College of Arts and Sciences Simpson Center for the Humanities

Public Lecture | Artemis Leontis | Secrecy, Stutter, and Care: Eva Palmer’s Hidden Letters

Friday, May 8, 2026, 3 – 4:30 p.m. PDT

Join us for an afternoon with scholar Artemis Leontis from the University of Michigan.

Hidden for decades in a locked cabinet at the Center for Asia Minor Studies in Athens, Eva Palmer Sikelianos’s love letters (1900-1910)—personal, creative, and revealing networks of desire and kinship—challenge expectations about what belongs in Greece’s archival record.

These scattered, stuttering papers sat uneasily within an institute dedicated to Orthodox Christian refugee history, raising new questions about whose lives and stories find a place in official memory.

What happens when a collection resists straightforward histories—when archiving itself becomes an act of negotiation, improvisation, and listening for what’s unsaid? What can these fragments teach us about the possibilities of cultural memory, and how listening to stutters and silences might open new ways of understanding the past?

In this talk, Leontis explores the process of archiving Palmer’s collection: the hurdles, improvisations, and acts of care involved in bringing these materials from secrecy to public view. Inspired by Patricia Keller’s idea of the “stutter in the archive,” she shows how gaps, interruptions, and incomplete stories invite us to rethink what archives can do, and how they respond to lives lived beyond conventional narratives.

Artemis Leontis is the C.P. Cavafy Professor of Modern Greek and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, and the current editor of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies. Her books include Topographies of Hellenism: Mapping the Homeland (1995; Greek translation 1998), Culture and Customs of Greece (2009), Eva Palmer Sikelianos: A Life in Ruins (2019; Greek translation 2022), and the edited volumes Greece: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (1997), and “What these Ithakas mean…”: Readings in Cavafy / «Η Ιθάκες τί σημαίνουν»: Αναγνώσεις στον Καβάφη (2002). She is currently coediting the letters of Eva Palmer and Natalie Clifford Barney. She is also preparing a book on the story of the archiving of those letters, which were long hidden in a backroom cabinet of a state-funded Greek academic institute.

Event interval: Single day event
Campus location: Allen Library (ALB)
Campus room: Peterson Room
Accessibility Contact: hellenic@uw.edu
Event Types: Academics
Event sponsors: UW Hellenic Studies Program, UW Department of Classics
Target Audience: Open to public. Registration required.

First Book Manuscript Panel with Bianca Dang, Ileana M. Rodríguez-Silva, and Walter Johnson: "Historical Approaches to Slavery, Abolition, and Imperialism"

Monday, May 11, 2026, 3:30 – 5 p.m. PDT

This panel will focus on how historians have expanded our understanding of the hemispheric history of slavery and abolition by attending to issues of imperial power.

Bianca Dang (History, University of Washington) researches and teaches on the histories of Black freedom movements and state coercion in the Americas during the 19th century. Her current book project, Making Meaningful Freedom: Gendered Struggles for Autonomy in the U.S. and Haiti, 1780-1880, traces how Haitians and African Americans emphasized autonomy as they worked to make freedom more than a legal status. It focuses on Black women's legal, diplomatic, and religious strategies to combat racism and misogyny.

Ileana M. Rodríguez-Silva (History, University of Washington) teaches Latin American and Caribbean history. She researches race-making, racial identity formation, and post-emancipation racial politics. Her book, Silencing Race: Disentangling Blackness, Colonial Regimes, and National Struggles in Post-Emancipation Puerto Rico, 1850-1920 (2012), received the 2012-2014 Frank Bonilla Book Award for best book on Puerto Rican studies.

Walter Johnson (History and African & African American Studies, Harvard University) studies slavery, capitalism, and imperialism in the 19th century. His first book, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (1999) used the slave market as a way to think about the fantasies, fears, negotiations, and violence that characterized American slavery. In River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Imperialism in the Mississippi Valley (2013) he wrote a history of the Mississippi Valley between the Louisiana Purchase and the Civil War. He is currently writing a book about the 1841 revolt aboard the slave ship Creole.

Flyer sponsorship acknowledgement:

Generously made possible by the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities.

Accessibility Contact

This event is free and open to all UW students, faculty, and staff . Accommodation requests related to a disability or health condition should be made by May 1, 2026 to the Simpson Center, 206.543.3920, schadmin@uw.edu.

