Humanities Week, Oct. 15-20, 2023

Humanities Week, Oct. 15-20, 2023

From October 15-20, ASU will be hosting The College’s Humanities Week with over 20 in-person and virtual events.

Events are open to students, faculty, staff and community members. Enjoy free food, swag, and speakers. The current event schedule is listed below, but updates can be viewed on the Humanities Week website.


Sunday, Oct. 15

‘Fly: The Big Book of Basketball Fashion’ Book Launch by Pulitzer Prize Winner Mitchell S. Jackson in Conversation with Marc J. Spears

7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. | Phoenix Art Museum

Join us for the release of Fly: The Big Book of Basketball Fashion by Mitchell S. Jackson. This sumptuous, colorful book celebrates NBA fashion and the decades of cultural and political phenomena that bring it into being.

The author will be in conversation with renowned veteran NBA reporter Marc J. Spears. 

Learn more


Monday, Oct. 16

TikTok and Tarot: Imagining Ethical Futures for Social Media

1 p.m. to 2 p.m. 

The Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics invites students and faculty to play, experiment, and discover using our Humane Tech Oracle Deck to explore our relationships with “the algorithm;” a mystifying black box we interact with every time we use our smart technology or engage in social media.

We will also be sharing about our newest research project, Understanding Algorithmic Folk Theories: Tracing Community-Based Knowledge on TikTok, which was recently awarded a grant by the NEH Dangers and Opportunities of Technology program.  

Learn more.

Humanities Week SILC Café: German

1:30 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. | Durham Hall Lobby

The School of International Letters and Cultures invites anyone who is searching for a place to come and get to know people from across the world or surround themselves with languages from around the globe. 

SILC Café will be every day during Humanities Week with a different language department hosting each one — and a Sun Devil Rewards secret word each day! 

Learn more.

Arming Students for Good: Youth Activism to Prevent Violence

3 p.m. to 5 p.m. | Walton Center for Planetary Health (Room 107 and Atrium)

Join the Humanities Lab at Arizona State University for a late afternoon event designed to elevate youth voices in collective efforts to prevent violence. 

Hear from public figures, scientists and students about what we know about school shootings. Participate in interactive activities designed to demonstrate the urgent need for innovative solutions.  

Learn more.


Tuesday, Oct. 17

Open Mic hosted by Hayden’s Ferry Review and Thousand Languages Project

12 p.m. to 1 p.m. | Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing or Online

Come share your creative work at this open mic event hosted by Hayden’s Ferry Review and the Thousand Languages Project.

We welcome poets, short story writers, and song writers/musicians and a microphone will be provided. Participants may share up to 3 minutes. Walk-ins may still sign up to participate. 

Learn more.

ASU Worldbuilding Initiative Distinguished Lecture with Connor Alexander

1:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. 

The ASU Worldbuilding Initiative invites you to join us during Humanities Week to welcome our Fall 2023 Worldbuilding Distinguished Lecturer, Connor Alexander, lead designer of the award-winning tabletop roleplaying game Coyote & Crow.

In this interactive lecture and workshop, Connor Alexander will first introduce the world of Coyote & Crow, a sci-fi and fantasy tabletop role playing game set in a First Nations alternate future where colonization never happened, detailing the inventive and collaborative work that went into the game’s design and launch.

Afterward, he will lead participants in a character creation workshop where students and other audience members can make their own Coyote & Crow characters to take home with them, working in collaboration with Connor Alexander, the Akinana Circle live play team, and other members of the audience. 

Learn more.

Humanities Week SILC Café: Japanese

1:30 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. | Durham Hall Lobby

The School of International Letters and Cultures invites anyone who is searching for a place to come and get to know people from across the world or surround themselves with languages from around the globe. 

SILC Café will be every day during Humanities Week with a different language department hosting each one — and a Sun Devil Rewards secret word each day! 

Learn more.

An Evening with Eddie Glaude Jr.

7 p.m. to 8 p.m. | Armstrong Hall (Room 101)

Eddie Glaude is a passionate educator, author and political commentator. He has authored a number of books on Black communities, the difficulties of race in the United States and the challenges we face as a democracy. He has also written award-winning books on religion and philosophy.

