Programs
Spring 2010
Atlantic Narratives
Thursday – Friday, February 4-5, 2010
This symposium will examine the production of narratives in and about
the Atlantic world in the period up to the mid-nineteenth century.
Bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars who work on the Anglophone, Francophone, and Iberian Atlantic worlds, this symposium seeks to promote a discussion about the subjects, practices, and theories that inform the writing of Atlantic narratives. What narrative trajectories have constructed our understanding of the Atlantic world and what are the inadequacies of these movements and stories? Does the Atlantic world require new narrative forms? Does it distinctively modify existing ones? Who produced these narratives and specifically, to what extent are the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Africa participants in, and producers of, Atlantic routes and narratives? In the end we hope that this conversation will help to elucidate the powerful possibilities of Atlantic narratives—then and now.
Trans Global/Global Trans
April 2, 2010
This symposium will bring together four interdisciplinary scholars who work on queer studies in different cultural contexts around the world, to speak about queer formations of gender. How is gender regulated, and what gender rebellions are being imagined, invented, and lived, in the US, the Maghreb, Spain, and Southern Africa today? How do transgender identities and queer sexualities intersect and diverge in these contexts? How might these emerging transformations speak to one another? How do the globalization of culture and the politics of postcoloniality affect these developments? By bringing scholars from several continents and diverse intellectual traditions together with UM scholars currently working within English, French, Latin American and North American Queer theoretical currents this symposium aims to open up global dialogues about and present challenges to hegemonic ways of studying gender and sexual identity.
Spring 2009
Milton Alive at 400: Samson Agonistes and
Religious Violence”
February 26-27, 2009
“Milton Alive at 400: Samson Agonistes and Religious Violence,” a two day symposium, was presented by Florida International University and the University of Miami on Thursday, February 26 and Friday, February 27, 2009. Renowned scholars from around the country joined noted faculty members from the two regional universities to hold panel discussions on the complex subject of religion, politics and violence. Joining in the worldwide quadricentennary celebration of Milton’s birth, they used his closet drama, Samson Agonistes, as a springboard for these discussions. The symposium was organized by Professors Jeffrey Shoulson, University of Miami and Andrew Strycharski, Florida International University.