Event interval: Single day event
Campus location: Communications Building (CMU)
Campus room: 202
Accessibility Contact: Simpson Center for the Humanities, 206.543.3920, humanities@uw.edu
Event Types: Lectures/Seminars
Event sponsors: Simpson Center for the Humanities, humanities@uw.edu, 206.543.3920, Co-sponsored by the Department of History

Listening in Colonial India: Musical Emotions between Sound, Text, and Image by Richard David Williams (SOAS, London): Andrew L. Markus Memorial Lecture

Monday, May 11, 2026, 5:30 – 7 p.m. PDT

This lecture explores the place of music in the history of the emotions, beginning in the early modern period. It considers theories of embodied response and systems for visualising music through painting and poetry. It explores how colonial-era authors writing in vernacular languages drew these older theories into conversation with modern ontologies of music and emotion, often inspired by developments in European understandings of the physics of sound and psychological models of emotion. Despite these developments, nineteenth and twentieth-century sources show that older concepts continued to shape the discourse in Indian music studies, and were not simply overwritten by new, European theories.

Richard David Williams is Reader (Associate Professor) in Music and South Asian Studies at SOAS University of London. A cultural historian of early modern and colonial South Asia, his research explores music, sound, and performance in literary, courtly, and religious contexts. He is the author of The Scattered Court: Hindustani Music in Colonial Bengal (University of Chicago Press, 2023), which traces the musical connections between north India and Bengal in the nineteenth century and considers how musical ideas and practices evolved in response to colonialism. His second book project focuses on Ragamala, the early modern practice of imagining musical sound through poetry and painting. In particular, the book considers the longer history of writings on music in Classical Hindi (Brajbhasha) between 1500 and 1900. He is also preparing a translation of a seventeenth-century Dakkani Sufi romance (Gulshan-e-‘Ishq) with Makoto Kitada (Osaka University), and an edited volume on the cultural history of eighteenth-century South Asian literature. More broadly, he has also written on musicology, religious history, manuscript cultures, courtesan poets, the creative industries in Pakistan, Bengali migrants in colonial Burma, the historiography of global music, and the history of emotions.

Event interval: Single day event
Campus location: Kane Hall (KNE)
Campus room: Kane Hall 225 (Walker-Ames Room)
Accessibility Contact: asianll@uw.edu or 206 543 4996
Event Types: Lectures/Seminars
Event sponsors: Asian Languages and Literature, asianll@uw.edu or 206 543 4996, (Andrew L. Markus Memorial Fund),
Target Audience: For anyone interested in South Asian (Indian) music, painting, and poetry
More info: asian.washington.edu…

Stroum Lectures 2026 with Rafael Neis: Did ‘Men’ and ‘Women’ Always Exist? What the Talmud Can Tell Us

Tuesday, May 12, 2026, 7 – 9 p.m. PDT

Join us for the first lecture of the UW's annual Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies. This year the series features University of Michigan scholar and artist Rafael Neis.

Register Here. Registration Required.

Lecture 1: Did ‘Men’ and ‘Women’ Always Exist? What the Talmud Can Tell Us
We often assume that the categories “man” and “woman” are timeless and self-evident. But what if they aren’t? In this talk, Professor Rafael Neis invites us to explore a surprising question: did “men” and “women,” as fixed and stable categories, always exist in the way we imagine them today? Turning to the Talmud, Neis shows how the rabbis wrestled with bodies, identity, and social roles in ways that don’t always fit neatly into modern assumptions. By setting aside what we think we already know about gender, we can discover fresh and unexpected ways of reading these ancient texts—and gain insight into how the rabbis themselves understood human difference. Along the way, Neis opens up intriguing new perspectives on rabbinic thought, revealing a tradition that is more curious, complex, and inventive than we might expect. Please join us for an informal reception following the lecture.

Read about the second lecture here.

Rafael Neis is a scholar and artist. Neis is the Jean and Samuel Frankel Professor of Rabbinic Literature and is appointed in the Department of History and Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. As Faculty Director of Arts Learning at Michigan’s Arts initiative, Neis supports campus-wide art-integrated pedagogy. Their second book, When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis & the Reproduction of Species, was published in 2023 by University of California Press. Their artwork has been featured in shows and in many publications.

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The Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies is a nationally-renowned series of public lectures, which has brought Jewish studies luminaries from around the globe to the University of Washington for more than fifty years. Made possible through the support of the Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures Endowment, this annual series is a cornerstone program of UW's Stroum Center for Jewish Studies and has led to impactful conversations, groundbreaking scholarship, and award-winning publications. You may view the full Stroum Lectures archive here and review corresponding books published by University of Washington Press here.