He is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor and Chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University and a contributor on programs like Morning Joe and Deadline Whitehouse with Nicolle Wallace. He also regularly appears on Meet the Press on Sundays and is a columnist for TIME Magazine. 

Learn more.


Wednesday, Oct. 18

Film and Media Studies Humanities Week Open House

11 a.m. to 1 p.m. | Ross-Blakley Hall (Room 117)

Film and Media Studies in the Department of English at ASU invites all to our Fall 2023 Humanities Week Open House.

We’ll showcase work from FMS students and faculty, talk about upcoming courses, and provide opportunities for students and potential students to speak with FMS faculty and staff.

Learn more.

Hear Our Voices: Why We Need Historians to Write Children’s Books in the Wake of a Banned Books Movement

2 p.m. to 5 p.m. | Hayden Library (Room 236)

Join the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies and the ASU Libraries for visiting historian Radhika Natarajan’s discussion of her first children’s book, Hear Our Voices: A Powerful Retelling of the British Empire in 20 Stories. 

Students will have the opportunity to create book ban and censorship awareness buttons via the library MakerSpace, as well as explore the Censorship Collection, a new curated collection of books and media that focuses on debates over censorship and free-speech.

Learn more.

Shakespeare at 400: Scenes From and Discussion of ‘The Book of Will’ by Lauren Gunderson

5:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. | Old Main, Carson Ballroom or Online

In the case of “The Book of Will” by Lauren Gunderson, historical fiction illuminates historical fact. Discover how history was made with the publishing of Shakespeare’s Complete Works. Arizona State University presents scenes from “The Book of Will” by Lauren Gunderson, a modern, comedic look at how the Bard’s plays became the First Folio.

Historian Helen Cam has said: “Historical fiction is not only a respectable literary form; it is a standing reminder of the fact that history is about human beings.”

Learn more.


Thursday, Oct. 19

Public History Student Poster Show

10 a.m. to 1 p.m. | Coor Hall Room 4403

The School for Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies invites you to engage one-on-one with our current students and recent graduates who have been making an impact in public history research!

Students will showcase their projects by creating and presenting poster-sized visual representation of their findings, including the social and cultural significance of their work. The posters will be evaluated by a committee of faculty who will award fellowships to the winning students.

Learn more.

ASU Book Group: ‘The Circle That Fits’ by Kevin Lichty

12 p.m. to 1 p.m. | Piper Writers House or Zoom

The book group is open to all in the ASU community and meets monthly from noon–1 p.m. with two different options for attendance: either in-person at the Piper Writers House or virtually on Zoom. Registration is required for online attendance. In-person attendees are invited to join the author for lunch after at the University Club, no-host.

Learn more.

Humanities Week SILC Café: Arabic

1:30 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. | Durham Hall Lobby

The School of International Letters and Cultures invites anyone who is searching for a place to come and get to know people from across the world or surround themselves with languages from around the globe. 

SILC Café will be every day during Humanities Week with a different language department hosting each one — and a Sun Devil Rewards secret word each day! 

Learn more

Mining the Deep: Speculative Fictions and Futures

Please join us for the 2023 Environmental Humanities Initiative Distinguished Lecture by Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles: “Mining the Deep: Speculative Fictions and Futures.”

The lecture examines the oceanic turn in the humanities, particularly what Gaston Bachelard once termed the “depth imagination.”

Learn more.

Social Cohesion Dialogue 2023 – Public Dialogue

6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. | Marston Exploration Theater or Online

Jonathan Daniel Wells, author of “The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War” and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, author of “Children of the Land” will be in conversation with communities in and beyond ASU. 

Join us as we reflect on vulnerability, borders, resistance, history, love, advocacy and justice.

Learn more.


Friday, Oct. 20

So, what are you going to do with that?

11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. | Armstrong Hall (Room L1-30) or Online

“So, what are you going to do with that?” English majors, history majors, language majors and more have heard the question a million times. The truth is that you can do a lot with a humanities degree.

Join a panel of alumni from the humanities division at The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences to hear their stories of where their humanities degrees took them and how their studies have positively influenced their careers.

Learn more.

Humanities Week SILC Café: Spanish

1:30 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. | Durham Hall Lobby

The School of International Letters and Cultures invites anyone who is searching for a place to come and get to know people from across the world or surround themselves with languages from around the globe. 

