Telling Stories, Telling Silences: Life-writing, Censorship, and Voice

June 12-13, 2023 听| Connolly House听| This event is invitation only

涩里番下载 strongly encourages conference participants to receive the COVID-19 vaccination before attending events on campus.
picture

Telling Stories, Telling Silences: Life-writing, Censorship, and Voice" is a 1.5-day workshop with scholars from History, English, Religious Studies, and other disciplines. We will focus on the tension between storytelling and silence in four kinds of stories: stories we tell about ourselves; stories we tell about others; storiesothers tell about themselves; stories others tell about others. This workshop aims to understand the creative and epistemological differences in how different disciplines confrontsilence and compose stories.

Schedule and Registration

Monday, June 12, 2023 | Connolly House听| By Invitation

3:00 PM听听

Introductions

3:30-4:45 PM

Session 1: Endings and the structure of stories

5:00-6:15 PM

Session 2: Grappling with scale

7:00 PM

Dinner


Tuesday, June 13, 2023 | Connolly House听| By Invitation

9:00-10:15 AM

Session 3: Existential and epistemological questions

10:30 AM-12:15 PM

Session 4: Ethical dilemmas听

12:30 PM

Lunch

1:30-3:10 PM

Session 5: Inherited genres

3:15 PM

Break

3:30 PM

Closing discussion

5:00 PM听听

Drinks


Speakers

Allison Adair

Originally from central Pennsylvania, Allison Adair is a graduate of the Iowa Writers鈥 Workshop. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Arts & Letters, Best American Poetry, Best New听Poets, Kenyon Review Online, North American Review, and ZYZZYVA, among other journals. Recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Florida Review Editors鈥 Award, the Orlando Prize, and first place in Mid-American Review鈥檚 Fineline Competition, Adair lives in Boston, where she teaches at 涩里番下载 and GrubStreet.


Ana Diaz Burgos

Ana Mar铆a D铆az Burgos is an associate professor of Hispanic Studies at Oberlin College and specializes in Spanish and Spanish American early modern literature and culture with an emphasis on gender studies and social history. Her research focuses on the impact of institutional practices and legal systems on the creation of female subjectivities in Hispanic territories. Her work has appeared in a variety of edited volumes and academic journals. Her book Tr谩fico de saberes: Agencia femenina, hechicer铆a e inquisici贸n en Cartagena de Indias 1610-1614 (Iberoamericana-Vervuert 2020) studies the first inquisitorial prosecution of female sorcery in early seventeenth-century Cartagena de Indias.


Arianne Chernock

Arianne Chernock is a Professor of History and Associate Dean of the Faculty for the Social Sciences at Boston University. She is the author of two books, Men and the Making of Modern British Feminism (2010) and The Right to Rule and the Rights of Women: Queen Victoria and the Women's Movement (2019). She also enjoys writing shorter pieces for a number of print and media outlets.


Elizabeth Graver

Elizabeth Graver鈥檚 fifth novel, Kantika, was inspired by her grandmother, Rebecca n茅e Cohen Baruch Levy, who was born into a Sephardic Jewish family in Istanbul and whose tumultuous and shape-shifting life journey took her to Spain, Cuba and finally New York. Kantika is due out in April 2023 from Metropolitan Books, with German and Turkish editions also forthcoming. Elizabeth鈥檚 fourth novel, The End of the Point, was long-listed for the 2013 National Book Award. Her other novels are Awake, The Honey Thief, and Unravelling. Her story collection, Have You Seen Me?, won the 1991 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and Best American Essays. The mother of two young adult daughters, she teaches at 涩里番下载.


Erin Goodman

Erin Goodman directs the visiting scholars and fellows program at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, a position she has held since 2021. Previously, she was associate director for academic programs at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (2014鈥2018). In addition to her 鈥渄ay job,鈥 Erin is also a professional translator, with much of her recent work focusing on Cuba. She has translated several books and many academic articles in a variety of disciplines and genres, and is also co-editor of three volumes centered on historical and collective memory. From 2019鈥2021 she was the lead translator from Spanish to English for The New York Times Opinion Section.


Gretchen Starr-LeBeau

Gretchen Starr-LeBeau is the Jeanne and George Todd Professor of Religious Studies at Principia College in Elsah, Illinois. She researches and writes about early modern Inquisitions and particularly investigations of Jewish converts to Christianity and their descendants. Her first book, In the Shadow of the Virgin, was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in history, and her most recent book, Seven Myths about the Spanish Inquisition, is forthcoming from Hackett later this summer.


Jonathan Adler

Jonathan Adler is a Professor of Psychology at Olin College of Engineering, outside Boston. He is also a Visiting Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Editor of Personality and Social Psychology Review, and Chief Academic Officer of Health Story Collaborative, a non-profit organization aimed at elevating storytelling in the medical ecosystem. Professor Adler鈥檚 research focuses on the ways in which narrative fosters a sense of identity and supports psychological well-being, especially across the adult lifespan. In the last five years this work has focused on narrative identity development among people with disabilities. Professor Adler鈥檚 research has been covered by The New York Times, National Public Radio, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, Scientific American, The Today Show, and other media outlets. Professor Adler is also a theater director and playwright. His play, Reverse Transcription, co-authored with Jim Petosa, premiered Off-Broadway in July, 2022 at The Atlantic Theater Company鈥檚 Stage 2, produced by PTP/NYC.


Karen Melvin

Karen Melvin is Thomas Hedley Reynolds Professor of History at Bates College, where she is also a member of the Latin American and Latinx Studies Program. She writes about colonial Mexico and global Catholicism, including an ongoing book project about two global charities in New Spain: maintaining a Catholic presence in the Holy Land and redeeming Christian captives from North Africa.


