World Literature Lecture Series lecture on Carmen Maria Machado, presented by Humanities Program faculty member Annjeanette Wiese. Monday, March 10, at 6:30 p.m.

Carmen Maria Machado is an American short story author, essayist, and critic best known for Her Body and Other Parties, a short story collection, and her memoir In the Dream House. Her fiction has been a finalist for numerous prizes including the Nebula Award and the Shirley Jackson Award. As the jacket copy of her short story collection notes, "Here are eight startling stories that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. Earthly and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties enlarges the possibilities of contemporary fiction." Her memoir, in turn, explores narrative tropes and form in many ways, including, as the copy tells us, legal proceedings, fairy tales, iconic works of film and fiction, and a broad swath of queer history in order to dissect "the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse."

The lectures are free and open to the public and light refreshments will be served. See a link to register . Please register in advance if possible (though registration is not required). We hope you will join us and bring your friends!

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Prof. Brian A. Catlos’s book, Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain (Basic Books, 2018) has now been published in Turkish as Endülüs: Müslüman İspanya'nın Yeni Tarihi by the publisher Kronik Kitap.

The book has already appeared in Spanish, German, Polish, Complex Chinese, and Korean, and is forthcoming in Simplified Chinese and Arabic. This is Catlos’s second book to be translated into Turkish, after his earlier Ortaçağ Latin Hristiyan Âlemi Müslümanları: 1050-1614 (Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, 1050-1614)

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Marcia (Whyte) Smart (BA Humanities, 1996 CU Boulder) — 

Not many people have been on a billboard in Times Square but Marcia Smart can count that as one of her many accomplishments! She made her billboard appearance in December 2023 after her cookbook, , won Best Cookbook by the Independent Publisher’s Association. 
See the full article !

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The Humanities Program invites you to come celebrate our 2025 Humanities Graduates! The celebration will take place on Friday May 9, 2025, in UMC 235. There will be a reception from 10:30-11:00 a.m.  followed by a commencement ceremony from 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. We hope to see you there!

No need for tickets or reservations. All are welcome.

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The Humanities Program (HUMN)

presents a talk

on Friday, September 30 at 4pm in Eaton Humanities 1B80

by

Michael Gallope

Associate Professor of Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature

University of Minnesota

"Artmaking and Late Modernity: Ineffability, Compulsion, Difficulty"

In this talk Professor Gallope examines work by Alice Coltrane, Bob Dylan, Ornette Coleman, Elton John, Beyoncé Knowles, and Ahmed Janka Nabay while engaging with the thought of Freud, Heidegger, Adorno, Fred Moten, and Marianna Ritchey.

Text to lecture 

Michael Gallope is an Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. His research focuses on twentieth and twenty-first century music, continental philosophy, critical theory, popular culture, sound studies, and music of the African diaspora. He previously taught at New York University where he completed a Ph.D. in Musicology as well as an Advanced Certificate in Poetics and Theory, and at the University of Chicago where he was a Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows. He is the author of  (U of Chicago Press, 2017).

Michael Gallope’s 

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Humanities faculty member Annjeanette Wiese's book releases October 1.  

Narrative Truthiness explores the complex nature of truth by adapting Stephen Colbert’s concept of truthiness (which on its own repudiates complexity) into something nuanced and positive, what Annjeanette Wiese calls “narrative truthiness.” Narrative truthiness holds on to the importance of facts while complicating them by looking at different types of truth, as well as the complexity, contradictions, and consequences of truth in the context of human experience.

Wiese uses narrative theory to analyze several examples of hybrid (non)fiction: works that refuse to exist as either fiction or nonfiction alone and that challenge monolithic definitions of truth. She examines memoirs by Lauren Slater, Michael Ondaatje, Binjamin Wilkomirski, Tim O’Brien; fiction by Julian Barnes, Richard Powers, W. G. Sebald; Onion headlines; comics and graphic memoirs by Joe Sacco, Art Spiegelman, and David Small; and fake news.

Narrative Truthiness foregrounds the complexity that is inherent in human understanding and experience and in the process demonstrates the significance of the complex tensions between what we feel to be true and what is true, and how we are shaped by both.

