Dear friends of the UMIH, Here you have a reminder of the Institute for the Humanities’ events for this week:
Join us today for,
“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 or Zoom at https://umanitoba.zoom.us/j/67309190833?pwd=dXxV9bHMTH8ueWXGik82Zr9bcagVib.1 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)
And then,
Abolitionist Intimacies with El Jones. Poetry, Storytelling, and Art Make. El Jones (Mount Saint Vincent University) March 13th, 12:30-2pm, 307 Tier Dr. El Jones, assistant professor of Politics and Canadian Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University and author of Abolitionist Intimacies (Fernwood, 2022), will share her poetry and stories of abolitionist organizing while participants engage in crafting, as together we imagine a world without prisons. Free and open to the public. Craft supplies and refreshments provided. This event is organized by the UMIH Prairie Abolition Research Cluster
- 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 deadline for 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@umanitoba.camailto:Carmela.Cianflone@umanitoba.ca
For next week, mark your agendas for three events organized by Mosaic and supported by the UMIH:
- Literature’s Strike: Melville, Bartleby Theory, and Benito Cereno
Michael Krimper (NYU)
Tuesday, March 17th, 7-8:30pm, Cross Common Room, St. John’s College Michael Krimper's work on inoperativity, désoeuvré, idleness, and the correspondences between Georges Bataille's notion of "unemployed negativity" and Walter Benjamin's "dialectics at a standstill" offer one of a number of crucial theoretical pathways to keeping the possibility of a subversive politics alive in the continuing end times in which we live. One of Krimper's aesthetico-political hunches is that the poetics of drifting typical of Baudelaire's Flâneur might not only rupture the work of the crowd (whether capitalist, communist, or fascist), but also resensitize the crowd in ways that would make for an open-ended and plural form of sociality. Dr. Krimper’s lecture will revisit the theoretical reception of Melville’s short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener” by writers ranging from Maurice Blanchot to Giorgio Agamben to the anonymous collective Tiqqun, as well as its political renewal during the events of Occupy Wall Street. It will ask how we can reread this reception now in the wake of Bartleby theory and politics, bringing it into conversation with the slave revolt of another short story by Melville “Benito Cereno.” Its aim will be to elucidate the art of refusal in Melville, his techniques of abdication and abolition, enacting a general strike in and through literature that speaks to the urgency of living otherwise in times of
distress.
-Graduate Seminar: “Nonsovereign: Inoperativity from Battaille to Agamben”
Michael Krimper (NYU)
Wednesday, March 18th, 11-1pm, 409 Tier
-Dying-In Banu Bargu (University of California-Santa Cruz) Thursday, March 19 Time: 11:00AM-1:00PM ZOOM RSVP for Dr. Banu Bargu's Zoom Lecture "Dying-In" and/or Graduate Student Seminar – Fill out formhttps://forms.office.com/r/ByZVNvm6jQ Dr. Bargu’s lecture concentrates on the intersection between climate protest and what she calls corporeal agency, a kind of truth telling, that risks or sacrifices the singular body for the common good. The lecture will build on the work of Dr. Bargu’s 2024 book Disembodiment: Corporeal Politics of Radical Refusal (Oxford UP). Dr. Bargu’s presentation is organized by Mosaic and supported by the UMIH
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@umanitoba.camailto: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-cari...