The Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages invites you to join Refusal(s) and Kurdish Literature, a virtual conference taking place on May 21–22, 2026. Building on the momentum of the 2025 gathering at Stanford University, this second edition brings together scholars, writers and artists to reflect on the generative force of refusal across Kurdish literary and cultural production.

At a moment when literature is often expected to render lives legible and accessible, the conference instead asks what becomes possible when texts across different forms resist such demands. Refusal here is approached not only as political dissent, but also as aesthetic gesture, ethical position and as a mode of reading. Across keynotes, creative roundtables and panels, participants will engage questions of silence, opacity, representation, and the limits of empathy, while tracing how Kurdish cultural expression reworks or at times withdraws from dominant frameworks.

The program features keynote talks by Joanna Bocheńska and Aynur Ünal, alongside creative roundtables with Selîm Temo, Choman Hardi, Zêdan Xelef on poetry and refusal, and with Jason R. Vivrette and Ali Yağız Şen on translating Ahmed Arif into English. Spanning disciplines and languages, the conference opens a space for critical and imaginative thinking, while staying attentive to histories of erasure and also to the many ways resistance and creativity continue to take shape.

Free and open to the public, the event will be held online via Zoom. We warmly encourage students, faculty and the broader public to register and attend sessions of interest. For more information on the conference program and registration, please refer to the event calendar webpage here: https://events.uconn.edu/human-rights-institute/event/1540229-conference-refusals-and-kurdish-literature

Nada Elshabrawy has been awarded UConn’s Harriott Fellowship for outstanding young scholars who have been admitted to doctoral programs at the University of Connecticut.  Recipients of these fellowship represent the very best applicants to graduate programs at the University. Applicants must also demonstrate a commitment to enhancing diversity in higher education and/or a commitment to enhancing diversity in their field of study.  Nada will be taking up the PhD fellowship in the fall of 2024.

In the spring of 2024, Nada will be completing her master’s degree in French and Francophone studies. Her academic journey has been marked by a profound exploration of identity politics within the realms of French and Arabic literature. Nada’s research delves into the intricate intersections of cultural and linguistic identities, weaving together the diverse narratives in the French-speaking world.

Born in Egypt in 1995, Nada received her B.A in Law from Mansoura University, and has garnered significant recognition for her creative endeavors. Her YouTube channel, boasting 150k subscribers, serves as a platform where she influences Arabic readers with her insightful content. In 2019, she expanded her reach by launching a literary podcast, further establishing herself as a voice in the literary community.

Nada’s literary prowess has been celebrated through numerous accolades. In 2020, her poetry collection “An Almost Fallen Heart” clinched a renowned poetry award, setting the stage for her subsequent success. In 2021, she followed this triumph with her second collection, “Curses,” which reinforced her poetic excellence and secured the same prestigious prize in 2022.

Beyond the realm of literature, Nada has extended her artistic contributions to the Arab music scene, collaborating as a lyricist. Her impact on the entertainment industry increased in 2022 when she created the children’s TV show “Almaktaba.” Currently gearing up for the third season, scheduled to commence filming in June 2024, Nada continues to demonstrate her versatility and commitment to inspiring audiences of all ages.

In addition to her accomplishments, Nada has an extensive background in the publishing and bookstore sectors in the Arab world. Between 2017 and 2022, she actively contributed to these sectors, participating in fellowships and programs in France, Turkey, the United States, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. This rich period of experience has undoubtedly enriched her understanding of the literary landscape and added depth to her contributions.

Rahul Koonathara has been awarded UConn’s Harriott Fellowship for outstanding young scholars who have been admitted to doctoral programs at the University of Connecticut.  Recipients of these fellowship represent the very best applicants to graduate programs at the University. Applicants must also demonstrate a commitment to enhancing diversity in higher education and/or a commitment to enhancing diversity in their field of study.  Rahul will be taking up the PhD fellowship in the fall of 2024.

Rahul Koonathara is completing his MA in Comparative Literature which is focused on tradition and transformation in  shadow puppetry. He is himself an accomplished shadow puppeteer, a tradition in his family. This past summer he toured extensively through the US with his father, Padmashri Ramachandra Pulavar, also a master and keeper of this form. They  performed across the country.

