Join us for the first Public Humanities Noted Scholar Lecture of 2023-24. Co-presented with the Faculty of Arts, and co-sponsored by St. John’s College.
This event is held on traditional, ancestral, and unceded xʷməθkwəy̓əm – Musqueam – territory.
Are you a student, staff, or recent alumni interested in this event? Then you might like this reading group happening on November 8 (Wednesday). Click here for an opportunity to connect with like-minded peers.
Public Humanities Noted Scholar Lecture Series 2023-24
Speakers:
Dr. Antoinette Burton and Dr. Jenny L. Davis
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Thursday, November 16, 2023
12:30-1:30 PM Pacific Time
Hybrid:
In person at
St. John’s College
Dining Hall
2111 Lower Mall
Vancouver BC V6T 1Z4
and
Online via Zoom
Please indicate upon registration whether you will be attending in person or online. Light refreshments will be served for in-person attendees who register by November 9th.
In this short introduction to a broader discussion with UBC practitioners and scholars of public humanities work, we will share some lessons learned from the Humanities Without Walls project, funded by the Mellon foundation and housed at the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Our focus will be on the two final rounds of Grand Research Challenge awards. These projects are anchored in the methodologies of reciprocity and redistribution in the context of collaborative research and practice in partnerships with Minority Serving Institutions and community organizations. Our experiences suggest that the broad political and even affective appeal of “humanities without walls” must be tempered by the significant limits on possibility thrown up by a variety of institutional impediments embedded in the infrastructures of the predominantly white bureaucratic cultures of the research university in North America. We will call out half a dozen or so of those impediments which have become visible to us at HWW in order to generate a wider discussion of what best practices can and should be in this work.
Antoinette Burton is Professor of History, Maybelle Leland Swanlund Professor, and Director of the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. A feminist historian of imperialism, she has helped to shape the field of postcolonial British history with research and teaching that takes an intersectional approach to empire’s colonial subjects and an oppositional approach to conventional empire histories via a commitment to anti-imperial histories from below. Her most recent book, Animalia: An Anti-Colonial Bestiary for Our Times (Duke 2020), is co-edited with Renisa Mawani, with whom she is currently working (with Samantha Frost) on a project called Biocultural Empire. Also in process is a co-edited collection with Jenny Davis, History, Beware: Poetry, Archives, and Attending to the Past. Through both her work with Mellon Foundation grants and at HRI, Dr. Burton has helped to cultivate numerous innovative interdisciplinary faculty, student and community-based projects, especially in the context of the initiative Humanities Without Walls. She also supervises a humanities-based college credit-bearing program for income eligible adults called the Odyssey Project. She serves on the Board of Illinois Humanities and is chair of the Faculty Board at the University of Illinois Press.
Jenny L. Davis is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and an Associate Professor of Anthropology and American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where she is the Director of the American Indian Studies Program. Since 2020, she has worked with the Humanities Without Walls project as the Consultant on Ethical Methods and Reciprocal Community Partnerships. In her administrative and service roles at UIUC, she has developed a campus-wide NAGPRA and repatriation office, a university Tribal Liaison position, the Native American and Indigenous Language (NAIL) Lab, and a Center for Indigenous Science, and works toward the repatriation of Indigenous collections (osteological, archaeological, ethnographic, and archival) in both the United States and international contexts. Her most recent book, Trickster Academy, is a poetry collection published in the University of Arizona Press Sun Tracks Series, and she is currently working on a graphic novel, Deer Woman Killed DeSoto, that is an Indigenous feminist speculative retelling of Hernando De Soto’s final days and a co-edited volume with Antoinette Burton entitled History, Beware: Poetry, Archives, and Attending to the Past.