The Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill boasts a robust graduate student population between our Ph.D. students and Literature, Medicine, and Culture master’s students. In addition to their busy schedules, many graduate students organize and run some of the university’s most exciting organizations and intellectual communities.
Below, we have a few of the featured organizations run by DOECL graduate students. Read on to see a variety of organizations that focus on topics from literature to scholarship to film, as well as their upcoming event schedules for the Spring 2023 semester.
Critical Speaker Series
The Critical Speaker Series of the Department of English and Comparative Literature is a graduate-student-run program featuring outstanding and innovative scholars in the literary humanities. It showcases their contributions for the larger University community and the public.
For more information, please contact criticalspeakerseries@gmail.com.
Check out the exciting slate of speakers below:
Dr. Jean-Thomas Tremblay, February 22-23
Dr. Tremblay is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at York University. They research environmental and sexuality studies, as well as modern and contemporary literary, screen, and performance cultures. Their most recent book, Breathing Aesthetics, studies the way that difficult breathing can serve as both the embodied experience of and a critical lens into life under extractive capitalism and environmental racism.
Dr. Ronjaunee Chatterjee, TBD
Dr. Chatterjee is an Assistant Professor of English at Queen’s University, where she specializes in nineteenth-century literature and culture, critical race theory, feminist and queer theory, and Continental philosophy. Her most recent book, Feminine Singularity: The Politics of Subjectivity, studies individuality in the 19th-century novel through singularity—enmeshed with partiality, contingency, and relation—over liberal autonomous subjectivity. Through this reading, she crystallizes an image of singularity that is enmeshed with racial difference.
Email CSS or follow them on social media for details on these upcoming talks!
If, Then: Technology and Poetics
If, Then: Technology and Poetics is a collaborative, interdisciplinary working group and workshop series promoting inclusivity and skills-building in creative computation for artists, scholars, and teachers. Join us for monthly discussions, workshops, and events! Get in touch with Carly Schnitzler (cschnitz@live.unc.edu) or Lillian-Yvonne Bertram (lbertram@northeastern.edu) with any questions or suggestions.
“Since If, Then started in the fall of 2020, over 250 scholars and artists have come to 25+ events and a diverse cohort of about thirty multi-disciplinary faculty members, librarians, graduate students, artists, poets, and creative technologists form the community core of the working group as regular attendees. Events have ranged from technically-oriented workshops on creating with unsupervised learning algorithms and generating a novel for NaNoGenMo to teaching-focused sessions on p5.js and Twine. There are often demos of creative works-in-progress—we have held sessions on a visual programming language (ColorCode), a platform that publishes poems in the form of interactive timelapses (Midst), and a set of data exploration tools that remix Hip hop lyrics and Black scholarly texts (LiteraryDJ). Last spring, If, Then held it’s first symposium, a long weekend on disability studies and speculative world-building called “Speculative Lessons/Just Futures: Creativity and Accessibility in Computational Poetics.” We also hold regular community open mics. With my co-organizer, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, we curate events with the aim of exploring the capacity of creative computation to show us something deeply human, to speak truth to power, to demonstrate ways of subverting oppressive systems, and to reimagine completely new ones.”—Carly Schnitzler, DOECL Ph.D. Candidate
If, Then upcoming events:
Nkosi Nkululeko on Inventing the Square Poem (Analog Procedural Poetry)
January 13, 2023 @ 2 PM Eastern
Tommy Martinez on Sounding Things Out with Machines (sonic experimentation + ML + HCI)
February 17, 2023 @ 1PM Eastern
Kino Corner
Kino Corner is a weekly film screening open to faculty, staff, students, and community members in and around Chapel Hill. Each screening is preceded by a talk and followed by an open discussion between the organizers and the audience. Our mission is to challenge and delight audiences with an eclectic mix of art and cult movies. Screenings are every Wednesday night at 8.00 PM in Genome Sciences Building Rm G100.
Screenings have had attendance upwards of 60 audience members, in particular for our very popular double features hosted at the Chelsea theater, as well as regular attendees at our weekly screenings.
To join the listserv and keep up to date with times and screenings, email kinocorner@office.unc.edu.
Spring 2023 Kino Corner Screening Schedule
01/18 — Spirited Away (Miyazaki, 2001)
01/25 — Gates of Heaven (Erol Morris, 1978)
**02/01 — Watermelon Woman (Dunye, 1996) and Clerks (Smith, 1994)
02/08 — Bound (Wachowskis, 1996)
02/15 — Tampopo (Juzo Itami, 1985)
02/22 — Wanda (Loden, 1970)
**03/01 — Blue Collar (Paul Schrader, 1978) and Fat City (John Huston, 1972)
03/08 — Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)
03/15 — Spring Break, No Screening
03/22 — Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami, 1990)
**03/29 — Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960) and Memories of Murder (Bong Joon-ho, 2003)
04/05 — The Spirit of the Beehive (Victor Erice, 1973)
04/12 — Khrustalyov, My Car! (Aleksei German, 1998)
04/19 — Nostalgia for the Light (Patricio Guzmán, 2010), a collaboration with the UNC Latina/o Studies Program
**04/26 — Perfect Blue (Satoshi Kon, 1997) and The Red Shoes (Powell & Pressburger, 1948)
**Double feature at the the Chelsea Theater (Weaver Dairy Road)
