Upcoming Events

Apr
7

Postdoctoral Fellow Talk:
Dr. James M. Kopf,
“In Essence, nature with its seven forms arises”:
Carl Gustav Carus and the Unsigned Eighth Letter

Nine Letters on Landscape Painting by the German Romantic Carl Gustav Carus is a strange text. An epistolary novel that also functions as a didactic text between two correspondents, the names of whom, when you combine them form the first and middle names of Carus's beloved son. Yes, it is certainly a text about landscape painting, but it is also a sustained meditation on mourning, the mail, and psychological overdetermination. How to approach this text? James M. Kopf, translator of a new critical edition of Nine Letters, found a hole in its defenses - the unsigned eighth letter. Reading the text from the inside out, Kopf explores the intricacies of the text, a key document of Romanticism that nevertheless remains frequently overlooked. 

4pm, Humanities 201

Apr
15

Scholar-in-Residence Workshop with Dr. Stephanie Ann Frampton:
"Future Readers: The Humanities Beyond the Human"

This culminating discussion engages ecocritical and Indigenous perspectives (Roy Scranton, Timothy Morton, Elvia Wilk, Gerald Vizenor) to explore friendship and care as dimensions of reading in the Anthropocene, considering how texts, like ecosystems, outlast us and invite responsibility toward future generations.

To register, email humanitiescenter@ttu.edu.

2pm, 228 Weeks Hall

Apr
22

Humanity Speaker Series:
Dr. Rebecca Louise Carter
(Brown University)
"The Animation of Brilliance: From Sorrow to Joy in New Orleans"

In this presentation Rebecca Louise Carter considers the strategies that people deploy in the navigation of sorrow and joy and in the context of vulnerability, violence, and loss. Drawing from her ethnographic research in New Orleans’ African American religious communities, the presentation highlights the subtle shifts in orientation and affect, such as rituals of mourning and remembrance, testimonies, and fellowship, that reclaim lost loved ones in the space of death and transformation. Situating such practices as essential knowledge about human being and becoming in enduring and unendurable times, the presentation anchors humanistic social inquiry at the intersection of anthropology, black studies, and digital humanities. Sharing experimental and arts-based modes of ethnographic practice including collage and animation, Carter explores how such knowledge might be developed and shared, from the formatting of black experience in the post-digital age to the coding of black stories for social and spiritual repair.

Rebecca Louise Carter is a cultural anthropologist, educator, writer, and artist. She holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Michigan (2010) and has a B.A. in psychology and art theory and practice from Northwestern University (1988). An Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Brown University, Carter’s research interests focus on disaster and crisis, social and spiritual movements, and restorative practices of kinship and relatedness. Her first book, Prayers for the People: Homicide and Humanity in the Crescent City was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2019. The book won the 2020 Anthony Leeds Prize in Urban Anthropology and was a co-winner of the 2020 Edie Turner First Book Prize in Ethnographic Writing. Carter’s current projects develop through experimental and arts-based modes of ethnographic analysis, at the intersection of anthropology, Black studies, and digital humanities.

5:30pm, MCOM 067

Apr
27

Book Publishing Lab Workshop:
Dr. Petra Rethmann
(McMaster University)

Join us for a Book Publishing Lab workshop with Dr. Petra Rethmann, Professor of Anthropology at McMaster University. Dr. Rethmann will lead an open workshop on the developing manuscript Thrown Out: A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Ethnographic Novella by BPL Fellow Dr. Lauren Miller, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Texas Tech. This workshop is open to all faculty and graduate students.

Dr. Petra Rethmann is professor of Anthropology, a faculty member in the Cultural Studies & Critical Theory program, and a member of the Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition. She is the author of Tundra Passages (2001) and co-editor of Globality: Frictions and Connections (in press), and the author of numerous articles that have appeared in edited volumes and in journals such as American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Anthropologica, Cultural Critique, and Anthropologie et Société.

1:00pm-2:30pm, 328 Weeks Hall

Apr
30

Book Publishing Lab Workshop:
Dr. Suzanne Scafe
(Vrije Universiteit Brussel)

Join us for a Book Publishing Lab workshop with Dr. Suzanne Scafe, Associated Senior Researcher on the research project MERLIT at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Dr. Scafe will lead an open workshop on the developing manuscript Revisioning the Contemporary, 1968-2018, a volume within the book series associated with The Orlando Project: An Integrated History of Women's Writing in the British Isles, authored by BPL Fellow and TTU Professor of English Dr. Kanika Batra (with Dr. Maryse Jayarusiya of St. Louis University). This workshop is open to all faculty and graduate students.

Dr. Suzanne Scafe is a Visiting Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Brighton and is an Associated Senior Researcher on the research project MERLIT at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. She is the co-author of The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain, republished in 2018, and co-editor of several collections of essays on Caribbean and Black British literature and culture, the most recent of which is the interdisciplinary anthology of essays, published this year, entitled African-Caribbean Women Interrogating Diaspora/(Post) Diaspora.  She has written extensively on Black British women’s literary fiction, life writing, and poetry, and on writers including Bernardine Evaristo, Dorothea Smartt, Diana Evans and Irenosen Okojie. Her E-book, Reading to Resist: Contemporary Black British Women’s Fiction was published in July 2025 by Routledge. 

Register on Zoom at https://texastech.zoom.us/meeting/register/F4aGTQGuT-mqVXDiyIFIjg

May
4

Book Publishing Lab Workshop:
Dr. May Joseph
(Pratt Institute)

Join us for a Book Publishing Lab workshop with Dr. May Joseph, Professor of Global Studies at Pratt Institute. Dr. Joseph will lead an open workshop on the developing manuscript Thrown Out: A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Ethnographic Novella by BPL Fellow Dr. Lauren Miller, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Texas Tech. This workshop is open to all faculty and graduate students.

Dr. May Joseph is the founder of Harmattan Theater,  an environmental theater company based in New York City and Professor of Global Studies in the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute, New York. She is currently the Managing Co-Editor-in-Chief of ‘Island Studies Journal’, https://islandstudiesjournal.org. Dr. Joseph's scholarly research combines critical theory with architectural and environmental theory and performance practice.

1:00-2:30pm, 228 Weeks Hall

May
6

Book Publishing Lab Workshop:
Dr. Shanon Fitzpatrick, Academic Developmental Editor

Join us for a Book Publishing Lab workshop with Dr. Shanon Fitzpatrick, Academic Developmental Editor. Dr. Fitzpatrick will lead an open workshop on the developing manuscript Revisioning the Contemporary, 1968-2018, a volume within the book series associated with The Orlando Project: An Integrated History of Women's Writing in the British Isles, authored by BPL Fellow and TTU Professor of English Dr. Kanika Batra (with Dr. Maryse Jayarusiya of St. Louis University). This workshop is open to all faculty and graduate students.

Dr. Shanon Fitzpatrick is an academic developmental editor, writing consultant, and historian. She has a Ph.D. in history from the University of California-Irvine, and an BA in American Studies from Columbia University. After spending eight years as a professor at a large research university, in 2020 she founded Style & Spine to help other scholars develop, revise, and publish new research. Since then, she has worked with academic authors on more than 100 projects, mostly books and articles in the humanities and social sciences. Her own publications include a monograph, True Story: How a Pulp Empire Remade Mass Media (Harvard University Press, 2022); a co-edited volume, Body & Nation: The Global Realms of U.S. Body Politics in the Twentieth Century (Duke University Press); and various articles on the histories of imperialism, biopolitics, and eugenics. 

Register on Zoom at https://texastech.zoom.us/meeting/register/qbDbIp9SQMyG32NbyGpl6g