Dawg Daze: Old Books, New Technologies. UW Special Collections and the Minor in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities
Learn about the minor in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities from faculty, students and librarians involved in the program. Hear about current student work, current and upcoming courses as well as about resources in the libraries and other sites on campus for studying the history and future of how we write, read, archive, story, access, and analyze cultural texts, historical documents, and other materials. Coursework and capstones in the minor offer a range of possibilities for hands-on, projected-oriented work exploring the impacts of changing technologies and media forms on the writing, reading, editing, archiving, preservation, and transmission of texts across history. These opportunities include working with historical materials such as handprinted books and manuscripts, archival sources and artists’ books; using digitization tools to create and publish digital editions and exhibits based on those materials; and developing skills to build, analyze and understand text-oriented databases like Google Book…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Allen Library (ALB). Campus room: B069, Special Collections Classroom, Allen Library South Basement. Accessibility Contact: text@uw.edu. Event Types: Information Sessions. Target Audience: Incoming students.
Monday, September 22, 2025, 10:30 AM – 12:30 PM.
Thinking with Monsters: A Conversation with Novelist Gerardo Sámano Córdova
Join us for a conversation between novelist and artist Gerardo Sámano Córdova and UW professors María Elena García (CHID) and Vanessa Freije (JSIS/History), centered around Sámano Córdova's recent novel, Monstrilio. The discussion will touch on major themes of the book, including queerness, monstrosity, and grief. Monstrilio (Zando 2023) was the winner of the Balcones Fiction Prize, finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and named a Book of the Year by NPR, Elle, Goodreads and others.
Gerardo Sámano Córdova is a writer and artist from Mexico City living in Brooklyn, and his novel has received multiple accolades, including the Balcones Fiction Prize, finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and was named a Book of the Year by NPR, Elle, Goodreads and others.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Communications Building (CMU). Campus room: 202. Accessibility Contact: lasuw@uw.edu. Event Types: Academics. Special Events.
Wednesday, October 8, 2025, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
Symposium | Gender, Translation, and the Short Form in the Eurasian Periodical
October 10: 9am - 2pm (tentative)
October 11: 9am - 2pm (tentative)
Literary modernity did not always appear in book form, but as a periodical! Throughout the 20th century, literary and cultural production across much of Central, Western, and South Asia reached readers through the pages of periodicals. These periodicals–newspapers, magazines, and journals–housed a variety of literary forms ranging from serialized novels, to poetry, to short stories, alongside advertisements, comics, and photography. This symposium features emerging literary scholarship that investigates short form fiction as it appears in the rhizomatic 20th century periodical, and its intersections with translation and gender. How does fiction move across and between languages in 20th century periodical cultures of Eurasia? What does an explicit and intentional consideration of gender in these translingual (and frequently transnational, or transhistorical) literary movements illuminate? In exploring such questions, this symposium…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Thomson Hall (THO). Campus room: 317. Accessibility Contact: learna@uw.edu. Event Types: Academics. Lectures/Seminars. Workshops.
Friday, October 10, 2025, 9:00 AM – Saturday, October 11, 2025, 2:00 PM.
Film Screening: HEIGHTENED SECURITY
Registration Info: TBA, This event is free and open to the public. Accommodation requests related to a disability or health condition should be made by October 6, 2025 to the Simpson Center, 206.543.3920, schadmin@uw.edu.
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: Screenings.
Thursday, October 16, 2025, 6:30 PM – 9:00 PM.
Panel Discussion: Transgender and the Law
Registration Info: TBA, This event is free and open to the public. Accommodation requests related to a disability or health condition should be made by October 6, 2025 to the Simpson Center, 206.543.3920, schadmin@uw.edu.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Student Union Building (HUB). Campus room: 340. Accessibility Contact: Simpson Center, 206.543.3920, schadmin@uw.edu. Event Types: Workshops.
Friday, October 17, 2025, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
Katz Distinguished Lecture: Michael Rothberg, "Comparison Controversies: Historical Analogy and the Politics of Holocaust Memory"
Comparison Controversies: Historical Analogy and the Politics of Holocaust Memory, Why do we turn to the past in order to confront the crises of the present? Michael Rothberg approaches this question from the perspective of “comparison controversies,” which occur when impassioned public debates emerge from provocative historical comparisons. Since October 7, 2023, political speeches, protests, magazine articles, and social media posts have generated controversy by connecting recent events in Israel and Gaza to the Holocaust. In this talk, Rothberg will consider post-October 7 examples in relation to a larger context of comparison controversies and a longer trajectory of Holocaust memory to reflect more generally on the possibilities and pitfalls of historical analogy. Michael Rothberg (1939 Society Samuel Goetz Chair in Holocaust Studies and Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of California, Los Angeles) researches the social and cultural implications of political violence and its…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Kane Hall (KNE). Campus room: 210. Accessibility Contact: Simpson Center, 206.543.3920, humanities@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Tuesday, November 4, 2025, 6:30 PM – 8:00 PM.
Ghazal Celebration: Poetry Readings Across Languages
This event brings together colleagues and students for a collective celebration of the ghazal, a poetic form that has flourished in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Urdu, and many other languages. Each participant will read one of their favorite ghazals in its original language, followed by a translation into English.
By foregrounding oral recitation and the experience of listening across languages, the gathering highlights the ghazal’s role as a transregional and transhistorical form of poetic expression. Together, we will reflect on the pleasures of sound, the challenges of translation, and the enduring vitality of the ghazal across literary traditions.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Denny Hall (DEN). Campus room: Denny 211. Accessibility Contact: ariafani@uw.edu. Event Types: Academics. Lectures/Seminars.
Friday, November 14, 2025, 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM.
Wetlandia: Analytics for a Global Terraqueous Humanities
Wetlandia is a symposium that attempts to systematically rethink the wetland as an analytic constituted by far more than nature. Often located at ocean/river/land boundaries, wetlands serve as homes to a rich collection of flora, fauna, and people. Salt, sand dunes, mangroves, mud, weeds, and reeds all animate the uncertain wetland environment. Birds, fish, animals, and insects thrive (and die) on wetlands. Wetlands are spaces of economic life, affording people life and livelihood in salt pan development, fishing, hunting, agriculture, and more. At the intersection of this rich physical and social geography, we propose to rethink and reclaim the wetland from a conservationist and statist paradigm, to a political, economic, and historical one. In our symposium, we will convene global wetland scholars to propose four analytical interventions in wetland studies, namely: rethinking the undisciplined wetland; post-colonial/settler politics of the wetland; shifting spatial geographies and temporalities of the wetla…
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.
Friday, November 21, 2025, 9:30 AM – 4:30 PM.