Image: 4th-7th c. incantation bowl written in Aramaic from Iraq. Photo by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin via Wikimedia Commons.

Event interval: Single day event
Campus location: Kane Hall (KNE)
Campus room: Kane 225, Walker-Ames Room
Accessibility Contact: jewishst@uw.edu
Event Types: Academics
Event sponsors: Stroum Center for Jewish Studies
Target Audience: Open to public. Registration required.

Black Digital Humanities: State of the Field

Thursday, May 14, 2026, 4 – 6 p.m. PDT

Registration required.

Join the Black Digital Humanities in the Age of Technofascism research cluster at the University of Washington for a symposium and conversation on the racialized perils of digital technologies, led by scholars in the field of Black Digital Humanities alongside community-led organization Wa Na Wari and its Black Spatial Histories Institute.

From AI’s impact on ecosystems and scarce water resources to the use of surveillance technologies to suppress dissent and social movements, Black populations in the US and abroad have historically been testing grounds for many of these rapid and far-reaching developments. Participants will address how digital technologies curtail freedoms and create unequal material impacts on everyday life while also highlighting the work of community-led organizations working toward a more just future. Presenters will briefly introduce their work using an object that they have chosen to represent their academic research.

Part 1: Digital Labor + Memory Work
4 – 5 PM
Inye Wokoma (Wa Na Wari)
Sierra Parsons (SE Seattle Oral Historian and Software Engineer)
LaShawnDa Pittman (UW)
Kwame Otu (Georgetown University)
Golden Owens (UW)
A. E. Stevenson (University of Chicago)

Part 2: Surveillance + Counter-Surveillance
5 – 6 PM
Simone Durham (Morgan State University)
Jelani Ince (UW)
Brandy Monk-Payton (Fordham University)
Christopher Paul Harris (UC Irvine)
Chrystel Oloukoï (UW)
Rebecca Bayeck (Utah State University)

Generously made possible by the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, and co-sponsored by the UW departments of American Ethnic Studies, Cinema & Media Studies, History, Geography, and Sociology, and by the UW Honors program.

This event is free and open to the public. Accommodation requests related to a disability or health condition should be made by April 30, 2026 to the Simpson Center, 206.543.3920, schadmin@uw.edu.

Event interval: Single day event
Campus location: Henry Art Gallery (HAG)
Campus room: Auditorium
Accessibility Contact: Simpson Center for the Humanities, 206.543.3920, humanities@uw.edu
Event Types: Lectures/Seminars
Event sponsors: Simpson Center for the Humanities, 206.543.3920, humanities@uw.edu, Henry Art Gallery, Black Digital Studies in the Age of Techno-Fascism

Stroum Lectures 2026 with Rafael Neis: Monsters, Hybrids, and Holy Images - Rethinking Bodies in Ancient Jewish Art

Thursday, May 14, 2026, 4 – 5:30 p.m. PDT

Join us for the first lecture of UW's annual Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies. This year the series features University of Michigan scholar and artist Rafael Neis.

Registration link coming soon. Read about the first lecture here.

Lecture 2. Monsters, Hybrids, and Holy Images: Rethinking Bodies in Ancient Jewish Art
Walk through the ancient world and you would have been surrounded by images of all kinds of beings—human figures, animals, hybrids, and creatures that blur the line between the familiar and the fantastic. These images appeared everywhere: in streets and homes, bathhouses and synagogues, public buildings and sacred spaces. In this talk, Professor Rafael Neis explores a handful of striking examples from ancient Jewish art and asks what happens when we look at them with fresh eyes. Instead of sorting these figures into modern boxes about “human,” “animal,” “male,” or “female,” Neis invites us to step back and see how ancient artists and communities imagined bodies more broadly. By letting go of some of our present-day assumptions, we begin to notice new patterns and possibilities—and gain insight into how people in the ancient world understood identity, difference, and the sacred. The result is a richer, more surprising picture of Jewish visual culture, filled with creativity, complexity, and imagination.

Rafael Neis is a scholar and artist. Neis is the Jean and Samuel Frankel Professor of Rabbinic Literature and is appointed in the Department of History and Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. As Faculty Director of Arts Learning at Michigan’s Arts initiative, Neis supports campus-wide art-integrated pedagogy. Their second book, When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis & the Reproduction of Species, was published in 2023 by University of California Press. Their artwork has been featured in shows and in many publications.

