Dear friends of the UMIH,
As we move to a new month, a gently reminder of the Institute’s events for this week:
-Photography and Diaspora: Orphaned Memory
Mariya Shymchyshyn, UMIH Research Affiliate
Wednesday, March 4th, 3:30pm, 409 Tier
The presentation examines photography as a privileged site of diasporic epistemic uncertainty. It will first explain that diasporic subjects often inherit visual archives without inheriting narrative authority. Family photographs from the “old country” resurface only after the death of the parental generation, leaving the next generation with material evidence but without interpretive guardians. The presentation then will turn to Ghosts in a Photograph by Myrna Kostash, which offers a distinct reorientation of diasporic photography. Rather than focusing on epistemic suspension, Kostash mobilizes photographs as archival triggers for historical reconstruction. Through what is described as photographic familial autofiction, staged portraits and inherited images become entry points into broader Ukrainian and Ukrainian Canadian histories.
Mariya Shymchyshyn is the Department of Literary Theory and World Literature Chair at Kyiv National Linguistics University in Ukraine. Her current research explores the lives of objects - how things travel, transform, and take on meaning in Ukrainian Canadian literature. She is a visiting professor at the University of Manitoba, where she also holds a UMIH Research Affiliate position.
-Unnatural mothers: motherhood and nature in Venezuelan cinema
Omar Rodriguez, University of Lethbridge
Thursday, March 5, 2:30pm, 409 Tier
Are all women “natural” mothers? Is nature a protective, nurturing force? Can a relative, a stranger or a community assume the role of a mother? Join us for a discussion of these questions through Venezuelan cinema. From the stark black-and-white landscapes of Araya (1958) to the excesses of melodrama in El pez que fuma (1977), to contemporary films such as La distancia más larga (2015), we explore how cinema reimagines, subverts and at times reinforces the conception of mothering and the trope of Mother Nature.
Omar Rodríguez is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Lethbridge’s Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics. He specializes on Latin American and Venezuelan cinema. He is the co-editor with María Soledad Paz of Politics of Children in Latin America (Lexington Books, 2019) and the author of The Melodramatic Nation: Novel, Soap Opera and the National imaginary in Venezuela (published in Spanish, Caracas: Fedeupel, 2009)
-Panel: Old and New Challenges: Latin America and US Renewed Hegemonic Interventionism
Participants: Anamary Linares Maqueira (University of Manitoba/Economics), Omar Rodríguez (University of Lethbridge), Wilder Robles (Brandon University), and Jorge A. Nállim (University of Manitoba/UMIH and History)
Friday, March 6, 12pm, 409 Tier
Over the last year, the United States has disrupted the global postwar political and economic structures in different and profound ways. This development is particularly clear in the case of Latin America. From tariffs to direct intervention in Venezuela, the US is once again affecting Latin American countries as they confront the new reality. This panel will discuss the broader context of US policies in the region, the real and potential impact in countries like Venezuela, Cuba, and Brazil, and how they are responding to the new context.
And for next week, mark your agendas for the following events:
“Anne Carson’s NOX: Playing with a “Hopeful Monster” and Its Variants”
UMIH Grad Fellow Virginia Page Jähne
Date: Monday, March 9, 2:30pm, 307 Tier
This research presentation engages with NOX, Anne Carson’s epitaph for her brother, as an “un-kindle-able” hopeful monster. It develops this idea through a detailed bibliographic study of the work, situating it within a post-digital ecology as personal archive, ur-text cahier, elegiac literature, anti-codex book-object, Oulipian and neo-Fluxus gesture, and public performance. In conversation with Eleanor Wachtel, Anne Carson notes, “I loved making that book despite the context… mechanically, physically, it was just a joy.” Carson’s description of making frames NOX as a space where play is not unserious, joy coexists with grief, and constraint is generative.
Virginia Page Jähne is an award-winning Winnipeg writer, playwright, and doctoral candidate in the Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media at the University of Manitoba. She is the founder and president of the UM Cicero Club, an organization supporting older adult students pursuing university degrees. She holds a BA(Hon) in Theatre from the University of Winnipeg, where she received the Gold Medal in Theatre. Her MA thesis, The Far-off Edge of Things, won the Robert Kroetsch Award for Best Creative Thesis and placed second for the Playwrights Guild of Canada’s Tom Hendry Award. She is also a past recipient of the C.D. Howe Award in Creative Writing from the Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture. Before academia, she was a rug weaver, soap-maker, and Celtic musician (the bronze branch)
- 1st Annual Dr David Pentland Lectureship in Linguistics
“From the Shoulders of Giants to the Local Community: The case of Menominee Comparatives”
Monica Macauley (University of Wisconsin Madison)
Date: March 13, 2:30-4pm, 204 University College
This presentation explores ways in which the job of a linguist working with an Indigenous language has and has not changed over the last several decades. Specifically, I look at the task of documenting and analyzing data in Menominee, something I could never have begun to do without the significant amount and quality of work done by linguists stretching back well over a century. But then I look to the future and consider a job most of us are also presently undertaking: how that knowledge can be put to use in a community’s language revitalization work.
Finally, a reminder of the call for papers for the,
Prairie Conference: Ukrainian Studies in Times of Global Transformations of the Humanities
University of Manitoba, April 30 - May 3, 2026,
Call for papers deadline: Tuesday, March 10, 2026
The Prairie Conference seeks to examine how Ukrainian studies and studies of the Global East can contribute to new approaches in cross-disciplinary and cross-area research and education. The event will bring scholars of Ukraine and the Global East into conversation with scholars, educators, and curators working on Canada, Africa, Latin America, and Asia. It will explore how scholars can draw on different theoretical frameworks (e.g., world-systems analysis, settler colonialism, neocolonialism, coloniality, decoloniality, inter-imperiality, creolization) and approaches from fields such as Indigenous studies, gender studies, peace and conflict studies, and environmental studies to develop new forms of cross-regional research and teaching. The conference also aims to advance decolonizing approaches in pedagogies through a student-centered education. Undergraduate and graduate students will play an active role in planning and shaping the event, and a student-led panel, along with student presentations in other panels, will provide a visible platform for their research and perspectives.
For more information on the conference, please visit our website of contact Dr. Oksana Dudko, oksana.dudko(a)umanitoba.ca<mailto:Carmela.Cianflone@umanitoba.ca>
Jorge A. Nállim
Director, Institute for the Humanities
Acting Head and Professor, Department of History
405 Fletcher Argue Bldg.
University of Manitoba
Winnipeg, MB R3T 5V5
jorge.nallim(a)umanitoba.ca<mailto:jorge.nallim@umanitoba.ca>
https://umanitoba.ca/arts/jorge-nallim
Sanda McGee Deutsch and Jorge A. Nállim (eds.), Antifascism(s) in Latin America and the Caribbean: From the Margins to the Center (Cambridge University Press, 2025). For more information, visit our blog,
https://cambridgeblog.org/2025/08/antifascisms-in-latin-america-and-the-car…
