Stanford Humanities Center
Where is hope in humanities research? Perhaps it's a concept with a particular history, perhaps a force whose effects are latent or invisible; or it may be absent altogether for reasons to explain. Does hope motivate one's work? What does hope mean intellectually and personally?
Please join us for brief responses to these questions by current fellows, followed by a general discussion with Q&A moderated by SHC Director Roland Greene. The event will conclude with a reception.
About the Speakers
La Marr Jurelle Bruce (External Faculty Fellow) is a philosopher, fever dreamer, interdisciplinary humanities scholar, and Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Much of his scholarship explores and activates B/black, queer, and mad expressive cultures—spanning literature, music, film, theatre, and the art and aesthetics of everyday life. His debut book, How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity, earned the Modern Language Association’s 2022 First Book Prize.
Indra Levy (Internal Faculty Fellow) is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures. She works on modern Japanese literature, with a particular interest in the changes that took place in conceptions of language, style, gender and genre in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Attention to the pivotal role of translations into Japanese informs her work on the development of modern Japanese vernacular style as well as her current research on concepts and practices of comedy. Levy received her PhD in Japanese literature from Columbia University in 2001. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty in 2004, she taught at Rutgers University.
Ali Madani (Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow) is a literary and cultural historian of early modern England. He received his MA from the University of Pennsylvania and PhD from Brown University, where he was a founding board member of the Center for the Study of the Early Modern World. His research and teaching examine Shakespeare and Renaissance poetics, premodern race, and histories of criticism and modern discipline formation.
Chepchirchir Tirop (SHC Dissertation Prize Fellow) is a historian of Kenya, East Africa, and the Indian Ocean world. She is primarily interested in questions of post-independence nationalism. Specifically, she seeks to understand how different understandings of Kenyan identity and Kenyanness have been articulated through culture. Her current work and dissertation project explores the role of athletics in nation building in Kenyan history. In addition to histories of sports and nationalism, this dissertation is in conversation with labor histories and histories of the body to think through athletes' work and performance on local and global stages.
Explore the Hope Colloquy
For this related Colloquy on Arcade, we asked current and recent fellows to reflect on questions about hope. The contributions, while conceived from many distinctive intellectual and personal positions, are best discovered in twos and threes. Read or watch one, then another and another, at random. Imagine these items as belonging to a virtual conversation, which stands in for the exchange of ideas that takes place every day at the Center.
When
Stanford Humanities Center
424 Santa Teresa Street
Also online via Zoom
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