Past Events

About the speaker

Catherine Davies is Professor Emerita and the Director of the Institute of Modern Languages Research at the University of London. She is the co-editor of Transnational Spanish Studies (2020), and has contributed chapters to a number of edited collections, including The Oxford Handbook on Gender, War and the Western World since 1600 (2018), Spain in the Nineteenth Century: New Essays on Experiences of Culture and Society (2018), Rethinking Past and Present in Cuba: Essays in Memory of Alastair Hennessy (2018), and The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History (2017), among others. Her research interests are in 19th- and 20th-century Spanish and Spanish American history, culture and literature; the wars of Independence in Spanish American history and literature; Cuban history and literature; Abolitionism in Cuba and Puerto Rico; and literature and culture in Argentina.

Lecture presented in collaboration with the Centre for Comparative Literature.

About the talk

Famous chefs, Michelin stars, culinary techniques and gastronomical accolades attract moneyed tourists to Spain from all over the world. Even with this global attention, we know little about how Spanish cooking became a litmus test for demonstrating Spain's modernity and, relatedly, the roles ascribed to the modern Spanish women responsible for daily cooking.

Ingram will present her new book Women's Work and discuss how efforts to articulate a new, modern Spain infiltrated multiple genres and media, including those about food. Culinary writing engaged debates about women's roles in Spanish society and reached women at the site of much of their daily labor--the kitchen--and shaped thinking about their roles in modernizing Spain.

About the speaker

Rebecca Ingram is Professor of Spanish Languages, Cultures and Literatures, Honors Faculty Liaison, and the Interim Director of Interdisciplinary Humanities at the University of San Diego. Professor Ingram’s research involves food cultural studies in relation to Spain. She is the author of Women’s Work: How Culinary Cultures Shaped Modern Spain (Vanderbilt, 2022). Her volume Digestible Governance: Gastrocracy and Spanish Foodways, co-edited with Eugenia Afinoguénova and Lara Anderson, will be published later in 2024. In 2020, the Bulletin of Spanish Studies published the special issue she and Anderson edited titled “Transhispanic Food Cultural Studies,” the first extended study of food as a cultural text within the broader fields of Iberian and Latin American Cultural Studies.

Lecture presented in collaboration with Culinaria.

About the talk

One of the truly astounding things about postmodernism is that, whatever it became in the hands of less talented enthusiasts, it originated as more or less what many of its recent practitioners say it is not, that is, it began as a formal system or a series of formal systems. Formal systems are probably not well-known or understood outside of mathematics, computer and natural sciences, but they are pervasive across social sciences and humanities as well. This paper will examine the two sides of this question. On the one side, what takes place when a society only speaks with propositions that are determined to be either rationally or factually true, and on the other side, what happens when language is fully metaphorical?

About the speaker

Dorothea Olkwoski is University of Colorado Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at CU Colorado Springs. She is the Director of Cognitive Studies, former Director of Humanities, former Chair of Philosophy, and former founding Director of Women's Studies. Olkowski is the author of more than one hundred articles and fourteen books, including her most recent publication, Deleuze, Bergson, and Merleau-Ponty, The Logic and Pragmatics of Affect, Perception, and Creation (Indiana University Press, 2021).

Lecture presented in collaboration with the Centre for Creativity.

About the talk

As the world grapples with the promises and threats of AI, at the extreme ends of both wish-fulfillment and nightmare stands a common premise: the machine that not only follows instructions, but also chooses, invents, designs, and controls.

For some commentators, of course, we have already crossed that threshold. For others, we never will. While such disputes may entail different interpretations of today’s technological capacities, they are far more influenced by a lack of consensus concerning what we mean when we talk about human intelligence. And this is a debate that spans millennia.

While a thorough archeology of concepts like mind, spirit, soul—what is implicitly conjured by the promise or specter of thinking machines—would start at least with the ancient Greeks, early modern Europe provides us with a key moment and some vital protagonists in the story. In this lecture, William Egginton delves into a cross-cultural, transmedia conversation—involving thinkers and writers such as Llull, Cervantes, Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant—to unearth some of the basic problems and unspoken assumptions of today’s AI catastrophists and apologists alike.