Praise for the book:

“Beautifully written, Narrative Truthiness takes the reader on a trip through lies, hoaxes, satire, the search for origins, the fabrication of memories, the construction of the verisimilar, and—through all these narrative modes and themes—the quest for authenticity. Wiese makes a powerful plea in favor of a literary conception of truth that acknowledges the complexity of truth and does not limit it to the accurate presentation of facts, without, however, rejecting any kind of factuality.”—Marie-Laure Ryan, coeditor of Possible Worlds Theory and Contemporary Narratology
 

“Narrative Truthiness provides a new window into thinking about the interactions between fact and fiction, and how we need one to understand the other, through a focus on texts that straddle the line between representative and fictional narrative. It is well researched and theoretically sophisticated.”—Marjorie Worthington, author of The Story of “Me”: Contemporary American Autofiction

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Please see below or follow this link to the Humanities Program statement regarding systemic racism.

Sent to HUMN students on 6.15.20

Humanities Program Statement on the George Floyd Uprisings

The recent killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery make clear that black lives are not safe in the United States. Despite decades of efforts to eradicate it, racism continues to shape the systems that order our society. Some people have stood to protest these racist systems while others have taken a knee. Hundreds of thousands have marched in the streets, peacefully affirming that Black Lives Matter. We admire their courage, join that affirmation, and mourn the many black lives lost because it is not yet true.

Some say that systemic racism does not exist. Current events conspire with history to prove them wrong. It was 1931 in Birmingham, Alabama. Three young black men were arrested, beaten, and jailed for a crime they did not commit. One was Angelo Herndon, an activist and labor organizer. Three young white women had been shot, two were dead. The third was brought to see the prisoners. "No," she told police, "It was some other black man." Herndon wrote,

Yet we knew that we were not through with the messy business, for the lynchers were still there and our acquittal might so anger them that there was a likelihood that they would storm the jail and mete out "justice" to us in one-hundred-per-cent American style—a style draped in the stars and stripes and holding a Bible in its blood-stained hand.

Systemic racism exists. How else did one-hundred-per-cent American justice come to mean white people killing black people under cover of the flag and a holy book? More to the point, why do politicians still assert these connections? 

We condemn systemic racism, the police brutality that it excuses, and the authoritarian politics that it supports. But we also acknowledge that we must do more to root out systemic racism in our practices. 

The Humanities Program is committed to creating inclusive learning environments where diverse perspectives are recognized, respected, and seen as a source of strength. We bear a responsibility to contribute positively to an intellectual community enriched and enhanced by diversity. To this end, we commit to revising reading lists in Humanities Program courses so as to include more authors of color and voices from oppressed groups. We also commit to expanding efforts to broaden and diversify our faculty and student community. Developing new interdisciplinary courses for Gen Ed "Diversity" designation is a measurable first step that takes us in the right direction. 

We invite you to suggest other ways to make the Humanities Program more diverse and inclusive. We welcome you and your ideas. 

Faculty of the Humanities Program

College of Arts & Sciences

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You're invited to attend this FREE Event: 

Join Colorado writers and scholars of color in a conversation about structural racism and how America can dismantle this system. 
Sunday, June 14, 2020 from 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM MDT
Natalie Avalos: Professor of Ethnic Studies CU Boulder
Jeanine Canty: Professor of Ecopsychology Naropa University
Suzi Q. Smith: Renowned Denver Poet, Artist, Writer, and Activist
David Heska Wanbli Weiden: Author of Winter Counts and Professor of Native American Studies and Political Science Metro State University
 

JLF Colorado

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Prof. Brian A. Catlos will be a featured author at the  taking place from 22–27 January at the Diggi Palace in Jaipur, India. In a session sponsored by the Agha Khan Foundation he will be interviewed by best-selling author, William Dalrymple, regarding Catlos’s recent book, Kingdoms of Faith. A New History of Islamic Spain (Basic: 2018). The largest free literary festival in the world, past speakers have ranged from Nobel Laureates J.M. Coetzee, Orhan Pamuk and Muhammad Yunus, Man Booker Prize winners Ben Okri, Margaret Atwood and Paul Beatty. An annual event that goes beyond literature, the Festival has also hosted Amartya Sen, Amitabh Bachchan, the late A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Oprah Winfrey, Stephen Fry, Thomas Piketty and former president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai.

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Read the CU Boulder Today article about Associate Professor Oliver Gerland's play "Play Therapy," running from Nov. 7-10!

From the article: “I’ve found that creating theater with people whose minds work differently than typical and who come into the room with a different set of talents and qualities is extremely exciting,” [Oliver Gerland] said.

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