Ladino Day 2025: Sephardic Homelands: Spanish and Portuguese Citizenship and the Question of Belonging Today
Join us for Ladino Day 2025, featuring speakers Rina Benmayor, Dalia Kandiyoti, Devin Naar, and Isaac Alhadeff for a conversation on “Sephardic Homelands: Spanish and Portuguese Citizenship and the Question of Belonging Today.” The program will be followed by a modest reception featuring Sephardic foods.
Event will be live-streamed. Registration is only required for in-person attendance. View the live-stream here.
This year’s program critically examines the significance of the decision of the Spanish and Portuguese governments–exactly ten years ago in 2015–to offer citizenship to descendants of Sephardic Jews expelled five centuries ago. The discussion will situate Spain and Portugal’s offers within broader debates about the homelands that Sephardic Jews have claimed as their own over the generations, while also recognizing that millions of people in the world remain stateless today.
Isaac Alhadeff Professor in Sephardic Studies and program Chair, Devin E. Naar, will host Professor Emerita Rina…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Kane Hall (KNE). Campus room: Kane Hall 210. Accessibility Contact: jewishst@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars. Information Sessions. Special Events. Target Audience: Free and open to the public. Registration required.
Sunday, November 16, 2025, 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM.
Film Screening and Discussion | Vietnamerica
Join the Center for Southeast Asia and Its Diasporas (CSEAD) and Graduate Education and Training in Southeast Asia (GETSEA) for a simulcast screening of Vietnamerica.
Following the wars in Vietnam, over two million people fled to country with the collapse of the Republic of Vietnam. That exodus, referred to by many as “the boat people” resulted in nearly half dying while in flight, battling the elements, starvation, and pirates.
Vietnamerica follows Master Nguyen Hoa as he returns to former refugee camps in Southeast Asia after three decades abroad to search for the graves of his wife and two children. Having fled Vietnam in 1981 on a boat with his family and friends, Hoa was the only survivor.
Executive Producer Nancy Bui of the Vietnamese Heritage Foundation joins GETSEA and 25 universities across North America to watch Vietnamerica together simultaneously and connect via Zoom for a discussion with the filmmaker about the Vietnamese diaspora, their struggle, and how Master Hoa’s story is a prism to see…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Thomson Hall (THO). Campus room: 317. Accessibility Contact: csead@uw.edu. Event Types: Screenings.
Tuesday, November 18, 2025, 2:00 PM – 4:00 PM.
Exquisite Corpus. A Practical Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Creative Expression
This workshop, led by Laura Luna Castillo (UW, DX Arts), merges computational linguistics and creative experimentation. We will use Python’s Natural Language Toolkit (NTLK) to analyze, deconstruct and algorithmically expand text corpora in a Dadaist spirit. Participants will be guided through hands-on code examples to learn techniques for data augmentation and synthetic data generation. We will explore grammatical patterns, linguistic visualizations and randomization as meaning-making tools that introduce surreal linguistic styles into a corpus, generating endless variations of source texts. This process provides insight into how Large Language Models learn and adapt to linguistic styles, albeit on a much larger scale. Time allowing, we will use our augmented corpus to fine-tune our own, rustic, language model. A laptop is required for this hands-on session.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Suzzallo Library (SUZ). Campus room: Open Scholarship Commons. Accessibility Contact: text@uw.edu. Event Types: Workshops. Target Audience: Faculty and students.
Tuesday, November 18, 2025, 2:00 PM – 5:00 PM.
Panel: Pathways to Faculty Positions in Two-Year Colleges
This panel will feature the voices of two-year college faculty from the Seattle District Colleges who will describe their paths to these teaching-intensive institutions and offer advice to graduate students who are considering community college careers. Panelists will discuss effective approaches to the job search and application materials, the classroom experience, service expectations, and the unique rewards of working in this critically important part of the higher education sector. Panelist remarks will be followed by Q&A with the audience.
Panelists
Deepa Bhandaru, PhD (Humanities, North Seattle College)
Cristóbal A. Borges, PhD (History, North Seattle College)
Steph Hankinson, PhD (Humanities, Drama, & English, South Seattle College)
Free and open to graduate students. Accommodation requests related to a disability or health condition should be made by November 9 to the Simpson Center: 206.543.3920, schadmin@uw.edu.