He has produced several puppetry shows here at the Ballard Institute celebrating South Indian shadow puppet traditions of Tolu Bommalatta and Tholpavakoothu, as well as recent innovations reflecting the changing nature of the form, in a show he has curated called Tradition and Revolution in Indian Shadow Puppetry.  The show last summer led to a longer-term exhibition at the Ballard Institute.

 

The exhibition’s opening took place on August 4th. It featured a tour of the Ballard Institute, a gathering to celebrate the opening, followed by a 45-minute-long performance of Tholpava Koothu: The Shadow Puppet Play of Kerala by Padmashri Ramachandra Pulavar and Rahul Koonathara. This ancient, ritual-based performance was based on selected verses from the epic Kamba Ramayana. On August 5th Rahul  and Ramachandra Pulavar hosted an Indian Shadow Puppetry Workshop. The day-long event featured shadow puppet design, carving, and manipulation.

For over thirteen generations Indian puppeteers have performed myths, customs, and rituals based on two Hindu epics, The Ramayana and The Mahābhārata. In recent years new variations in design, construction, and content have re-shaped traditional performances, which in many cases have shifted from temple performances to secular locales and included new subjects such as the lives of Mahatma Gandhi, Jesus, and the animal characters of the Panchatantra, as well as contemporary social and political themes.

Tradition and Revolution in Indian Shadow Puppetry will remain on exhibit at the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry through December 17, 2023

Please note this exhibit contains some nudity.

Congratulations to Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann on her 2023-24 academic year Humanities Institute fellowship!

Katerina, an Associate Professor of Spanish Studies, will bring a project entitled “Aimé Césaire and His Cuban Comrades in Art.” Katerina writes that the project “examines the relationships of solidarity and translation between Martinican poet, dramatist, essayist, and politician Aimé Césaire and a set of Black and white translators and artists in Cuba who shaped Césaire’s Spanish-language legacy. Césaire’s collaborative legacy notably includes the contemporary Spanish-language adoption of his 1935 neologism, “negritude,” so that this radical intervention in French to name blackness in defiance of anti-Black racism has become part of Spanish-language Black consciousness discourse. This book examines the practices of solidarity and translation that gave rise to Césaire’s impact on the circulation of the Spanish-language race-proud discourse of “negritud” and contributes to understanding how practices of solidarity and translation create social and aesthetic meaning and impact beyond the framework of fidelity.”

In general Katerina works with Caribbean literature and intellectual history more broadly, with a special focus on the routes of circulation and translation of anticolonial, Black consciousness, and anti-racist poetics and discourse in addition to the dynamics of gender and sexuality in these routes of circulation and translation. She initiated the project she’ll bring to UCHI with her 2012 Comparative Literature MA thesis, “Cabrera’s Césaire: Notes on an Afro-Caribbean Crossing,” which went on to become my 2019 article for MLN, “Cabrera’s Césaire: The Making of a Trans-Caribbean Zone.” As she studied archives for my first book, Writing the Caribbean in Magazine Time (Rutgers UP, 2021), she found most of the primary source materials that I work with for this project. Katerina has also recently published another essay from this project, available open access at Continents manuscrits, “Colombes et Menfenil in Text and Image: Taking Flight from Conquest in Aimé Césaire and Wifredo Lam’s Collaborative Aesthetics.”

Valérie Saugera, Associate Professor of French and Director of the Language Program in French, has been awarded a National Endowment of for the Humanities (NEH) grant for her project, “Chronicling Louchébem, the Resilient Secret Language of the Butchers of Paris.”  This Fellowship, one of the most prestigious in the humanities, will allow Professor Saugera time to complete her current book project on Louchébem, a secret, endangered language (argot) spoken by Paris butchers since the nineteenth century.

Saugera has expertise in lexical borrowing and has published widely on Anglicisms in the French language. She is the author of Remade In France: Anglicisms in the Lexicon and Morphology of French published with Oxford University Press in 2017.  In this new project, she marries linguistic and ethnographic research to explore a trade argot that many considered dead. Saugera’s research shows that it is still alive and used by a significant number of traditional butchers in Paris.

