6th Annual HGMS Graduate Student Colloquium
Friday, March 28, 2025, 9am-5pm U.S. Central Time, Levis 210, 919 West Illinois Street, Urbana, IL
Or online via zoom: https://illinois.zoom.us/j/81023100376?pwd=ct9WgFomioN4alytvKG21HyCM0RZYo.1
9am Welcome and coffee
9:15-10:15 Panel One: Fleeting Archives
Attention as Root of Memory in Benjamin and Celan, Jared Cohen (German)
Composing the Aleph: Toward a Messianic Spacetime, Sara Yocheved Berlowe (Comparative Literature)
When Memory Matters: The role of historical memory in the construction of German National Identity, Kelsi Quick and Eylül Begüm Sağlam (Political Science)
Naming Violence in the New York Times: American Foreign Policy and the Politics of Genocide Recognition, Zachary Jablow (and Tianhong Yin) (Political Science, zoom)
Chair: Matthew Fam
Keynote: 10:30 Vishwayjoti Ghosh, Belonging with the 'Other' (introduced by Ragini Chakraborty)
Ghosh engages in graphic novels, documentaries, arts, and storytelling. Ghosh uses the medium of comics and graphic storytelling as a narrative form to communicate on issues and everyday stories across South Asia. He is the author of the graphic novel Delhi Calm (2010). Set during ‘The Emergency’ of 1975 to 1977, the graphic novel brings together realistic comic passages with political commentaries and fantastical elements. In 2013, he curated This Side That Side: Restorying Partition, an anthology of graphic narratives by 48 illustrators and authors from South Asia. With an impressive diversity of styles and perspectives, it deals with the Partition of the Indian subcontinent. With deep interest in children's literature, his graphic stories have appeared in various anthologies in India and abroad. Ghosh is also an avid podcaster as a medium of storytelling with his popular podcast ‘Kissa Stories’, available across all major platforms.
Currently as a visiting faculty member, he is also teaching courses on Visual Storytelling at Ashoka University, Sonipat.
Keynote: 11:30 Rituparna Roy, Archiving Displacement, Loss & Longing: the Art of Debasish Mukherjee in the context of V-KPM (introduced by Ragini Chakraborty)
Rituparna Roy is Initiator of the Kolkata Partition Museum Project that aims to establish a Partition Museum in Kolkata, focusing on the Bengal experience. An alumna of Presidency College and Calcutta University, she did her doctoral research in India with the support of two UGC Fellowships, and her postdoctoral research at the International Institute of Asian Studies (IIAS), Leiden, the Netherlands. She has taught at several institutions in Kolkata, Leiden, and The Hague. She is the author of South Asian Partition Fiction in English: From Khushwant Singh to Amitav Ghosh (Amsterdam University Press: 2010); and co-editor of Writing India Anew: Indian English Fiction 2000-2010 (Amsterdam University Press: 2013), and most recently, The Long History of Partition in Bengal: Event, Memory, Representations (Routledge: 2024).Her maiden collection of shorts, Gariahat Junction, was published in 2020 by Kitaab International, Singapore. She is currently seeking representation for a memoir, and writing a book on contemporary Partition art in and from Bengal. She blogs and regularly writes reviews and features for major Indian outlets. She can be reached at royrituparna.com.
12:30-1:30 lunch—vegetarian lunch will be served to all conference participants
1:30-2:30 Panel Two: Hauntology
Freeing the Golem: Queerness as Escape in Golem of Brooklyn and Kavalier & Clay Trinidad Gómez (English)
A Ghost (Hi)Story: While Dead/The End and Alive/Afterlife/A Life, deniz atakan gürbüz (Sociology)
The (In)ability of Memory in Two Medoruma Shun Stories, Samantha Ting (Comparative Literature)
Deutsche Konzentrations, Jamás Olvidaremos and the Pictorial Report on Polish Atrocities: Crafting Wartime Narrative and Visual Memory, Alex Lyon (Art History)
Chair: Taisuke Wakabayashi
2:30-2:45, coffee, stretch
2:45-3:45 Panel Three: Memory Writing
Ottoman Dreams on Republican Screens: Competing Visions of the Imperial Harem in Turkish Media, Elif Su Isik (Comparative Literature)
Finding Palestine in al-Andalus: (re)making memory in the postcolonial, Liliana Lule (Spanish and Portuguese)
Identity, Memory, and Foodways in Arab- American Literature, Aishi Bhattacharya (Comparative Literature)
Gendering the Holocaust: Jewish Women in Nazi Concentration Camps, Stephanie Bowers (Education, Policy, Organization, and Leadership)
Chair: Brett Kaplan
3:45-4, coffee, stretch
4-5 Panel Four: Oceanic Interconnections
Between Violence and Ecology: Rethinking Nuclear Memory in Modern Japan, Peihan Wan (East Asian Languages and Cultures)
Alexander Williams, "The Weight of Ghosts: Spectral Representation in Black Mathematics and the Archive" (English UCLA, zoom)
Sticky Islands: Muckraking the Petrochemical Industry in Playing With Fire, Matthew Fam (Comparative Literature)
Hiroshima Reimagined: The Architecture of Afterimage in Kenzō Tange’s Peace Memorial Park, Taisuke L. Wakabayashi (Landscape Architecture)
Chair: Emerson Pehl
