American Studies

Acclaimed author Emily St. John Mandel will bring her work and perspectives to Middlebury College in this special reading, Q&A and book signing. 

 

This event is in-person and open to the public.

Can’t make it? A recording will be available February 16-March 1, 2024 at https://vimeo.com/911642948

Password: EmilyMidd2024

 

Erin Durban and Lucinda Ramberg, two feminist, queer, postcolonial scholars, will have a conversation about queer anthropology: What does it mean to queer anthropology? How can we do anthropology, as well as ethnographic methods more broadly, in a queer way and for queer purposes?

Erin Durban, a scholar of queer anthropology, will discuss their book The Sexual Politics of Empire: Postcolonial Homophobia in Haiti. Evangelical Christians and members of the global LGBTQI human rights movement have vied for influence in Haiti since the 2010 earthquake. Each side accuses the other of serving foreign interests. Yet each proposes future foreign interventions on behalf of their respective causes despite the country’s traumatic past with European colonialism and American imperialism. As Durban shows, two discourses dominate discussions of intervention.

The Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs Program on Global and International History presents Julian Go and “Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the US.”

The line between wellness and illness seems thick, well drawn, and impermeable. We believe ourselves, and others, to be firmly situated on one side or the other. But that is not true. We all come to realize this about physical illness. We come to realize that eventually it will touch and alter our lives, either through our own direct experience or that of a loved one. So, we begin to learn the language of cancer, of Alzheimer’s, of Parkinson’s. What of mental illness, though?

Since the 1970s, a “Polynesian Pipeline” has brought football players from American Samoa to Hawaii and the mainland United States to play at the collegiate and professional levels. In Gridiron Capital Lisa Uperesa charts the cultural and social dynamics that have made football so significant to Samoan communities.

Please join us for a Career Conversation with Writer Abe Streep ’04. He will discuss his career journey and various aspects of the industry. He is the author of Brothers on Three: A True Story of Family, Resistance, and Hope on a Reservation in Montana, winner of the Montana Book Award and the New Mexico-Arizona General Nonfiction Book Award.

Join us for a performance by internationally recognized fingerstyle guitarist Paul Asbell.  With a multi-decade career that includes joining the seminal Butterfield Blues band, founding and leading jazz group Kilimanjaro, and playing and recording with a veritable who’s who of blues and jazz greats, Asbell is a musician’s musician.  This performance will highlight the history of the American guitar, as Asbell will demonstrate how the instrument itself changed and was changed by the music people made with it.

Award-winning journalist Abe Streep (‘04) will be in conversation with esteemed sports writer, Alexander Wolff to discuss his first book, Brothers on Three: A True Story of Family, Resistance, and Hope on a Reservation in Montana (Celadon Books, 2021). The book follows the boys basketball team from Arlee High School as they defend their state championship. Streep reports on the place of basketball in the lives of members of the Flathead Reservation’s Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes.

This event will place in conversation two high profile translators of Asian novels. Stephen Epstein, translator of The Wandering by Intan Paramaditha, and Stephen Snyder, translator of The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa will discuss their work as professional translators of novels in Asian languages. Epstein, Director of the Asian Languages and Cultures Programme at Victoria University in Wellington has translated multiple novels from Korean and Indonesian to English.