Although Louchébem is often classified as extinct, Saugera’s recent fieldwork reveals that the secret language of Parisian butchers survives, although in decline.  An argot borrowed from thieves’ slang that emerged in the nineteenth-century, in a slaughterhouse located in Villette. Louchébem is still spoken in butcher shops. The pressures on the butchers’ profession since the late 1980s lend urgency to the task of documenting Louchébem, especially given that scholarly research has overlooked this singular argot. Based on ethno-linguistic fieldwork, including data collected from 227 Parisian butchers, Sugéra’s book project chronicles Louchébem by tracing it to its origin, recording its history, and evaluating its current status. This project investigates an endangered cultural and linguistic phenomenon while shedding light on wider issues of modernity, including the role of tradition, the relationship between language and consumption, and the value of linguistic diversity in a world where languages are rapidly dying off.

We are providing a link to an overview of a talk about Louchébem that Professor Saugéra delivered in 2018 in the context of an annual LCL colloquia series.  It provides a helpful overview of what the NEH committee obviously recognized as a fascinating, urgent, and highly innovative project.

LCL Lecture: Valérie Saugera and the Secret Language of Butchers

Starting in the spring 2020 semester, the University of Connecticut began offering a minor that allows students to explore literary translation while learning how to interact with people from other cultures or those who speak different languages, according to the minor’s website.

The literary translation minor is interdisciplinary, incorporating many majors outside of its own department.

Translation classes, currently capped at 90 students, will allow for a hands-on environment in which students can work closely with professors and classmates.

The prerequisite for the minor is knowledge of a non-English language well enough to read literature and translate it. Most students in the program can be divided into three categories: fluent in their first language, intermediate to fluent in their heritage language and American students studying a foreign language.

The literary translation minor requires a minimum of 15 credits at the 2000-level or above, with two required translation courses (TRST 3010 and 3011), two literary or cultural courses from areas like Japanese or German, and one creative writing or related genre course from English (ENGL 3701, 3703, 2407, 4407W). Students may count up to six credit hours in independent study in the place of courses in literary and cultural or creative writing.

Peter Constantine, the director of the literary translation minor, said the program is popular because of its low pressure and enjoyable environment, where students have the opportunity to take classes they wouldn’t normally take.

“I was surprised at how many students come from outside literatures, cultures and languages, and I think that’s because we’re fun. It’s enjoyable, not high intensity; it’s like a writing course without some of the pressure,” Constantine said. “There seems to be a lot of students who were passionate about things like mathematics but are also passionate about literature or culture, and this is one way of really exploring that in a way that’s useful academically.”

“There seems to be a lot of students who were passionate about things like mathematics but are also passionate about literature or culture, and this is one way of really exploring that in a way that’s useful academically.”

Peter Constantine, the director of the literary translation minor

The purpose of the required courses is to have students engage with literature and have the opportunity to gain experience in fields like publishing, translating or editing. Constantine described the minor as a whole as a “gateway to world culture and literature.”

Constantine added that having international cultural understanding is a unique skill and opens doors for many areas, but specifically international relations, business, diplomacy and education.

David Lassy, a junior UConn student double majoring in Chinese and history as well as pursuing a literary translation minor, said he’s been taught relevant skills he can utilize post-grad. He plans to teach English as a foreign language as a career and continue his current contemporary Chinese poetry translation work, and this minor helped him to improve both his Chinese and English understanding and translating abilities, whether it be reading comprehension or writing.

“The minor not only gave me a better understanding of Mandarin idioms and cultures, but also developed my English writing abilities as I worked to create accurate and colorful translations,” said Lassy. “Literary translation gave me an avenue to improve my reading comprehension in Mandarin. I’ve found it to be one of the most helpful skills to combine with language learning because the study of one compliments the other.”

“Literary translation gave me an avenue to improve my reading comprehension in Mandarin. I’ve found it to be one of the most helpful skills to combine with language learning because the study of one compliments the other.”

