Month: September 2024

Medievalism Uncloistered: Bringing Underrepresented Voices into the Conversation

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Friday September 27 at 1pm EST, NYU

The Middle Ages often evoke images of academia’s exclusive domain, yet the richness of medieval studies can be greatly expanded through dialogue with those outside traditional academic circles. This webinar will explore how engaging with diverse communities — across educational, cultural, and social spectrums — can deepen our understanding of the medieval world and its influence on our present moment. Our speakers will share their experiences working with varied publics whose diverse interests and backgrounds demand genuinely novel approaches — through prison education, social media, podcasting, and modern archives. They will discuss how these interactions have not only broadened their own perspectives but also enriched the field of medieval studies. Join us to learn how expanding our conversation partners through new modes of engagement can lead to more inclusive and dynamic scholarship.

Speakers: Jon Correa-Reyes (Clemson; The Multicultural Middle Ages), Stefanie Matabang (UCLA), Olivia Swarthout (Weird Medieval Guys), and Mary Wellesley (London Review of Books)
Register here.

Translation, Multilingualism, Poetics: Language Work in Muslim and Jewish Diasporas.

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On September 19, 2024 at 3:30 pm PT, please join the UBC Department of English Language & Literatures (EL&L), Centre for European Studies (CES), and Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies (CENES) for “Translation, Multilingualism, Poetics: Language Work in Muslim and Jewish Diasporas.” 

Buchanan Tower 323 or virtually via Zoom

Full event details: https://english.ubc.ca/events/event/translation-multilingualism-poetics/

Registration link: https://ubc.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_eqwZo56AShuE6q2

This interdisciplinary roundtable brings together three Muslim and Jewish scholar-translator-poets —  Denis Ferhatović, Rahat Kurd, and Anna Elena Torres — to discuss the cross-currents of their work and the generativity of translation and multilingualism in Jewish and Muslim cultural work, with particular attention to dissension from state-sponsored narratives.

Denis Ferhatović (Connecticut College) will discuss his new translations of sixteenth-century Ottoman Turkish and twentieth-century Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) poetry, as well as his original Bosnian-language poetry, in the context of excavating a fuller and queerer historical multilingualism in Bosnia, beyond modern South Slavo-centric heteronationalisms. Rahat Kurd, award-winning Vancouver poet, will share poems and research from her in-progress poetry collection, tentatively titled THE BOOK OF Z, on the Biblical/Quranic figure of Potiphar’s wife, known in multiple sources of Persian and Urdu poetry, and Persian/Mughal art, as Zulaikha. Anna Elena Torres (University of Chicago) will discuss material from her new book Horizons Blossom, Borders Vanish: Anarchism and Yiddish Literature, on Yiddish anarchist aesthetics from the nineteenth-century Russia through the modernist avant-gardes of Warsaw, Chicago, and London to contemporary antifascist composers. Rather than focusing on narratives of assimilation, Torres intervenes in earlier models of Jewish literature by centering refugee critiques of the border that cultivated stateless imaginations.