Book Launch: Mark Letteney – Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration
Please join the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies as we celebrate the recent publication of SCJS faculty member and history professor Mark Letteney's 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…
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.
2026 McDiarmid Lecture: Kirk Ormand (Oberlin) "Bodies and Social Class in Archaic Greek Invective"
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Denny Hall (DEN). Online Meeting Link: https://washington.zoom.us/meeting/register/Dd2rBRQrTqm3GknC2POa4w#/registration. Campus room: DEN 212. Accessibility Contact: hollmann@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Friday, January 23, 2026, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
For more info visit classics.washington.edu. Public Lecture: 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.
Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand (Appalachian State University): "The Medieval, the Middle Ages, and the German Kulturgemeinschaft"
Everyone loves the Middle Ages, or so it seems, says Umberto Eco in “The Return of the Middle Ages.”
The Middle Ages often provide a comforting script for stories that may bind a community together, driving a kind of nostalgia for an imagined past. This talk examines the reception of the German Middle Ages after the rediscovery of, and renewed interest in, German medieval texts from Minnesang and the Nibelungenlied or
Wolfram’s Parzival by intellectuals such as Ludwig Tieck or Friedrich von der Hagen. I argue that this reception
becomes a foundational aspect of the greater German cultural community (Kulturgemeinschaft) of ethnic
Germans after 1750 living outside of the contemporary nation state of Germany (after 1750). Drawing a large arc
from the thirteenth century to present, this talk will explore the continuing medievalist legacy that supports
the Kulturgemeinschaft. The malleable concept of the “Medieval” undergirds the practice of medievalisms that
embed the Middle Ages in the present, amplifying the…
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, January 30, 2026, 1:30 PM – 3:00 PM.
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
This event is free and open to the public.At the Jackson School, opportunities and events are open to all eligible persons regardless of race, sex or other identity. 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. Clinton Westman | Welcome & Research Presentation | In the Land of Giants? Climate, Infrastructure, and Politics in Canada’s Oil Sands
Join us for a special Welcome and Research Presentation with 2025-26 UW Fulbright Canada Special Foundation Fellow, Clinton Westman. Coffee and pastries will be provided.
Canada’s energy industry, like many other sectors in the country’s economy, is at a strategic inflection point, which has implications for trade, national unity, and Indigenous rights. In recent decades, mainly owing to the growth of oil sands/tar sands (bitumen) extraction in northern Alberta, Canada has moved to near the front of the global pack as an oil-exporting nation. In 2024, Canada exported, on average, a record 4.2 million barrels of oil per day. Much of this product has been exported to and/or processed in the US, with Canada now providing over half of US oil imports. Canada has also expanded pipeline capacity to the Pacific Coast to access Asia-Pacific markets. Given price discounts and current uncertainties of trade with the US, there is currently a push to build another coastal pipeline and to reduce perceived impediments to…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Thomson Hall (THO). Campus room: THO 317. Accessibility Contact: canada@uw.edu. Event Types: Academics. Target Audience: No registration required.
Tuesday, February 3, 2026, 3:00 PM – 4:30 PM.
Book Talk: 'The Poetic Way of Xie Lingyu' with Ping Wang, University of Washington
The Poetic Way of Xie Lingyun : Literary Expression and the Natural World (University Press 2025).
During the dark centuries between the fall of the Han dynasty in 220 CE and the golden age of reunified China under the Tang and Song dynasties (618–1279), the shi poetic form embraced new themes and structure. In this meticulously constructed study, Ping Wang traces the social conditions that sparked innovation and marked a significant turn in intellectual history. Using biography, social history, and literary analysis, she demonstrates how the shi form came to dominate classical Chinese poetry, making possible the works of the great poets of later dynasties and influencing literary development in Korea and Japan.
Focusing on the life of poet Xie Lingyun (385–433), Wang traces the exile of aristocratic families in the wild south, which led to their thematic use of “mountains and water” (shanshui) landscapes over the pastoral ones of earlier writers and artists. Changes in poetic form moved away from genres…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Thomson Hall (THO). Campus room: Thomson Hall 317. Accessibility Contact: Chinast@uw.edu. At the Jackson School, opportunities and events are open to all eligible persons regardless of race, sex or other identity. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Thursday, February 5, 2026, 3:30 PM – 5:00 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.
