Co-Sponsored Events

Speaker Series: Aminatta Forna on "The Power of Storytelling"

The Writers Guild at Bloomington
November 15th|7:00 pm| Monroe County Public Library Auditorium

Award-winning author of several novels and the essay collection, The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion

Join the Writers Guild for a special event with celebrated author, Aminatta Forna when she presents “The Power of Storytelling” at the Monroe County Public Library Auditorium. Book sales/book signing/and reception to take place next door at the Monroe County History Center after the talk.

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Concrete Witness: Poetry, Migration, and Book Arts

October 23rd|4:00 - 5.30 pm|Cook Center, Maxwell Hall, IUB

Please join us for a reading and conversation with Divya Victor and Aaron Cohick. They will be reading from and sharing more about their collaborative work CURB, a double-sided accordion book with poems by Divya Victor and design and printing by Aaron Cohick. CURB is a series of poems documenting the assaults and murders of Indian-Americans and Indian immigrants in public spaces in the United States. Please share this event with friends, colleagues, students, and others who might be interested.

About the Speakers:

Divya Victor is a Tamil-American poet, essayist, and educator. She is the author of CURB (Nightboat Books), which won the 2022 PEN America Open Book Award and the 2022 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. She is an Associate Professor of English and Writing at Michigan State University and is the Director of the Creative Writing Program.

Aaron Cohick is a letterpress printer/artist/publisher based in Louisville, KY. His work focuses on the intersection of text, image, community, and collaboration. He is the founder and proprietor of the NewLights Press, and from 2010 - 2023 he was also the Printer of The Press at Colorado College. Aaron's workis held in public and private collections in the US, the UK, New Zealand, and Australia.

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2025 Maize Gathering

Hosted by IUB Anthropology

Maize is a protagonist that makes its appearance all across our contemporary world. We engage with it daily – through breakfast cereals, the corn-based coating on medicines, or the corn syrup in our desserts. Food sovereignty movements across Turtle Island argue that how we engage with maize is a choice that shapes our societies. This event seeks to bring together different perspectives on maize, from Indiana’s “corn belt”, to food sovereignty and seedkeeping movements in Tlaxcala, Mexico, and Greece, through three events Oct. 17th-18th. 

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Dr. Johanna Fernández: Redbud Books

Hosted by Redbud Books

Dr. Fernández will have an evening conversation with History PhD candidate Manuel Martinez Alvarenga to discuss “How to Make Latinx History a Common Good.”

October 15th,
7:30-9pm
Redbud Books
408 W Kirkwood Ave, Bloomington, IN 47404

Re-Encuentros

 Re-encuentros: Decolonial Dialogues on   Latin America
 A Hispanic Heritage Month Film +       Lecture

 Hosted by The Department of History

Join us for a celebration of Latin America's stories, histories, and voices. Each  Saturday evening features a powerful feature-length film, a short lecture from a graduate scholar or recent Ph.D. graduate, and an open discussion where everyone is welcome to share their thoughts.

Meet the Author: Faye Gleisser

Hosted by The College Arts + Humanities Institute
March 5, 2025
4:00pm

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Dr. Liv Furman

To be rescheduled due to weather advisory

Friday, Sept. 27, 2024, 12:00pm
Maple Room, Indiana Memorial Union

In this artist talk, Dr. Liv Furman explores the connections between their embodied praxis of quilt-making, archiving, and storytelling, within the context of family, identity, and ancestral memory. By bringing together collage-making, auto-ethnographic storytelling, and quilt documentation, Dr. Furman creates a transdisciplinary dialogue. This talk will encourage you to reflect on identity-informed, arts-based methodologies and their potential for liberation in teaching, learning, and research.

Olivia "Liv" Furman, Ph.D.  (they/them) is a Black non-binary womanist artist, educator, and researcher currently working on the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg the Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi peoples at Michigan State University. Their work currently explores the significance of engaging culturally informed literacies of dreaming, journaling, storytelling, and the arts within conceptualizations and practice of liberatory teaching, learning, and research. Their primary mediums include multimedia and digital collage, ceramics, quilting, and the written and spoken word. Liv is also an avid gardener, skater, singer, musician, and yoga apprentice. Liv is currently a Post-Doctoral scholar in the Department of African American and African Studies, and Assistant Project Director of the Quilt Index’s Black Diaspora Quilt History Project at Michigan State University.

Dr. Ada Cheng

"Loving Myself with/in a Thousand Cuts"

Sponsored by the Asian American Studies Program, Department of American Studies, and the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.

September 30, 2024, 4:30-6:00pm
Bridgwaters Lounge, Neal Marshall Black Culture Center

Dr. Ada Cheng, 2024 Illinois Humanities Public Humanities Award Honoree, is a sociologist-turned artist, community builder, and changemaker. This storytelling performance, exploring the linkages of sexual assault, racialized misogyny, anti-Asian racism, and the complexity of being a queer Asian woman, will show how stories are a form of feminist theorizing and can be a powerful instrument for popular education, critical engagement and community-building. The performance will be about 50 minutes, followed by a dialogue facilitated by Dr. Cheng. Save the date and spread the word!

Dr. Benjamin Balthasar

"Diasporism Is 21st Century Communism: The US Jewish Left and Internationalism"

Organized by the Department of American Studies and co-sponsored by the Department of English and the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society. 

Thursday, Sept. 26, 2024, 11:00 am
Walnut Room, Indiana Memorial Union

Benjamin Balthaser is an associate professor of multi-ethnic US literature at Indiana University South Bend. He is the author of Anti-Imperialism Modernism: Race and Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War from University of Michigan Press, and Dedication, a personal history of growing up in a Jewish "red diaper" family from Partisan Press.