About the speaker

William Egginton is the Decker Professor in the Humanities, chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, and Director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of multiple books, including How the World Became a Stage (2003), Perversity and Ethics (2006), A Wrinkle in History (2007), The Philosopher’s Desire (2007), The Theater of Truth (2010), In Defense of Religious Moderation (2011), The Man Who Invented Fiction (2016), The Splintering of the American Mind (2018), and The Rigor of Angels (2023), which was named to several best of 2023 lists, including The New York Times and The New Yorker. He is co-author with David Castillo of Medialogies: Reading Reality in the Age of Inflationary Media (2017) and What Would Cervantes Do? Navigating Post-Truth with Spanish Baroque Literature (2022). His latest book, on the philosophical, psychoanalytic, and surrealist dimensions of the work of Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky, was published in Jan. 2024.

About the talk

Though researchers on the development of gender reassignment surgery (GRS) in Thailand come from a diverse variety of fields, they share the same curiosity on Thailand’s contemporary status as the surgical center for trans medical operations, and they largely focus on the same period of the 1970s to 2010s. Scholars traditionally mark the 1970s as a landmark decade in Thai medical history as Thai doctors began performing vaginoplasty in the country. Due to the many medical papers published by the pioneering Thai GRS surgeon Dr. Preecha Tiewtranon (2001; 2004; 2014; 2015) and his many interviews with scholars and the popular press (Sinhaneti and Pullawan, 2008; Aizura, 2011; Farber, 2019) in which he denotes 1975 as the beginning of Thai doctors’ engagement with trans medicine, scholars have adopted his chronology. Yet, this starting point contradicts archival sources as it obscures the period that Thai doctors began to medically study kathoey (trans feminine) people, and it obfuscates the experimental stage of related-genital surgery in Thailand.

Esther's presentation will re-narrate the history of “sex-change” surgery in Thailand through exploration of Thai archival records from 1951-1975. In doing so, she will make three historiographic interventions: (1) re-narrativize the 1970s decade as a starting period for sex-change surgery in Thailand, (2) emphasize how kathoey were studied from a Western medical perspective, and how Thai medical scientists attempted to embed this paradigm in Thai society, (3) demonstrate how post-war American soft power influenced the evolution of trans surgery in Thailand from earlier intersex-related surgical practices. She will close with some preliminary historical conclusions on the formation of trans medicine in Thailand based off of cross-continental connections between Thai and American doctors.

 About the speaker

Chanathip (Esther) Suwannanon is a Thai kathoey trans woman scholar. At present, she is a PhD student in Interdisciplinary Studies (INTD) at the University of Victoria. Her dissertation blends oral histories with older Thai kathoeys with medical archives to trace the history of trans medicine in Thailand. Her project focuses on kathoey history, trans medical technology and Thai history from the 1950s to 1990s.

About the speaker

Dr. Saskia Cornes is an assistant professor of the practice at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University and Director of the Duke Campus Farm. She holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, where her work focused on the emergence of private property as a guiding logic in the culture and agriculture of 17th century England, and as a key point of origin for the climate crisis. A farmer by vocation, she learned regenerative agriculture through a range of on-farm apprenticeships, and through post-graduate study at the Center for Agroecology at UC Santa Cruz. In her work now, she weaves teaching, farming and more traditional forms of research together to rework our relationship to food, and to the land and people that grow it.

Over my Dead Body: Formula and Poetry in Late Medieval Manuscript

About the talk

When choosing an inscription to place on a tomb, whether one's own or that of a loved one, what information is most important to include? Why choose to have the inscription be a poem? Why choose one language over another? Medieval poetry usually survives in manuscript form, but another significant source of poetry is tomb inscriptions. This paper will consider poems inscribed on tombs in late medieval England and the composition choices behind them, especially the choice of language. It will also discuss the relationship of these poems with formulas used in prose inscriptions and the differences between tomb poetry in England as opposed to France.

About the speaker

Bard Swallow (they/them) is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Medieval Studies with a collaborative specialization in Book History and Print Culture. Their dissertation studies the choices made by poets in the multilingual environment of fourteenth-century England: does choosing to write in Latin give poets access to poetic forms and formulas that have no English or French analogues? Bard’s research interests more broadly include manuscript anthologies and how compilers chose their contents, (multilingual) wordplay as used in poetry, and medievalism in modern media—especially video games. Their research has appeared in the Journal of Medieval Latin and Games and Culture and is forthcoming in the Journal of the Early Book Society.

John Reibetanz has been a finalist for the National Magazine Awards (Canada) and the National Poetry Competition (United States). His poems have appeared in such magazines as Poetry (Chicago), The Paris Review, Canadian Literature, The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, The Southern Review, and Quarry. His most recent collection, Mining For Sun, was shortlisted for the ReLit Poetry Award. His reading will be to launch his new collection, Metromorphoses, and a signing will follow. 

