Speaker: Dr. Yvonne Kamugisha, Founding and Artistic Director of Fashion Diplomacy Renaissance Initiatives

Date: November 17, 2025

Time: 4:00 p.m.

Location: Anne Frank Center

Co-sponsors: Anne Frank Center

Dr. Kamugisha’s research critically examines U.S. influence and the role of religious actors in reconciliation and genocide prevention in Burundi, emphasizing regional dynamics that affect peacebuilding through judicial processes.

She founded and runs organizations that use fashion and sport to foster cultural understanding, empowerment, and restorative relationships between states, promoting dialogue, healing, and cross-cultural engagement.

Speaker/Photographer: Jan Banning

Date: October 14, 2025

Time: 4:15-6 p.m.

Location: Gambrell Hall 412

Co-sponsors: School of Visual Art and Design

Dutch photographer Jan Banning speaks about the role that social advocacy and commentary play in his artistic photography of themes such as post-genocide Rwanda, the US criminal justice system, and national identities.

Speaker: Dr. Anika Wilson

Date: April 23, 2025

Time: 12-2 p.m.

Location: Gambrell 429

Join us as we explore a moment when a community confronts the damage brought by a historic storm that caused a mudslide which destroyed crops, washed away fragile hillside farms, and swept away homes and inhabitants.

Speaker: Hisham Mayet, film director

Date: March 21, 2024

Time: 5:00 p.m. - 7:30 p.m.

Location: Close-Hipp Building, Lumpkin Auditorium

Co-Sponsors: World Affairs Council

Oulaya’s Wedding offers an impressionistic portrayal of love, family, gender roles, and ecstatic music in the Sahara Desert. The documentary focuses on Group Doueh, a beloved family band in the Western Sahara, and their participation in the traditional Sahraoui wedding of their eldest daughter. Through candid and sincere accounts from residents, hosts, guests, and artists, the film captures the emotional and logistical maelstrom of a Sahraoui wedding, highlighting its significance as a foundation of Saharan culture in the city of Dakhla.

Condensed from 40 hours of footage shot between 2007 and 2012, The Divine River: Ceremonial Pageantry in The Sahel is an exhilarating, hallucinatory, harrowing record of music, ritual, life, and landscape along the Niger River—which the Tuareg call Egerew n-Igerewen, or "River of Rivers"— as it winds through Mali and the Republic of Niger. Traversing 300 miles of this transitional zone between the Sahara and the Savanna, The Divine River is not a linear record of a journey so much as a phantasmagoria of visual associations that create their own emotional topography and chronology, always accompanied by music that blurs the lines between sacred and secular, past and present.

Speakers: Boubacar Ndiaye. Baye Cheikh Mbaye, Pape Ndiaye Paamath

Date: October 25, 2022

Time: 7:00 p.m. - 8:30 p.m.

Location: Columbia Museum of Art Theater 

Affiliation: Columbia Museum of Art Theater 

Speaker: Dr. T.J. Tallie

Date: Nov. 5, 2020

Time: 4:00 p.m. - 5:15 p.m.

Affiliation: Department of History, University of San Diego

Speakers: Dr. Robin Chapdelaine, Assistant Professor 

Date: March 11

Time: 11: 40 a.m. - 12:50 p.m.

Affiliation: Department of History, Duquesne University

Recorded lecture available upon request

Speaker: Dr. Tiffany Florvil, Associate Professor

Date: March 23

Time: 3:00 p.m.

Affiliation: Department of History, The University of New Mexico

Co-sponsored by the Ann Johnson Institute for Science, Technology and Society

Speaker: Dr. Olusade Taiwo

Date: March 23

Time: 1:00 p.m. 

Affiliation: Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research

Co-sponsored by the USC College of Social Work

Speaker: Lindsey Green-Simms

Affiliation: Associate Professor of Literature, American University

Speaker: Jae Won Chung, Jiangtao Harry Gu,  Jie Guo, Jung Joon Lee, Minna Lee, Sohl Lee, Greg Wilsbacher

Date: August 22-23 

Location: Gambrell Hall 431

Co-sponsors: Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, USC, Association for Asian Studies-Northeast Asia Council (AAS-NEAC), Walker Institute of International and Area Studies, USC Moving Image Research Collection (MIRC), USC

Speaker: Dr. Jack Neubaeur

Date: April 4, 2025

Time: 12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.

