Harnessing the Power of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Jupyter Notebooks for Modern Applications
This workshop will focus on using Large Language Models (LLMs) within Jupyter Notebooks to unlock their potential in modern research and applications. It will provide a hands-on tutorial on integrating LLMs using open libraries like Hugging Face Transformers, constructing effective prompts, processing model outputs, and deploying these tools for real-world tasks such as text summarization, natural language querying of datasets, and code generation. Participants will gain practical insights into incorporating LLMs into their workflows, even without extensive AI expertise.
My academic background in Machine Learning and Software Engineering has involved applying LLMs to various challenges, including text analysis, data exploration, and automating workflows. I have experience working with open-source platforms and understand the common challenges users face, such as navigating ethical concerns, managing computational resources, and selecting appropriate tools for specific problems. This workshop draws on these e…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Suzzallo Library (SUZ). Campus room: Open Scholarship Commons Presentation Space. Accessibility Contact: vkern@uw.edu. Event Types: Information Sessions. Target Audience: UW students, postdoctoral researchers, faculty and staff.
Tuesday, April 29, 2025, 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM.
Dangerous Subjects Series - "Held in Memory": Immigrant Detention Surveillance and Struggles of Visual Evidence, with Diana Flores Ruíz
RSVP Required: https://simpsoncenter.org/form/dangerous-subjects-april-29
Video surveillance systems in ICE detention centers capture the inner workings of immigrant incarceration, yet ICE agents and contractors employ a variety of tactics to keep their closed-circuit video footage out of the public's view. This chapter excerpt, from Diana Flores Ruíz’s book-in-progress, examines epistemic and administrative violence produced through ICE’s digital retention practices regarding on-site surveillance video. As a feminist media scholar, Ruíz approach the institutionally incriminating potential of ICE’s own surveillance footage with skepticism rooted in historical carceral impunity. Rather than advocate for increased datafication of immigrants and people on the move, Ruíz emphasizes the epistemic violence produced by deleted, unarchived surveillance video footage. For families, loved ones, and advocates of immigrants killed and assaulted in detention, they hold promises of legal accountability. As such, Ruíz re…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Communications Building (CMU). Campus room: 202. Accessibility Contact: Simpson Center, 206.543.3920, schadmin@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Tuesday, April 29, 2025, 12:30 PM – 2:00 PM.
Letters from the Ancestors: Family History and our Capitalist Future | Nathan Connolly, Johns Hopkins
In “Letters from the Ancestors,” Prof. Connolly follows the experiences of four generations of his Caribbean family, offering an intimate view of the history of late capitalism in the Atlantic World. Under twentieth-century colonialism, he argues, working people developed uniquely gendered coping strategies for managing the precarities of racism and reputation. Even in apparently post-colonial times, these strategies continue to govern how we relate to institutions, set our aspirations, and even narrate our own personal and political histories. More than just a tour through a single family’s past experience, “Letter from the Ancestors" seeks to retain and advance our fluency in the history of colonized families. This history, Connolly suggests, seems all the more relevant today, in a nation and world of dwindling government protections for women and people of color. N. D. B. Connolly is Associate Professor of History and holder of the Herbert Baxter Adams Professorship at Johns Hopkins University. Prof.…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Communications Building (CMU). Campus room: 120. Accessibility Contact: histmain@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Wednesday, April 30, 2025, 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM.
An Evening with Christine Sun Kim
Berlin-based artist Christine Sun Kim discusses her wide-ranging practice around sound and language. Kim, who was born in California and is now based in Berlin, reflects on her experiences as part of the Deaf community, using performance, video, drawing, writing, and technology to explore how we perceive and understand sound. In her talk, Kim will delve into her work within various systems of visual communication, including American Sign Language (ASL), musical notation, infographics, and television captioning. With humor and critique, Kim illuminates the complexities of social interactions where language, culture, and access collide. Kim is currently showing a new mural, Ghost(ed) Notes, on the east facade of the Henry Art Gallery. We encourage you to visit the mural prior to the talk.
Event interval: Single day event. Accessibility Contact: Office of Public Lectures at lectures@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars. Diversity Equity Inclusion.
Wednesday, April 30, 2025, 7:00 PM – 8:00 PM.
Town Hall Seattle.
For more info visit www.washington.edu. Conference: Political Software: Mapping Digital Worlds From Below
By focusing on software and countermaps primarily designed for political action with social, environmental, and land justice movements, this conference brings together organizers, researchers, educators, and technologists questioning the interdependencies between digital infrastructures, software code, and emancipatory spatial futures.
Panel 1: Community Mapping
10:00 am-12:30 pm
This session explores how activist groups mobilize counter-mapping and cartographic software in order to mobilize for spatial and territorial justice. Speakers include members of groups of the following projects: Queering the Map (Canada), kollektiv orangotango (Germany), Ushahidi (Kenya), Missing Basti Project (India), and Waterlines Project (Seattle). Together, we will explore what it means to mobilize spatial software for emancipatory futures.
Lunch Break
12:30-1:30 pm
Panel 2: Community Software
1:30-4:00 pm
This session focuses on community-made political software and how different collectives mobilize digital technologies…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Allen Library (ALB). Campus room: Petersen Room. Accessibility Contact: Simpson Center, 206.543.3920, schadmin@uw.edu. Event Types: Conferences.
