Upcoming Events

Feb
12

Humanity Speaker Series:
Dr. Kimberly Mack
(University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

"Brown Sugar Blues:
The Pleasure and Pain of Loving Rock as a Black Girl"

In this presentation, Kimberly Mack considers the reasons and costs of Black women’s erasure from rock through the analysis of a controversial song that engages Black women and race, sex, power, and violence more directly than perhaps any other 1970s-era rock tune: “Brown Sugar” by the Rolling Stones. Kimberly tells the story of her mom’s uncritical love of the song, as well as her own unwitting participation in her mother's fandom, as a toddler, in 1971. Alongside this conversation about “Brown Sugar” is the story of how rock music--a site of simultaneous pleasure, empowerment, and alienation--complicated Kimberly's budding awareness of her own sexuality as a young Black girl.

Kimberly Mack is is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her book, Living Colour’s Time’s Up, part of Bloomsbury’s acclaimed 33 1/3 book series, was published in May 2023. She is also the author of Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020), which won the 2021 College English Association of Ohio’s Nancy Dasher Award and was a finalist for the 2022 IASPM-US Woody Guthrie First Book Award. Kimberly is writing another book, tentatively titled The Untold History of American Rock Criticism (under contract with Bloomsbury Academic), about the BIPoC and White women writers who helped develop American rock criticism and journalism during the 1960s and 1970s. Kimberly is a memoirist and music writer, and her public-facing and scholarly articles and essays have appeared in Longreads, No Depression, Hot Press, PopMatters, Relix, African American Review, Popular Music and Society, Journal of Popular Music Studies, and elsewhere.

5:30pm, Escondido Theater, Student Union Building

Feb
20

FaDe: The Faculty Derrida Colloquium
with Dr. James M. Kopf,
Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Humanities

The FaDe (Faculty Derrida) Colloquium aims to bring scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to read and engage with one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century, Jacques Derrida. Structured as a seminar led by the Humanities Center's 2025-2026 Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. James M. Kopf, author of Phenomenology, Soundscape, Music: A Fragmentary System of Resonance and Echo (De Gruyter 2025), the FaDe Colloquium is designed to build disciplinary bridges and approach difficult texts from a variety of aspects and viewpoints. Participants will grapple directly with the primary text and the primary text alone, posing questions, answering others, and opening their own semantic fields in an intellectually generous and decentralized manner.

The text at hand is “Plato’s Pharmacy,” a crucial node in the development of Deconstruction; weaving contemporary reflections with classicism, “Plato’s Pharmacy” is a seminal text and an excellent gateway into Derrida’s daunting corpus – often spoken of but too little read.

Open to all faculty members and graduate students. It is expected that participants will have read the essay prior to attending.

4:00pm-6:00pm, 228 Weeks Hall

Email humanitiescenter@ttu.edu to register.

Mar
26

Humanity Speaker Series:
Dr. John Ma
(Columbia University)

"Political equality, economic redistribution, and social justice in the case of the Greek city-state (Polis)"

This talk examines the tensions surrounding political equality and economic inequality in the polis, with specific attention to the practical consequences of the generalization of democratic regimes in the Hellenistic period. Did the democratic polis pursue specific policies to achieve economic redistribution or the curbing of excessive wealth ? Did they justify such practices in terms of civic ideology of the common good ? The possiible answers take us from Aristotle to Roman-era public inscriptions, but also to modern debates about class-struggle constitutions, redistribution, and taxation.

John Ma is a historian of ancient Greece, with particular interest in the Hellenistic period and in epigraphical material. He is the author of three books on these topics, the last one a survey of the history of the Greek polis. He currently teaches in the Department of Classics at Columbia University.  

5:30pm, Room 067, Media & Communication Building