Location: Gambrell Hall 429

Co-Sponsors: History Center and Geography

Speaker: Dr. Jack Neubaeur

Date: April 3, 2025

Time: 12:00 p.m. - 1:15 p.m.

Location: Gambrell Hall 429

Co-Sponsors: History Center and Geography

Speaker: Nishant Tiku, Himalayan Institute of Alternatives Ladakh (India)

Date: October 3, 2024

Time: 3:00 PM

Location: Jones 006

Co-sponsors: School of the Earth, Ocean, and Environment and Asian Studies

Wu Wei, sheng with Trudy Chan in Conversation

Date: September 27, 2024

Location: School of Music Recital Hall

Co-sponsors: Composition, Spark, and Asian Studies

Speaker: Joowon Park, Associate Professor of Anthropology and the Director of the Asian Studies Program at Skidmore College

Date: April 4, 2024

Time: 3:00 p.m. 

Location: Gambrell, Room 412

How do militarization and a continuum of violence impact resettled North Koreans' pathways to belonging in South Korea? In this talk, Park draws on his recently published book, Belonging in a House Divided (University of California Press, 2023), to chronicle the everyday lives of resettled North Koreans and their experiences with violence, postwar citizenship, and ethnic boundary making. He asks readers to consider why North Korean resettlement in South Korea is a difficult process, despite a shared goal of reunification and the absence of a language barrier.

Co-sponsors: Center for Asian Studies, Department of Anthropology, The History Center, Migration Lab

Speaker: Dr. Anne Rose Kitagwawa, Chief Curator of Collection & Asian Art and Director of Academic Programs at UO's Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art

Date: March 28, 2024

Time: 5:00 p.m. 

Location: McMaster, Room 329

Co-sponsors: Association for Chinese Art History, School of Visual Art and Design

In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the University of Oregon’s Center for the Study of Women in Society, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art recently organized the special exhibition Half the Sky: Women in Chinese Art, referencing the 1968 Chairman Mao Zedong quotation “Women hold up half the sky,” meaning that they are the equal of men. The art on display attests to the remarkable resilience and creativity of women despite their relatively low status in traditional Chinese society due to Confucian and Buddhist value systems that deemed them to be inferior.

Speaker: Dr. Dimitri Vanoverbeke, The University fo Tokyo

Date: March 13, 2024

Time: 12:30 p.m. 

Location: Sloan College, Room 104

Speaker: Sung Soo Lee, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto

Date: September 21, 2023

Time: 11:40 a.m. - 12:55 p.m. 

Location: Virtual Event

Sponsored by the Center for Asian Studies, Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

Speaker: Dr. Eric Hung

Date: Friday, March 18, 2023

Time: 10:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.

Location: Boyd Plaza (in front of  the Columbia Museum of Art)

Hosted by: Transpacific Intercultural Collaboration Research Group, The Humanities Collaborative

Co-sponsored by The School of Music and the Music History Area, Peake Colloquium, The Music of Asian America Research Center

South Carolina is home to many diverse Asian American communities. At this event, members of some of these communities will share how they use music and dance to preserve ancestral cultures, adapt to life in the United States, perform their senses of belonging and citizenship, and create space in local music ecosystems. Our lineup features Chiara Cox, Xiaomin and Laura Li, Diaspoura, Gamecock Bhangra, Kosmic Dance Club, and students from the USC School of Music.

Speaker: Dr. Colleen Laird

Date: March 24, 2023

Time: 1:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.

