STSS Encounters | Fall 2025 Research Mixer
The interdisciplinary STSS community at UW is both unfunded and robust. This fall meeting brings together faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, and staff who are curious about and committed to the critical, cultural, historical, and philosophical study of science and technology. The convening is designed to foreground encounters: it will be a space to share what we’re encountering from our various vantage points across UW, with reports from 4S, the First Monday STSS reading group, the certificate, and the undergraduate major. We’ll introduce new students and end with a game to spark discussion of emerging research.
Register: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdNkXAVcaUjV9T1JNfgxMjs8QcgbOSIThqic8eGdTN1KUe35A/viewform.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Communications Building (CMU). Campus room: 202. Accessibility Contact: mmjones@uw.edu. Event Types: Meetings. Workshops. Target Audience: STSS faculty, staff, and students from UW Bothell, Seattle, and Tacoma.
Tuesday, November 25, 2025, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
A Celebration of 25 Years of the Simpson Center and a Legacy of Leadership
Please join us in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities. Over the past quarter century, the Simpson Center has established itself as an internationally recognized model for leading-edge humanities research. Its work—from scholarly gatherings to fellowship programs to publications—has been transformative for faculty, students, and staff at the University of Washington. The new faculty director of the Simpson Center, Professor Lynn M. Thomas, invites you to join us from 3:30 – 5:00 pm in the Walker-Ames Room, Kane Hall 225. Brief remarks will begin at 4:00 pm, after which we will raise a glass to honor Professor Kathleen Woodward’s legacy of leadership at the Simpson Center.
RSVP here: https://simpsoncenter.org/form/dec4-simpson-center-celebration.
Free and open to the public. Accommodation requests related to a disability or health condition should be made by November 20, 2025 to the Simpson Center, 206.543.3920, schadmin@uw.edu.
Generously made possible…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Kane Hall (KNE). Campus room: 225. Accessibility Contact: Simpson Center for the Humanities, 206-543-3920, schadmin@uw.edu. Event Types: Special Events.
Thursday, December 4, 2025, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
"Comics of the Anthropocene: Graphic Narrative at the End of Nature" Book Talk
UW professor, translator, and writer José Alaniz visits the store to discuss his latest book, Comics of the Anthropocene: Graphic Narrative at the End of Nature, the first full-length monograph to explore how US comics artists have depicted environmental destruction, mass extinctions, and climate change. He will be joined in conversation by fellow artists Megan Kelso, Leonard Rifas, and T Edward Bak.
Registration is not required, but helps us anticipate audience size. If you'd like to RSVP, please do so here!
Since the first Earth Day in 1970, how have US comics artists depicted the human-caused destruction of the natural world? How do these representations manifest in different genres of comics like superheroes, biography, underground comix, and journalism? What resources unique to the comics medium do they bring to their tasks? How do these works resonate with the ethical and environmental issues raised by global conversations about the anthropogenic sixth mass extinction and climate change? How have com…
Event interval: Single day event. Accessibility Contact: Jose Alaniz. Event Types: Academics. Lectures/Seminars. Diversity Equity Inclusion. Target Audience: Environmental Humanities scholars, Comics Studies scholars, lay readers.
Thursday, January 1, 2026, 7:00 PM – 8:00 PM.
For more info visit www.elliottbaybook.com. Futurisms and the African Now: Tech for Development and Democracy
Free and open to the public. Registration required.
In this talk, Dr. Reginold Royston will discuss technology and role of Pan-Africanism in the fields of international development, diaspora and politics in Ghana and beyond. Royston's new book Pan-African Futurism examines the state of IT for development work in this critical moment of "post-aid” drawing from his ethnographic research with programmers, artists and entrepreneurs on the continent since 2010. The book charts the explosion of mobile Internet across Africa during the early 2000s, growing interest in African tech entrepreneurship as a development driver, and the flowering of digital diasporas in the time since, especially in the creative fields of Nollywood and AfroBeats. Royston describes how Ghana's Pan-African futurists advocate entrepreneurship and civil society activism as a means of “hacking” the kinds of socio-economic development work that has long been advocated by NGOs. He will discuss how the controversial ideas of Afropolitanism and…
Event interval: Single day event. Online Meeting Link: https://washington.zoom.us/meeting/register/qTu1SkvcSo26UKakcllYDw. Accessibility Contact: sameerai@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Monday, January 12, 2026, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM.
Virtual Talk | Trump in the World 2.0: The European Partnership in Trade and Security
Join us for a free livestream talk and discussion on The European Partnership in Trade and Security as part of our Trump in the World 2.0 Winter Lecture Series on the international impact of the second Trump presidency. RSVP here for the online link, Featured speakers: Edward Alden, Ambassador (ret.) John Koenig, and Jacqueline Miller (moderator), Moderator: Danny Hoffman, Director of the Jackson School of International Studies and Stanley D. Golub Chair of International Studies
Questions? Email jsisevents@uw.edu.
Event interval: Single day event. Online Meeting Link: https://bit.ly/Trump-in-World-2026. Campus room: Online. Accessibility Contact: jsisevents@uw.edu. Event Types: Special Events. Lectures/Seminars.
Monday, January 12, 2026, 5:00 PM – 6:20 PM.
