Open Colloquies The Colloquies shown here are currently active. Their curators continue to gather material, consider submissions, and adapt the topics to reflect an evolving conversation. We welcome your comments and contributions as we develop these collections. Open Colloquies Forthcoming The Intellectual in a Time of Crisis Curator Rachel Karas New Reframing the PhD: Centering Students in a Changing Humanities Landscape Curator Stephanie Kirk Colonialism, Post, and Anti in the Digital Age Curators Carmen Thong Kay Barrett In the “digital age” broadly conceived, how do we continue to understand and resist colonialism? What are the existential risks of our present moment and in what ways can we appropriate these formidable apparatuses and digital methods for anti-/postcolonial ends? Imperial Environments Curators Julia Fine Miri Powell Mariana Calvo Our present moment of political and environmental crisis demands attention from historians. This Colloquy aims to draw together an array of scholarship that reflects the breadth and complexity of our shared past in ways that help us understand contemporary perils. The Data that Divides Us: Methods and Frameworks for Data Across the Humanities Curator Nichole Nomura What is data in the humanities? What relationships do humanists have with data? What is the place of data in humanistic inquiry? These are pressing questions in an era in which data is created and consumed at ever larger scales. Towards a Blue Art History Curators Juliette Bessette Margaret Cohen This Colloquy assesses the importance and critical role of the arts in blue humanities, or ocean humanities. It approaches this broad question through themes that bring together scholars across disciplines. Photography and the Archive in South Africa Curators Joel Cabrita Zoe Edelman This Colloquy aims to create an archive of the recent residency of South African photographer, Sabelo Mlangeni, at Stanford University, provoking discussion around the intersection between the academy and artistic practice, as well as providing a long-term record of Stanford’s engagement with an important artist. Updated Black and Brown Intimacies Across Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean Curators Usha Iyer Karishma Bhagani Reading Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia alongside each other reveals polycentric and multivalent histories. Hope: The Future of an Idea Curator Rachel Karas How has hope been defined and critiqued? Where does it lie latent or unacknowledged? And how does the work of the humanities depend on hope, and perhaps arouse it? Queer Transpacifics Curators Christine Xiong Delaney Chieyen Holton What affinities, tensions, and conceptual convergences emerge between “queer” and “transpacific”? How can we (re)conceptualize queerness both transnationally and translocally? What is queer about the transpacific? Updated The Future of the Public Humanities Curators Mahishan Gnanaseharan Roland Greene Is the future of the humanities a public one? This Colloquy proposes that a truly public humanities must encourage critical attention to its own premises. Its ten contributions include reflections on the concept of public humanities, interviews with practitioners and critics, and accounts of public-oriented projects in action. Shakespeare and Cervantes Then and Now Curator Roland Greene An early modern transatlantic world in which information moved slowly could hardly have noticed the date, but 408 years later it registers for us. Precariousness and Aesthetics Curators Benjamin Bateman Elizabeth Adan If precarity is both a limit for the human and an opening for imagining the human differently, what limits and openings does it offer to aesthetic practice, and what limits and openings does it expose within our reigning critical paradigms? Postcolonial Spatialities Curator Ato Quayson On one reading, postcolonial studies seem to be riveted more firmly on temporal as opposed to spatial questions. This may be traced partly to the effect of the temporalizing "post-" in the term postcolonialism, which has allowed an insistence on various dates as inaugurating the epochal postcolonial relation. On Being a Medievalist and More Curator Marisa Galvez This Colloquy is one of two that originated in the "After 1967" conference in which we celebrated the work of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. While the other (soon to appear) Colloquy gathers papers and related materials that reflect the general shape of Gumbrecht's career, this one is concerned with his relation to medieval literature, his original field of interest. Comparing Literatures: Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Turkish, Urdu Curator Alexander Key Comparative Literature has spent the last few decades expanding its focus beyond Europe and the Anglophone Americas. But has it succeeded? Updated Arts + Justice Curators Jisha Menon Anna Jayne Kimmel Approaching justice from the perspective of arts and culture enables us to attend to its affective, embodied, social, and political dimensions, thus bringing together a range of cross-disciplinary dialogues.