Location: Richland Library-Main Branch Auditorium

Affiliation: Assistant Professor of Japanese Popular Culture at the University of British Columbia

Co-sponsored by the School of Visual Art and Design, Humanities Collaborative

Link: https://www.richlandlibrary.com/event/2023-03-24/promoting-women-arts-digital-era

In celebration of Women's History Month, USC's School of Visual Art and Design joins forces with Art+Feminism, a global movement that builds communities and closes information gaps related to gender, feminism, and the arts. Speakers will highlight efforts to increase women artists' visibility on the Internet and in the digital humanities. The second half of the event will feature a Wikipedia editing tutorial for beginners and active practice with research and writing. Help us bring attention to traditionally underrepresented artists, especially those who may have been overlooked due to race, ethnicity, gender, age, religion, language, abilities/ disabilities, sexual orientation, gender identity, socioeconomic status, or geographic region.

Speaker: Linda Rui Feng

Date: December 8, 2022

Time: 6:00 p.m. - 7:30 p.m.

Location: Richland Library-Main Branch Auditorium

Affiliation: Cultural Historian at the University of Toronto

Co-sponsored by Transpacific Intercultural Collaboration Research Group, USC Humanities Collaborative Center for Asian Studies, Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

Please join us for a conversation with Linda Rui Feng about her highly acclaimed novel, Swimming Back to Trout River, which Garth Greenwell calls “one of the most beautiful debuts I have read in years.”

Speaker: Dr. Prasenjit Duara

Date: October 11, 2022

Time: 4:00 p.m.

McKissick Museum Theater 

Affiliation: Oscar Tang Chair of East Asian Studies at Duke University

Co-sponsored by History Center, Department of History, Transpacific Intercultural Collaboration Research Group, Humanities Collaborative

Contemporary world politics is structured around the world order of nation-states in turn founded largely upon a Newtonian cosmology and an associated worldview. I develop a conceptual framework around the ‘epistemic engine’ which organizes and circulates the cosmological and institutional structures of Enlightenment modernity. Subsequently, I explore how the imperial Chinese world order--functional until at least the late 19th century-- reveals a different cosmology shaping a different world order and politics. I also explore the contemporary PRC view of the world order probing the extent to which its historical experiences can be seen to re-shape the hegemonic epistemic engine. In the final section, I draw from a paradigm of ‘oceanic temporality’ to grasp counter- finalities generated by the epistemic engine on the earth and the ocean itself. Can the counter-flows of social movements allow us to imagine a postEnlightenment, planetary cosmology?

Speaker: Professor Ivan Raykoff

Date: April 24, 2025

Time: 4:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.

Location: Gambrell 429

Speaker: Georgia Cowart, Case Western Reserve University

Date: November 22, 2024

Time: 1:10 p.m.

Location: School of Music Room 232

Speaker: Dr. Austin Crane, Walker Institute of International & Area Studies, The University of South Carolina

Date: September 13, 2024

Time: 3:30 p.m.

Location: Callcott, Room 201

Speaker: Dr. Malene Jacobsen, NUAcT Fellow in Geography at Newcastle University, UK

Date: March 23,  2023

Time: 4:00 p.m.

Location: Gambrell Hall, Room 429

In this talk, Dr. Jacobsen explores the spatial and procedural aspects of asylum adjudication in the Danish system. Asylum seekers in Denmark undergo interviews by the Immigration Service, which is the primary means for the state to collect evidence, assess credibility, and decide on asylum claims. Drawing on feminist political geography and legal theory, Dr. Jacobsen views the asylum interview as a quasi-legal space with uneven and uncertain power dynamics. She highlights connections between the interview, other geographical sites, policing practices, and various temporal and spatial scales. Contrary to the perception of impartiality, Dr. Jacobsen argues that the asylum interview resembles the quasi-legal dynamics of police interrogations.

Speaker: Dr. Jelena Subotic, Department of Political Science at Georgia State University

Date: January 24,  2023

Time: 4:30 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.

Location: Gambrell Hall, Room 429

Affiliation: Professor in the Department of Political Science at Georgia State University

Jelena Subotić is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Georgia State University. She writes broadly about international relations theory, memory politics, human rights, transitional justice, international ethics, state identity, and the politics of the Western Balkans. Her recent book, Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism (Cornell UP: 2019) has received several awards and high praise. The book explains how East European countries after the collapse of communism pursued new strategies of Holocaust remembrance where the memory, symbols, and imagery of the Holocaust became appropriated to represent crimes of communism.