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The Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies is a nationally-renowned series of public lectures, which has brought Jewish studies luminaries from around the globe to the University of Washington for more than fifty years. Made possible through the support of the Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures Endowment, this annual series is a cornerstone program of UW's Stroum Center for Jewish Studies and has led to impactful conversations, groundbreaking scholarship, and award-winning publications. You may view the full Stroum Lectures archive here and review corresponding books published by University of Washington Press here.

Image: 4th-7th c. incantation bowl written in Aramaic from Iraq. Photo by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin via Wikimedia Commons.

Event interval: Single day event
Campus location: Student Union Building (HUB)
Campus room: HUB 214
Accessibility Contact: jewishst@uw.edu
Event Types: Academics
Event sponsors: The Stroum Center for Jewish Studies
Target Audience: Open to public. Registration required.

Humanities Network Analysis

Friday, May 15, 2026, 1 – 3 p.m. PDT

This workshop will explore foundational techniques in humanities network analysis: the study of links and connections between people, books, events, artworks, and more. You’ll learn how to…

· Collect, organize, and maintain network data for humanities research

· Create network visualizations and animations using popular network analysis software

· Analyze network data describing social relationships, correspondence, and copublication

Participants should bring a laptop but don’t need to have anything pre-installed. No prior experience with digital humanities or data science is necessary, and all are welcome!

Event interval: Single day event
Campus location: Suzzallo Library (SUZ)
Campus room: Open Scholarship Commons Presentation Space
Accessibility Contact: mundtm@uw.edu
Event Types: Special Events, Student Activities, Workshops

Cultural Analytics Praxis Lightning Talks

Monday, May 18, 2026, 2:30 – 4 p.m. PDT

Cultural Analytics (CA) has recently emerged as a convergent, multidisciplinary field focused on the use of data-driven and computational methods to study contemporary and historical cultural materials. The Cultural Analytics Research and Teaching Initiative (CARTi) is a network of early career scholars whose aim is to promote sustainability in CA research and teaching and to provide new models for scholarship in the field. In this symposium, CARTi members will share short papers focused on cultural analytics praxis, bringing together technical methodologies with critical theory to illuminate the challenges and possibilities of using computational methods in humanistic fields.

John R. Ladd
Assistant Professor of Computing & Information Studies
Washington & Jefferson College

Matthew Lavin
Associate Professor of Data Analytics
Bard College

Zoe LeBlanc
Assistant Professor
School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Anna Preus
Assistant Professor, English Department
University of Washington

Melanie Walsh
Assistant Professor, Information School
Adjunct Assistant Professor, English Department
University of Washington

Generously made possible by the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities.

This event is free and open to the public. Accommodation requests related to a disability or health condition should be made by May 4 to the Simpson Center, 206.543.3920, schadmin@uw.edu.

Event interval: Single day event
Campus location: Communications Building (CMU)
Campus room: 202
Accessibility Contact: Simpson Center for the Humanities, humanities@uw.edu, 206.543.3920
Event Types: Lectures/Seminars
Event sponsors: Simpson Center for the Humanities, humanities@uw.edu, 206.543.3920, Cultural Analytics Praxis Faculty Research Collaboration
Target Audience: Open to the public.

Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism

Tuesday, May 19, 2026, 3:30 – 5 p.m. PDT

Will green capitalism save us from the climate crisis? "Clean" technologies and renewable energy are certainly growing sites of capitalist investment, with government policies playing a key role in making these sectors profitable. But the supply chains that produce the technologies pose vexing dilemmas for the energy transition. These dilemmas are most dramatic at the extractive frontiers of green capitalism: where the natural resources needed to manufacture electric vehicles and build windmills are extracted. In this talk, Thea Riofrancos (Providence College) will unpack these challenges through the lens of lithium, a so-called "critical mineral" essential for its role in decarbonizing one of the most polluting sectors: transportation.

With forecasters predicting an enormous surge in lithium demand, exceeding existing supplies, Global North governments and downstream firms scramble to "secure" lithium, resulting in a new state-corporate alliance and the return of vertical integration. Meanwhile, Global South governments are attempting to leverage critical mineral deposits into sustainable and sovereign economic development. And, across the world, environmental and Indigenous movements contest the rapid expansion of extraction, defending ecosystems, livelihoods, and waterways already under pressure from global warming from a new boom in mining. It is in the play of these forces, unfolding amidst geopolitical rivalry and economic turbulence, that the energy transition will be forged. Riofrancos’s talk will explore the possibility of a less mining-intensive pathway to zero carbon transportation.