David Lassy, a junior UConn student double majoring in Chinese and history as well as pursuing a literary translation minor

Professor Brian Sneeden, who will be leaving UConn for the University of Manchester, UK in the spring of 2022, also said the global connectivity of the modern world requires knowledge of other cultures and the ability to interact with those who are different from us.

“As our world becomes increasingly connected, it’s more important than ever for students to gain skills for navigating multilingual texts and settings,” said Sneeden. “UConn’s Literary Translation Minor is designed to offer students comprehensive instruction in the major theoretical approaches to translation — while putting those theories to practice creating our own literary translations.”

Sneeden emphasized the importance of having a skill for translating.

“Often our students find that the skills for translating works of literature carry over to other types of translation,” Sneeden said. “If you can translate a nuanced text like a poem, for instance, you’ll also likely be able to translate a speech from a politician, or a report for the United Nations.”

Students interested in pursuing a minor in literary translation should contact program director Peter Constantine.

From From the Daily Campus

Many have heard about the sad news that our dear colleague, Laurietz Seda Ramirez, passed away on December 7, 2021.

Her trajectory as a researcher was, and will continue to be, a source of pride for our Spanish section and the department of Literatures, Cultures & Languages. Those of you who have read her books, such as Teatro contra el olvido (U Científica del Sur 2012), La nueva dramaturgia puertorriqueña (Ateneo Puertorriqueño 2003, 2007), Travesías trifrontes: Teatro de vanguardia en el Perú, Trans/Acting: Latin American and Latino Performing Arts (Bucknell UP 2009) and Teatro de frontera 11/12 (U de San Marcos 2008) understand this statement perfectly. She was internationally renowned, as one of the most prominent figures in the field of Spanish American theater.

Her work as editor, critic, and scholar of dramaturgical theater leaves a significant mark. She always interpreted textual theater together with dramatic practice, ritual, and human presence. Pre-pandemic, this perspective forged an itinerary of remarkable travels and residencies. She had an adventurous spirit and this led her to seek fearlessly out theatrical life in unexpected places: in abandoned factories, in urban ruins, in squares and streets, in destitute neighborhoods, in mountain ranges and tropical jungles. Her journeys informed her academic writing; she was able to understand the intimate relationship between globalization and theater, particularly in late capitalism and liquid modernity. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she studied synchronously performed virtual theater and managed to teach her last graduate seminar while facing a grueling illness. Despite this, her conversations with colleagues and students stemmed from a need to understand how these forces were reshaping the lines of an art form she knew intimately.

Above all, she taught us in the classroom and through her publications.  We celebrate the traces she has left in the history of our section and in our department. The study of Spanish American theater was of great importance in our curriculum.  Her graduate students found themselves acting and directing as a way of investigating theater as a bodily practice, a social event, a live act. The importance of her contribution to Latin American theater and its presence in the United States can be gauged by the LATT (Latin American Theatre Today) conference in 2005, in which Storrs turned into the epicenter of Latin American theater for a few days. The hemisphere’s main voices in criticism and dramaturgy, as well as renowned actors and theatrical collectives, collected for the gathering. It was one of the most successful Latin American theater conferences and festivals held in the northeastern United States. Laurietz seized on the occasion of this intellectual and artistic meeting to create the prestigious George Woodyard Latin American Theater Award in an effort to celebrate the achievements of Latin American playwrights.

In addition to her academic work, she was a great mentor, colleague and friend. We will remember her humanity: her professionalism, her camaraderie, her ability to work in a group, and to listen and understand students and colleagues. Laurietz was kind and creative, elegant.  She was a reserved and loyal friend, with an endearing and cordial manner. She made her home in several countries and continents from her beloved island, Puerto Rico to Peru, from Connecticut to Granada (Spain).

We have lost not only a member of our Spanish section,  but someone who has marked our lives in countless ways over the last twenty-four years. One way to honor her memory is not only to continue reading the works she bequeathed to us, but also to keep her in mind as an example of the best that our profession has to offer.

