Axinn Center for the Humanities

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.

Participants in the Axinn Center for the Humanities-sponsored Faculty Research Seminar from 2021-22, titled “What is Human?,” will discuss the theme of their seminar and present on the scholarly projects they pursued and completed. Seminar participants will include James Berg (ENGL), Carrie Anderson (HARC), Kristin Bright (ANTH), Justin Doran (RELI), Irina Feldman (SPAN), and Linsey Sainte-Claire (FREN).

Appetizers and refreshments will be served.

In this hour-long session, Christopher Schaberg will share some of his experiences with students focusing on collaborative public-facing writing, and getting this sort of work published. Schaberg will offer insights and guidance for instructors who want to experiment with this type of work, including styles the writing can take and outlets where such pieces can be pitched.

Register here.

“Nothing is more intimate than your body in the world” – Alice Randall

NY Times bestselling author & activist Alice Randall joins artist & Middlebury scholar-in-residence Carolyn Finney for a conversation where they give up the “t” on the intimate experience of being a black body on a green and imperiled planet. 

Join them as they go off the beaten path to dig into self-care, allyship, Black possibility and the art of living. 

What would a Black Walden Pond look like? 

2021 Contemporary Liberal Arts Teaching Series: In this workshop by the Axinn Center for the Humanities’ Public Humanities Labs Initiative, faculty will discuss the Middlebury resources available to prepare and teach a public humanities lab or class this spring or in the future. Presentations and panelists include Marissa Brown from Brown University’s Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, The Vermont Folk Life Center, Rebekah Irwin for Special Collections, Kathy Morse for MiddData, Amy Collier for DLINQ, and Diane Munroe for Community Engagement.

With guest speaker Zakiyyah Iman Jackson

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World, published by NYU Press in 2020 as part of their Sexual Cultures series. She is at work on a second book, tentatively entitled Obscure Light: Blackness and the Derangement of Sex-Gender. She has published numerous articles in Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, Feminist Studies, South Atlantic Quarterly, and others.

Please join us for a Zoom talk with Dr. Nell Irvin Painter.

The Axinn Center for the Humanities presents its inaugural lecture by Emily Bernard: “Black is the Body: Writing about Race in America”

Racial identity is a construction. But just because it is a fiction does not make it untrue. In this talk, Emily Bernard  discusses the complex and central role of storytelling as a source of power, meaning, and beauty in her life as a writer, reader, and scholar of African American experience.