Thursday, May 1, 2025, 10:00 AM – 4:00 PM.
Intermediate Twine - Virtual Workshop: Styling for Aesthetics & Meaning
Once you've learned the basic mechanics of Twine, you'll want to dress up your game – for more enjoyable gameplay and to deliver meaning. In this follow-up session, you'll learn how to apply CSS basics within Twine, add counters, and insert audiovisual files. If you haven't already started a game, we'll provide a simple game to practice with.
Part of the OSC Digital Storytelling Lab.
Event interval: Single day event. Accessibility Contact: aubreyjw@uw.edu. Event Types: Information Sessions.
Thursday, May 1, 2025, 1:00 PM – 2:30 PM.
Digitized but Not Done: Critical Conversations on Optical Character Recognition (OCR) (In Person)
Join us for a lively panel conversation exploring the evolving world of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and its vital role in academic research and digital scholarship. OCR—the process of converting scanned images of text into machine-readable data—underpins much of the digitized material scholars rely on today, from historical newspapers to multilingual archives. But how does OCR actually work, and what happens when it doesn’t?
This panel brings together researchers, developers, and theorists who use, create, and critically engage with OCR tools. Together, they’ll unpack the real-world implications of OCR for humanities research, including what works well, what remains frustratingly out of reach, and how language, character sets, and context affect outcomes. We’ll talk about what’s easy, what’s hard, and what questions we should ask—especially for those who rely on OCR-generated texts without even realizing it.
From massive digitization projects like Google Books to grassroots efforts in specialized ar…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Suzzallo Library (SUZ). Campus room: Open Scholarship Commons Presentation Space. Accessibility Contact: aubreyjw@uw.edu. Event Types: Information Sessions. Target Audience: UW students, postdoctoral researchers, faculty and staff.
Thursday, May 1, 2025, 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM.
TALK | Co-Designing the Future of Cultural Heritage: Interactive Technologies and Museum Collaborations in Northern Europe by Siiri Paananen, University of Lapland (Finland)
About the Talk:
What does cultural heritage mean today, and how can we shape its future together? My research explores interactive technologies in collaboration with Nordic museums, including Indigenous Sámi institutions. It focuses on creating new ways to experience heritage while addressing ethical concerns. From photogrammetry for detailed 3D models to virtual experiences of remote sites, digital tools reshape how people relate to the past. Heritage is not only about the past but also about shaping the future, and arts-based and speculative design approaches explore new possibilities for this. The talk considers how design and technology can support diverse cultural perspectives and recontextualize heritage in a changing world.
About the Speaker:
Siiri Paananen is a University Teacher in Design and a doctoral researcher in the Lapland User Experience Design group (LUX) at the University of Lapland, Faculty of Art and Design. She specializes in Human-Computer Interaction, focusing on designing…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Thomson Hall (THO). Campus room: 317. Accessibility Contact: cweseuc@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Thursday, May 1, 2025, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
Indigenous Land and Indigenous Health: Agroecology in Ecuador
Agroecology can be defined simply as a way to work with nature rather than against it. Indigenous peoples have long built systems of knowledge that embody this agroecological ethos. Join Amazonian Indigenous leader Indira Vargas (Kichwa) and two Ecuadorian scholars of agroecology, Juan Mateo Espinosa and Xavier León, in learning how Native peoples and their allies have forged multiple strategies to work with the land and avoid industrial and extractive modes of agriculture in the Andes and Amazon.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Communications Building (CMU). Campus room: 202. Accessibility Contact: jal26@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars. Target Audience: Students, faculty, community.
Thursday, May 1, 2025, 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM.
The Living Breath of wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ Indigenous Foods Symposium
We hope you will join us for our 13th annual “Living Breath of wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ” Indigenous Foods Symposium on May 2nd & 3rd 2025, hosted by the UW’s American Indian Studies Department and the Na’ah Illahee Fund. We are happy to share that our Keynote speaker is Mateus Tremembé an Indigenous Youth Leader from the Tremembé da Barra do Mundaú Indigenous community in Brazil! Mateus is an agroecological farmer, an agronomy student, and he coordinates Of Just Transitions in Food Systems Network and the Tremembé Climate Project. Mateus presented virtually at our symposium a few years ago and we were so moved by his presentation and the important work he is doing with and for his community that we invited him to come to Seattle and present in person (please see attached flyer for more information on Mateus).
Our 2025 Symposium theme is “Generational Food Sovereignty: Nurturing our Sacred Relationships” and this year, for the first time, we have coordinated youth-driven panels and presentations highlighting the work ou…
Event interval: Ongoing event. Campus location: Intellectual House (INT). Campus room: Gathering Hall. Accessibility Contact: dso@uw.edu. Event Types: Academics. Conferences. Exhibits. Lectures/Seminars. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/UWLivingBreath.
Friday, May 2, 2025, 9:00 AM – Saturday, May 3, 2025, 3:00 PM.