Generously made possible by the Walter Chapin Simpson Center Endowment for the…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Allen Library (ALB). Campus room: Allen Auditorium. Accessibility Contact: Simpson Center for the Humanities, 206-543-3920, schadmin@uw.edu. Event Types: Information Sessions.
Wednesday, November 19, 2025, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
ROK Consul General Lecture: Consul-General Eunji Seo, "Towards the New Chapter of US-ROK Partnership and Korea's Smart Power"
TOWARDS THE NEW CHAPTER OF US-ROK PARTNERSHIP AND KOREA’S SMART POWER
A lecture by Ms. Eunji Seo, Consul-General of the Republic of Korea in Seattle
The US-ROK relationship has evolved from a military alliance forged during the Korean War into a comprehensive strategic partnership grounded in shared values such as democracy, innovation, and cultural exchange. Korea has emerged as a global leader in technology, economy, and culture—demonstrating smart power, which blends hard power like economic and military strength with the soft power of cultural influence. From K-pop and K-content to advancements in AI and global diplomacy, Korea’s growing role on the world stage reflects the dynamic potential of this modern partnership.
19 November 2025
4:00–5:00PM
Communications 120 | University of Washington
Lecture open to the public. Reception to follow at the Simpson Center for the Humanities (CMU 204), 5:00 – 6:00pm. Reception restricted to UW students, faculty, and staff. Consul-General Eunji Seo joined the…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Communications Building (CMU). Campus room: 120. Accessibility Contact: asianll@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Wednesday, November 19, 2025, 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM.
Pan-Africanism in Paris: Haiti and the Black Atlantic at the 1900 World’s Fair | Global Africa Transcontinental Seminar Series
Free and open to the public. Registration required.
Dr. Randolph will present findings from his new article in the Journal of African and African Diasporic Studies (York University, Harriet Tubman Institute) in a special issue emerging from a 2023 conference at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop (Dakar). He offers a close reading of a curious item in the French national archives: a tattered book of lost dreams, featuring blueprints and correspondence honoring Haiti as part of the 1900 exposition universelle. Even with dashed dreams for a pavilion, the plans of Haitian diplomats to (quite literally) step up on the world stage in Paris reverberated across the Black Atlantic.
Article available here: https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.55914/hti.2.1.002
Dr. Matthew (Matt) Alexander Randolph (he/him/his) is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies, in the Department of American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. His multilingual and inter-imperial scholarship…
Event interval: Single day event. Online Meeting Link: https://washington.zoom.us/meeting/register/qyqcu3-nTT6HYjD_MK-KUg. Accessibility Contact: sameerai@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Thursday, November 20, 2025, 8:00 AM – 9:00 AM.
Healing Heart of Lushootseed Speaker Series
A series to prepare for the UW Symphony performance of Healing Heart of the First People of This Land (February 2026)
Open to the public – doors open at 10:30am for coffee & pastries
Featuring
10/9 łuutiis Charlotte Coté (Nuu-chah-nulth) with Dian Million (Tanana) as discussant.
10/16 Tami Hohn (Puyallup) with McKenna Sweet Dorman (Snoqualmie) as discussant
10/23 Laurel Sercombe with John Vallier as discussant
10/30 John LaPointe (Swinomish)
11/6 Jill tsisqʷux̌ʷaʔł LaPointe (Upper Skagit/Nooksack) with Janet Yoder
11/13 Composer Bruce Ruddell, Musicians Adia tsi sʔuyuʔaɫ Bowen (Upper Skagit) and
Ben Workman Smith (Tolowa), Conductors Ryan Dudenbostel and David Rahbee,
with John-Carlos Perea (Mescalero Apache/German/Irish/Chicano) as discussant
11/20 Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe (Upper Skagit/Nooksack)
For more information on this series: https://healingheartproject.org/
For more information on the Feb. 2026 performance: https://music.washington.edu/upcoming.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Intellectual House (INT). Campus room: Gathering Hall. Accessibility Contact: jbperea@uw.edu. Event Types: Academics. Lectures/Seminars. Performances. Target Audience: students, faculty. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/1664BnEscg/.
Thursday, November 20, 2025, 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM.
