DATE: Feb 17, 2022
TIME: 3:15pm – 4:45pm
LOCATION: Online
As academics, we are trained to write in specific, rigorous prose styles. But many of us are drawn to creative writing—fiction, poetry, and other genres—in addition or instead. How can we integrate creative writing into our academic work? This panel features three outstanding contemporary scholar-writers who will describe their own experiences at this intersection, with a Q&A afterwards for those interested in exploring this path.
Part of the Public Humanities Hub’s Public Scholarship Series.
Speakers
Carla Nappi is a historical pataphysician and a writer. She holds the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in History at the University of Pittsburgh, where she is also Co-Director of the Humanities Center. Her most recent book is Translating Early Modern China: Illegible Cities (Oxford University Press, 2021). Carla has a deep interest in the forms, methodologies, and processes that we use to understand and come into relation with the past. The forms in which her research and scholarship manifest include poetry, short fiction, performance, and experimental creative nonfiction.
Minelle Mahtani is Associate Professor at the Institute for Social Justice at UBC. She is also a former national television news journalist at the CBC and was previously a journalism and geography professor at University of Toronto. She hosted a radio show at Roundhouse Radio, 98.3 Vancouver for three years. Her show was unapologetically anti-racist and feminist in its approach, focusing on the stories of systemically disadvantaged communities. Minelle is the author of Mixed Race Amnesia: Resisting the Romanticization of Multiraciality with UBC Press.
Christopher B. Patterson is an Assistant Professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on transpacific discourses of literature, games, and films through the lens of empire studies, queer theory and creative writing. Chris writes fiction under his pseudonym Kawika Guillermo, and is the author of Stamped: an anti-travel novel (Westphalia Press, 2018), and the queer speculative novel All Flowers Bloom (Westphalia Press, 2020).
Host
Carrie Jenkins is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. Her most recent books include a novel (Victoria Sees It, Penguin Random House, 2021) and a co-authored book of poetry (Uninvited: Talking Back to Plato, McGill Queen’s University Press, 2020, with Carla Nappi). Her second non-fiction book on the philosophy of love will be published this Spring (Sad Love: Romance and the Search for Meaning, Polity, 2022).
