Spring 2023 Colloquium

 

Jenna Sciuto

White Violence as Exclusion in Guðbergur Bergsson’s Iceland and William Faulkner’s and Jean Toomer’s US South

Dr. Jenna Sciuto

Tuesday, January 31, 2023 at 5:30pm at 49 Main St. (next to Gallery 51)


This talk explores sanctioned forms of anti-Blackness and violence in Icelandic society through a novel by Guðbergur Bergsson, alongside work by US southern writers William Faulkner and Jean Toomer. Dr. Sciuto exposes the complex impacts of colonial histories, such as the far-flung webs of racialized violence, as represented in literature from these diverse regions not typically considered together.  

 
Jenna Grace Sciuto is Associate Professor of Global Anglophone Literature at MCLA. Her first book, Policing Intimacy: Law, Sexuality, and the Color Line in Twentieth-Century Hemispheric American Literature, was published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2021. She is currently at work on her second book on Icelandic and US Southern literatures (under contract). 

 

Kebra Ward

Flippin’ Amazing: Interactive Engagement in the South African Physics Classroom

Dr. Kebra Ward

Thursday, February 9, 2023 at 12pm in Murdock 218


The flipped classroom and peer instruction are two complementary pedagogical methods that foster active student engagement. In this lecture, Dr. Ward shares research about a study to quantitatively measure the effectiveness of these approaches against international benchmarks using the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) diagnostic in three first-year physics courses at Nelson Mandela University.


Kebra Ward
is Associate Professor of Physics at MCLA. Dr. Ward received her BS in astronomy from the University of Southern California, and MS and PhD in physics from Lehigh University. She was a Peace Corps volunteer in Mozambique, and recently received a Fulbright Scholarship to study physics education in South Africa. She has taught at MCLA since 2015.

 

Anthony Daly

Fighting for Democracy: An Irish Radical’s Struggle to Change British Politics

Dr. Anthony Daly

Thursday, March 2, 2023 at 12pm in Murdock 218   


William Sharman Crawford was a wealthy Irish landlord, but he became a politician dedicated to expanding voting rights for the English working class. In this talk, Dr. Daly shares part of an article draft that uses material from a research trip to Ireland to understand William Sharman Crawford, his motivations, and his impact. 


Anthony Daly
is a Professor of History at MCLA. He holds a BA from the University of Toronto and an MA and Ph.D. from Boston College. His research interests center on Britain and Ireland in the nineteenth century, especially radical activity in areas such as voting rights, religion, and nationalism.

 

Mariah Hepworth

D.W. Griffith, World War I, and the Antiwar War Film

Dr. Mariah Hepworth

Thursday, March 30, 2023 at 5:30pm at 49 Main St. (next to Gallery 51)


World War I defined modern American culture, giving rise simultaneously to modern U.S. foreign policy and Hollywood. In this talk, Dr. Hepworth argues that D.W. Griffith was at the forefront of this transformation, teaching Americans to engage war primarily through cinema, and conditioning them to accept U.S. war-making as fundamentally altruistic.  

 
Mariah Hepworth is Assistant Professor of History at MCLA. Dr. Hepworth received her B.A. in history from Seattle University and M.A. and Ph.D. in American history from Northwestern University. Her research and teaching interests center on the ways in which popular culture shapes mainstream understandings of American politics. At MCLA, she teaches courses in American military, cultural and social history.

 

Antonio Templanza

Milton’s Metaphors of Knowledge

Dr. J. Antonio Templanza

Monday, April 10, 2023 at 5:30pm in the CSI Atrium


The western literary and philosophical tradition has preponderantly described knowledge in terms of vision, but how can a blind person participate in that tradition in a meaningful and authentic way? Using Paradise Lost — which John Milton famously composed after losing his sight — as a case study, this lecture presents Milton’s idiosyncratic strategies for grappling with the nature of knowledge.
 

J. Antonio Templanza is Assistant Professor of English at MCLA, where he teaches Renaissance English literature. His work examines how the discursive fluidity of seventeenth-century intellectual culture allowed its authors to expand, contest, and reformulate the various philosophical frameworks surrounding them in the face of an emerging rhetoric of scientific objectivity.

 

Mohamad Junaid

Logo Maps and Geo-Bodies: Hindutva State and the Postcolonial Empire in India

Dr. Mohamad Junaid

Tuesday, April 18, 2023 at 5:30pm in the CSI Atrium


This lecture traces the rise of the Hindutva state in India which claims an anti-colonial mantle yet relies on an imperial form of nationalism. Dr. Junaid shows how rightwing Hindu nationalism asserts a discourse of indigenous sovereignty while promoting settler colonial practices, raising conceptual questions about contemporary theories of decoloniality.


Mohamad Junaid
is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at MCLA. He has a Ph.D. from the Graduate Center CUNY, with research on violence, youth activists, and political subjectivity in Kashmir. His book project, titled Rebel Dreams: Postcolonial Empire and Political Subjectivity in Kashmir, is a historical and ethnographic account of the aspiration of freedom and the political movement against the occupation in Indian-controlled Kashmir. 

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