Karen Tejada and Rashmi Viswanathan Chosen to Lead Humanities Center Seminars
Karen Tejada, associate professor of sociology, and Rashmi Viswanathan, assistant professor of art history, have been chosen to lead the Humanities Center honors seminars for the next two years. These seminars will serve as foundational to the center’s dedication to support and promote Ethnic Studies at the University of Hartford.
For 2022-23, Karen Tejada’s seminar, “Decolonizing the University: Ethnic Studies throughout Time,” will focus on the social movements that led to the creation of Ethnic Studies departments within the academy. Starting from the perspective of what it means to be part of a minoritized racial and/or ethnic group in the U.S. and how such peoples have fought for and continue to seek their own liberation, she will explore topics such as: mestiza consciousness, Chican@ art and literature, settler colonialism and Indigenous rights, Afro-Latino art and culture, the establishment of centers for Black, Dominican, and Puerto Rican studies, the literature of Asian migrant families, and the ongoing defunding of Ethnic Studies programs along with the recent firings of professors working in this field.
In Spring 2022, the Humanities Center will send out a call for Student Fellows to apply for Professor Tejada’s class and for Faculty Fellows to participate in the 2023 Spring lecture series on “Decolonizing the University.”
For 2023-24, Rashmi Viswanathan’s seminar, “Fiction, Fabulation, Futurity,” will focus on how colonial legacies have come to shape much of the contemporary discourse within the academy, while looking at how such discourse is being informed by new conceptions of race, ethnicity, class, sex and gender. These new conceptions, however, can cause us to dream about remaking our futures through a critical inquiry of the world around us, inquiries that occur through speculative and science fiction and that question received truths and categories of knowledge. As a means of working through these ideas, the course will explore topics such as: contemporary artists and theorists who interrogate race and place, novels such as Octavia Butler’s Kindred, classed and colonial histories, Black radical feminism, Indigenous speculation, third-world feminisms, and the rethinking of producer-consumer relations.
The Humanities Center at the University of Hartford supports interdisciplinary scholarship focusing on the humanities through art, science, technology, media, music, psychology, history, film, philosophy and literature. For more information, contact Nicholas Ealy, director, at ealy@hartford.edu, follow us on Facebook here or on our website here.