For more info visit livingbreathfoodsymposium.org. Computing With Classics: The Current Digital Landscape (In Person)
Computing With Classics is a three-workshop series exploring how computing has affected classical scholarship. In this first workshop, we will examine commonly-used digital libraries and databases, their histories, their structures, and their uses.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Suzzallo Library (SUZ). Campus room: Open Scholarship Commons Presentation Space. Accessibility Contact: atobdura@uw.edu. Event Types: Information Sessions. Target Audience: UW students, postdoctoral researchers, faculty and staff.
Friday, May 2, 2025, 2:30 PM – 4:00 PM.
Accessibility & Data Visualization Workshop (online)
Data visualization best practices and tools do not always discuss accessibility, which can exclude many groups of people. This workshop will review ways to make your visualizations more accessible. We will work through a visualization together and add features to make it more accessible. You are encouraged to follow along, but no active participation is necessary. Data visualization experience is not required, though some familiarity with accessing and using spreadsheet software may be helpful. This workshop will not be recorded.
Event interval: Single day event. Accessibility Contact: Negeen Aghassibake. Event Types: Workshops. Target Audience: UW students, researchers, faculty.
Monday, May 5, 2025, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM.
Online.
"The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property" by Eunsong Kim
In The Politics of Collecting, Eunsong Kim traces how racial capitalism and colonialism situated the rise of US museum collections and conceptual art forms. Investigating historical legal and property claims, she argues that regimes of expropriation—rather than merit or good taste—are responsible for popular ideas of formal innovation and artistic genius. In doing so, she details how Marcel Duchamp’s canonization has more to do with his patron’s donations to museums than it does the quality of Duchamp’s work, and she uncovers the racialized and financialized logic behind the Archive of New Poetry’s collecting practices. Ranging from the conception of philanthropy devised by the robber barons of the late nineteenth century to ongoing digitization projects, Kim provides a new history of contemporary art that accounts for the complicated entanglement of race, capital, and labor behind storied art institutions and artists. Drawing on history, theory, and economics, Kim challenges received notions of artistic succ…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Communications Building (CMU). Campus room: CMU 120. Accessibility Contact: Dept. of English 206.543.2690. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars. Target Audience: UW community.
Monday, May 5, 2025, 3:30 PM – 4:30 PM.
For more info visit dukeupress.edu. Book Talk: "Sentimental Republic: Chinese Intellectuals and the Maoist Past" (Harvard Asia Center 2025) with Hang Tu
A conversation with Hang Tu, Assistant Professor of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore
How does emotion shape the landscape of public intellectual debate? In Sentimental Republic, Hang Tu proposes emotion as a new critical framework to approach a post-Mao cultural controversy. As it entered a period of market reform, China did not turn away from revolutionary sentiments. Rather, the post-Mao period experienced a surge of emotionally charged debates about red legacies, ranging from the anguished denunciations of Maoist violence to the elegiac remembrances of socialist egalitarianism.
Sentimental Republic chronicles forty years (1978–2018) of bitter cultural wars about the Maoist past. It analyzes how the four major intellectual clusters in contemporary China—liberals, the left, cultural conservatives, and nationalists—debated Mao’s revolutionary legacies in light of the postsocialist transition. Should the Chinese condemn revolutionary violence and “bid farewell to socialism”? Or would a…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Communications Building (CMU). Campus room: CMU 202. Accessibility Contact: A. Bernier, abernier@uw.edu, #206-543-4391. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Monday, May 5, 2025, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
For more info visit discovery.nus.edu.sg. A Delicate Symphony: Courtship, Guardianship, and (self-)Censorship in Translating from Arabic with Sawad Hussain
Sawad Hussain will highlight how she has courted authors and editors, and then played guardian and censor – sometimes against her better judgments – in order to bring literary works from Arabic into English. She will discuss the roles and responsibilities a translator assumes when bringing a text from less commonly translated languages into diverse commercial Anglophone arenas. She will underscore the political and social reasons that influence how much of the original text and themes make it into the published book in translation.
Sawad Hussain is a translator from Arabic whose work has been recognized by, among others, The Warwick Prize for Women in Translation and the National Book Award for Translated Literature. She is a judge for the Palestine Book Awards, and has run translation workshops for Shadow Heroes, Africa Writes, the Yiddish Book Center, the British Library, and the National Centre for Writing. Her latest co-translation is The Book Censor's Library. A former Co-Chair of the Translator's…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Student Union Building (HUB). Campus room: 332. Accessibility Contact: Simpson Center for the Humanities, humanities@uw.edu, 206.543.3920. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Tuesday, May 6, 2025, 4:30 PM – 6:30 PM.
Not So Simple! Translating Young Adult Literature as Resistance and Entertainment with Sawad Hussain
There is a common misconception in literary publishing that books for children and young adults are “simple” and are, therefore, easy to translate. But translating literature for younger people is not simple at all. How does the process of “curating” young people’s literature involve translators’ negotiation with the expectations of English-language editors and publishers? How might translation of young people’s literature into English function as a form of decolonization and resistance? What are the sensitivity issues that are particular to publishing young adult literature? Should young adult literature in translation be handled like highbrow adult literature in translation, like “ordinary” YA literature, or something in between? And, finally, does the original language of the book or its country of origin affect these calculations? Join the panel of three distinguished translators—Sawad Hussain (Arabic), Shelley Fairweather-Vega (Russian and Uzbek), and Takami Nieda (Japanese)—for an engaging discussion of…
Event interval: Single day event. Accessibility Contact: Sasha Senderovich, senderov@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Wednesday, May 7, 2025, 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM.
