The Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere continued its grant support for Speaker Series and Workshops in the Humanities throughout the 2021-22 academic year. Despite the pandemic and subsequent postponements of events, UF faculty, graduate students, and staff successfully organized several energizing scholarly exchanges. Programs funded by this award included the Music and Movement Speaker Series, organized by Dr. Laura Dallman Rorick (Music). The grant funded the UF Department of English’s Graduate Comics Organization’s 18th Annual Comics Conference “Exploring the In-Between: Comics in Flux,” while Prof. Stephan Kory brought the highly successful 25th Annual Southeast Early China Roundtable to UF.
Speaker Series and Workshops Grant SPOTLIGHT
“Latin America Writes Back 2.0: Political and Environmental Crisis in Science Fiction”
— Prof. M. Elizabeth Ginway (Spanish and Portuguese Studies) and Prof. Terry Harpold (English)
After postponing the event twice, Ginway and Harpold organized a primarily in-person two-day hybrid symposium in October 2021. The event included a reading in English and Spanish by Mexican author Gabriela Damián Miravete with an audience of undergraduate and graduate students, professors from UF, and members of the public. The opening keynote by J. Andrew Brown (Washington University in St. Louis) provided a survey of changes in the field of Latin American Science Fiction Studies from 2005 to the present. Alfredo Suppia (UNICAMP) and Emily Maguire (Northwestern University) presented virtually on environmental themes in Brazilian film and ecological apocalypse in Cuba, respectively. Pablo Brescia (University of South Florida) presented on the politics of posthumanism in Latin America, followed by David Dalton (University of North Carolina at Charlotte) on environmental activism in the theatre of Latinx author Cherríe Moraga. The roundtable discussion by writers Gabriela Damián Miravete, Edmundo Paz Soldán, and Giovanna Rivero was one of the highlights. Each of the authors read a brief statement and followed up on the themes of the symposium by answering questions posed by the audience. The event closed with a keynote by author and scholar Edmundo Paz Soldán, “Ways of Narrating Environmental Crisis in Latin American Literature,” which proposed climate fiction as a new lens of analysis of the genre.