For more info visit healingheartproject.org. Pilgrimage in Mexico: A Dynamic Tradition: a Talk by Edward Wright-Ríos
From a distance nearly all of us misunderstand pilgrimage. Influenced by movies, memoirs, and travel influencers we tend to think of the practice as a personal reboot, a self-imposed extended, sweaty therapy session that leads to the authentic and better self. Alternatively, we conjure notions of stoic devotees preserving ancient traditions. But in Mexico a small subset of Catholics numbering the millions embrace pilgrimage as a lifelong practice knit into the complexities of their hectic modern lives. Why and how do they sustain this mode to religious devotion at considerable cost and effort? Why does pilgrimage endure, and why is it experiencing something of a renaissance? Edward Wright-Rios (Professor of History, Vanderbilt University) will explore these questions in his talk.
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Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Communications Building (CMU). Campus room: 202. Accessibility Contact: jsisevents@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Thursday, November 20, 2025, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
Creative Conservation and the Rise of Fascism (1922-1939)
Miguel Caballero (Northwestern University) will present his recent book The Monument of Tomorrow: Avant-Garde Conservation and the Spanish War (Penn State University Press, 2025). This is a study of how liberals, communists, and anarchists transformed an aesthetic and political strategy of creative destruction into one of creative conservation in response to the rise of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, with a focus on the Spanish War (1936-1939).
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Allen Library (ALB). Campus room: Allen Auditorium (Allen Library North). Accessibility Contact: dso@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars. Target Audience: Faculty and students from Spanish and Portuguese, Art + Art History + Design, History, English.
Thursday, November 20, 2025, 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM.
Wetlandia!: Analytics for a Global Terraqueous Humanities
Wetlandia! reframes the wetland as an analytic constituted by far more than nature. Situated in terraqueous terrains where land meets rivers, oceans, and other bodies of water, wetlands serve as homes to a rich collection of flora, fauna, and people. At the intersection of this physical and social geography, we will rethink and reclaim the wetland from a conservationist and statist paradigm, to a political, social, economic, and historical frame.
RSVP Requested: bit.ly/Wetlandia
9:00 am – Coffee & light refreshments
9:30 am – Opening remarks
9:45-11:00 am – Panel 1
Malini Ranganathan (Associate Professor, School of International Service, American University)
Camelia Dewan (Associate Professor, Cultural Anthropology & Ethnology, Uppsala University)
Morgan P. Vickers (Assistant Professor, Law, Societies & Justice, UW)
Moderated by Patrick Trent Greiner (Assistant Professor, Sociology, UW)
11:15 am-12:30 pm – Panel 2
Molly Roy (Designer and Guerilla Cartographer)
Rozalinda Borcilă (Independent Scholar,…
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, 9:00 AM – 3:30 PM.
GWSS & the State of the Field: Reporting Back from the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) Conference
Join us for a panel discussion with three GWSS faculty members who will participate in the upcoming 2025 NWSA Annual Conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico and share what they learn with our community upon their return.
Centered around the theme “An Honour Song: Feminist Struggles, Feminist Victories,” the conference will convene thousands of scholars and activists to explore evolving priorities and urgent issues—including colonialism, feminist resistance, and the shifting political landscape.
Join us in GWSS as these three faculty assess the state of the field and consider how national dialogues intersect with local struggles for sovereignty, justice, and liberation.
Presenters: Cricket Keating, Associate Professor, GWSS UW , Noralis Rodríguez-Coss, Associate Professor, WGSS Gonzaga University; GWSS PhD (2016) , Amanda Swarr, Professor and Chair, GWSS UW.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Padelford Hall (PDL). Campus room: PDL B110 G. Accessibility Contact: GWSS, gwss@uw.edu, 206-593-6900. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Friday, November 21, 2025, 2:30 PM – 3:30 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.
As the days grow shorter, we gather in for a gathering with friends, family, and community to appreciate some long-form storytelling.
3:00pm Weaving Workshop
4:00pm Storytelling Session 1 with Roger Fernandes and youth storytellers
5:00pm Dinner served
6:00pm Storytelling Session 2 with a special…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Intellectual House (INT). Campus room: Gathering Hall. Accessibility Contact: jedge18@uw.edu. Event Types: Performances. Special Events.
Friday, November 21, 2025, 3:00 PM – 8:00 PM.
For more info visit ais.washington.edu. 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.
Book Talk: Mark Letteney – Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration
Join us for a talk with Mark Letteney on his new book: Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration, by Mark Letteney and 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.
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.