Folio: The Seattle Athenaeum, 93 Pike Street #307, Seattle, WA 98101.
Sawad Hussain: Selling literature: What’s a translator got to do with it?
What exactly sells in translation and what role does a translator play in the selling of their translation? With the public profile of the translator becoming more visible, this seminar will pick apart the marketing tools that today’s translators are expected to master -- and whether this expectation is fair to begin with. In addition to answering the foregoing, Sawad Hussain will share, for the first time, the numbers of copies her translations from Arabic have sold by presenting an analysis of factors that might have led to some triumphing and others flopping. Finally, she will offer marketing tips as well as pointers on how to protect yourself as a translator when negotiating contracts (especially regarding the translator’s expected involvement in marketing activities).
Sawad Hussain is a translator from Arabic whose work has been recognized by, among others, The Warwick Prize for Women in Translation and the National Book Award for Translated Literature. She is a judge for the Palestine Book Awards, and…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Communications Building (CMU). Campus room: CMU 202. Accessibility Contact: Simpson Center for the Humanities, humanities@uw.edu, 206.543.3920. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Thursday, May 8, 2025, 11:30 AM – 1:00 PM.
DIGITAL HUMANITIES LECTURE: Ryan Cordell - Bibliography & the Sociology of Large Language Models
Drawing on experiments from the Viral Texts project (https://viraltexts.org), this talk will reflect on the relationship between bibliography & AI in two directions. First, the talk will consider how bibliographic methods can help scholars, as D.F. McKenzie wrote of printed texts, "to describe not only the technical but the social processes" of AI models' "production and reception." The talk will argue that historical practices, such as reprinting in historical newspapers, can offer vital interpretive purchase for theorizing the dominant text-reuse technology of our moment. From here, the talk will describe a series of experiments aimed at understanding what analytical use LLMs might offer scholars researching in large-scale historical collections, for tasks such as genre classification, textual segmentation, or topic identification. Ryan Cordell (Information Sciences and English, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign). Cordell is co-PI of the Viral Texts project, which uses robust data mining tools to…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Communications Building (CMU). Campus room: 120. Accessibility Contact: Simpson Center, 206.543.3920, schadmin@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Thursday, May 8, 2025, 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM.
Politics of Representation: A Conversation Between STS and Visual Studies
Representation is not a passive act of recording; it is an active, constructed practice. In Science, Technology, and Society Studies (STS), this refers to the visuality participate in the construction of techno reality; in humanities, it involves examining how different visual media reconfigure narratives of history. This roundtable brings together scholars to explore how visuality shape both the objects and methods of inquiry across STS and humanities. How do visual media actively construct knowledge, identity, and power? Through the roundtable we aim to see how STS engages with humanities to interpret the epistemic, affective, and political stakes of visual practices in diverse cultures.
Time: Friday, May 9th, 12:00 PM – 14:00 PM
Location: Husky Union Building, 307
Host: Yomi Braester, Cinema and Media Studies
Speakers: Mal Ahern, Cinema and Media Studies
Jenna Grant, Anthropology
Yijun Li, School of Journalism and Information Communication
(Huazhong University of Science and Tech…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus room: Husky Union Building 307. Accessibility Contact: rinhuang@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars. Target Audience: UW Community.
Friday, May 9, 2025, 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM.
2025 GWSS Spring Community Gathering: Undergraduate Research Colloquium
Please join us as this year’s Undergraduate Research Grant awardees share their research with the GWSS community. This event is an opportunity to engage with emerging scholarship in gender, women, and sexuality studies and to celebrate the work of our undergraduate researchers.
Each student will give a short presentation, followed by responses from GWSS graduate students Marielle Marcaida, Shelley Pryde, and Royalti Richardson, who will help facilitate the discussion. Whether you're a student, faculty member, or community member, we invite you to attend, support these scholars, and take part in the conversation!
A reception will follow the event from 5-6 pm—come connect with our presenters and fellow attendees over refreshments!
Presenters Include: Lou Chow, "Alleviating Dysmenorrhea in BIPOC Populations through Community Dance" , Matthew Judd, "Dialogue/ Loving yourself as you would love another" , Fiona Rivera, "Queer Animality: Dismantling Spanish Colonialism Through Peruvian Artistry" , Mel Whitesell…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Communications Building (CMU). Campus room: CMU 202/204. Accessibility Contact: GWSS, gwss@uw.edu, 206-593-6900. Event Types: Academics. Lectures/Seminars. Student Activities. Special Events.
