Cymene Howe, the final guest of the Winter 2026 HistCon Research Colloquium will be joining us next week to give her talk “Elemental Encounters: how water, ice and fire + earth, spin and chemicals become us”. From chemical relations to the sweep of stormfronts, the elements render a series of sensory, scientific and semiotic coordinates […]

Please join the More-Than-Human(ities) Lab for our winter book club meeting. We will be discussing Alexis Shotwell’s book Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times, which offers a framework for conceiving of our own complicity in the presence of toxicity, climate change, and other ongoing crises. Event attendees will be expected to have read the book. […]

Stephen David Engel will read from an experimental history called “Timescape of Rings.” In it, he meditates on a 2,200-year-old redwood round with markers for historical events affixed to its rings—the birth of Jesus, the invention of gunpowder, the drafting of the Magna Carta, and on. By running his fingers over the rings, he recalls […]

The Department of History invites you to join their talk about African Arts, Western Museums, and the debate over restitution. This lecture examines restitution as an ethical and epistemic process that goes beyond the physical return of objects from Western museums to African institutions. While repatriation often functions as a diplomatic practice, restitution is framed […]

Join the Linguistics Department for Ethan Poole's talk “Syntactic Variables and Semantic Minimality” in collaboration with Zahra Mirrazi. In this talk, Poole argues that when two syntactic variables are "related" and stand in a c- command relationship at LF, a 3⁄4-pattern emerges: free/free, bound/bound, bound/free, and *free/bound. Several otherwise-disparate puzzles are shown to fall under […]

The History of Consciousness department invites you to the next talk in their Winter 2026 Research Colloquium series. This talk examines Tomba’s Revolution and Restoration as an expression of his philosophy of political time. Tomba argues that modernity consists of dynamic and overlapping temporal layers and that revolutionary change occurs when oppressed groups draw on […]

Join the Linguistics Department for Liv Hoversten's talk "Is Language Control in Comprehension Applied Within or External to the Lexicon?" Bilinguals need to continually monitor and select the appropriate language(s) for the current context in order to communicate efficiently. Prominent models of bilingual word recognition posit that this selection process, known as language control, occurs […]

Join the Linguistics Department for Elsi Kaiser's talk, "Do Birds of a Feather Flock Together? Exploring Interpretation and Dissimilation of Third Person Pronouns in English and Finnish". Transitive clauses with two personal pronouns in coargument position (e.g. “she saw her”, “he helped him”) are perfectly natural in English. But perhaps surprisingly, such two-pronoun sequences are […]