Treasuring All the Knowledges: Writing Abundance in Academia
Please join us for a conversation- and creativity-centered gathering celebrating the book launch of Navigating Academia as a Transnational Scholar from the Global South: Treasuring All the Knowledges. Date: February 11, 2026
Time: 3:30–5:00 PM (panel discussion followed by a reception)
Location: Samuel E. Kelly Ethnic Cultural Center (ECC)
Room: Unity Suite
This edited collection brings together the voices of 16 women and non-binary scholars who began their postgraduate journeys as non-elite international students and (un)documented migrants in countries positioned as economically more powerful than their places of origin. Inspired by the book’s creative and relational approach to knowledge, this event will also open a collective space for poetry and storytelling. Participants are invited to write and share short poetic or narrative reflections that speak to their own experiences of abundance, survival, care, and knowledge-making within academic spaces.
Panelists: Roxana Chiappa, Assistant Professor at…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Samuel E. Kelly Ethnic Cultural Center (ECC). Campus room: ECC Unity Suite. Accessibility Contact: GWSS, gwss@uw.edu, 206-593-6900. Event Types: Special Events. Lectures/Seminars.
Wednesday, February 11, 2026, 3:30 PM – 5:00 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.
Book Talk: 'Ghost Nation: the Story of Taiwan and its Struggle for Survival' with Chris Horton
In Ghost Nation: the Story of Taiwan and its Struggle for Survival, Chris Horton compares Beijing's claim that Taiwan has been Chinese territory "since time immemorial" with Taiwan's actual history. Several different groups have controlled some or all of Taiwan over the last 400 years -- the Dutch, Spanish, Tungning, Manchu, Japanese, Chinese, and now, Taiwanese. By looking at those who have ruled Taiwan, Horton also tells the story of the Taiwanese people, highlighting their intergenerational quest for self-determination -- and the existential threat posed by an expansionist Chinese Communist Party.
, Chris Horton is a freelance journalist and author who has been based in Taipei, Taiwan for the past decade. He previously spent 13 years in China and two in Hong Kong. He has written extensively for The New York Times, Bloomberg News, Nikkei Asia, The Atlantic and elsewhere, covering Taiwan's national security, diplomacy, economy, culture and more. His new book, Ghost Nation: The Story of Taiwan and its …
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Thomson Hall (THO). Online Meeting Link: https://www.youtube.com/@UWTaiwanStudies. Campus room: Thomson Hall 317 and Online. Accessibility Contact: Taiwan Studies (taiwanst@uw.edu). At the Jackson School, opportunities and events are open to all eligible persons regardless of race, sex or other identity. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars. Target Audience: Free and open to the public. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/UWTaiwanStudies#.
Thursday, February 12, 2026, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
Lecture: Lisa Uperesa, "Embodied Racialization, Mobility, and Cultural Expression: Tracing the Roots of the Modern Polynesian Sport Diaspora"
Athletes with ancestral ties to the Pacific islands are dominant fixtures in some of the world’s most visible sports and over several generations have produced a modern sport diaspora. Tracing Samoan transnational and diasporic movement along divergent colonial pathways, this talk examines the relationship between embodied experiences of racialization and the emergence of Pacific sport excellence in three settler colonial countries (United States, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Australia). It then considers what recent efforts to mobilize Indigenous practice inside and outside sport tell us about the uses and importance of culture in contemporary sport.
Lisa Uperesa (Associate Professor, Asian American Studies, UCLA) works with Pacific communities to understand movement and mobility, and how they shape lives, identities, families, cultures, and futures. Her past research focused on the rise of American football in Samoan communities and the navigation of sport as both labor and tautua (service). Current research…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus room: Communications 120. Accessibility Contact: Simpson Center for the Humanities, 206-543-3920, schadmin@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Thursday, February 12, 2026, 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM.
Douglass Day Transcribe-a-thon
Douglass Day is an annual transcribe-a-thon program that marks the birth of Frederick Douglass. Each year, sites across the country gather thousands of people to help create new & freely available resources for learning about Black history. A transcribe-a-thon is an event in which a group of people work together to transcribe a collection of digitized historical materials. The primary goal of a transcribe-a-thon is to make the materials more easily accessible, but these events also serve to promote awareness of parts of Black history – and especially Black women’s history – that remain too-little-known.
Douglass Day invites people from all backgrounds to join in this effort to make these histories more widely accessible and searchable. No previous experience with transcription is required to join us. During this event, we will stream national Douglass Day celebrations including speakers, songs, and more. The experience of taking part in a transcribe-a-thon can transform us from consumers of history into kn…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Suzzallo Library (SUZ). Campus room: Open Scholarship Commons, Presentation Space. Accessibility Contact: osctech@uw.edu. Event Types: Special Events. Target Audience: students, faculty, researcher, community.
Friday, February 13, 2026, 9:00 AM – 12:00 PM.
Public Lecture: Seeing Like a Merchant – Jews and Greeks from Ottoman to Greek Rule
Join us for a talk with Paris Papamichos Chronakis on his new book: The Business of Transition – Jewish and Greek Merchants of Salonica from Ottoman to Greek Rule.