Colonialism, Post, and Anti in the Digital Age Curators Carmen Thong Kay Barrett In the “digital age” broadly conceived, how do we continue to understand and resist colonialism? What are the existential risks of our present moment and in what ways can we appropriate these formidable apparatuses and digital methods for anti-/postcolonial ends?
Imperial Environments Curators Julia Fine Miri Powell Mariana Calvo Our present moment of political and environmental crisis demands attention from historians. This Colloquy aims to draw together an array of scholarship that reflects the breadth and complexity of our shared past in ways that help us understand contemporary perils.
The Data that Divides Us: Methods and Frameworks for Data Across the Humanities Curator Nichole Nomura What is data in the humanities? What relationships do humanists have with data? What is the place of data in humanistic inquiry? These are pressing questions in an era in which data is created and consumed at ever larger scales.
Towards a Blue Art History Curators Juliette Bessette Margaret Cohen This Colloquy assesses the importance and critical role of the arts in blue humanities, or ocean humanities. It approaches this broad question through themes that bring together scholars across disciplines.
Photography and the Archive in South Africa Curators Joel Cabrita Zoe Edelman This Colloquy aims to create an archive of the recent residency of South African photographer, Sabelo Mlangeni, at Stanford University, provoking discussion around the intersection between the academy and artistic practice, as well as providing a long-term record of Stanford’s engagement with an important artist.
Updated Black and Brown Intimacies Across Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean Curators Usha Iyer Karishma Bhagani Reading Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia alongside each other reveals polycentric and multivalent histories.
Hope: The Future of an Idea Curator Rachel Karas How has hope been defined and critiqued? Where does it lie latent or unacknowledged? And how does the work of the humanities depend on hope, and perhaps arouse it?
Queer Transpacifics Curators Christine Xiong Delaney Chieyen Holton What affinities, tensions, and conceptual convergences emerge between “queer” and “transpacific”? How can we (re)conceptualize queerness both transnationally and translocally? What is queer about the transpacific?
Updated The Future of the Public Humanities Curators Mahishan Gnanaseharan Roland Greene Is the future of the humanities a public one? This Colloquy proposes that a truly public humanities must encourage critical attention to its own premises. Its ten contributions include reflections on the concept of public humanities, interviews with practitioners and critics, and accounts of public-oriented projects in action.
Shakespeare and Cervantes Then and Now Curator Roland Greene An early modern transatlantic world in which information moved slowly could hardly have noticed the date, but 408 years later it registers for us.
Precariousness and Aesthetics Curators Benjamin Bateman Elizabeth Adan If precarity is both a limit for the human and an opening for imagining the human differently, what limits and openings does it offer to aesthetic practice, and what limits and openings does it expose within our reigning critical paradigms?
Postcolonial Spatialities Curator Ato Quayson On one reading, postcolonial studies seem to be riveted more firmly on temporal as opposed to spatial questions. This may be traced partly to the effect of the temporalizing "post-" in the term postcolonialism, which has allowed an insistence on various dates as inaugurating the epochal postcolonial relation.
On Being a Medievalist and More Curator Marisa Galvez This Colloquy is one of two that originated in the "After 1967" conference in which we celebrated the work of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. While the other (soon to appear) Colloquy gathers papers and related materials that reflect the general shape of Gumbrecht's career, this one is concerned with his relation to medieval literature, his original field of interest.
Comparing Literatures: Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Turkish, Urdu Curator Alexander Key Comparative Literature has spent the last few decades expanding its focus beyond Europe and the Anglophone Americas. But has it succeeded?
Updated Arts + Justice Curators Jisha Menon Anna Jayne Kimmel Approaching justice from the perspective of arts and culture enables us to attend to its affective, embodied, social, and political dimensions, thus bringing together a range of cross-disciplinary dialogues.
Stanford Humanities Center
