This paper insists on working, playing, and thinking in multispecies cosmo- politics in the face of the killing of entire ways of being on earth that characterize the age cunningly called “now” and the place called “here.” Thinking with work- ing homing pigeons leads us into needed knots of SF – string figures, science fic- […]

Christopher Connery’s recent work has centered on the global 1960s and its aftermaths, Chinese urbanism, and Shanghai studies. He is currently working on a psychogeographical study of Shanghai. His talk is part of a series of reflections on left and anti-capitalist critical discourse on contemporary China, in China and internationally. Christopher Connery is Professor of […]

Lynn Hejinian is currently at work on a book-length essay, tentatively titled The Positions of the Sun, and exploring practical as well as conceptual possibilities for avant-garde and quotidian practices under conditions of late (or perhaps, now, triumphant) capitalism. Lyn Hejinian is professor of English at UC Berkeley. She is a poet and critic. She […]

In her new translation of Marco Polo’s Travels, Sharon Kinoshita reorients a text typically read as a western narrative of first contact, by returning it to its original context, the midpoint of the century chronicled in Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony, and to its original title, The Description of the World. Sharon Kinoshita is Professor of […]

Janette Dinishak’s work explores how Wittgenstein’s concept “noticing an aspect” can provide a frame for capturing and understanding commonly neglected phenomena that are characteristic of autistic experience. She also traces the inter-relations between scientific, cultural, and first-person perspectives on autism and how these perspectives interact in shaping our understanding of autism. Janette Dinishak is Visiting […]

Marc Matera is finishing a book, London and the Black International, on the wider Atlantic and imperial horizons of black activism, intellectual work, and cultural production in London between the world wars. His most recent work examines the Jamaican visual artist Ronald Moody’s agonistic relationship to modernism. Marc Matera is Assistant Professor of History at […]

Going beyond the assessment that Asian American men in the movies embody asexuality/effeminacy/queerness, or a manhood that falls short of the norms, Celine Shimizu’s Straitjacket Sexualities (Stanford, 2012), explores how Asian/American men in US film history sought to formulate masculinities in, through, and beyond constricting notions of their identities.          

Kimberly Lau’s work explores some of the ways that World of Warcraft engages masculinity in play through the convergence of player practices, game designers, and the ongoing interaction between the two.  Reading invocations of hypermasculinity, Lau investigates how everyday “camp” practices might open up alternative spaces and forms of masculine sociality. Kimberly Lau is Professor of […]

"'War Is the Force That Gives Us Meaning': Militarized Queerness, Lieutenant Dan Choi, and Korean War Mascotry" Offering a historically layered examination of the rights-based battle waged by former Lt. Dan Choi, son of a war orphan, against the now-defunct policy of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” this talk inquires into the homology between queer masking in […]

"Timely and Untimely Politics: Art and Protest in Early 1960s Japan" William Marotti explores politics and timeliness by examining the advent of a critical art of the everyday in Japan in the 1960s and its links to political action. Out of sync with eventful mass activism, artists sought to create eventfulness against a state-promoted, depoliticized […]