Video Recordings Available Here
March 31st, April 14th, April 28th, 2023
Organized in partnership with the University at Albany Department of English, “Meeting Places: Conversations Between & Beyond the Disciplines ” is a three-part event comprising a series of online conversations between scholars and writers intended to foster the exchange of ideas and interests beyond and between academic and disciplinary boundaries.
Rather than inviting participants to give conventional lectures or presentations, we have organized three facilitated but open-ended conversations in hopes of exemplifying the crucial role meeting places-between practices, methods, people, and ideas-play in the production and circulation of knowledge. This event is an experimental attempt to draw attention to the often invisible, unnoticed, or undervalued forms of intellectual collaboration and social exchange that animate inquiry, scholarship, and teaching.
We will make ample space for attendees to join the conversation with the invited participants in each session, so we hope to see you there. You can find more information and links to register for the meetings below.
Infrastructures in Question: A Dialogue
Raquel Velho & Devin Short in Conversation
March 31st @ 4:00 PM EST
Register for the Event.
Participant Information:
Raquel Velho is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She’s a sociologist of infrastructures and her work focuses on the development of large sociotechnical systems and how they shape our lives while simultaneously highlighting the transformative practices of marginalized users. She received her Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies from University College London (UK).
Devin Short is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Washington, where he studies the development of computer models in US climate science. Devin began his career in physics, earning a master’s degree specializing in nuclear science experiments with low-energy particle accelerators. He switched fields to better understand how scientific knowledge about climate change is created and how it might benefit people adapting to life in a warming world. He is currently developing a database that provides new methods for investigators to explore the complex archives people create when they work in distributed collaborations like modern scientific communities.
Literature as Equipment for Living: Critics in Conversation
Sam Hushagen & Andries Hiskes in Conversation
April 14th @ 3:00 PM EST
Register for the Event.
Participant Information:
Sam Hushagen received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 2019. He has served as Assistant Editor at MLQ: A Journal of Literary History and writes about John Milton, Enlightenment visual culture, contemporary philosophy of mind, and georgic in British and American literature. His current book considers long-form topographical poetry from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in relation to “post-critique” and its silent incorporation of what the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars called the “Myth of the Given.”
Andries Hiskes is a lecturer at the department of nursing at The Hague University of Applied Sciences, where he teaches narrative medicine, participative healthcare, and disability studies. As a PhD candidate at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society, he works on the intersection between disability studies and affect theory. His research examines literature and art in which affective responses are evoked and/or shared by deviant and disabled bodies, focusing on how the artwork is constructed to elicit such responses. Concurrently, through the added emphasis on emotional and affective responses provoked by disabled bodies, his research explores how art may manipulate such responses.
Tales, Tall and Otherwise: The Uses of Stories
Christina Thyssen & Jackie Ess in Conversation
April 28th @ 4:00 PM EST
Register for the Event.
Participant Information:
Christina Thyssen holds a Ph.D. in American literature and teaches in the English Department at University at Albany. She also teaches writing and storytelling to incarcerated individuals. She is the co-founder and producer of On The Fly, a monthly Moth-style story slam in Catskill, NY and is currently at work on a memoir about raising a special needs daughter.
Jackie Ess is the author of Darryl (Clash, 2021), In The Absolute Balloon (Chicago Review, 2022), and Shade (The Recluse, 2022).