The first event in the 2017-2018 Sexuality & Geopolitics Seminar Series will feature Ari Heinrich, Associate Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies at UCSD. Their lecture, “Chinese Bodies as Biological Surplus: Plastinated Cadavers and Geopolitical Heirarchies of the Human" will question what a comparative examination of Chinese-language discourse on the plastinated human cadaver exhibits might...

 Li Zhiwang, “Female Nude.”    Abstract:  This chapter argues that the works of controversial Chinese contemporary experimental artists known as the “Cadaver Group”—some of whom were at the center of a recent controversy surrounding a retrospective of Chinese art at the Guggenheim—should not be dismissed so easily as “shock art.”  Instead the works could be understood as documenting a transition from an...

The second event in the 2017-2018 Sexuality & Geopolitics Seminar Series will feature Peter Sigal, Professor of History and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. His lecture, "Thinking with Trash: Nahua Knowledge and Queer Being" discusses how the Nahuas of central Mexico help us to see how indigenous meaning-making relates to the intellectual enterprise that...

Figure 1 from Making Maya Men: Fantasy, Voyeurism, and Queer Abjection Abstract: Franciscan friar Diego de Landa, in the mid sixteenth century, and Hollywood film producer and director Mel Gibson, in the early twenty-first century, created Maya men as abject queer beings. In 1566 Landa wrote his Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, an extensive ethnographic...

  The American Comparative Literature Association's 2018 Annual Meeting will take place at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in Los Angeles, California between March 29th and April 1st, 2018. The ACLA's annual conferences have a distinctive structure in which most papers are grouped into twelve-person seminars that meet two hours per day for...

The 2018 Michael Henry Heim Annual Memorial Lecture in Translation and Translation Studies, entitled “Self-Translation and Its Discontents; Or: The Translational Work Lost in the Theory of Bilingualism”, will be given by Dr. Sigrid Weigel (Professor of German Literature and Director of the Centre for Literature Research in Berlin). Members of the community are welcome to attend.

  This half-day symposium brings together an array of international scholars and writers engaged with the history, literature, and impact of Primo Levi, a chemist, writer, and humanist who survived Auschwitz and, through his writing, provided generations of students and scholars with the philosophical language to understand the Shoah—and the modern condition. The symposium celebrates...