Hosted by Anna Ziajka Stanton and Jonathan P. Eburne. Additional participants TBA.

Perry Zurn is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at American University and affiliate faculty in the Department of Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies. He researches in political philosophy, critical theory, and transgender studies. Zurn is the author of Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry (2021) and the co-author of Curious Minds: The Power of Connection (MIT Press, forthcoming 2022). He is also the co-editor of Active Intolerance: Michel Foucault, the Prisons Information Group, and the Future of Abolition (2016), Carceral Notebooks 12 (2017), Curiosity Studies: A New Ecology of Knowledge (2020), and Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group, 1970-1980 (2021).

Yasmine Seale is a British-Syrian writer. Her essays, poetry and visual art have appeared widely — in Harper’s, Poetry Review, Frieze, the Times Literary Supplement and elsewhere. She has translated many texts, classical and contemporary, from the Arabic and French. Her work has earned her a PEN America Literary Grant and the Wasafiri New Writing Prize for Poetry. She lives in Paris.

Larissa Sansour and Oreet Ashery will respond to questions and discuss their collaboration on the graphic novel The Novel of Nonel and Vovel, which focuses on the occupation of Palestine and the reasoning and process behind the work; the political situation in Palestine and what has changed since the novel was published in 2009; as well as their own individual practices.

This chapter utilizes the words, actions, and impacts of Frederick Douglass and Gregorio Luperón to analyze the relationship between the project of US imperial expansion over the Caribbean and the project of US Black citizenship during the two decades that followed the US Civil War. I argue that this relationship is central to Black Latinidad.

Dr. Lorgia García-Peña is a first-generation Black Latina scholar from Trenton, New Jersey. Through a transnational, multidisciplinary lens, grounded on humanistic approaches to history and literature, García Peña studies Blackness, colonialism, migration and diaspora with a special focus on Black Latinidad. Her work emphasizes social justice, women of color feminism and Afro-Latinx episteme. She has a strong commitment to undocumented communities, and first-generation students of color.

Dr. García Peña is the co-founder of Freedom University Georgia, a school that provides college instruction to undocumented students and the co-director of Archives of Justice a transnational digital archive project that centers the life of people who identify as Black, queer and migrant. Dr. García-Peña’s first book The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nations and Archives of Contradictions (Duke, Fall 2016) won the 2017 National Women’s Studies Association Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize, the 2016 LASA Latino/a Studies Book Award and the 2016 Isis Duarte Book Prize in Haiti and Dominican Studies.

Dr. García Peña has two forthcoming books, Translating Blackness: The Vaivén and Detours of Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective (Duke, Fall 2022) looks at how Black Latinx migrants and their descendants grapple with various racial systems finding ways to translate racial meaning across national contexts while carving a space of belonging and representation within the nation (s) that often exclude them and Community as Rebellion (Haymarket, January 2022) a meditation of teaching Ethnic Studies as a woman of color in the academy.

Dr. García Peña is the 2018 Martin Luther King, Jr. fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the recipient of the 2017 Disobedience Award, Ford Foundations Postdoctoral Fellowship (2016), The Johns Hopkins University African Diaspora Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship (2010), the Future of Minority Studies Fellowship (2010), and the Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship (2006). García-Peña received a PhD in American Culture from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and an M.A. in Latin American and Latino Literatures from Rutgers University.

CMLIT major Frederick Miller will be playing at 8 pm at the Downtown Theatre on September 17th. The play was written by and stars Freddie and is directed by Sebastian Trainor; it features a score by Leah Mullen, lighting by David Reingold, sound design by Carter Celgin, and dramaturgy by Mary Rose Valentine. 

Here is the Collegian’s coverage of the new play:

https://www.collegian.psu.edu/culture_lifestyle/student-written-play-headspace-explores-self-expression-personal-pandemic-journeys/article_313eb8f8-16a3-11ec-8b4a-63a1bed8a5e3.html?fbclid=IwAR0L97a7iE6u0GxsLV21t3jE0pJDxx8x9lYZtnmwTtAC79euHn53krj3oSs

CMLIT major Frederick Miller will be opening tonight at 8 pm at the Downtown Theatre. The play was written by and stars Freddie and is directed by Sebastian Trainor; it features a score by Leah Mullen, lighting by David Reingold, sound design by Carter Celgin, and dramaturgy by Mary Rose Valentine. 

Here is the Collegian’s coverage of the new play:

https://www.collegian.psu.edu/culture_lifestyle/student-written-play-headspace-explores-self-expression-personal-pandemic-journeys/article_313eb8f8-16a3-11ec-8b4a-63a1bed8a5e3.html?fbclid=IwAR0L97a7iE6u0GxsLV21t3jE0pJDxx8x9lYZtnmwTtAC79euHn53krj3oSs

This presentation examines how comparative methods can be incorporated within experiential learning courses; it accomplishes this by capitalizing on the conceptual frameworks outlined in one of Assia Djebar’s short stories, which takes place in the context of a classroom where students discuss the cultural and political relevance of The One Thousand and One Nights.

