Spring 2026 Events
January
Date and Time: January 15 at 4 pm
Location: Humanities Office Builidng Room 104
The Nineteenth Century Working Group will meet to discuss the Introduction and "Picturesque" from Rachel Teukolsky's Picture World: Image, Aesthetics, and Victorian New Media (Oxford UP 2020). The book is available digitally through the Thomas Cooper Library.
All are welcome, including non-Working Group members.
Date and Time: January 20 at 6:30 pm
Location: The Nick
The Ann Arbor Film Festival is the oldest avant-garde and experimental film festival in North America, founded by George Manupelli in 1963. Internationally recognized as a premiere forum for independent filmmakers and artists, each year's festival engages audiences with remarkable cinematic experiences. Each filmmaker participating in the AAFF tour is also paid for each tour stop, directly supporting their filmmaking.
Date and Time: January 22 at 5-6:30 pm
Location: Campus Room, First Floor of Capstone House (902 Barnwell St)
Osita Nwanevu (New Republic) will give a lecture on his new, bestselling book The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding (Penguin Random House 2025). Spanning democratic theory, the American Founding, our aging political system, and the dizzying inequalities of our new Gilded Age, Nwanevu makes a visionary case for a political and economic agenda to fulfill the promise of American democracy and revive faith in the American project.
Date and Time: January 23 at 12:30-2 pm
Location: All Good Books
RSVP to Samuel Bagg.
A lunch seminar with Nwanevu discussing his work. Open to faculty and graduate students.
Lunch will be provided.
(Sponsored by Mellon)
Date and Time: January 23 at 1:30-4:30 pm
Location: Thomas Cooper Library Room L118
Register here.
Join Kate Boyd for an afternoon investigating tools for your digital scholarship project. These will be freely available, relatively easy to use tools for creating web sites, maps, timelines, and other simple computational analysis software for showcasing your research online. See the Libraries' Digital Scholarship guide for example tools that might be discussed. Open to all faculty and graduate students.
Date and Time: January 28 at 12 pm
Location: Zoom
Neale Barnholden (Alberta) will be speaking about his Eisner-nominated book, From Gum Wrappers to Richie Rich: the Materiality of Cheap Comics (University Press of Mississippi 2024).
Date and Time: January 30 at 11 am-12 pm
Location: Gambrell 429
Join Rachel Teukolsky (Vanderbilt), a scholar of literature, culture, and visual media, for a lecture on Victorian erotic photographs. Erotic photographs were among the daring new visual media that captured dramatic transformations in late-Victorian culture, reflecting the moment’s turbulent gender wars and the rise of feminism. These fault lines are evident across a range of controversial media deemed “obscene” in the 1890s, from nude fine-art paintings, to “Living Pictures” theater performances, to some of the earliest erotic films.
Reception will follow.
(Co-Sponsored by the Humanities Collaborative, the Nineteenth Century Interdisciplinary Working Group, the Department of English, and the School of Visual Art and Design)
Date and TIme: January 30 at 3:30 pm
Location: English Department Lounge, Humanities Office Building 104
Open to all graduate students.
(Co-Sponsored by the Humanities Collaborative, the Nineteenth Century Interdisciplinary Working Group, the Department of English, and the School of Visual Art and Design)
February
Date and Time: February 4 at 12-1:30 pm
Location: Gambrell 429
USC Press is partnering with the Humanities Collaborative for the first in a series of workshops about academic publishing. Join director Michael McGandy for a discussion about the peer review process in our first installment. Topics to be addressed include: understanding the basic process and goals of peer review in book publishing, “dos and don’ts” for evaluating and responding to reports, and the changing landscape of publishing as it affects peer review.
Open to all faculty and graduate students.
Lunch will be provided.
Date and Time: February 19 at 5-6:30 pm
Location: Lumpkin Auditorium, 8th floor of the Close-Hipp Building
Join Jamie Druckman (Rochester) for a public lecutre.
Date and Time: February 20 at 12:30-2 pm
Location: All Good Books
RSVP to Samuel Bagg.
A lunch seminar with Druckman discussing his work. Open to faculty and graduate students.
Lunch will be provided.
(Sponsored by Mellon)
Date and Time: February 20 at 10am-12pm
Location: Green Quad
A traditonal ecological knowledge workshop for students and faculty with Jalen Gordon, a local
Gullah-Geechee medicine man from the SC low country. The workshop offers a deep dive
into seasonal medicinal native plants and traditional plant gathering significant
to Gullah-Geechee culture.
(Part of a series based on Black Southern Ecologies and organized by the USC Environmental Justice and Humanities Lab)
Date and Time: February 27-28 at TBA
Location: TBA
April
Date and Time: April 9 at 3-5 pm
Location: Lumpkin Auditorium, 8th floor of the Close-Hipp Building
Join a roundtable discussion of Black southern ecologies featuring Morgan Vickers (Assistant Professor of Race/Racialization; Washington). Respondents include: Jalen Gordon (Gullah-Geechee Medicine Man); Dr. Robert Adams (Director of the Penn Center Historical Site); Adrian Cato (PhD Candidate, African American Studies, Emory); and Alyssa Raynor (USC Alumna, Bachelor of Marine Science and Portuguese).
(Part of a series based on Black Southern Ecologies and organized by the USC Environmental Justice and Humanities Lab)
Date and Time: April 10 at 1-4 pm
Location: Green Quad
Join Maurice Bailey (Save Our Legacy Ourselves, Sapelo Island) and Nik Heynen (University of Georgia) for a workshop that weaves the practices of indigo dyeing with a discussion of geography, culture, and history and the reclamation of indigo by Black growers and artists. This event introduces students and faculty to the history of indigo dying in the sea islands of South Carolina, and issues of coastal gentrification and climate change impacting Sapelo Island, Georgia. The event will provide a hands-on indigo dying experience.
(Part of a series based on Black Southern Ecologies and organized by the USC Environmental Justice and Humanities Lab)
Date and Time: April 13-14 at TBA
Location: Karen J. Williams Courtroom at Joseph R. Rice School of Law
Keynote speakers: Arlie Hochschild (Berkeley), Peter Levine (Tufts), Deva Woodly (Brown), Jedediah Purdy (Duke), Kate Andrias (Columbia), Jamila Michener (Cornell), and journalist / filmmaker Astra Taylor.
The Capstone Conference for this three-year Mellon project will focus on the “Civic Engagement” element of its mandate, which is of special interest given the rapid growth of “civics” as an educational mandate at USC and around the country—as well as the many other challenges of our broader political moment. In particular, two distinct forms of “civic engagement” are necessary for a healthy constitutional democracy: building organized power among one’s partisan allies; and building common ground across sharp divides. Keynote speakers and core participants will examine the tensions and possible complementarities among these more oppositional and conciliatory modes of civic engagement.
Date and Time: April 16 at 1:30-4 pm
Location: Thomas Cooper Library Room L204
Helen Bertoletti presents research that captures sensory and affective phenomena through digital humanities methods, and how text mining can make such phenomena analyzable.
Refreshments will be provided.
Date and Time: April 17 at 10 am-12 pm
Location: Green Quad
A traditonal ecological knowledge workshop for students and faculty with Jalen Gordon, a local
Gullah-Geechee medicine man from the SC low country. The workshop offers a deep dive
into seasonal medicinal native plants and traditional plant gathering significant
to Gullah-Geechee culture.
(Part of a series based on Black Southern Ecologies and organized by the USC Environmental Justice and Humanities Lab)
Browse our archive of past lectures and events.