Session 2

1:30 to 2:30 p.m. CDT

Watersheds—Writing Environmental, Political, and Cultural Change for a World in Transition

From wildfires on the West Coast to Supreme Court decisions on the Eastern Seaboard, ours is a "watershed moment" in environmental, political, and cultural history. How can novelists, poets, and essayists address our watershed moment to imagine and shape emergent futures through literary practice? In this session, writers on the University of Chicago's Creative Writing faculty consider the ways that urgent questions of race, gender, class, and environmental justice have transformed the literary arts in contemporary American society.

Exile and Chinese Poetry

Exile was a standard professional risk for poets in dynastic China, who were almost always officials and administrators required to speak out on matters of public concern. Incurring the displeasure of the emperor or his court meant having to spend a period of years—conceivably the rest of one's lifetime—in a remote region of the empire, dealing with inhospitable climates, diseases, predators, and native peoples resistant to being converted to the Chinese way.

Kaneesha Parsard

Kaneesha Parsard’s research concerns legacies of slavery and emancipation in the Caribbean and broader Americas. Her first book project, “An Illicit Wage,” tracks 19th- and 20th-century Caribbean cultural repertoires that cast doubt on wage labor as the condition of freedom. Her scholarship can be found in the American Quarterly, Small Axe, and the South Atlantic Quarterly.

Helma Dik

Helma Dik works on Ancient Greek linguistics and digital humanities. She has published on word order and pragmatics in Ancient Greek. Her interests in Greek linguistics and digital humanities find a common focus in various digital projects: perseus.uchicago.edu, where researchers, but also students, teachers, and any other readers of Greek can explore Greek and Latin texts with the help of PhiloLogic, textual database software developed at the University of Chicago.

William Nickell

Much of William Nickell's work has focused on media studies in Russia and the USSR. His book, The Death of Tolstoy: Russia on the Eve, Astapovo Station, 1910 (Cornell University Press, 2010), uses media coverage of the dramatic story of Tolstoy’s death as a lens for examining Russian culture between the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917.

Juliano Saccomani

Juliano Saccomani has experience carrying out projects in foreign language in multiple contexts. He is the editor-in-chief of Revista Vaeranda at the University of Chicago, a tool for instructors and students to make their work public, experimenting with publishing different forms of media. Saccomani is Assistant Instructional Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago.

Claudia Quevedo-Webb

Claudia Quevedo-Webb’s focus on language pedagogy drives her to learn new technologies, methodologies, and frameworks to implement in her language and culture classes. She is Assistant Instructional Professor in Spanish, the co-director of the virtual reality in Spanish and Portuguese project, and the co-director of DEI-SLT, an open educational resource website that offers support to educators who want to bridge language teaching and social justice, in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago.

Edgar Garcia

Edgar Garcia is a poet and scholar of the hemispheric cultures of the Americas. His most recent book, Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2022), is a collection of nine essays that show what this foundational creation story of the Indigenous Americas (the Popol Vuh) has to teach people about the relation between emergency and emergence.

Jennifer Scappettone

Jennifer Scappettone works at the confluence of the literary, visual, and scholarly arts, focusing on the way language shapes our relation to built and natural environments under the anthropocene.

Srikanth (Chicu) Reddy

Srikanth Reddy’s latest book of poetry, Underworld Lit (Wave Books, 2020), was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Four Quartets Prize, and a Times Literary Supplement “Book of the Year” for 2020. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, The Guardian (UK), The New York Times, Poetry, and numerous other venues.

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