Kate Cayley has published two short story collections and three collections of poetry, and her plays have been performed in Canada, the US and the UK. She has won the Trillium Book Award, an O. Henry Prize, and the Mitchell Prize for Poetry, and been a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, among other awards.

Hosted by Prof. Adam Sol in collaboration with the Centre for Creativity.

About the speaker... 

I. Augustus Durham is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto. A former President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in English at the University of Maryland, College Park, he worked in New York prior to his arrival at Toronto. His research interests span numerous centuries to account for the emergence, presence, and meaning of blackness in modernity. Durham’s first monograph, Stay Black and Die: On Melancholy and Genius (Duke University Press), takes up such ideas to examine the relationship between black mothers and sons whereby through abstraction, the black feminine/maternal maintains a psychoanalytic and affective role in the making of melancholy and genius in the black masculine. He has published work in Syndicate, Black Camera: An International Film Journal, Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International, and Journal of Religion and Health; and an essay on the film Moonlight for an edited collection on Tarell Alvin McCraney. Durham is currently working on three new projects regarding a singer, a calendar year and (re)invention.

In the dark and wet conditions of the WWI trenches objects became imbued with memories and stories, taking on larger-than-life meanings and acting as a mediator between wartime and civil life.

After the First World War, student veterans returned to University of Toronto and responded to the trauma of war through the writing and staging of a memory play. The cast members and writers all contributed their uniforms, gear, and personal equipment to the production. The collective experience of war was illustrated through the material culture that was brought back and presented in the production.

This symposium discusses the use of war souvenirs, equipment, paraphernalia, museum pieces and curiosities to materialize memory and to make sense of an extraordinary historical moment. How did the war’s material objects impact the making of modernism? What role did objects that came out of the trenches and conflict have on nation-building and identity formation in post WWI Canada?

About the keynote

Keynote address, 10-11 a.m., by Dr. Sarafina Pagnotta | From "From Somewhere in France" to Somewhere in the Collections: Recovering Soldier Art at the Canadian War Museum

Dr. Sarafina Pagnotta completed her PhD in Public History at Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, in September 2024. Her research focuses on ‘unofficial’ artworks made by Canadians (soldiers, civilians, and prisoners of war, among others) during the First and Second World Wars both on and behind the front lines. Her goals are: to find ways to engage with these works as war art, artifact and historical document, to recommend updates to the cataloging best practices of these works (especially when they appear in a textual archive, rather than in a war art collection), and to explain the important connections between national institutions such as archives, museums and art galleries and their impact on public/collective memory. She has been a contract research assistant at the Canadian War Museum since 2017 and does independent research consulting including family military histories and genealogical research.

With a lecture by Professor Alan Filewod

Supporting lecture, 10-11 a.m., Prof. Alan Filewod: From Hart House to Vimy Ridge and Back: Student Vets Restage their War

About the speaker

Alan Filewod is a Professor Emeritus of Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph, where he specializes in Canadian and political theatre history. He has published widely on Canadian theatre and drama, with a focus on political intervention theatre. His most recent book is Reliving the Trenches: Memory Plays by Veterans of the Great War (2021, Wilfrid Laurier UP).

Lunch from noon to 1 p.m., followed by the opening of the exhibit "Reliving the Trenches: Cultural Artifacts and the Embodiment of War Memories" in the Pratt Library Foyer.

Hosted and organized by Prof. Cathie Sutton.

About the talk

Patrick van Rensburg was a renowned humanitarian worker and an anti-apartheid activist. In 1982 he was the recipient of the Right Livelihood Award for his pioneering model of ‘education with production’ practiced at his famous Swaneng Hill School and in the Serowe Brigades. Bessie Head became Botswana’s most famous novelist. Her fiction and non-fiction drew heavily on van Rensburg’s projects. Both admired one another, though at times they had a tempestuous relationship. By framing the development encounter through Head’s letters and writing, Hilton explores how aid work served the interests of so many and not only the intended beneficiaries. Moreover, by uncovering both protagonists’ psychological breakdowns, Hilton amplifies the ‘nervous conditions’ of development during the decades of decolonisation.

About the speaker

Matthew Hilton is a social historian with interests in the history of humanitarianism, consumer society and social activism, both in Britain and globally. He did his PhD at Lancaster University before spending nearly twenty years at the University of Birmingham. Hilton joined Queen Mary in 2016 as Vice-Principal for Humanities and Social Sciences.