SILC Café will be every day during Humanities Week with a different language department hosting each one — and a Sun Devil Rewards secret word each day! 

Learn more.

Rachel Cantor’s Half-Life of a Stolen Sister

Rachel Cantor

Rachel Cantor has recently published Half-Life of a Stolen Sister. The imaginative novel follows the lives of the Brontë siblings—Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and brother Branwell—retelling their story from the beginning in their precocious childhoods, to the writing of their renowned novels, to their early deaths. The work is a form-shattering novel written by an author praised as “laugh-out-loud hilarious and thought-provokingly philosophical” (Boston Globe).

The novel-by-stories book beautifully brings together diaries, letters, home movies, television and radio interviews, deathbed monologues and fragments from the sprawling invented worlds of the siblings’ childhood. The writing explores how the three sisters were able to produce literary landmarks that have withstood the ages and how their lives and circumstances brought the children together in greatness. Rachel Cantor is able to meld known biographical facts with storytelling to depict the family’s genius, their bonds of love and duty, impassioned creativity, and the ongoing tolls of illness, isolation, and loss.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee, author of The Evening Hero, praised Cantor’s reimagining of the Brontë family, “With humor and heart, Rachel Cantor paints a vivid, multi-voiced picture of the Brontës via a shape-shifting, time-bending tapestry of unforgettable characters and situations. Whether you’re a fan of this literary family or not, this book is a must-read for anyone looking for a truly innovative, tender, and humorous take on genius, the creative process, family, and life.”

Read some of the book’s other reviews below:
“Cantor pulls out all the stops to make this a unique and unforgettable reading experience that is as difficult to describe as it is to set down . . . Clever without straining, true to the basic facts of the Brontë family history, and emotionally compelling as the children grow while continuously facing new obstacles, Cantor’s unusual tale can be read and reread for endless diversion.”
Booklist

“Cantor spins a free-ranging and intriguing tale of a literary family inspired by the Brontës that incorporates a mix of forms and anachronistic details . . . Cantor’s frisky and time-collapsing blend of forms elevates the experiment above run-of-the-mill Brontë fodder . . . For Brontë fans, this is a jolt of fresh air.”
Publishers Weekly

“[Cantor’s] take on [the Brontës’] lives plays fair with their limited life spans and general relationships to each other and the world while throwing them into a setting replete with bagels, McMansions, subways, television, and soy milk. The structure of the novel is playful . . . with a few surprising insights.”

Kirkus Reviews

“Innovative . . . Cantor spins the known biographies of the Brontë siblings into a surrealist, eccentric story where modernity blends with the archaic … Retells the story of the Brontë family with flair.”

Foreword Reviews, Starred Review


Rachel Cantor is the author of the novels Half-Life of a Stolen Sister (Soho Press 2023), Good on Paper (Melville House 2016), and A Highly Unlikely Scenario (Melville House 2014). Two dozen of her stories have been published in the Paris Review, One Story, Ninth Letter, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and elsewhere, and she has written about fiction for National Public Radio, the Guardian, Publishers Weekly, and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she is writing a series of middle grade and young adult books set in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. 

Rachel Cantor was interviewed in Issue 17 of Superstition Review. View it here.

Half-Life of a Stolen Sister is available for purchase here. Read more from Rachel Cantor at her website or find her on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

A graphic that says "Writing Workshop"

GSEA Writing Workshop

On Friday, Dec. 2nd, from 10am – 1pm, the Graduate Scholars of English Association will be hosting a writing workshop at Ross-Blakely Hall, room 117. There will be two 45-minute writing sessions (so be sure to bring your laptop) and a Q&A session with faculty members. Free food will be provided.

GSEA is an official student organization; its goal is to promote the “professional development of the English Graduate Student community at Arizona State University.” It regularly hosts writing workshops.

This event can also be joined online. To learn more and register, go here.

A photo of Percival Everett.

TomorrowTalks with Percival Everett: The Trees


Join ASU’s TomorrowTalks with Percival Everett, November 3rd at 6pm AZ time. TomorrowTalks is a student-engagement initiative meant to put students in conversation with authors who explain how they use their writing to address society’s most pressing issues. It’s led by the Division of Humanities at ASU and hosted by ASU’s Department of English in partnership with Macmillan Publishers.

