Global Humanities Series
The Global Humanities Lecture Series is an annual event that has been an initiative of our PhD Program in Humanities since 2011 and that showcases the program’s vital contribution to the intellectual life of the university.
The series is cosponsored by the Department of Comparative Humanities and the Commonwealth Center for Humanities and Society and hosts scholarly and creative presentations exploring the humanities from a global and contemporary perspective.
All the students in our graduate programs are encouraged to participate in the academic community of the humanities by attending this and other events that the programs support, such as the Annual Jewish Heritage Fund for Excellence Lecture, the Naamani Memorial Lecture, and the CCHS Leadership Series.
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Patricia Rozema2023 Director, Producer, Writer Patricia Rozema is one of Canada's most accomplished and internationally recognized filmmakers. Throughout her narrative feature film work, she has maintained an elegant female consciousness while drawing male characters with compassion. Most notably, Rozema has established herself as an exceptional and distinctly sensual visual artist. Her films are characterized by self-referential narration, idiosyncratic protagonists who are often struggling artists, formal adventurousness, and the use of fairy tales, mythology and poetry as structuring notions. |
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Jackie Murray2022 “War, Racecraft and the Heroic Body in Greek and Roman Epic” Dr. Jackie Murray is Associate Professor of Classics in the Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures and Cultures Department at the University of Kentucky. Dr. Murray examined the role that epic discourse in the Iliad, Odyssey, Argonautica, and the Aeneid gives to war in defining, legitimating and naturalizing the racialized hierarchies that obtain among mortals in the real world. She focused on how war put the male body at risk of being racialized because heroic glory tends to rest on humiliating and dehumanizing other men. Her talk argued that the ancient Greek and Roman epic poets presented insightful and nuanced ways of seeing and critiquing the way war produces race. |
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Lonnie G. Bunch III2019 “A Fool’s Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture” Lonnie G. Bunch III is the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the new secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Secretary Bunch’s talk addressed the relevance of the African American museum; how it is impacting the dialogue about race, discrimination, inclusion and reconciliation in the United States; and the implications of the African American historical experience for our country today. |
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Margaret Noodin2018 Margaret Noodin is an Anashinaabe poet and interdisciplinary scholar. She received her MFA in creative writing and her PhD in English and linguistics from the University of Minnesota. She is an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where she serves as the director of the Electa Quinney Institute for American Indian Education. Her talk focused on her current project, which includes translations of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Sappho, and Hafez into Anishinaabemowin. |
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Alysia Nicole Harris2017 Alysia Nicole Harris is a Pushcart Prize nominee and winner of the Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize in 2014 and 2015. Her work was featured in HBO’s Brave New Voices. She received her MFA in poetry from New York University in 2014 and is a PhD candidate in linguistics at Yale University. |
