Dear friends of the UMIH, As we return to the university after reading week, we want to gently remind you about the UMIH events-for the full list of events for February and March, please visit our website. Join us today for,
-Landscape Use and the Political Economy of the Nineteenth-Century Zulu Kingdom, South Africa Desmond Owusu-Ansah, UMIH Graduate Fellow Monday, February 23, 1pm, 409 Tier From the early to late nineteenth century, a succession of Zulu kings established their capitals at different localities across the kingdom. These capitals were situated in four distinct environmental and geographic zones. Based on ongoing research, this presentation examines how these landscapes supported the operations of the capitals and whether each was provisioned in the same ways. It explores how multiple historical, archaeological, and geophysical datasets are being analysed within the framework of landscape affordances, capability equivalence, and mobility potentials. The study uses GIS tools to investigate these aspects of the kingdom's landscape against the backdrop of the operations of the capitals and the connectedness of resources, settlements, and people across the kingdom. Desmond Owusu-Ansah is a doctoral candidate in the department of Anthropology. His area of research is precolonial African urbanism with a focus on the 19th century Zulu Kingdom in South Africa. He is a recipient of a University of Manitoba Institute for the Humanities Graduate Fellowship.
And for later this week, please see the next events:
- Covenants (or how to read Wordsworth) Andrzej Warminski (University of California- Irvine) Thursday, Feb. 26th, ArtLab 368, 12-1:30pm, A reception will follow the presentation
-Graduate Seminar on Hegel Andrzej Warminski (University of California- Irvine) Friday, February 27, 409 Tier, 11-1pm Coffee and muffins will be provided at the seminar
Both events by Dr. Warminski are organized Mosaic and supported by the UMIH
Andrzej Warminski is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California, Irvine who works on literary theory and its history, German 19th- and 20th-century philosophy and its reception in French thought, and British romantic literature. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome and Butler Visiting Chair at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Warminski's main publications include Material Inscriptions: Rhetorical Reading in Practice and Theory (2013), Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics: For De Man (2013), and Readings in Interpretation: Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger (1987). Some of his scholarly essays and articles include "Machinal Effects: Derrida With and Without de Man" (2009); "Discontinuous Shifts: History Reading History" (2007); "Lightstruck: 'Hegel on the Sublime'" (2012); and "Allegories of Symbol: On Hegel's Aesthetics" (2004). As one of the key inheritors of the double legacy of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, Warminski is uniquely situated to speak to the aporia's that each confronted through the question of suicide. Like speech and writing themselves reading too emerges from the death of a former self. Warminski's lecture will concentrate on William Wordsworth's supposedly simple poem, "My Heart Leaps Up" and the "Great Ode." Suicide as the necessary requisite to positive becoming and the mirror of nature as the non-dialectical counterpart to a sheltering heaven and earth will be plumbed for its ecocidal imperative.
-Annual Black History Month Celebration. Black Narratives Leading Our Communities: Action, Vision and Change Keynote speaker: HE. The Hon. Gline Clarke, High Commissioner to Canada from Barbados Friday, February 27, starts at 5pm University of Winnipeg, 515 Portage Avenue This event will celebrate the Black African Diaspora community in Canada and pay homage to the great accomplishments of the Black African Diaspora people throughout history, leading to the present. The event will involve panel discussions, Black business showcases, Bursaries for Black African Diaspora students (secondary and post-secondary Winnipeg students), recognition for trailblazers in the Black African Diaspora Winnipeg community and much more For more information, visit https://weareacmp.com/black-history-month-2025-2/
Finally, mark your agendas for next 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.
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...