norms, and the vulnerability of Middle Eastern immigrants to scapegoat impulses.

"Medieval Holy Women and the Desire for Death"

Speaker: Jessica Barr
Time: 11:40–11:50 a.m.

In their biographies, ancient and medieval Christian saints are often described as yearning for death--but did they, really? While that question is unanswerable, in my forthcoming book, I investigate writings by and about medieval holy women to explore what they might have thought and felt about their own mortality. These women's at-times ambivalent responses to the prospect of death offer rich reflections on the meaning of life, as well, and on how to think about one's limited time on earth. While these medieval women's worldviews are in many ways quite distinct from our own, nonetheless I found that their reflections on mortality enriched my own understanding of what it means to die. In this talk, I'll discuss a couple of my key figures and how their theologies of death might affect our own ideas about dying—and living in the meantime.

Unusual pen pals. Italo Calvino and Renato Poggioli.

Speaker: Roberto Ludivico
Time: 11:50–12 a.m.

Italo Calvino, perhaps the most studied Italian author of the 20th century around the world, and Renato Poggioli, a lesser-known slavicist, translator, and comprativist who left fascist Italy in 1938 to pursue an academic career in New England, exchanged about sixty letters between 1952 and 1963, when Poggioli died. The correspondence between them has never been published nor studied, nor has it been noticed by anyone who may have had access to it, albeit partially. The reason for this unusual oversight may be found in the apparent distance between the personal and intellectual trajectory of these two men who lived worlds apart, literally, moving on parallel tracks apprently destined to never converge: a star and icon of international literary jet set Calvino, a tireless cultural mediator working in the shadows of academia Poggioli. Their ususpected friendship, and the private nature of their correspondence shed light on certain aspects of the cultural and political environment in post-WWII Italy and about Calvino’s desire to emancipate himself from it. The Calvino-Poggioli case also raises questions about the study of literature during times of political and ideological polarization and about the researcher’s responsibilities toward (recent) history and toward present society.

What's in a phrase?

Speaker: Kyle Johnson
Time: 12–12:10 p.m.

You may have learned in elementary school how to "parse" a sentence into its constituent parts. This is a common method of getting students to reflect on how to compose essays, or other written work. It taps into intuitions we all have about our spoken language, namely that words are grouped into phrases. This turns out to be a universal design feature of human languages. They all involve a method of coding information in which phrases play a central role. Moreover, there is a surprising degree of similarity in how phrases are constructed. In this talk, I will present some of the ways that phrases vary across languages, but also some ways in which they don't. I will try to give a glimpse of contemporary theories that linguists have developed in an effort to capture the underlying structures of human language that give rise to phrases.

Mingle and lunch

Time: 12:10–1 p.m.