 

Last summer, LCL’s Professors Anke Finger, Professor and Manuela Wagner along with Graduate Student Isabell Sluka won a grant in an initiative sponsored by CLAS in order to develop anti-racist courses, to enable insights into racism on college campuses, and to facilitate direct interaction with anti-racist activists.

The focus of the grant, called Decolonizing Area Studies: Towards Intercultural Citizenship and Social Justice was to de-center whiteness in language education and help uncover the oppression that minoritized students often suffer and that dominant groups perpetuate. This project involves different complementary activities and was designed to solicit participation by active language teachers, including graduate students through a series of lectures, a symposium, and a graduate student working group. The participant-driven project aimed to develop a plan for implementing theories, approaches, practices, and assessments that would help decolonize language curricula by taking a hands-on approach.  The organizers hoped that students and faculty could work towards actually implementing new curricula and developing learning materials and teaching methods that truly reflect the diversity and cultural variety of modern-day societies.

Upcoming Events

March 16, 2021, 4:00 pm-5:30 pm.

Double Lecture with Q&A

• • Nicole Coleman, Assistant Professor of German, Wayne State University

“‘We are all more alike than not’: Moving Beyond Universalism for Anti-Racist Pedagogies in the Literature Classroom”

• • José Aldemar Álvarez Valencia, Professor, School of Language Sciences Universidad del Valle, Cali (Colombia)

“‘Doing Research with University Indigenous Students: From ‘rationalizing the decolonial to feeling the decolonial’”

(You can register for this event by following this link:)

 

 

COMING In May 2021.  Two-Day symposium

More information about this even coming soon!

 

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For more information about the Decolonizing Area Studies initiatives, please visit https://sites.google.com/view/decolonizeareasstudies/home?authuser=0.

Read the whole article on the CLAS Anti-Racism pedagogy grant project in UConn Today at https://today.uconn.edu/2020/09/new-clas-programs-support-anti-racist-teaching-research-community-engagement/#.

This symposium brings together important scholars in the area of Cuban studies to analyze the Cuban period between 1902 and 1959. The presentations will investigate translations and the exercise of translation in relation to the formation of various humanistic or scientific disciplines on the island, such as anthropology, medicine, political science, literature, and psychoanalysis. The symposium will allow, on the one hand, to expand critical studies on translation in Cuba, and on the other, to implement the concept of translation as a vehicle to investigate the racial, gender, or post-colonial constructions put into practice in the Republican period.

Organized by Jacqueline Loss, Professor, Literatures, Cultures & Languages and Reynaldo Lastre, PhD Student and Jorgensen Fellowship Recipient

March 2-March 5, 2021

Co-sponsored by:
Department of Literatures, Cultures & Languages
Humanities Institute
El Instituto Seed Grant
John N. Plank Lecture Series
Global Affairs

Registration is obligatory. To obtain program information and conference links please visit us at: https://s.uconn.edu/ogx7qvfhpj.

 

 

When the pandemic struck, few of Ana Maria Diaz-Marcos’ 50 students in her Span 3232: Literature of Crisis in Modern Spain course imagined that the spread of a worldwide virus would lead to a meeting with a living Spanish playwright over Zoom. Yet when the crisis hit, Professor Diaz-Marcos, an expert in contemporary Spanish theater, saw an opportunity for learning on many levels.  She contacted Gracia Morales, author of the play NN12 that deals with historical memory and the drama of the “desaparecidos” (missing people) to invite her to create a special event for her class. Gracia Morales also happens to be a professor at the University of Granada (Spain).  On April 15th both professors joined online to lead a virtual discussion on the importance of historical memory during and in the aftermath of any crisis.  Graduate students and faculty along with other students in LCL, many majoring and minoring in Spanish, joined Diaz-Marcos’s class for the virtual meeting.  Students were given the opportunity to ask Prof. Morales questions about her dedication to theater, her academic life, and her thoughts on the current crisis. The event turned the challenge of the pandemic into an occasion of transnational teaching, learning, collaboration, and hope. Gracia Morales concluded on a positive note when she commented that “art is deeply human (…) This pandemic is going to change society as we know it. Hopefully it will bring about a more lucid society.”