Speaker: Dr. Kara Dempsey

Date: January 18,  2023

Time: 4:30 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.

Location: Gambrell Hall, Room 429

Affiliation: Associate Professor of Geography at Appalachian State University

Sponsored by Department of Geography

Speaker: Dr. Noah Gardiner

Date: October 23, 2025

Time: 4:30 p.m.

Location: Petigru 213

Co-sponsors: Department of Religious Studies

Speaker: Esra Mirze Santesso

Date: February 13, 2025

Time: 5:00 p.m.

Location: Gambrell Hall 429

Co-sponsors: Humanities Collective

Analyzing comics from the Middle East, which push back against the stereotypical representations of Muslims based on racial and moral cliches.

Speaker: Richard Bulliet, Columbia University

Date: November 22, 2024

Time: 11:30 a.m.

Location: Gambrell Hall 245b

Co-sponsors: College of Arts & Sciences History Center Islamic World Studies Religious Studies

Questions and discussion on global history, premodern history of technology, large-scale religious conversions, and history of the Islamicate World, among other potential topics.

Speaker: Tessa Farmer

Date: March 15, 2023

Time: 3:30 p.m.

Location: Callcott Room 104

Affiliation: Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Virginia

Who is responsible for ensuring access to clean potable water? In this talk, I follow residents of Ezbet Khairallah, an informal neighborhood of Cairo, as they labor to exchange, value, and evaluate potable water and to eliminate wastewater. I argue that urban residents’ practices are a locally specific form of the sociality of water, integral to the project of being well connected--to other people, to the neighborhood, and to state-run water infrastructures. While being well connected is often thought of as an elite project, I show how the deployment of connections is equally important to those who live on the urban margins.

Speaker: Jessica Barnes

Date: October 28, 2022

Time: 3:00 p.m.

Location: Callcott, Room 101

Affiliation: Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and School of Earth, Ocean, and the Environment.

Staple Security examines the central role of bread and wheat in Egyptian daily life. Focusing attention on staple foods, the book offers a new take on food security, highlighting the anxieties surrounding the possibility of these foods’ absence and actions taken to mitigate this threat.

Speaker: Musa Syeed

Date: October 26, 2022

Time: 6 p.m.

Location: The Nickelodeon

Speakers: Dr. Drucilla Barker, Dr. Farzad Salamifar, Dr. Carl Dahlman

Date: October 25, 2022

Time: 4:00 p.m.- 6:00 p.m.

Location: Close-Hipp Building, Lumpkin Auditorium

Come hear a discussion about recent events in Iran and their significance with community members and a faculty panel.

Speaker: Dr. Catherine S. Ramírez

Date: November 17, 2025

Location: Hollings Program Room, Thomas Cooper Library

Sponsored by The Walker Institute

Speaker: Dr. Lanie Millar

Date: November 11, 2025

Location: Petigru 213

Sponsored by The Walker Institute, Portuguese Program, and the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

Speaker: Dr. Cecilia Marquez

Date: September 23, 2025

Location: Gambrell 429

Sponsored by The Walker Institute, Southern Studies, Honors College, History, Center, Center for Civil Rights History & Research

Speaker: Krista Schlyer

Date: September 26, 2024

Location: Richland County Public Library

1431 Assembly Street, Columbia, SC 29201

Sponsored by USC Departments of Anthropology and Geography, the School of Earth,
Ocean, and Environment, the Walker Institute of International and Area Studies,
and by the Richland County Public Library

Please join us in welcoming this stunning collection of photographs taken during a month-long expedition along the 2000-mile United States–Mexico border.

Speaker: Dr. Miguel Arnedo-Gomez

Date: March 26, 2024

Time: 4:00 p.m. (Virtual Event)

Sponsored by Latin American, Caribbean, and US Latinx Studies Program

20th-century Cuban scholar Fernando Ortiz is broadly considered a defender of Afro-Cuban culture and AfroCubans. In this presentation, Dr. Arnedo-Gomez will probe this reputation by considering two aspects of Ortiz’s writings on Cuban national identity and Afro-Cuban ethnography. The first aspect is Ortiz’s discourse of mestizaje, which points to an oncoming Cuban future where all racial and ethnic divisions will disappear to be replaced by a single common national culture that is a mixture of African and Spanish ingredients. The second aspect is Ortiz’s belief in the idea that Afro-Cubans had basically transplanted African religions to Cuba in a perfectly preserved fashion and were, thus, still engaging in purely African cultural behaviors.