Mich Yonah Nyawalo earned his Bachelor’s and Master of Arts degrees in English (with specializations in literature, sociolinguistics and cultural studies) at West University and Gothenburg University (respectively) in Sweden. He completed his second Master’s as well as a Ph.D. in comparative literature with a focus on media and globalization studies at the Pennsylvania State University. He is fluent in French, English, Swedish, Swahili and Luo (one of his identities includes being from the Luo ethnic group in Kenya). His research and teaching intersect with fields such as globalization studies, postcolonial studies, transnational feminist and queer studies, media studies, critical pedagogy and service-learning. The years he has spent living and studying in Kenya, Uganda, France, Sweden and the United States have highly defined his academic projects, which appropriate a mixture of critical tools and scholarly texts derived from the fields of African, African Diaspora and African American Studies (Mich was born in Kenya and was raised in different countries throughout his childhood, adolescent years, and as a young adult). His recently published book, Teaching in Times of Crisis: Applying Comparative Literature in the Classroom, explores how comparative methods that are instrumental in reading and teaching works of literature stemming from different regions around the world also provide us with tools to dissect and engage the moments of crises that permeate our contemporary political realities.

Mentoring for the Future: Save The Date

Throughout the 2020-2021 academic year, the Liberal Arts Collective at Penn State will be running a “conference-style” podcast series to feature intellectual, activist, artistic, or community work happening around the contemporary crises of race, environment, and pandemic. New episodes are posted weekly on Thursdays. For our full list of episodes, please see the Unraveling the Anthropocene main page. Meet the organizing team here.

You can listen to these episodes on the LAC website, Anchor, or Spotify. Be sure to subscribe on your chosen platform!

Our annual awards ceremony for all students, staff, alums, and faculty will take place virtually on Monday, April 26, 2021, starting at 6:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. 

Register in advance for this meeting:

https://psu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUvf-mppzwjGtdndGt5_7NnR5EC83iMWIEs

Artist Ibrahim Mahama and his gallery the White Cube

In this 90-minute, informal workshop Rebekah will walk us through how she uses professional editing software including PerfectIt and Macros. She may also highlight other materials in the Editor's Toolkit. Back by popular demand, Rebekah is offering this as a follow-up to her March 18 introduction to the world of scholarly editing. You are welcome to attend, whether you were at the first workshop or not! Attendees will have a chance to see how the software works and to ask Rebekah questions about her experiences in scholarly editing.

Greetings! In collaboration with the Comparative Literature Club, the PSU Department of Comparative Literature will be hosting a Virtual Open House on Monday, March 29, at 5:30 pm EDT.  All PSU students, faculty, staff, alumni, and club members are encouraged to attend.  

We especially welcome undergraduate students who are interested in majoring in Comparative Literature or adding a Minor in World Literature, and/or students interested in joining the Comparative Literature Club. 

The Open House will feature some brief remarks about the department and some introductions to faculty, staff, graduate students, undergraduate majors and minors, CMLIT club officers, and alumni, as well as information about departmental events. 

In this talk, I will chart a sexual trafficking enterprise in the first two chapters of the book of Esther. Sexual exploitation begins in chapter 1, when the king endeavors to subject Vashti to the sexualized gaze of his male guests. It is then intensified in chapter 2 when virgin girls throughout the king’s provinces are gathered and taken to the king’s palace for the purpose of sex. Attention is given to the role of intersectionality in the exploitation of these girls and women. 

Dr. Ericka Shawndricka Dunbar lives in Atlanta, GA, and teaches at Payne Theological Seminary. She received her Ph.D. in Biblical Studies (Old Testament) in May 2020 from Drew University. Her dissertation, entitled “Trafficking Hadassah: An Africana Reading of Collective Trauma, Memory, and Identity in the Book of Esther and the African Diaspora,” is a dialogical cultural study of sexual trafficking in the book of Esther and during the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

To register: https://psu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEod-mgrz4uEtCFDLmMh-q6QIUM-KvAkuIS

Sponsored by the department of Comparative Literature, department of Asian Studies, Center for Humanities and Information, and the Digital Culture and Media Initiative.

Rebekah Zwanzig is a freelance editor who has a passion for projects in the fields of religion, Arabic and Middle Eastern culture and thought, literature, and peacebuilding. She completed extensive graduate work in philosophy, religion, and comparative literature and used this knowledge to develop her expertise as an academic editor who works on material ranging from medieval Islamic history and philosophy to early modern literary studies and Japanese social and political history. Rebekah has worked on scholarly monographs, edited volumes, and articles for both individual clients and academic presses and journals in the United States and abroad.

This 90-minute, informal workshop is an opportunity to speak with her about specific methods, challenges, and approaches to professional work in the field of scholarly editing. She will discuss her experiences getting started in the business, some tips for success, and highlight some of her current projects.

Please register in advance.

We especially welcome undergraduate students who are interested in majoring in Comparative Literature or adding a Minor in World Literature, and/or students interested in joining the Comparative Literature Club. 

The Open House will feature some brief remarks about the department and some introductions to faculty, staff, graduate students, undergraduate majors and minors, CMLIT club officers, and alumni, as well as information about departmental events. 

Please email odb2@psu.edu for Zoom information.