Friday, May 9, 2025, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
Cinematic Returns: Affect, Language, and Sexuality in the 1990s and 2000s with Jinsoo An, Nguyễn Tân Hoàng, and Ungsan Kim
What lessons can be learned from the past, when movie theaters were filled with cinephiles and VHS technology created an alternative cultural space? Underscoring the margins of cinema and media studies, three scholars discuss the long-lasting legacies of the film and video cultures of the 1990s and 2000s. An investigates how millennial Korean films deploy speech acts and verbal expression as central elements of their popular appeal and thematic sophistication. Exploring the intersection of affect theory, queer of color critique, experimental video, and porn studies, Nguyen highlights sad porn in the 1990s. Finally, analyzing the inter-Asian remakes of queer cinema, Kim examines inter-Asian remakes of queer cinema as a life-sustaining technique of marginal cinema.
Jinsoo An (East Asian Languages & Culture, University of California Berkeley) has written on the representation of Christianity, nationalism, historical drama, popular justice and legal formalism, and cult film aesthetics in Korean cinema. His book …
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Communications Building (CMU). Campus room: CMU 202. Accessibility Contact: Simpson Center, 206.543.3920, schadmin@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Monday, May 12, 2025, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
Global Asias at the UW Reception
Global Asias at the University of Washington is a dynamic interdisciplinary initiative that explores the transnational and transcultural connections shaping Asian and Asian American experiences across the world. Bringing together scholars, artists, and communities, Global Asias fosters critical conversations on migration, identity, colonialism, and globalization. Through research, public events, and collaborative projects, we seek to deepen our understanding of Asia’s global entanglements and their impact on contemporary society.
With generous funding from the Henry Luce Foundation and institutional support from the Simpson Center for the Humanities, we will host a special reception on Tuesday, May 13, 2025 from 3:00 to 5:00 pm at the Petersen Room, Allen Library, marking the culmination of the Global Asias at UW grant planning period. This gathering will bring together members of the UW community to build connections among faculty and students engaged in Asia-related research and community-based…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Allen Library (ALB). Campus room: Petersen Room. Accessibility Contact: Marielle Marcaida: marcaida@uw.edu. Event Types: Not Specified. Target Audience: UW Faculty and students working on Asia-related research.
Tuesday, May 13, 2025, 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM.
For more info visit tinyurl.com. Katz Distinguished Lecture by Jahan Ramazani: "Mourning across Centuries and Languages: A Poem’s Six-Hundred-Year Journey"
Grief over the loss of a child is well known to be especially difficult and intractable. Across cultures, people have long turned to poetry in times of mourning. Years after the loss of his five-year old son, Ralph Waldo Emerson repeatedly translated an elegy written by a classical Persian, Muslim poet, Sa‘di, to mourn the loss of his child, as mediated by a nineteenth-century German translation of a sixteenth-century Ottoman Turkish commentary. What can we learn from the extraordinary journey this elegy makes across epochs, cultures, and languages about mourning, translation, and poetry’s capacity to help us grapple with grief through the words of another? Jahan Ramazani is University Professor and Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia. His books include Poetry in a Global Age (2020), A Transnational Poetics (2009), winner of the Harry Levin Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association, and Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (1994). He is…
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, May 13, 2025, 6:30 PM – 8:00 PM.
Global Sport Lab: African Women, Gender and Soccer with Martha Saavedra
Join us for a retrospective reflection on the future of African women and football followed by a Q&A featuring guest speaker Martha Saavedra, faculty and associate director of the Center for African Studies at the University of California in Berkeley. This event is part of the Global Sport Lab initiative.
This event is free and open to all. About the speaker
At the Center for African Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, Martha Saavedra manages the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program, and other African-focused research, fellowship and public programs. Trained in International Studies and Political Science, Martha has taught in California, Ohio, and Madrid. Her research has been on agrarian politics in Sudan, gender and development and sport in Africa.
She is a board member of Sports Africa and Soccer Without Borders. A veteran of Title IX battles in the U.S. she has been involved with soccer/football most of her life as a player, coach, scholar, and fan.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Student Union Building (HUB). Campus room: Room 340. Accessibility Contact: Katie Sandler (ksandl@uw.edu). Event Types: Lectures/Seminars. Special Events.
Thursday, May 15, 2025, 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM.
Jahan Ramazani: Elegies for the Planet
Twenty-first-century climate change poems mourn the dying and possible death of the planet. In this colloquium, Jahan Ramazani will discuss his recent article, “Elegies for the Planet,” on how ecocriticism on the poetics of climate change can help develop and revise the paradigms of poetic mourning in elegy scholarship. Ramazani will explore how elegy scholarship can help address ecocriticism’s qualms about mourning and elegy by asking: Are there ways of thinking about these poems as elegies for the planet that clarify their ethical purchase, elucidate their literary power, and embrace their necessity? And what are the implications of this body of poetry for conceptualizing our affective response to the climate crisis? Jahan Ramazani is University Professor and Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia. His books include Poetry in a Global Age (2020), A Transnational Poetics (2009), winner of the Harry Levin Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association, and Poetry of…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Communications Building (CMU). Campus room: CMU 202. Accessibility Contact: Simpson Center, 206.543.3920, schadmin@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Thursday, May 15, 2025, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
For more info visit bit.ly. Colonizing Kashmir: State-Building Under Indian Occupation
In this talk, Dr. Hafsa Kanjwal discusses her book Colonizing Kashmir: State-Building Under Indian Occupation, which received the 2025 Bernard S. Cohn Prize for First Book in South Asia (Association for Asian Studies). The book interrogates how Kashmir was made “integral” to India through a study of the decade long rule (1953-1963) of Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, the second Prime Minister of the State of Jammu and Kashmir. Drawing upon a wide array of bureaucratic documents, propaganda materials, memoirs, literary sources, and oral interviews in English, Urdu, and Kashmiri, Kanjwal examines the intentions, tensions, and unintended consequences of Bakshi’s state-building policies in the context of India’s colonial occupation. She reveals how the Kashmir government tailored its policies to integrate Kashmir’s Muslims while also showing how these policies were marked by inter-religious tension, corruption, and political repression. Challenging the binaries of colonial and postcolonial, Kanjwal historicizes India’s oc…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Denny Hall (DEN). Campus room: DEN 313. Accessibility Contact: sascuw@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars. Target Audience: This event is free and open to the public. Registration encouraged.