About the speaker
Thea Riofrancos is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Providence College, a Strategic Co-Director of the Climate and Community Institute, and a fellow at the Transnational Institute. She is the author of Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism (W.W. Norton, 2025) and Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador (Duke University Press, 2020), and the coauthor of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso Books, 2019).

At the Jackson School, opportunities and events are open to all eligible persons regardless of race, sex or other identity.

Event interval: Single day event
Campus location: Allen Library (ALB)
Campus room: Petersen Room
Accessibility Contact: lasuw@uw.edu
Event Types: Lectures/Seminars
Event sponsors: This event is hosted by Latin American and Caribbean Studies and co-sponsored by the Departments of Comparative History of Ideas and Geography.
Target Audience: Free and open to the public

Public Lecture | Jacob Daniels | The Jews of Edirne: The End of Ottoman Europe and the Arrival of Borders

Tuesday, May 19, 2026, 4:30 – 6 p.m. PDT

Join us in welcoming visiting author and scholar Jacob Daniels, discussing his new book, The Jews of Edirne: The End of the Ottoman Europe and the Arrival of Borders.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the city of Edirne was a bustling center linking Istanbul to Ottoman Europe. It was also the capital of Edirne Province—among the most religiously diverse regions of the Ottoman Empire. But by 1923, the city had become a Turkish border town, and the province had lost much of its non-Muslim population. With this book, Jacob Daniels explores how one of the world's largest Sephardi communities dealt with the encroachment of modern borders.

Jacob Daniels is Assistant Professor of Instruction and Assistant Director of the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. He received his Ph.D. in History at Stanford University in 2022.

Event interval: Single day event
Campus location: Student Union Building (HUB)
Campus room: HUB 145
Accessibility Contact: jewishst@uw.edu
Event Types: Academics
Event sponsors: UW Sephardic Studies Program, UW Middle East Center, UW Stroum Center for Jewish Studies
Target Audience: Open to public. Registration required.

Sacred Breath: Indigenous Writing and Storytelling Series

Thursday, May 21, 2026, 5 – 7 p.m. PDT

Save the Date!
Thrusday, May 21st, 5:00-7:00pm at wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ Intellectual House
The Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Washington hosts an annual literary and storytelling series. Sacred Breath features Indigenous writers and storytellers sharing their craft at the beautiful wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ Intellectual House on the UW Seattle campus. Storytelling offers a spiritual connection, a sharing of sacred breath. Literature, similarly, preserves human experience and ideals. Both forms are durable and transmit power that teaches us how to live. Both storytelling and reading aloud can impact audiences through the power of presence, allowing for the experience of the transfer of sacred breath as audiences are immersed in the experience of being inside stories and works of literature.
Free and open to the public. Doors open at 4:30pm with light refreshments. Books available for purchase with author signing after the event.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
BETH PIATOTE (Nimi:pu, Colville)
Beth Piatote is an associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California Berkeley. She is the author of two books: the scholarly monograph Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and the Law in Native American Literature (Yale 2013), and the mixed-genre collection, The Beadworkers: Stories (Counterpoint 2019). Her full-length play, Antikoni, has been supported by workshops and public readings with Native Voices at the Autry, New York Classical Theatre, and the Indigenous Writers Collaborative at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival; and her short play, Tricksters, Unite! was featured in the 2022 Native Voices Short Play Festival. She currently holds a playwriting fellowship with AlterTheatre. Her creative and scholarly work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Epiphany, Poetry, World Literature Today, PMLA, American Quarterly, American Literary History, and other major journals and anthologies. She has served as a judge for literary awards for PEN America and the Poetry Foundation. She is currently working on a scholarly monograph on the representation of Native American legal systems through sensory representations (sound, visuality, synesthesia, and haunting) in texts across the long twentieth century; a collection of poems, and a collection of essays. Beth's research interests include Native American and Indigenous literature and history, arts, and law; Nez Perce language and literature, and Indigenous language revitalization more broadly; and creative writing. She co-created and now chairs the Designated Emphasis in Indigenous Language Revitalization at Berkeley. Currently she serves as the Director of the Arts Research Center, where she has established the Indigenous Poetics Lab to support artistic expression as a means of language revitalization. She holds a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University. She is Nez Perce and an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation.