How did the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie of the Eastern Mediterranean navigate the transition from empire to nation-state in the early twentieth century? In this talk, Paris Papamichos Chronakis shows how the Jewish and Greek merchants of Salonica (present-day Thessaloniki) skillfully managed the tumultuous shift from Ottoman to Greek rule amidst rising ethnic tensions and heightened class conflict. Bringing their once powerful voices back into the historical narrative, he traces their entangled trajectories as businessmen, community members, and civic leaders to illustrate how the self-reinvention of a Jewish-led bourgeoisie made a city Greek. Salonica’s merchants were present in their own—and their city’s—remaking.
Paris Papamichos Chronakis is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Modern Greek History at Royal Holloway University of London. His work…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Student Union Building (HUB). Campus room: HUB 145. Accessibility Contact: jewishst@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars. Target Audience: Open to the public. Registration Required.
Thursday, February 26, 2026, 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM.
TALK | Trump in the World 2.0: What Was Intelligence What Was Intelligence and What Comes Next?
Join us for a free livestream talk and discussion on What Was Intelligence What Was Intelligence and What Comes Next? 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: Ambassador (ret.) Jeff Hovenier and Kelly McGannon
Moderator: Danny Hoffman, Director of the Jackson School of International Studies and Stanley D. Golub Chair of International Studies
This event is free and open to the public. At the Jackson School, opportunities and events are open to all eligible persons regardless of race, sex or other identity. 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, March 2, 2026, 5:00 PM – 6:20 PM.
For more info visit bit.ly. Book Launch - Sasha Senderovich - In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union
Please join the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies in celebrating a new book translated by Dr. Sasha Senderovich: In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union.
The short fiction collected in In the Shadow of the Holocaust, translated by Sasha Senderovich and Harriet Murav, recovers a range of compelling voices that had been scarcely known or translated, with particular emphasis on the work of women writers. Jewish authors from Ukraine, Lithuania, Russia, and Belarus—some writing in Yiddish and others in Russian—tell stories of ordinary people living on after the massive devastation of the Holocaust on Soviet territory, depicting memory, conflict, love, and loss. Writers in this collection offer especially powerful perspectives on survival in the aftermath of genocide. These are not stories only about how people died, but about how they continued to live and make meaning. In this talk, Sasha Senderovich will discuss how these works, and the act of translating them, open…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Kane Hall (KNE). Campus room: Walker Ames Room, Kane 225. Accessibility Contact: jewishst@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars. Target Audience: Open to public. Registration required.
Tuesday, March 10, 2026, 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM.
'The Neighborhood: Space, State, and Daily Life in a Manchurian City' with Nianshen Song
What can one neighborhood reveal about the making of a modern nation? This talk deciphers the unexpected significance of Xita, a half-square-mile quarter in Shenyang, in Northeast China. It shows that over nearly four centuries, Xita has been shaped and reshaped by empire, war, migration, and urban transformation. The history of this small area mirrors large-scale changes, including and especially China’s metamorphosis from a multi-ethnic Eurasian empire to a postindustrial society. By studying how global and local forces play out in everyday spaces, the talk reveals a perspective for understanding China’s past—not from the top down, but through the streets and people who lived it. Nianshen Song is a historian and professor at Tsinghua Institute of Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences. His research and teaching focus on late imperial and modern East Asia, with special interest in frontiers, trans-regional networks and historical geography. His monographies in English include The Neighborhood:…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Thomson Hall (THO). Campus room: Thomson Hall 317. Accessibility Contact: Contact chinast@uw.edu. At the Jackson School, opportunities and events are open to all eligible persons regardless of race, sex or other identity. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Monday, March 16, 2026, 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM.
Literary Translator Lecture: Tiffany Tsao, "Beyond Novelty and Exoticism: Taking the Long View in Translating Indonesian Literature "
Tiffany Tsao will discuss the challenges of translating Indonesian literature in the context of a publishing industry that has tended to value Indonesian works more for their “Indonesianness” than their literary value. Catering to a readership interested specifically in the history, culture, and living conditions of Indonesia has some near-term benefits, but does this approach do Indonesian writing a disservice over the long term? She will discuss, more specifically, how this state of affairs has shaped the decisions she has made as a translator – from the works she has chosen to translate, to her approach to the translation process itself.
Tiffany Tsao’s translations of Indonesian literature have received the PEN Translation Prize, the Republic of Consciousness Prize, and a longlisting for the International Booker Prize. She is also the author of The Majesties (2018) and But Won’t I Miss Me (2026), and Deputy Editor at the Sydney Review of Books.
*author photo by Joy Mei En Lai
Generously made possible by…
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, April 14, 2026, 4:30 PM – 6:30 PM.