For more info visit bit.ly. Book Talk: Mark Letteney – Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration
Join us for a talk with Mark Letteney on his new book: Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration, co-authored by Matthew D. C. Larsen.
This book examines spaces, practices, and ideologies of incarceration in the ancient Mediterranean basin from 300 BCE to 600 CE. Analyzing a wide range of sources—including legal texts, archaeological findings, documentary evidence, and visual materials—Matthew D. C. Larsen and Mark Letteney argue that prisons were integral to the social, political, and economic fabric of ancient societies. Ancient Mediterranean Incarcerationtraces a long history of carceral practices, considering ways in which the institution of prison has been fundamentally intertwined with issues of class, ethnicity, gender, and imperialism. By foregrounding the voices and experiences of the imprisoned, Larsen and Letteney demonstrate the extraordinary durability of carceral structures across time and call for a new historical consciousness around contemporary practices of incarceration.
Mark Letteney,…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Kane Hall (KNE). Campus room: Walker-Ames, KNE 225. Accessibility Contact: jewishst@uw.edu. Event Types: Special Events. Lectures/Seminars. Target Audience: Open to the public. Registration required.
Thursday, January 22, 2026, 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM.
Book Talk: Umbrella Sky – Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children's Literature
Join us for a talk on Miriam Udel's new book: Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children's Literature, hosted by the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, a group of Yiddish-speaking educators, authors, and cultural leaders undertook a bold project: creating a corpus of nearly one thousand books and several periodicals, which flourished in conjunction with the secular Yiddish school systems that spanned the globe in the 1920s and 30s. These vibrant texts cut across continents and ideologies but shared in their creators’ overarching goal: to write into being a better world, a shenere un besere velt—in a distinctively Yiddish key. The question of what a “better world” looks like is, of course, inextricably bound up in questions of political vision. Investigated as an archive, the stories, poems, and plays written for children during the early twentieth century furnish a novel record of the movements—geographic and ideological—that made Ashkenazi Jewry fully…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Student Union Building (HUB). Campus room: HUB 145. Accessibility Contact: jewishst@uw.edu. Event Types: Special Events. Target Audience: Open to the public. Registration required.
Wednesday, January 28, 2026, 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM.
Virtual Talk | Trump in the World 2.0: The US, India and the World
Join us for a free livestream talk and discussion on The US, India and the World as part of our Trump in the World 2.0 Winter Lecture Series on the international impact of the second Trump presidency. RSVP here for the online link, Featured speakers: Radhika Govindrajan, Sunila Kale, and Milan Vaishnav
Moderator: Danny Hoffman, Director of the Jackson School of International Studies and Stanley D. Golub Chair of International Studies
Questions? Email jsisevents@uw.edu.
Event interval: Single day event. Online Meeting Link: https://bit.ly/Trump-in-World-2026. Campus room: Online. Accessibility Contact: jsisevents@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars. Special Events.
Monday, February 2, 2026, 5:00 PM – 6:20 PM.
For more info visit bit.ly. Katz Distinguished Lecture: Emily M. Bender, "Resisting Dehumanization in the Age of "AI": The View from the Humanities"
The production and promotion of so-called "AI" technology involves dehumanization on many fronts: the computational metaphor valorizes one kind of cognitive activity as “intelligence,” devaluing many other aspects of human experience while taking an isolating, individualistic view of agency, ignoring the importance of communities and webs of relationships. Meanwhile, the purpose of humans is framed as being labelers of data or interchangeable machine components. Data collected about people is understood as "ground truth" even while it lies about those people, especially marginalized people. In this talk, Bender will explore these processes of dehumanization and the vital role that the humanities have in resisting these trends by painting a deeper and richer picture of what it is to be human.
Emily M. Bender is the Thomas L. and Margo G. Wyckoff Endowed Professor in Linguistics and an Adjunct Professor in the School of Computer Science and the Information School at the University of Washington, where she has…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Kane Hall (KNE). Campus room: 210. Accessibility Contact: Simpson Center, 206.543.3920, schadmin@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Tuesday, February 10, 2026, 6:30 PM – 8:00 PM.
TEAL Digital Scholarship Series 2025-26: Detecting Shifts in Linguistic Register in Late Imperial Chinese Fiction
The Tateuchi East Asia Library (TEAL) is proud to present the 2025-2026 TEAL Digital Scholarship Series, a dynamic program showcasing cutting-edge research by scholars in the fields of Chinese, Japanese and Korean studies. This series highlights how innovative digital tools and methodologies are transforming East Asian scholarship, fostering interdisciplinary dialogue, and broadening the impact of research within and beyond academia.
Detecting shifts in linguistic register in late imperial Chinese fiction: Fine-tuning language models to detect fictionalized memorials to the emperor
Paul Vierthaler, Assistant Professor at the Princeton University
Abstract: It is common in late imperial Chinese literature for novels to appropriate the voice of officialdom for a variety of purposes, often as a means of bolstering historical credibility. While this appropriation can manifest in a variety of ways, it often comes in the form of verbatim quotations from memorials that officials wrote to the emperor. Some such…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Gowen Hall (GWN). Campus room: Tateuchi East Asia Library (Gowen 3rd) Seminar Room. Accessibility Contact: hkyi@uw.edu. Event Types: Academics. Lectures/Seminars. Workshops.
Wednesday, February 11, 2026, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.