Event interval: Single day event
Campus location: Intellectual House (INT)
Campus room: Gathering Hall
Accessibility Contact: dso@uw.edu
Event Types: Lectures/Seminars, Performances, Special Events
Event sponsors: Sacred Breath is sponsored by the Department of American Indian Studies, the Mellon Foundation, the Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies, the UW Department of English, the Banks Center for Educational Justice, the Squaxin Island Tribe, the Suquamish Tribe, and the Muckleshoot Tribe.
More info: ais.washington.edu…

Lecture: Simone Stirner, “Haunting, Quilting, Melting: Shapes of Queer Memory”

Tuesday, Jun 2, 2026, 3:30 – 5 p.m. PDT

What happens to our understanding of relational memory when viewed through queer histories? In this talk, Stirner examines memory art dedicated to often neglected queer and trans histories after National Socialism, from translucent quilts to an installation that melts a concentration camp gate and rewelds it into new forms. Beyond arguing for the inclusion of queer histories in relational frameworks of remembrance, the talk proposes that attending to the distinct shapes and textures of queer relationality reshapes the concept itself, showing how queer memory practices expand and transform what it means to think memory relationally.

Simone Stirner (Assistant Professor, Germanic Languages & Literatures, Harvard University) works on poetry and poetics, memory studies, and the intersections of critical and creative practices. Stirner's first book Poetic Grief: Form and Remembrance after National Socialism (Fordham University Press, forthcoming) develops a new framework for understanding the relationship between reading poetry and the affective experience of grief by studying how poems in the enduring aftermath of National Socialism and the Holocaust make space for an encounter with the uncontainable dimensions of loss—on and off the page.

Generously made possible by the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities.

This event is free and open to the public. Accommodation requests related to a disability or health condition should be made by May 19, 2026 to the Simpson Center, 206.543.3920, schadmin@uw.edu.

Event interval: Single day event
Campus location: Denny Hall (DEN)
Campus room: 359
Accessibility Contact: Simpson Center for the Humanities, 206-543-3920, humanities@uw.edu
Event Types: Lectures/Seminars
Event sponsors: Simpson Center for the Humanities, humanities@uw.edu, 206.543.3920, German Studies Department, Part of the Relational Memory Studies project.

Workshop with Simone Stirner: "Intertextuality as Relational Memory: Paul Celan’s ‘Death Fugue’ in the Poetry of Almadhoun, Clark, Dzukogi”

Wednesday, Jun 3, 2026, 1 – 3:30 p.m. PDT

Paul Celan’s poem “Death Fugue” is one of the most famous poems to commemorate the Holocaust. Celan himself refused to publicly read the poem in the decades after its publication. But the poem and its key figure of “black milk” also developed their own life, and up until today they reappear in the writings of a range of contemporary poets: Tiana Clark cites it when remembering the history of the Civil War; Ghayath Almadhoun invokes it in the context of the Syrian migration to Europe in the 2010s; and Saddiq Dzukogi turns to Celan’s words in mourning the death of his infant daughter. In this workshop, Stirner discusses the intertextual relations around the figure “black milk,” proposing that they offer a basis for a theory of relational memory. The citational economy around “black milk” provides an understanding of intertextuality as cultural memory that shifts the focus to the ways texts participate in each other’s histories and in a shared structure of feeling of grief.

Simone Stirner (Assistant Professor, Germanic Languages & Literatures, Harvard University) works on poetry and poetics, memory studies, and the intersections of critical and creative practices. Stirner's first book Poetic Grief: Form and Remembrance after National Socialism (Fordham University Press, forthcoming) develops a new framework for understanding the relationship between reading poetry and the affective experience of grief by studying how poems in the enduring aftermath of National Socialism and the Holocaust make space for an encounter with the uncontainable dimensions of loss—on and off the page.

Generously made possible by the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities.

Global Antiquities & Early Modernisms Lecture

Wednesday, Feb 3, 2027, 3:30 – 5 p.m. PST

Details TBA

Event interval: Single day event
Campus location: Communications Building (CMU)
Campus room: 202
Accessibility Contact: Simpson Center for the Humanities, 206.543.3920, humanities@uw.edu
Event Types: Lectures/Seminars
Event sponsors: Simpson Center for the Humanities, 206.543.3920, humanities@uw.edu