About the talk

Recognizing that the ancient Greek sex trade depended on enslaved labour, Glazebrook focuses on the connection between slavery and the Athenian brothel to examine Greek slaving practices as a cycle. The evidence available for sex labourers in Athens is plentiful, unlike other types of enslaved people, including evidence from acquisition to manumission and even integration into the system of slavery as enslavers. In addition to the practices around managing and freeing sex labourers, she considers the enslaved phase of (mostly) women employed in this same industry. 

About the speaker

Allison Glazebrook is Professor in the Department of Classics and Archaeology at Brock University. She specializes in women, gender, sexuality, and slavery in ancient Greece. Her publications include Sexual Labor in the Athenian Courts (2021), Themes in Greek Society and Culture: An Introduction to Ancient Greece, 2nd edition (2022, edited with C. Vester), Houses of Ill Repute: The Archaeology of Brothels, Houses and Taverns in the Greek World (2016, edited with B. Tsakirgis) and Greek Prostitutes in the Ancient Mediterranean, 800 BCE-200 CE (2011, edited with M. M. Henry).   

About the talk

Built through partnerships between governmental agencies, liberalizing colleges and industrial expansionists, modern chemical laboratories constructed in North America towards the close of the 19th century were designed to extend the ocular gaze and tactile reach of frontier chemists, equipping them with the chemical tools and techniques to manifest destiny and conquer the mineral, bituminous and agricultural matter of the North American interior. Architectural guides on how to construct chemical laboratories first appeared during this period, encouraging builders to integrate the “modern tools” of chemical inquiry into the proliferating physical infrastructure of the colonial city, by extending gas pipelines, drainage systems and ventilation technology directly into the workstations of chemists.

In this paper, I look at how the rise of chemical governmentality depended on the standardization of chemical knowledges, a project that I argue not only unfolded through debates about the precision of analytic instruments and the systemization of chemical nomenclature, but extended outwards to the architectural form of the nascent modern chemical laboratory by the end of the 19th century. Studying these architecture guides while looking closely at the chemical laboratories that were built into the School of Practical Science (SPS) at the University of Toronto in the 1880s under the leadership of ethnologist Sir Daniel Wilson, I further trace out how the infrastructural development of the chemical laboratory was crucially imagined through a mix of chemical theory and the evolutionary frameworks of race science as the final catalyst for civilizational progression, placed at the end of a system of liberal education designed to refine the races. As such, I introduce the concept of “racial infrastructure” to highlight how settler colonial laboratories were not only designed to improve chemical inquiry for the sake of economy, but were importantly constructed to advance the ethnologized figure of the proto-cyborg scientist, ensuring his steady, continued evolution away from the Wilsonian figure of prehistoric man and his “primitive tools.”

About the speaker

Sajdeep Soomal is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Toronto writing about the history and philosophy of chemistry in 19th century Canada with M. Murphy and Bhavani Raman. His dissertation project, The Chemicalization of Substance, looks at how chemistry altered the way that settler colonists imagined and engaged with the environment in 19th century Canada. His objective is to place chemistry at the very heart of Canadian history, looking at how chemical knowledge not only provided industrious settler colonists with the tools and techniques to visualize and render the rocky lands, bituminous earth and waters of the Canadian hinterlands economically productive, but powerfully furnished their imaginations. Taking chemistry as a novel way of thinking about lands and bodies, he considers how chemical consciousness profoundly transformed economic thought, legal governance, medicine, social theory, environmental conservation, and artistic expression in 19th century Canada. His doctoral research is currently supported by the Institute for Environment, Conservation, and Sustainability (IECS), the Technoscience Research Unit (TRU) and the Northrop Frye Centre (NFC) at the University of Toronto, as well as the Government of Ontario.

He works on related curatorial projects about the politics of chemical visualization with artists who are re-imagining, playing with and altering our synthetic surround. Most recently, Sajdeep has been collaborating with Foundation Chamar on research about caste, pollution, un/touch/able matter and the art history of leather, supported by the IARTS Textiles of India Grant from the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). He currently serves as board member for InterAccess and Sanghum Film. Sajdeep has previously conducted research projects for the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA), South Asian Visual Arts Centre (SAVAC), and the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives (CLGA). From 2015-2016, he held the Archie Malloch Fellowship in Public Learning at the Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas (IPLAI) at McGill University. He holds a BA in History from McGill University and an MA in History from the University of Toronto.