Karin V茅lez

Karin V茅lez is currently teaching History at Macalester College. She is an intellectual/narrative historian by training, specializing in religious encounters in the early modern period (1500-1750). She is obsessed with how myths and other implausible events might resonate more than actual happenings, and feels a personal mission to put the story back in history. Karin teach courses on magic and science; conquest and conversion; pirates, translators and missionaries鈥攁 comparison across categories; and world history course on oceans and 鈥渞umors鈥/fake news. Her research focuses on episodes of the 鈥渕iraculous鈥 or unexpected: animals impacting conversion zones, churches falling on faithful converts, houses flying across oceans, and other moments of bizarre cross-cultural and trans-religious convergence.


Katherine Hill

Katherine Hill is the author of two novels, The Violet Hour (Scribner 2013) and A Short Move, (Ig Publishing 2020), which was a New York Times Editors鈥 Choice. With Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, and Juno Jill Richards, she is also co-author of The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism (Columbia University Press 2020), which won the PROSE Award in Literature from the Association of American Publishers and an Honorable Mention in the MLA Prize for Collaborative, Bibliographical, or Archival Scholarship. Her fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous publications. Katherine is Associate Professor of English at Adelphi University, where she teaches creative writing and literature to undergraduate and MFA students.


Katrina Olds

Katrina Olds is Professor and Chair of History at the University of San Francisco. She studies the history of ideas 鈥榝rom below鈥 by examining how erudition and popular culture overlapped and informed religion and society in the early modern period. Her first monograph, Forging the Past: Invented Histories in Counter-Reformation Spain (Yale, 2015) analyzed a sixteenth-century Spanish Jesuit鈥檚 forged histories and was recognized by the American Catholic Historical Association withthe John Gilmary Shea Prize. She has also written on the authentication of saints鈥 relics in the Counter Reformation; the eclectic methods of Spanish antiquaries; and on relics, saints, and memory in Spain and the Americas.


Manuela Ceballos

A native of Medell铆n, Colombia, Manuela Ceballos studies Islamic and Christian mystical literature in the medieval and early modern Western Mediterranean. She completed her dissertation at Emory University in 2016. She has published articles on mysticism and violence, the historiographical concept of convivencia (the coexistence of Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Islamic Spain), and has a forthcoming article on the hagiographical account of a sixteenth-century Muslim saint of Christian and Jewish ancestry. She regularly teaches "Introduction to the Study of Islam," and other courses that focus on literature, history, and culture in the Muslim West. Before focusing on the study of Islam, Dr. Ceballos earned a B.A in French and Comparative Literature and an M.A. in French from Bryn Mawr College and worked as an English as a Second Language instructor for refugees in Albuquerque, New Mexico.


Min Song

Min Hyoung Song is the Chair of the English Department and Director of the Asian American Studies Program. His most recent book is entitled Climate Lyricism. He is also the author of two other books, The Children of 965: On Writing and Not Writing as an Asian American and Strange Future: Pessimism and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots.


Rachel Nolan

Rachel Nolan is Contributing Editor at Harper鈥檚 Magazine and has written for the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, the New York Times, and the New York Review of Books and for the Salvadoran investigative news outlet El Faro. She is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Boston University. Her first will be published January 2024.


Sean McEnroe

Sean McEnroe is a historian of intellectual and political life in the early modern Atlantic World with a particular interest in the interaction of European and Indigenous worldviews. He has written two books on the subject: From Colony to Nationhood in Mexico and A Troubled Marriage. Sean's current book project treats the circulation of ideas about technology and magic in the nineteenth century. He was educated at UC Berkeley and teaches now at Southern Oregon University.


Sergio Guti茅rrez Negr贸n

Sergio Guti茅rrez Negr贸n is a scholar and writer. His academic research focuses on 19th-century Latin American intellectual history and cultural studies, as well as on 20th-century Mexican and Caribbean literatures. He has recently published articles on literature and ethics, ugliness and liberty, and nineteenth-century conservatism. His scholarly monograph, Mexico, Interrupted: Labor, Idleness, and the Economic Imaginary of Independence, will be published in June 2023 by Vanderbilt University Press. He is author of the novels Los d铆as h谩biles (2020), Dicen que los dormidos (2014), and Palacio (2011), and the short-story collection Preciosos perdedores (2019).


Sylvia Sellers-Garc铆a

Sylvia Sellers-Garc铆a is a historian of colonial Central America and a fiction writer. Her most recent historical work, The Woman on the Windowsill: A Tale of Mystery in Several Parts (Yale U. Press, 2020) bridges the academic and popular history genres. She has published literary fiction for adults (When the Ground Turns in Its Sleep, Riverhead 2008), science fiction for YA readers (The Waning Age, Viking, 2019) and fantasy for middle-grade readers (The Mapmakers Trilogy, Viking, 2014, 2015, 2016).


William B. Taylor

William B. Taylor is Muriel McKevitt Sonne Professor of History, Emeritus, at the University of California, Berkeley. His books on Latin American history include Fugitive Freedom: The Improbable Lives of Two Impostors in Late Colonial Mexico, Theater of a Thousand Wonders: A History of Miraculous Images and Shrines in New Spain, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages, and Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico.

Campus Map and Parking

Parking is available at the nearby Beacon Street and Commonwealth Avenue Garages.

涩里番下载 is also accessible via public transportation (MBTA B Line - 涩里番下载).

Directions, Maps, and Parking

Visitor Parking Information

涩里番下载 strongly encourages conference participants to receive the COVID-19 vaccination before attending events on campus.