This event takes place over Zoom and is free, although registration is required. Everett will be discussing his book The Trees, published by Graywolf Press. Winner of the 2022 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, this novel deals with a series of devastating and puzzling murders in Money, Mississippi. As detectives attempt to figure out what’s going on, they discover that similar murders are taking place all over the country. In the process, they must reckon with America’s brutal history of racism and police violence.

Everett has mastered the movement between unspeakable terror and knockout comedy.

Amy Rowland, The New York Times Book Review

Percival Everett has written over twenty novels and is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.

“The Trees” is a wild book: a gory pulp revenge fantasy and a detective narrative. . . . [It] is just as blood-soaked and just as hilarious as Inglourious Basterds or Django Unchained, but it comes with more authentic historical weight for being set in a dreamlike counterpresent.

bookforum

To learn more about TomorrowTalks and register for the event, go here.

An Evening with Rita Dove, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet

An Evening with Rita Dove, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet


Currently a professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Rita Dove is coming to give a lecture at ASU’s Tempe campus. Called “An Evening with Rita Dove,” this event will be the highlight of ASU’s second annual Humanities Week. This is a series of special events that celebrate how students and faculty are exploring human adventure across culture, time, and space.

Born in 1952, Rita Dove has won the Pulitzer Prize, the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and others. She has written extensively; her most notable works include her poetry collections Thomas and Beulah (which won the Pulitzer Prize), Playlist for the Apocalypse, and Collected Poems 1974 – 2004. Although many of her awards relate to her poetry, Dove has also written essays, songs, a play, and a novel.

Dove’s lecture is free and open to the public; it will take place on Tuesday, October 18, at 7:00pm in the Roskind Great Hall. Go here to learn more and register!

Paul Baker talk Flyer

Linguist Paul Baker: Sex Differences on a Forum About Anxiety

Paul Baker discussion flyer.
Dr. Paul Baker Discussing Gender and Anxiety

This Friday at 9:00am AZ time, Dr. Paul Baker will be discussing global trends in anxiety and the intersection between anxiety and gender. The WHO estimates over 200 million people around the globe have anxiety, and women are more likely than men to be diagnosed. Some studies suggest that the way people conceptualize their emotions through language impacts whether they develop anxiety.

Dr. Baker has published over twenty books, conducting research on media, gender, sexuality, language, and more. He is a Professor of English Language at the Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University.

The linguistics and applied linguistics / TESOL program in the Department of English at ASU presents this free, open, and virtual talk.

Click here to learn more and register for this event!

Submissions Open: Dear Mother Earth

Narrative Storytelling Initiative Submissions: Dear Mother Earth

The Narrative Storytelling Initiative‘s goal is to enhance access and public engagement with narrators and narratives. They are currently looking for messages written to Mother Earth in the future, with a maximum of 100 words. These messages will be included in a special exhibition piece at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory during the last two weeks of October.

Learn more and submit your message here!

@SupersitionRev Twitter Contest

@SupersitionRev Twitter Contest

Superstition Review is having a contest on Twitter!

All you have to do is post an image of your favorite gift to receive as a writer and reader and tag us @SuperstitionRev! Once the contest closes, we will announce the winner and send them an SR mug!

The contest will be from March 1 to March 5. Make sure to get those tweets in!

Conversations in Craft and Content

Conversations in Craft and Content

Check out Arizona State University’s new creative writing lecture series hosted and moderated by Mitchell Jackson, Guggenheim fellow, Pulitzer winner, and the John O. Whiteman Dean’s Distinguished Professor of English at ASU. Join Jackson as he welcomes two-time National Book Award-winner Jesmyn Ward as the inaugural guest at this virtual event via Zoom on Friday, February 4, 2022, at 6 p.m AZ/MST.

Photo of Jesmyn Ward by Beowulf Sheehan

The Conversations in Craft and Content lecture series is free of charge and open to the public. Take advantage of this great opportunity to learn more about Jesym Ward’s craft including her writing and revision process, philosophies that guide her, and ideas about her work.

Learn more about the moderator, guest, and series on the Department of English’s website and register here!