Colloquia

The Long Echo: Writing Civil War, Memory and Resilience

April 8 Tuesday, 4:30pm | Oakley Center Aminatta Forna is a distinguished novelist, memoirist, and essayist whose work explores how violence fractures societies and individuals. Over four novels and two works of non-fiction, she has examined themes of war, trauma, and resilience. *The Memory of Love* delves into Sierra Leone’s civil war, *The Hired Man* investigates collective trauma in Yugoslavia, and *Happiness* explores human connections amid adversity. Her memoir, *The Devil that Danced on the Water*, investigates her father’s murder in Sierra Leone, and *The Window Seat* is a collection of essays. A recipient of numerous literary awards, Forna is currently the Director of the Lannan Center at Georgetown University. Continue reading »

The Politics of Civil Rights Memory from the Civil Rights Movement to Gen Z Activism Today

March 11 Tuesday, 4:30pm | Oakley Center This event explores how the politics of collective memory influence our understanding of history, identity, and the future, with a focus on the rollback of DEI initiatives and campus activism debates. Hajar Yazdiha, a sociology professor at USC and author of The Struggle for the People’s King, will discuss how civil rights memory is politically misused and its impact on democracy. Christina Simko, a Williams College professor specializing in memory and identity, will join the conversation, drawing from her research on violent pasts, U.S. memorials, and historical narratives. The discussion aims to highlight the dangers of revisionist history and the potential for reclaiming memory to shape a more inclusive future. Continue reading »

ENGAGE: Indigenous, Black, and Afro-Indigenous Futures

March 5 Wednesday, 4:30pm | Oakley Center In this talk Dian Million and Stephanie Lumsden will discuss the historical context of policing and incarceration for Indigenous peoples as well as their resistance to settler state occupation. Using a Native feminist analytic, Million and Lumsden discuss the relationship between ongoing Indigenous dispossession and the proliferation of the settler state's carceral reach drawing examples from missionization, reservations, removals, criminal jurisdiction, and police violence and incarceration. Importantly, this discussion concludes with radical care within Native communities and their fights for liberation.  Continue reading »

Exhibitionism: A History of Fashion Exhibitions

March 4 Tuesday, 4:30pm | Oakley Center Dr Valerie Steele, fashion historian, author, editor, director and chief curator of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. A high school dropout, Steele went on to get her PhD in cultural history from Yale University, where she realized that fashion is part of culture and decided to specialize in fashion history. Since1997, she has curated more than two dozen exhibitions, including The Corset: Fashioning the Body; Gothic: Dark Glamour; Japan Fashion Now, and A Queer History of Fashion. The author or editor of 30 books, including Paris Fashion: A Cultural History; Fetish: Fashion, Sex, and Power; and Fashion Designers, A-Z: The Collection of The Museum at FIT, she is also the founding editor of Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture. She is currently working on a forthcoming exhibition (and book), Dress, Dreams, and Desire: A History of Fashion and Psychoanalysis. Dr Valerie Steele Director and Chief Curator, The Museum at FIT and Founding Editor, Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture Continue reading »

Literary Training in Medieval China: Evidence from Dunhuang Manuscripts

February 26 Wednesday, 4:30pm | Oakley Center This event explores how the literate elite of Tang-period China (618–907 CE) engaged with a literary and cultural tradition spanning thousands of years. By examining surviving educational manuscripts from the period, the discussion will shed light on how knowledge was transmitted and learned. Christopher Nugent, John W. Chandler Professor of Chinese at Williams College, specializes in Tang literary culture, manuscript traditions, and medieval educational texts. His works include *Manifest in Words, Written on Paper* and *The Textual Practices of Literary Training in Medieval China*. Man He, Associate Professor and chair of the Department of Asian Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Williams College, researches 20th-century Chinese theatre, literature, and film. Her forthcoming book, *Backstaging Modern Chinese Theatre*, examines cultural and intellectual influences on Chinese theatre from the 1910s to the 1940s. Continue reading »

Poetics of Repair: Artistic Afterlives of Colonial-Era Mass Housing in the Maghreb

February 11 Tuesday, 4:30pm | Oakley Center This event explores the role of contemporary art in reshaping the narratives, histories, and futures of colonial-era mass housing in North Africa and France. Kashia Pieprzak will discuss insights from her new book, Poetics of Repair: Contemporary Arts and Afterlives of Colonial-Era Mass Housing in the Maghreb (Duke University Press, 2025), which examines how visual, literary, and performance art engage with the legacies of modernist mass housing. Pieprzak, the Massachusetts Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Williams College, specializes in North African and Francophone studies, visual culture, and urban studies. She is also the author of Imagined Museums: Art and Modernity in Post-Colonial Morocco. Denise Kimber Buell, Cluett Professor of Religion at Williams College, will join the conversation. Her research focuses on how contemporary and historical contexts shape the study of early Christianity, with attention to race, ethnicity, gender, and human-nonhuman relations. She is the author of Making Christians and Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity. Continue reading »

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