A devastating and heart-rending take on grizzly bear activists Timothy Treadwell and Amie Huguenard, who were killed in October of 2003 while living among grizzly bears in Alaska.
Sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities.
Jerusalem Demsas is the Editor-in-Chief of The Argument, a magazine dedicated to revitalizing liberalism through public debate. The Argument takes on illiberalism left, right, and center through policy journalism, original issue polling, and a prominent debate podcast with Slow Boring’s Matthew Yglesias. Before founding The Argument, Demsas was a staff writer at The Atlantic where she created and co-hosted the podcast Good on Paper. Her work has spanned such issues as housing, labor economics, race, gender, and the politics of exclusion. Demsas is the co-author of “On the Housing Crisis: Land, Development, and Democracy.” She previously wrote for Vox as a policy journalist and co-hosted “The Weeds.”
Organized by the Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs with support from the Center for the Arts and Humanities.
In a future where a failed climate change experiment has killed all life except for the survivors who boarded the Snowpiercer (a train that travels around the globe), a new class system emerges.
Sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities.
Esteban Crespo’s research and teaching focus on 15th-, 16th-, and 17th-century Iberian cultures and literatures. His research explores gender, desire, race, and sexuality in relation to the history of the book, contemporary critical thought, and colonial studies. His current book project, Queer Pleasures: Constructing Early Modern Dissident Sexual Cultures, analyzes the presence of sexual and gender variance in the Iberian Peninsula and the viceroyalties of Mexico and Peru in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
This project argues, on the one hand, that early modern Iberian cultures incorporated dissident sexualities and gender variance in richer, more quotidian ways than only through policing systems, including mainstream culture. On the other, it demonstrates that such ways were ubiquitous and coterminous on both sides of the Atlantic. Before joining Boston College, Dr. Crespo has taught at Boston University and has held fellowships at Harvard University (Houghton Library), Brown University (John Carter Brown Library) and the Folger Memorial Library.
James Calvin Taylor is Assistant Professor of Classics at Colby College, where he also teaches courses in the Environmental Humanities. He received his PhD in Classical Philology from Harvard in 2020 with a dissertation on the conceptualization of deep time, geological processes, and environmental change in classical texts. His research interests span a wide variety of genres and time periods in classical antiquity, embracing texts as diverse as Aristotle’s Meteorologica and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and drawing upon interpretative frameworks from the history of science, environmental criticism, and the philosophy of history. He has written articles on topics as diverse as Lucan’s description of the Syrtes, Herodotus’ integration of Egypt’s geological and human histories, and the significance of tides in Stoic meteorology.
His current monograph project is tentatively titled Time’s Abyss: Geological Processes and Deep Time in Ancient Greek Prose. This book investigates how the observation of geological processes led ancient Greek philosophers and historians to imagine much deeper timescales than those made possible by the shallow reach of recorded history and collective memory, and the intellectual problems that these deeper timescales raised in classical thought.
A young girl risks everything to prevent a powerful, multinational company from kidnapping her best friend – a fascinating beast named Okja.
Sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities.
Se Young (Seth) Kim is an Assistant Professor of Global Cinema and Digital Media in the Cinema Studies Department. He is the author of The Intimate Violence of South Korean and Japanese Cinema. His research interests include South Korean, Japanese, and US cinema and media, including video games and streaming media, with a focus on the use of violence. He is also a martial artist and instructor of Filipino Combat Systems.
Serena Ferrando is Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities and Italian at Arizona State University. Her book, Channelling Nature: Plants, Animals, and Water in Italian Poetry (Toronto University Press, 2026), is an eco-digital study of the nonhuman in contemporary poetry. Dr. Ferrando directs a digital humanities project on Milan’s water canals called Navigli Project.
She also studies environmental and experimental noisescapes and develops multimedia projects that utilize digital mapping to create a multisensory experience of the world. Her work has appeared in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Ecozon@, Italian Culture, Italica, Humanist Studies & the Digital Age, Rivista di studi italiani, and the volumes Italy and the Ecological Imagination. Ecocritical Theories and Practices and Landscapes, Natures, Ecologies. Italy and the Environmental Humanities.
In a post-apocalyptic wasteland, a woman rebels against a tyrannical ruler in search for her homeland with the aid of a group of female prisoners, a psychotic worshipper and a drifter named Max.
Sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities.
Mihku Paul is a multidisciplinary Indigenous artist and writer who grew up on a wild Maine river. She specialize in cutting edge collaborations including Spinning Wampum, Pejepscot Portage Mapping Project, Waponahki Studies Redux, Skoniminol Kuliwot (Good Seed) and others.
Mihku grew up on the Penobscot river, trained by a traditional Wolastoqey grandfather and a mother who ensured that she had every opportunity to acquire divergent skills.
Cathy’s current research focuses on the behavioral and physiological ecology of vertebrate animals and amphibian conservation. She and her students are studying the complex interactions among amphibian skin secretions and their antimicrobial properties, epibiotic bacteria, and how these regulate and potentially inhibit growth of microbial pathogens such as chytrid fungus. They are also studying behavior in amphibians using analysis of vocalizations and passive acoustic monitoring. Cathy has been involved in research investigating resiliance to development in the Belgrade Lakes Watershed.
Eloy Romero-Blanco is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Pittsburgh. Prior to coming to Pitt, Eloy earned a M.A. in World History at the University Pompeu Fabra and a BA in History at the University of Huelva. His dissertation explores the links between Cuban anticolonial movements and US expansionism in the Caribbean during the 1850s. It examines Cuban dissident actions against Spanish colonialism both on the island and abroad. By tracing the actions of Cuban rebels, migrants, and refugees in the Americas and Europe, the dissertation rethinks the foundation of Cuban independent movement in the Caribbean. He is broadly interested in the themes of revolutions, empires, and nationalism.
Jessamine Batario is an art historian, curator, and museum educator specializing in modern and contemporary art. Within this broad field, she is primarily concerned with issues of critical historiography, interrogating how histories are written in the first place. Her projects question canonical authority and advocate for a transgression of the traditional boundaries between the roles of historians and the roles of artists.
Batario’s current research and curatorial project features modern and contemporary art by artists with cultural heritage ties to Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. This project critiques U.S. imperialism by foregrounding the lived experiences of those who resist U.S. interventions and interrogate their inheritance of colonialist narratives.
After years in hiding, a woman is forced to go on the run when her superhuman abilities are discovered. Years after having abandoned her family, the only place she has left to hide is home.
Sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities.
Jorell Meléndez-Badillo is a historian of Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, and Latin America. His work focuses on the global circulation of radical ideas from the standpoint of working-class intellectual communities.
Dr. Meléndez-Badillo is the author of Puerto Rico: A National History (Princeton University Press, April 2024). The book is also available in Spanish as Puerto Rico: Historia de una nación (Translated by Aurora Lauzardo Ugarte, Grupo Planeta, 2024). It offers an accessible introduction to Puerto Rico, its history, and the contemporary political moment. It is a national history of a country without a nation state. It tells the story of how Puerto Rico has been colonized for more than five centuries. However, it also documents how the people have resisted colonial domination. Ultimately, the book will provide unfamiliar readers with an informed argument of how and why Puerto Rico arrived at its current juncture, as well as how Puerto Ricans are imagining possible futures in the face of austerity, failing infrastructures, and the rubble left behind by colonial neglect