Events

Current Events

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

February 3, 2025

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.

Kafka at 100

February 3, 2025

This event features Mark Anderson, Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, whose research focuses on German modernism, contemporary Austrian literature, and translation studies. He is the author of several books on Franz Kafka, including Kafka’s Clothes and Reading Kafka, and has edited and translated works by Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard.

Anderson regularly teaches courses on modern German-Jewish culture (1750–present), opera and music in German culture, and German exile during the Nazi period. His comparative literature courses have explored topics such as Gothic literature, the materiality of the book in Western culture, and Jewish identity in modern European culture.

Oakley Movie Night: “Dune”

February 3, 2025

Oakley Movie Night: “Dune” (USA, 1984), directed by David Lynch

Literary Training in Medieval China: Evidence from Dunhuang Manuscripts

February 3, 2025

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.

Exhibitionism: A History of Fashion Exhibitions

February 3, 2025

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

ENGAGE: Indigenous, Black, and Afro-Indigenous Futures

February 3, 2025

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. 

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

February 5, 2025

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.

Past Events

 

Jacob’s Pillow, A Legacy Institution: Relevance in a Changing World

Movie Night: A Night of Knowing Nothing

Provenance and Restitution: The AfricaMuseum (Belgium) and “Its” Objects

The Far Right Populist Wave

Movie Night: Dry Ground Burning

Why Weimar Matters Today: Reflections on Netflix Series Babylon Berlin

The Iconography of Devotion in Muslim South Asia

Printing in the Darkroom: the Creativity of an Intimate Practice

Colloquium with Nikhil Goyal

Colloquium with Zachary Wadsworth

When Life Gives You Lemons, Paint Them

Colloquium with Gulnur Mukazhanova

Movie Night: Hollywood

Colloquium with Janet Roitman

Colloquium with Padmini Chettur

Davis Lecture: Robin Zape-tah-hol-ah Minthorn

Colloquium with Elidor Mëhilli

Movie Night: Nollywood

Colloquium with Nancy Ancrum

Colloquium with Hernan Diaz

Colloquium with kelli rae adams

Movie Night: Bollywood

Colloquium with Reinhard Kleist

Abortion Rights in the Deep South: Reflections on the Ongoing Struggle for Reproductive Justice

Zhuangzi and the Tragedy of Personal Freedom in Chinese History

Tactics at the Bakery

The Haitian Revolution and the Reinvention of Sociology

The MENA Question: Studying an Invisibilized Community thru Humanistic and Quantitative Approaches

The U.S. Supreme Court and the Impossibility of Religious Freedom

How Chisme Informs Communal Contributions

HEBA GOWAYED

An Ontology of Betrayal*: A conversation on Politics, Theory, Antiblackness, Gender and Freedom: Frank B. Wilderson, III, Selamawit D. Terrefe, and Joy James

Apostles of Change

Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women’s Food Work: Diana Garvin

Policing Black Women: The Urgency of Reproductive Justice: Dorothy E. Roberts

Post-Discipline: Literature, Professionalism, and the Crisis of the Humanities: Merve Emre

The Secretive Prisons that Keep Migrants out of Europe: Ian Urbina

Screenwriting from the Academy: Rebecca Connor & Paul Park

P@W: Disease, Activism and Student Life, Part 4 in the Pandemic Series

Corona Time: Temporalities of Race and Disease, Part 1 in the Pandemic Series

Corona Time: Isolation, Emergency and Surveillance, Part 2 in the Pandemic Series

Corona Time: Racism and Disease, Part 5 in the Pandemic Series

Corona Time: Racism and Disease, Part 5 in the Pandemic Series

P@W: A Semester in Pandemic, Part 7 in the Pandemic Series

Corona Time: Masks and Vaccines, Part 14 in the Pandemic Series

Corona Time: Global Health, Part 12 in the Pandemic Series

https://oakley.williams.edu/?p=10786&preview=true

P@W: The Way Forward, Part 13 in the Pandemic Series

P@W: Pandemic Inequalities, Part 11 in the Pandemic Series

P@W: Pandemic Sciences, Part 9 in the Pandemic Series

Pandemic Series

Corona Time: Epidemic Empire, Part 8 in the Pandemic Series