Thursday, May 15, 2025, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
MAY 15 - 'In the Global Vanguard: Agrarian Development and the Making of Modern Taiwan' with James Lin, UW
In just half a century, Taiwan transformed from an agricultural colony into an economic power, spurred by efforts of the authoritarian Republic of China government in land reform, farmers associations, and improved crop varieties. Yet overlooked is how Taiwan brought these practices to the developing world. In the Global Vanguard elucidates the history and impact of the “Taiwan model” of agrarian development by incorporating how Taiwanese experts took the country’s agrarian success and exported it throughout rural communities across Africa and Southeast Asia. Driven by the global Cold War and challenges to the Republic of China’s legitimacy, Taiwanese agricultural technicians and scientists shared their practices, which they claimed were better suited for poor, tropical societies in the developing world. These development missions, James Lin argues, were projected in Taiwan as proof of the ruling government’s modernity and technical prowess and were crucial to how the state sought to hold onto its contested p…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Thomson Hall (THO). Campus room: Thomson Hall 317 and online. Accessibility Contact: Taiwan Studies (taiwanst@uw.edu). Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Thursday, May 15, 2025, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
For more info visit www.ticketleap.events. AI and the Future of Holocaust Research & Memory: A Public Symposium
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is impacting all areas of academia. Scholars are utilizing AI in every component of research, including the collection, synthesis, analysis, and visualization of data; drafting of articles; and “peer” review of final submissions. The field of Holocaust studies is not immune to these trends. The question is how will the advent of AI impact the future of Holocaust studies? Will it provide new methods for analyzing data and displaying information for research and education that will benefit the field, or will the reduction of victim data to datasets and the problems of accuracy and reproducibility yet again strip people of their humanity?
The objective of the workshop and symposium is to draw on the fields of information science, history, sociology, anthropology, Jewish studies, museology, material culture, and art history to examine four aspects of this discussion:
AI and Holocaust Studies research: How can the advent of AI technologies advance research, and what are the peril…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Student Union Building (HUB). Campus room: HUB 332. Accessibility Contact: bcgl@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Tuesday, May 20, 2025, 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM.
For more info visit ischool.uw.edu. Golden M. Owens, Evolutions of Domestic Labor: Service-Performing Devices in United States Homes and Lived Spaces
In this workshop, Golden M. Owens will discuss how the late-nineteenth/early twentieth-century introduction and promotion of laborsaving products and technologies influenced and altered popular perceptions and articulations of domestic work and domestic workers. Examining how this work, once largely performed by Black women, came to be performed by or with the aid of labor-performing technologies, Owens connects this history of laborsaving devices to the present proliferation of artificially intelligent virtual assistants such as Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and ChatGPT.
Golden M. Owens (Cinema and Media Studies) studies and teaches about race, AI, and popular culture. Her current book project, Digital Maids in Domestic Spaces: Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Assistants, and the Ghosts of Black Women’s Labor, examines how artificially intelligent virtual assistants evoke and are haunted by Black female slaves, servants, and houseworkers in the United States.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Communications Building (CMU). Campus room: 202. Accessibility Contact: Simpson Center, 206.543.3920, schadmin@uw.edu. Event Types: Workshops.
Wednesday, May 21, 2025, 11:30 AM – 1:00 PM.
Teaching With Large Language Models: Hackathon
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently been top of mind for many in higher education, and UW has hosted a variety of great talks and events centered on LLMs and teaching. The Teaching With LLMs Hackathon picks up where those events leave off: it provides a good stretch of time where instructors can individually or collectively revise their teaching materials with respect to LLMs. At this event you are the driver: bring a laptop and whatever teaching materials you would like to revise with respect to LLMs, including course policies, assignment prompts, or course-specific chatbots. Each session will begin with an overview of guiding principles and resources. Come when you can, leave when you like! Bring department colleagues, or fly solo! You can also optionally participate in one or more of the instructional workshops, which will each be pitched to different needs and levels of experience.
1:00-2:00 pm - Session 1:
Fundamentals of GenAI in Classrooms: Philosophical Considerations & Logistics
2:00-…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Suzzallo Library (SUZ). Campus room: Open Scholarship Commons. Accessibility Contact: Simpson Center, 206.543.3920, schadmin@uw.edu. Event Types: Not Specified.
