Seminars

Reading and discussion with Jay Prosser about Loving Strangers: A Camphorwood Chest, A Legacy, A Son Returns – a diasporic journey of inherited and chosen Jewishness from the UK to Iraq, India, China and Singapore. Our conversation will focus on the writing of family memoirs, intermarriage, the place of the stranger, and the transmission of memory objects across generations. Jay Prosser is Reader in Humanities at the University of Leeds, and the author of Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality and Light in the Dark Room: Photography and Loss.

In March 1999, struck by the preponderance of images of refugees fleeing Kosovo that appeared above the fold on the front page of the New York Times when NATO began bombing Serbian military positions, Novak started saving the front section of the Times. She continued collecting for 25 years of multiplying wars and political upheavals. What started out as an attempt to visualize a war evolved into a multi-faceted presentation and analysis of trends and biases in U.S. media. The over 9,000 front page sections are sorted into 33 categories suggested by the photograph above the fold. By drawing attention to the overabundance of some images and the absences of others, Novak questions how mainstream media’s focus on objectivity has minimized systemic injustices and current threats to democracy. Novak's presentation will offer us insight into her process as she concludes her 25-year project and prepares its publication in book form by Blow Up Press in 2026.

Historian Rachel Nolan and journalist Jonathan Blitzer will discuss two new books on Central America's close and fraught relations with the US., past and present. Two forms of different but related migrations have linked the regions: asylum-seeking and international adoption. Connecting the historical realities of political violence in Central America to our present immigration impasses helps us see this mass movement of people in a new way.

As many of you may know, Shibli's novel--which was a finalist for the National Book Award and longlisted for the International Booker Prize--was recently awarded a German literary prize, and the author was to be honored at the Frankfurt Book Fair. On 10/13, the prize ceremony was cancelled and postponed to a later date, suppressing Shibli's voice in favor of Israeli voices at the Book Fair instead. Shibli's novel is about the politics of cultural memory and the limits of the archive as a resource for reconstructing and repairing the history of violence. Her work speaks directly to the preoccupations of this seminar and it has emerged as a cultural flashpoint in the current human and political catastrophe unfolding in Palestine and Israel. We invite members of this seminar to read this short novel, if you have not already, and come together to discuss what it teaches us about memory, and what we do with this insight in the present.