In this talk, Emek Ergun will explore the political role of translation in facilitating transnational feminist transformations and connectivities. She will discuss the transatlantic journey of Hanne Blank’s Virgin: The Untouched History — a popular feminist book demystifying the man-made histories of virginity in western geographies — via her Turkish translation and its reception. This lecture is part of the Spring 2024 Humanities Forum.

The Department of English hosts two events relating to law and restorative justice on March 27, inspired by the career path of 2018 UMBC English Alumna Breia Lassiter. She will return to UMBC to share her experiences with the university community. In this event, From the Classroom to the Courtroom, Breia Lassiter will discuss her personal history from her days as an English major at UMBC, through law school and work as a student clinician at Michigan State University, to taking the bar exam, passing it, and finally now working as an Associate Attorney at a law firm.

The Department of English hosts two events relating to law and restorative justice on March 27, inspired by the career path of 2018 UMBC English Alumna Breia Lassiter. She will return to UMBC to share her experiences with the university community. This event, a panel discussion, Restorative Justice and the Rights of the Incarcerated, will feature Lassiter with Walter Lomax (Executive Director, Maryland Restorative Justice Initiative), and Natasha Dartigue (Office of the Public Defender, Baltimore).

In 1947, Martin Heidegger wrote what is now known as his “Letter on Humanism,” which is rich and revealing. At the center of the Letter stands a singular, pointed claim: that all previous “humanisms,” have failed to recognize the “proper dignity of human being.” Drawn from a book in progress, this talk by Sean D. Kelly of Harvard University will explore questions of our proper dignity, and the threat to it posed by the technological age. This event is part of the Spring 2024 Humanities Forum.

Drawing on her forthcoming book, Disorienting Politics: Chimerican Media and Transpacific Entanglements, Fan Yang mines 21st-century media artifacts such as Firefly and House of Cards to make visible the economic, cultural, political, and ecological entanglements of China and the United States. This event is part of the Spring 2024 Humanities Forum.

With an eye to local Baltimore developments, like the Eager Park and UMB BioPark projects, Davarian Baldwin will discuss what he calls the rise of UniverCities—higher education’s growing control over the economic development and political governance of urban America. From housing and wage labor to health care and even policing, colleges and universities have become big business and our communities their company towns. He will explore the costs when our cities become campuses and how we can think through a more liberatory way forward. This event, a collaboration with the University of Baltimore's History Program, is part of the Spring 2024 Humanities Forum.

The Fall 2024 Humanities Forum presents food writer, recipe developer, and food stylist Karla Tatiana Vasquez in conversation with food designer and artist Krystal C. Mack. In 2015, first-generation Salvadoran American, Karla T. Vasquez, began an online project to document recipes like the ones her mother made during her childhood. Over time, the project grew to include not only recipes, but also stories from the women who created them, offering a portrait of life for Salvadoran women both before the civil war and after their arrival in the United States. Vasquez will discuss The SalviSoul Cookbook and her efforts to preserve the food and stories of Salvadoran moms, aunts, grandmothers, and friends.

The annual Webb Lecture features Amanda Herbert, who will speak on Authorship, Authenticity, Erasure: British Atlantic Women’s Recipe Books, 1600–1850. British Atlantic women’s recipe books are crucial historical sources, offering evidence of the consumer and scientific revolutions, the rise of the city, female alliances, networks of knowledge and inquiry, and, perhaps most importantly, women’s authoritative voice. In this talk, Amanda Herbert demonstrates how free white women worked to deliberately erase Black food-workers from their practices of recipe writing, collection, and record-keeping; close reading of ingredients, techniques, and adaptations, however, can help us to recover Black culinary innovations and contributions.

The annual Ancient Studies Week Lecture features Phillip Mitsis of New York University. In reading ancient philosophers, we often face unsettling claims. A case in point is Plato’s view of hatred: he thinks that children must be taught to love the right things and to hate bad things. This talk examines the place of hatred in our moral lives and asks such questions as “Should we hate racism, genocide, sexism, etc., or is there no place for that?”

The annual Daphne Harrison Lecture features Dagmawi Woubshet, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Term Associate Professor, English, University of Pennsylvania, who will speak on James Baldwin and the Art of Late Style. James Baldwin has come back with full force in our era of Black Lives Matter. In the 100 years since his birth, he has become the most cited literary artist—living or dead—on matters of race on social media since the Ferguson Uprising, his words deployed to expose white power and innocence and to express black rage and ethics. Decades after his death, the fact that Baldwin’s words ring loud and true today not only testifies to his genius, but also offers an indictment of an America that continues to disparage, torture, and murder black people with impunity.

In this Humanities Forum talk, Adrian De Leon, Assistant Professor, History, New York University, discusses Diaspora’s Boondocks: Hinterlands in Filipino American History. How were the native people from the margins of empire, from Christianized lowlands peasants to sovereign indigenous people in the mountainous highlands, thrust into the center of late Spanish and American imperial projects of race-making across the Pacific? In this talk, Adrian De Leon re-routes the history of Filipino American migration to its indigenous roots in the bundok (Tagalog: the hinterland) of Northern Luzon.