Wednesday, May 21, 2025, 1:00 PM – 5:00 PM.
Film Screening: "How I Learned to Fly" ("Leto kada sam naučila da letim") with Director Radivoje Andrić
Please join us for a screening and discussion of "How I Learned to Fly" ("Leto kada sam naučila da letim") with Director Radivoje Andrić on Wednesday, May 21.
The University of Washington is committed to providing access and accommodation in its services, programs, and activities. To make a request connected to a disability or health condition contact the Slavic department at slavoffice@uw.edu or 206-543-6848 by May 7.
Director Radivoje Andrić.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Kane Hall (KNE). Campus room: 210. Accessibility Contact: Slavic Department, slavoffice@uw.edu. Event Types: Screenings.
Wednesday, May 21, 2025, 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM.
BOOK LAUNCH | “To Stand with Palestine: Transnational Resistance and Political Evolution in the United States” by Dr. Karam Dana
This event is free and open to the public. Registration is encouraged. Doors expected to open at 4:40pm.
In recent years, attitudes in the United States toward the Palestinian cause have shifted dramatically. Although Palestinians have long been demonized in U.S. media and politics, their struggle, often portrayed as illegitimate, is now increasingly supported by emergent progressive voices challenging the status quo on Israel and Palestine. What accounts for this change and its evolution? This book explores how Palestinian identity is strengthened by the absence of a defined home nation and how a coalition rooted in exile continues to resist and advocate for a distant homeland. It examines the social, political, economic, and technological forces that have amplified Palestinian voices globally, particularly in the United States, fostering new forms of activism and solidarity.
Dr. Karam Dana is Professor of Middle East Studies and the Alyson McGregor Distinguished Professor of Excellence & Transformative…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Kane Hall (KNE). Campus room: 110. Accessibility Contact: Katie Sandler, ksandl@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Thursday, May 22, 2025, 5:00 PM – 6:45 PM.
Sacred Breath: Indigenous Writing and Storytelling Series
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.
Event interval: Single day event. Accessibility Contact: jedge18@uw.edu. Event Types: Performances. Lectures/Seminars.
Thursday, May 22, 2025, 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM.
Town Hall Seattle
1119 8th Ave, Seattle, WA 98101.
For more info visit ais.washington.edu. Public Lecture Series: Strangers Within: The Muslim Question in German Identity and Intellectual History. With Pardis Dabashi (Bryn Mawr) and Mohammed Rafi (UC Irvine)
Dr. Mohammad Rafi (UC Irvine)
"Muslims in Germany: A Permanent Threat to German National Identity?"
This paper traces how Islam has been construed as a threat to German national identity and its declared values. It explores how Muslims are perceived to be a danger to social order since the arrival of Turkish guest workers in the 1960s, by persistently being depicted as prone to violence without the ability to assimilate to German society. The media in Germany continues to play a crucial role in propagating a misleading narrative that connects Muslims to political Islam, especially after 9/11. The status of (Muslim) Iranians in Germany and the (Im)possibility of integration into a society–hostile to those perceived to be Muslim—puts in question Germany’s stated ideals and its identity
Pardis Dabashi (Bryn Mawr College)
"On Revelation and the Limits of Critical Argument"
In what precise ways do divine revelation and the interpretation of art differ from one another, and in what ways do they converge? This…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Denny Hall (DEN). Campus room: 359. Accessibility Contact: uwgerman@uw.edu. Event Types: Academics. Lectures/Seminars.
Friday, May 23, 2025, 1:30 PM – 3:00 PM.
Decolonial Approaches in Book History and the Digital Humanities with Amardeep Singh, Priya Joshi, and Anna Preus
How do we reckon with histories of power, exclusion, and erasure in work with physical and digital archives? This panel explores decolonial approaches in book history and the digital humanities through discussions of projects focused on mapping South Asia’s Adivasi communities, reading representations of cultural genocide in U.S. settler archives, and uncovering the imperial underpinnings of the Anglophone publishing industry.
Amardeep Singh (English, Lehigh University) is the author of two scholarly books, and has been involved in a number of digital humanities projects, including “African American Poetry: A Digital Anthology,” “The Kiplings and India,” and “Responsible Datasets in Context.” His next book project is called The Archive Gap: Race and Representation in the Digital Humanities.
Priya Joshi (English, Temple University) is a book historian and scholar of narrative who writes on the social work of popular forms from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. She is the author of In Another…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Communications Building (CMU). Campus room: 202. Accessibility Contact: Simpson Center, 206.543.3920, schadmin@uw.edu. Event Types: Workshops. Lectures/Seminars.
Friday, May 23, 2025, 2:30 PM – 4:00 PM.
Giant Leaps for Humankind: Outer Space & Intergenerational Ethics
TBA.
Event interval: Ongoing event. Campus location: Communications Building (CMU). Campus room: 202. Accessibility Contact: Simpson Center, 206.543.3920, schadmin@uw.edu. Event Types: Conferences.
Wednesday, May 28, 2025 – Friday, May 30, 2025.