Speaker: Dr. Andrew Eugene Lynch

Date: February 22, 2024

Time: 4:30 p.m.

Location: Gambrell Hall, Room 429

Sponsored by Latin American, Caribbean, and US Latinx Studies Program, the Spanish Program, and the Department of Languages, Literature, and Cultures

Dr. Lynch’s talk will describe the political and economic forces that have shaped the construct of ‘Hispanic’ or ‘Latina/o’ identity in US public life in the late 20th century. He will consider the interdependent roles of civic organizations, political leaders, government, and the mass media in the creation of this construct, which now constitutes a vital element of postmodern US society. He will also highlight the consumerist dimension of the process, drawing upon critical cultural theory.

Speaker: Professor Julia López-Robertson, Professor of Instruction and Teacher Education, Chair, Orbis Pictus Award Committee, NCTE

Date: February 7, 2024

Time: 4:00 p.m.

Location: Gambrell Hall, Room 429

Sponsored by Latin American, Caribbean, and US Latinx Studies Program

Families are resources that are extremely powerful and important for young learners from minoritized backgrounds, yet they are often overlooked, silenced, or ostracized. Framed around Yosso’s theory of Community Cultural Wealth (CCW), this work answers the call for scholars to collaborate with practitioners to showcase the importance of using CCW as an approach to facilitate learning in various PK-20 contexts. Through their work, they challenge the low expectations some have of minoritized families and shift to an asset-based lens where families are viewed as cultural experts and active contributors to their child’s education. In this presentation, Professor López-Robertson will discuss the theoretical framework (CCW), provide examples of engagements with families, and share strategies for implementing culturally responsive classroom practices to create positive home-school partnerships.

Speaker: Professor James Kirylo, Professor of Education at the University of South Carolina

Date: November 15, 2023

Time: 5:00 p.m.

Location: Gambrell Hall, Room 429

Sponsored by Latin American, Caribbean, and US Latinx Studies Program.

James Kirylo is a Professor of Education at the University of South Carolina. He has published numerous works in various journals and written several books, including The Catholic Teacher: Teaching for Social Justice with Faith, Hope, and Love. In this book, he shares about his personal experiences and reflections on what it means to be a Catholic teacher. He draws on the inclusive nature of the Church through ecumenical, interfaith, and interreligious dialogue, as well as the Church's social teachings and its connection to liberation theology and a critical pedagogy in the context of faith.

Speaker: Professor Oswaldo Estrada, Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, director of the Faculty Fellows Program, and editor of Hispanófila and Palabras de América

Date: November 2, 2023

Time: 5:00 p.m.

Location: Gambrell Hall, Room 429

Sponsored by the Spanish Program and the Latin American, Caribbean, and US Latinx Studies Program.

Meet Professor Oswaldo Estrada, an accomplished academic at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As a professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies, director of the Faculty Fellows Program, and editor of Hispanófila and Palabras de América, he is also involved in the university's Institute for the Arts and Humanities. Dr. Estrada is also a prolific author and editor of numerous books on literary and cultural criticism, including the awardwinning Troubled Memories: Iconic Mexican Women and the Traps of Representation (2019 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title). This presentation focuses on Francisca Pizarro, daughter of the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro and the Inca princess, Quispe Sisa. Prof. Estrada analyzes contemporary rewritings of Francisca, and how they speak of otherness, gender challenges, and coloniality in the 21st Century.

Speakers: Professor Paul Malovrh, Chair of the Department of Languages, Literatures, & Cultures, Associate Professor of SLA and Hispanic Linguistics, Core Faculty of the Linguistics Program University of South Carolina; Professor Nina Moreno, Associate Chair and Undergraduate Director of the Department of Languages, Literatures, & Cultures, Associate Professor of SLA and Hispanic Linguistics

Date: October 12, 2023

Time: 5:00 p.m.

Location: Thomas Cooper Library, Scholar's Corner

Sponsored by University Libraries and the Latin American, Caribbean, and US Latinx Studies Program.

Speaker: Mr. Ivan Segura, Director of Multicultural Affairs for SC Commission for Minority Affairs

Date: September 21, 2023

Time: 5:00 p.m.

Location: Thomas Cooper Library, Scholar's Corner

Sponsored by the Latin American, Caribbean and, US Latinx Studies Program.

Mr. Ivan Segura is the Director of Multicultural Affairs at the SC Commission for Minority Affairs. With extensive experience in community activism, arts advocacy and grassroot leadership development for Latinos in SC, Mr. Segura has made a positive impact on the lives of many. He has also been recognized for his contributions as a recipient of the Othli Award by Mexico's Secretariat of Foreign Affairs.

Art display featuring Palmetto Luna's Latino Art Collection

Date: September 18 - October 13, 2023

Location: Thomas Cooper Library

Sponsored by University Libraries, the Latino and Hispanic Faculty Caucus at USC, and the Latin American, Caribbean and US Latinx Studies Program.

Speaker: Dr. Rafael Ocasio, Charles A. Dana Professor and Chair of Spanish,  Faculty Fellow for the Gay Johnson McDougall Center for Global Diversity and Inclusion at Agnes Scott College

Date: March 29, 2023

Time: 4:30 p.m.

Location: Gambrell Hall, Room 429

Affiliation: Charles A. Dana Professor and Chair of Spanish and the Faculty Fellow for the Gay Johnson McDougall Center for Global Diversity and Inclusion at Agnes Scott College

Sponsored by the Latin American, Caribbean and US Latinx Studies Program and the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

This presentation describes his book, Race and Nation in Puerto Rican Folklore: Franz Boas and John Alden Mason in Porto Rico (Rutgers University Press, 2020), which offers a critical view of Boas’s historic trip to Puerto Rico in 1915. Dr. Ocasio will also discuss some of the special categories of folk tales that Boas and Mason presented as examples of representations of a well-grounded Puerto Rican identity

Speaker: Sedra "Amy" Snipes, Associate Professor of Biobehavioral Health at The Pennsylvania State University

Date: February 24, 2023

Time: 2:00 p.m.

Location: Close-Hipp Building, Room 401

Co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology, The Walker Institute, Latin American, Caribbean, & US Latinx Studies Program, Department of African American Studies

Dr. Snipes will talk about her research on migrant farm work as influenced by her position as a slave-descendant daughter of the American South. Focusing on her positions as a Southern woman, anthropologist, and health behavioralist, she untangles how these interesting perspectives strengthened her ties to health, equity and policies for migrant and seasonal farmworkers.

Speaker: Dr. Greg Dawes

Date: February 14, 2023

Time: 4:30 p.m.

Location: Gambrell Hall, Room 429

Affiliation: Distinguished Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at North Carolina State University

Sponsored by the Latin American, Caribbean and US Latinx Studies Program and the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

One of the most significant ways Una misma noche differs from similar novels by Ricardo Piglia, Alan Pauls, and Martín Kohan has been largely overlooked, that is, its deep exploration of the manner in which State violence and the fear of violence suffuse and encumber the characters and the way that informs their decision-making and their actions. Whether it is violence unleashed by the State in 1976 or the vandalism visited upon the neighborhood years later, it triggers in the characters fear, anger, guilt and/or relief. And those affective responses intertwine with their political ideologies. In that regard, Una misma noche is a subtle study in the way ideology operates within the confines of class and race or from without, thus teasing out the inner contradictions present in anyone’s ideology and mirroring more closely, I would argue, the contradictions in society at large.

Speaker: Dr. Araceli Hernandez-Laroche

Date: January 26, 2023

Time: 4:30p.m.

Location: Gambrell Hall, Room 429

Affiliation: Director of South Carolina Centro Latino, Professor of Modern Languages and Coordinator of French Global Studies at USC Upstate

Sponsored by the Latin American, Caribbean and US Latinx Studies Program/Latino and Hispanic Faculty Caucus

We invite you to learn first-hand about South Carolina Centro Latino (El Centro), its creation during the pandemic, and impact in the community. Explore the role of publicfacing work to bridge new audiences as we collaborate to elevate Hispanic and Latino talent within and beyond higher education. Discover how you can engage with El Centro through any of its three pillars, Latinx Interdisciplinary Studies & Civic Leadership, the Multilingual Public Humanities, and Translation & Community Interpreting.

Speakers: Dr. Rebecca Janzen, Dr. Jorge Camacho

Date: November 2, 2022

Time: 4:00 p.m.

Location: Gambrell 429

Sponsored by Latin American Studies Program, US Latinx Studies Program

Dr. Janzen and Dr. Camacho will speak about their recently published books: Unholy Trinity: State, Church, and Film in Mexico (SUNY 2021), and Jorge will speak about his Representaciones del mal: brujos y ñáñigos en Cuba. Romance Monographs, University of Mississippi, 2021, [Representations of evil: sorcerers and ñáñigos in Cuba].

Speaker: Dr. Michael Zeuske

Date: October 12, 2022

Time: 3:30 p.m. (Zoom)

Affiliation: Professor of Latin American and Iberian History at the University of Köln (Cologne), Germany

Sponsored by Latin American Studies Program

Does the slave's perspective on slavery exist? No, this is not existing. Did enslaved people under slavery speak, tell, sing, narrate, criticize, or even write about their own real lives, their work, their suffering, love and sexual relations, conflicts, and joys? My main argument here is – yes, they have. But possibly mainly with each other or with their respective groups in their respective times. I will present the cases of auto-representation and, at the same time, the slaves view of slaveries primarily in the form of individual cases, in which slaves and ex-slaves spoke (and wrote) in slavery or shortly after slavery about their life histories. The exception in Bezug auf diesen Punkt “in oder nahe der Sklaverei-Regimes” is Esteban Montejo who spoke his narration to Miguel Barnet in the 1960s. The other exception is María de los Reyes Castillo Bueno, called Reyita, who narrated her life to her daughter in the 1990s.

Speaker: Stephanie Pidgeon

Date: March 25

Time: 1:30 p.m.

Affiliation: Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies, Bates College

Co-sponsored with Jewish Studies and Film and Media Studies

Speaker: Stephanie Pidgeon

Instructor: Dr. Rebecca Janzen

Date: March 25

Virtual class visit to SPAN 575/SPAN 783

Affiliation: Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies, Bates College

Speaker: Paul Joseph López Oro

Instructor: Dr. Sherina Feliciano-Santos

Date: March 15

Virtual class visit to ANTH 271 - Language and Popular Culture

Affiliation: Assistant Professor, Smith College

Speaker: Artist Krzysztof Wodiczko, Peace Anthropologist Dr. Douglas P. Fry

Date: October 28, 2024

Time: 7:00 pm

Location: Virtual Event

Co-sponsors: UNC Greensboro Department of Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Baltimore College of Public Affairs, LMCC (Lower Manhattan Cultural Council)

Speaker: Dr. Natalia Tšuikina, Associate Professor at Tallinn University (Estonia) and Erasmus scholar

Date: September 13, 2024

Time: 4:30 p.m.

Location: Gambrell Hall, Room 217

Co-sponsors: History Center

This talk focuses on the contemporary socio-linguistic situation in Estonia, with an emphasis on the role of the Russian language and the language ideologies present in modern Estonian society, particularly in light of the consequences of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Dr. Tšuikina will also talk about the changes that have occurred in public spaces and the discussions surrounding this topic.

Speaker: Dr. Vitaly Chernetsky, Professor Of Slavic Languages And Literatures At The University Of Kansas

Date: February 23, 2024

Time: 3:00 p.m.

Location: Gambrell Hall, Room 429

Vitaly Chernetsky is a Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas and President of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. A native of Ukraine, he studied at Moscow State University and Duke University and earned his MA (1993) and PhD (1996) in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania. He has a wide-ranging research profile in Ukrainian, Russian, and other Slavic literatures and cultures, as well as cross-disciplinary engagements in film, gender and LGBTQ+ studies, Jewish studies, translation studies, and diaspora/migration studies. Dr. Chernetsky is the author of Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007) and numerous articles on modern and contemporary Russian and Ukrainian culture, highlighting cross-regional contexts. He is also the author of A monograph in Ukrainian, Intersections and Breakthroughs: Ukrainian Literature and Cinema between the Global and the Local is forthcoming from Krytyka, Ukraine’s leading academic publisher

Speaker: Dr. Volodymyr Dubovyk, Odesa I. I. Mechnikov National University (Ukraine)

Date: April 18th, 2023

Time: 11:30 a.m.

Location: Gambrell Hall, Room 429

Russia's massive invasion of Ukraine has been ongoing for more than a year now. There is no crystal ball to see how and when exactly it will end. Yet, this will determine the future of these two countries, for sure, and will also reverberate well beyond. Ukraine is fighting for itself, naturally, for its survival, sovereignty, territorial integrity, freedom. But these issues, values are meaningful for many other nations, people. Standing up for what is right, for the just international order, while preventing the world from tuning into some sort of jungle. This and more have particular meaning in the postSoviet Eurasia, Eastern Europe, Black Sea region, but also in multiple corners of the world.

Speaker: Dr. Dovilė Budrytė

Date: April 13, 2023

Time: 4:00 p.m.

Location: Gambrell Hall, Room 429

When the war in Ukraine started last year, Maria Mälksoo argued that this war has become a “decolonizing moment of sorts” as Central and Eastern European states have started taking the “moral and practical lead” in supporting Ukraine and thus asserting their own agency. Following this line of argumentation, I assert that this war has indeed become a decolonizing moment for the states in Central Eastern Europe and beyond. Focusing on the Baltic states, I will explore the Central and Eastern European states’ vicarious identification with Ukraine, identifying multiple ways in which these actors have initiated policies to support Ukraine internationally and the ways in which solidarity with Ukraine has been received by various domestic constituencies, including ethnic minorities. By vicariously identifying with Ukraine, the states in Central and Eastern Europe have continued their transformation from “policy-takers” to “policy-makers” in the European security landscape.

Speaker: Isabelle Khurshudyan

Date: March 14,  2023

Time: 6:00 p.m.

Location: Close-Hipp Blgd. East View Room, 8th Floor

Affiliation: Ukraine Bureau Chief, The Washington Post

Sponsors: School of Journalism and Mass Communications 

Speaker: Dr. Emily Chanell-Justice, Director of The Temerty Contemporary Research Institute, Harvard University

Date: February 14,  2023

Time: 4:00 p.m.

Location: Close-Hipp Building 8th Floor, East View Event Room

Affiliation: Director of the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University

At the end of 2013, with a pro-Russian government turning its back on Ukraine’s aspirations to join the European Union, Ukrainians gathered in protest in what would become the Euromaidan Revolution. With the illegal annexation of Crimea and the Russia-backed separatist movements inciting war in the Donbas in 2014, civil society networks have remained critical as Ukraine fought for its democracy and territorial integrity. When Russia invaded on February 24 and brought the full force of its army upon Ukraine, the smaller and lesser-armed country responded with unimaginable tenacity. In this talk, Dr. Channell-Justice discusses how the phenomenon of self-organization – that if something needs to be done and you have the capacity to do it, you should do it – was embraced during the Euromaidan, shaped Ukrainians’ attitudes toward their relationship with the government and their communities, and established trust networks Ukrainians were able to build on to meet urgent needs in 2022.

Speaker: Dr. Matthew Pauly, Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University

Date: January 20,  2023

Time: 12:00 p.m.

Location: Gambrell Hall, Room 429

This talk explores how Soviet authorities appropriated medical knowledge derived from the treatment of a “passive” juvenile population to create a new assurance of municipal wellbeing in 1920s Odesa. After the tumult of revolution and war, state custodians sought to raise a new, loyal generation in this traumatized city at the Soviet Union’s edge. Children’s health would signify revolution achieved. Illness would continue to plague the city’s residents, but the myth of a community united in health created an ecology of promise and activism.