The conference is intended to encourage regional HB scholars and PhD students to make or strengthen personal connections with one another. At the same time, we hope to highlight interdisciplinary, intercultural, and intertextual connections that many of us are making in our scholarship on the Hebrew Bible The day will be prepared for by gathering responses from planned participants (both attendees and presenters) with 1-2 sentences giving a brief pointer to how they have found an interdisciplinary connection useful for their research or teaching. Those responses will be collected and circulated to attendees so they have an idea of who is at […]

There is considerable excitement about a new generation of anti-obesity medications (AOMs). These medications supply the body with analogues of hormones that are naturally produced in the gut, including glucagon-like-peptide-1 (GLP-1), which signal the termination of eating and suppress hunger. Recent clinical trials demonstrate marked efficacy of GLP-1-based AOMs in promoting weight loss with some evidence that their primary mechanism of action is to limit food intake. Although work is needed to precisely characterize effects on eating behaviors, initial data suggest that GLP-1 analogues can enhance satiation and curb appetite. Ultimately, these new classes of AOMs have potential to counter […]

Scholars across disciplines are increasingly treating “Black Europe” as a pertinent object of study. Yet conversations continue to take place regarding what “Black Europe” is. Does Black Europe describe a place, an identity, an aspiration, or something else? Scholars oscillate between terms such as “Afropean,” “African-European,” and “Black European.” The institutionalization of Black European studies remains a work in progress, and views vary on whether it is an academic field, a subsection of Black Studies or African Diaspora Studies, or a reference point for a set of inquiries and practices that exceed the bounds of academic discipline. Black Europe: A Field […]

Sponsored by The University Seminar on Affect Studies This workshop seeks to explore the tension between the universal normative claim to truth and the singular claim to truth in affect, focusing on one of the strongest human emotions and experiences: erotic desire. In the absence of an absolute in a post-secular society, the role of affect has stepped in to substantivize many normative claims—either culminating in a ‘politics of feeling’ or in prioritizing individual emotions and affective economies over normative categories such as justice or freedom. This has major implications for two of the most contested concepts in religious, philosophical, […]

Sponsored by The University Seminar on The History and Philosophy of Science Many recent works in the history of science and knowledge address various aspects of materiality, including material culture, agentive matter, and the trajectories of materials, objects, and knowledge across geographic and epistemic borders. This workshop, which accompanies a new graduate history course taught by Professor Pamela Smith, seeks to introduce and discuss some of these new approaches. Visiting scholars Anna Grasskamp (University of Oslo), Dana Leibsohn (Smith College), and Alisha Rankin (Tufts University) will present their research in conversation with the work of local graduate students and scholars […]

Sponsored by The University Seminar on Beyond France This symposium on architecture and urban planning in Twentieth-Century Senegal spotlights new research on how the built environment in and around Dakar registered the continuities and ruptures between French rule and independence, indigenous heritage and colonial legacies. What role did the built environment play in constructing citizenship? What opportunities did Senegal’s independence usher in for French and African designers? What effect did Léopold Sédar Senghor’s emphasis on the arts as a path to Négritude have on architectural production and training? Each panel will address one architectural scale: urban, housing, and monumental. Speakers include: […]

Co-sponsored by The University Seminar on Studies in Modern Italy Italians in/and the Maghreb will expand discussions of colonialism, migration, race, decolonial movements, and postcolonial issues in Italian and Italian diaspora studies. While the study of Italian colonialism has blossomed in recent years with the country’s official colonies in Eritrea, Somalia, Libya, Ethiopia, and the Dodecanese Islands now the topic of many scholarly studies, the history of Italians in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia has tended to remain marginal, and mostly examined as an example of Italy’s aggressive emigration policies and attempts to pursue informal colonies. This seminar explores the exchanges […]