DH Colloquium - Introduction to The Black Grandmother Archive
“When an elder dies, a library burns.” This African proverb emphasizes the irreplaceable role of elders as guardians and transmitters of knowledge, culture, and wisdom. Black grandmothers, as living "libraries," carry and preserve vital stories and cultural inheritances—such as material possessions, traditions, rituals, and language—that have shaped the matriarchal legacies and cultural identity of African-descended peoples. The Black Grandmother Archive and The Black Grandmother Worldmaking Library intervene in the fields of archiving and preservation by offering publicly accessible, digitally preserved websites for user-generated narratives. They also reshape the discourse around Black culture and history by centering Black grandmothers as knowledge producers. Their stories set the historical record straight, providing invaluable insight into Black experiences and cultural traditions.
These digital humanities projects digitize the stories and cultural inheritances of Black grandmothers, counteracting the…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Smith Hall (SMI). Campus room: Smith Hall, Room 320. Accessibility Contact: ejred@uw.edu. Event Types: Academics. Information Sessions.
Wednesday, May 28, 2025, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM.
Workshop: Christopher Wild (U. Chicago), "Theater and theoria in Hannah Arendt’s Late Thought"
In her last work, the posthumously published Life of the Mind, Hannah Arendt develops a phenomenology of the activities that make up mental life, specifically thinking and willing (the section on judging remained largely unwritten). In order to elucidate thinking (and to a certain extent willing) in its constitutive invisibility she frames it within a phenomenology of what she calls the “world of appearances.” The workshop will examine the role of theoria (the Greek word for contemplation), theater, and theatricality in this phenomenology by closely reading selected excerpts from the Life of the Mind and her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy,” in order to mine it for a generalized theory of theatricality.
Generously supported by the
Simpson Center for the Humanities,
with sponsorship from the Departments of
German Studies,
Drama,
Philosophy, and
Political Science, .
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Denny Hall (DEN). Campus room: DEN 359. Accessibility Contact: uwgerman@uw.edu. Event Types: Academics. Workshops.
Thursday, May 29, 2025, 2:30 PM – 4:00 PM.
The Party's Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping with Joseph Torigian
Please join us for a book talk with Joseph Torigian, Research Fellow, Hoover Institution and Associate Professor, School of International Service at American University.
The Party's Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping
Friday, May 30, 2025
1:00-2:30 PM
TEAL Seminar Room M232, Gowen Hall
China's leader, Xi Jinping, is one of the most powerful individuals in the world―and one of the least understood. Much can be learned, however, about both Xi Jinping and the nature of the party he leads from the memory and legacy of his father, the revolutionary Xi Zhongxun (1913–2002). The elder Xi served the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for more than seven decades. He worked at the right hand of prominent leaders Zhou Enlai and Hu Yaobang. He helped build the Communist base area that saved Mao Zedong in 1935, and he initiated the Special Economic Zones that launched China into the reform era after Mao's death. He led the Party's United Front efforts toward Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Taiwanese.…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Gowen Hall (GWN). Campus room: Tateuchi East Asia Library Seminar Room M232. Accessibility Contact: A. Bernier, abernier@uw.edu, #206-543-4391. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars. Special Events.
Friday, May 30, 2025, 1:00 PM – 2:30 PM.
For more info visit www.hoover.org. Annual Graduate Student Invited Lecture: Christopher Wild (U. Chicago) "Exercitia theatralia: Toward a Theory of Baroque Tragic Drama"
The lecture proposes a new poetology of German Baroque Tragedy by placing it within the tradition of spiritual exercises and meditation that emerged in antiquity as an integral part of a philosophical paideia and then in early Christianity as it sought to define itself as the vera philosophia. The surge of lay spirituality and the rediscovery of philosophical schools beyond Aristotle across Early Modern Europe also prompted a reemergence of spiritual practices and meditation, which were integrated – alongside rhetorical exercises – into a comprehensive paideia that dominated schools across the continent. Framing continental (school) drama within a “care of the self” allows not only for a better understanding of its intended (non-Aristotelian) efficacy but also for the articulation of a new – historically informed – theory of theatrical performativity.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Denny Hall (DEN). Campus room: 359. Accessibility Contact: Department of German Studies, uwgerman@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Friday, May 30, 2025, 1:30 PM – 3:00 PM.
Lecture | Militant Mothers of Kurdistan: Mothering the Dead and Care Beyond Life
This event is free and open to the public.
This talk discusses the unconventional forms of care that emerge out of Kurdish resistance in
Turkey, where mothering becomes a powerful response against necropolitical state violence. By centering
the stories of two Kurdish mothers who had to care for their dead children and mother beyond life under
the violent state of emergency regime declared in 2015; the talk examines the ways in which Kurdish
mothers “rescue the dead” (Antoon, 2021) from the necropolitical state and create their own
necropolitical power through a radical embrace of death and decoupling of mothering from the corporeal
link between the mother and the child. It is a critical intervention into conventional humanitarian care
frameworks that prioritize human survival and calls for a re-imagination of humanitarianism as
something that extends to the non-human and the dead and for the discovery of sites where humanitarian care
is not passively received but is politically reconstructed as a site of…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Student Union Building (HUB). Campus room: 337. Accessibility Contact: Katie Sandler, ksandl@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Monday, June 2, 2025, 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM.