News and Events

 

Promoting Legal Protections to Uphold the Ban on FGM in The Gambia (Hilina Degefa) and Training and Supporting Local Human Rights Defenders in Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Trinidad and Tobago (Marian Da Silva)

Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Please join us for an evening with Hilina Berhanu Degefa and Marian Alejandra Da Silva Parra, our 2024–25 Lester Fellows in Human Rights. Degefa, an expert on women’s rights from Ethiopia, will discuss her work to combat proposals to legalize female genital mutilation in the Gambia. Da Silva Parra, a human rights lawyer from Venezuela, will discuss her project to train and support local human rights defenders in Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Trinidad and Tobago. The fellowships honor the memory and legacy of Anthony Lester QC (Lord Lester of Herne Hill), one of Britain’s most distinguished human rights lawyers.

William Egginton, Decker Professor in the Humanities, Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, and Director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute, Johns Hopkins University
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
In this lecture I explore the two major physical theories of the twentieth century, relativity and quantum mechanics, by way of what we could call their poetic and philosophical foundations. Key to this approach will be the idea that reality isn’t an unfiltered picture of what’s out there, but rather a complex human construct, and that because of that we need essentially human means to understand it, among them literature and philosophy. In this light I argue that philosophers like Plato and Kant, and poets like Dante and Borges, are key to understanding the ideas of Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg.

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: How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World (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 most recent book, on the philosophical, psychoanalytic, and surrealist dimensions of the work of Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky, was published in January 2024.

John Burns, Associate Professor of Spanish,
Bard College
Olin Humanities, Room 201  5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
What challenges and opportunities does translating a play from Spanish into English present? This talk will focus on the case of Troya tropical by contemporary Cuban playwright Gleyvis Coro Montanet, a play written largely in rhyming octosyllabic verse, which I am translating for an anthology focusing on contemporary Cuban literature that draws on references to Ancient Greece and Rome. We will specifically look at the ways in which the piece, which is brimming with references to Cuban literature and history, playfully reimagines the Trojan War in the context of contemporary Cuba. 

Yafrainy Familia
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
In the Western imagination, the Caribbean has often been configured as a feminized landscape—its territories likened to a woman’s body that is sexually available for conquest and exploitation. Similarly, Black and Indigenous Caribbean women’s bodies have been historically configured as sites of extraction, subjected to colonial fantasies of production and reproduction. Focusing on the island of Hispaniola as a case study, this talk traces the role of Western travel narratives, illustrated maps, and nationalist cultural production in shaping these racialized and gendered spatial tropes. Through literary and visual analysis, Familia considers a genealogy of Western-masculine narratives that have shaped enduring colonial visions of the Caribbean, from the writings of Christopher Columbus and the cartographic work of Henry Popple to the literary texts of Francisco Javier Angulo Guridi. She then situates the work of contemporary Dominican visual artist Firelei Báez as a powerful counter-narrative, arguing that Báez’s series of map paintings strategically reckon with the violence of these historical archives, while illuminating the spatial strategies Caribbean women and femmes have employed to disrupt this colonial geographical imagination.

Yafrainy Familia is a PhD candidate in Spanish and an Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellow in Caribbean Literatures, Arts and Cultures at the University of Virginia. She holds a master’s degree in creative writing from Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. She specializes in contemporary Caribbean literature and visual culture from a comparative perspective across the Spanish, French and English-speaking Caribbeans. Her research focuses on Caribbean women writers and artists and engages feminist, decolonial, and digital humanities methods. Her work has been supported by the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), Center for Global Inquiry and Innovation, and UVA’s Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, among others. She is also a Solidarity Fellow in the Mellon-funded digital humanities project Diaspora Solidarities Lab, which supports solidarity work in Black and ethnic studies. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism; The Acentos Review; and the exhibition catalogue of Diasporic Collage: Puerto Rico and the Survival of a People. 

Dr. Ethel Barja Cuyutupa
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:30 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
This presentation will discuss twenty-first century poetry by two Afro-Hispanophone Caribbean poets, Mayra Santos-Febres from Puerto Rico and Soleida Ríos from Cuba, to underline how their poetry imagines futures under threatening circumstances such as forced displacement and anti-blackness. How does the longue durée of Black resistance influence twenty-first-century poetics?

Dr. Ethel Barja Cuyutupa will present her research, which takes place through an interdisciplinary approach in between history and poetics and in dialogue with scholars interested in how lyric language is historically inflicted and intertwined with social justice and Blackness. The intertwining of imagery of long-lasting Black resistance and the emotional and political dimensions of the posthuman lyric subject ensures the poetics of maroonage exposes transhistorical genealogies of hope.

Ethel Barja is a scholar, educator, and award-winning poet originally from the Andes, Peru. She holds a PhD in Hispanic Studies from Brown University and an MA in Hispanic literary Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is an Assistant Professor in the Modern Languages and Intercultural Studies Department at Salisbury University. Her research focuses on transnational and interdisciplinary approaches to Hispanophone Caribbean, Andean, and Latinx literature, integrating critical Indigenous studies, Afro-poetics, gender, and posthuman studies. She is the author of the monograph titled Poesía e insurrección: La Revolución cubana en el imaginario latinoamericano. Her poetry collections include Insomnio Vocal, Hope is Tanning on a Nudist Beach, and La Muda.

Dr. Juan Diego Mariátegui
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:30 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Puerto Rico emerged from the 1950s transformed. By 1952, governor Luis Muñoz Marín inaugurated the Free Associated State, a new legal status that ostensibly ended Puerto Rico’s colonial subordination as a “non-incorporated territory” of the United States. Another key development in these heady years was the Korean War (1950-1953), in which 61,000 Puerto Rican soldiers participated. This conflict was crucial because it allowed Muñoz Marín to present Puerto Rico as an exemplary defender of capitalist democracy and thereby discursively support its colonial relationship with the United States. But there is a parallel war that occurred in this period: the armed insurrection known as the Jayuya Uprising that Pedro Albizu Campos and the pro-independence Nationalist Party launched as a response to the Free Associated State. This talk centers on two opposed visions of war, a nationalist one and a neo-imperialist one. Through the speeches of governor Luis Muñoz Marín, poems by the Nationalist mystic Francisco Matos Paoli, and a short story by pro-independence author José Luis González, I explore how literary representations of these armed conflicts formed different anti-colonialist cultural and political subjectivities at a time when the island’s commitment to the U.S. was enshrined.

Juan Diego Mariátegui is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Lehigh University. Prior to that he received a PhD in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Studies from the University of Chicago as well as a B.A. in Comparative Literature and Hispanic Studies from Brown University. His teaching and research focus on modern Puerto Rican and Cuban literature, particularly the way literary representations of space explore the relationship between man and the natural world, the cultural dimensions of colonialism, and the tensions between citizenship and diaspora. 

Gisabel Leonardo
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:30 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
In Junot Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Lola explores her contentious relationship with her mother, childhood trauma, and racial identity through hair. Similarly, Shenny De Los Angeles’ autobiographical documentary short “The Ritual to Beauty” explores themes of race, gender, and haircare through intimate interviews with Shenny’s mother and grandmother. These women turn to haircare as a site of expression to address the trauma they and the women before them have endured. In critical moments of release, both Lola and Shenny shave their heads in complete refusal of the Dominican aesthetics of race that promote hair straightening. In a Dominican context, the “Big Chop”—as this is often referred to in anglophone cultures—conjures a negative affect that mirrors the traumatic memory of El Corte, or The Parsley Massacre (1937), when tens of thousands of Haitians were slaughtered at the hands of Dominican armed forces. The works explored here confront the racial terror of the corte to heal generational trauma rooted in an anti-Black aesthetic imaginary. Through literature and visual media, this talk explores the nuances and consequences of the “chop” as an act of aesthetic refusal and an affirmation of Dominican Blackness.

Gisabel Leonardo is a PhD candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese with a graduate minor in Latina/o Studies. Her interdisciplinary work centers expressions of gender, race, and sexuality through performance in contemporary Dominican and diasporic Dominican literary, artistic, and musical cultures. While at Illinois, she had the pleasure of designing and facilitating language, literature, culture, and media studies courses at several levels of instruction while also serving as a Graduate College Fellow and a Humanities Research Institute Predoctoral Fellow. Her teaching and research interests aim to center the cultural and literary production of marginalized voices across the Hispanophone Caribbean and its US diaspora. Her current work Melenas Malcriadas: The Black Aesthetics of Hair and Dominicanidad examines the conflicting affects of the Dominican hair salon and how Dominican hair culture is reproduced and reimagined in music, literature, and art.