Interseminars Event Series
SPRING 2023 EVENTS
Through the Mellon-funded Interseminars Initiative, faculty and graduate students collaborate in the design of cross-departmental and cross-college courses, with funding for key aspects of that work: co-curricular programming, shared research experiences, and fellowship support for students.
The inaugural project is themed “Imagining Otherwise: Speculation in the Americas,” and includes three faculty conveners and nine graduate student fellows. Visit this space for Interseminars-related programming information. Events listed below are free and open to the public!
Tues., February 7, 7:30 p.m. Central

“Critical Futures: Re-Imagining Academia’s Relevance”
Futurity, or the intentional imagining and materializing of liberated futures—where freedom from oppression, trauma, violence, and discrimination are realized—inspires this talk. Dr. Amber Johnson (Communication, Saint Louis University) will discuss their methods for conjuring the world and communities in which we want to live and thrive. This talk will empower scholars from various disciplines to imagine alternatives to the political, social, academic, and oppressive present via an imaginative approach to scholarship and publishing
Location: Levis Faculty Center, Room 300
Tues., April 4, 7:30 p.m. Central

“Unwriting the Colonial Anthropocene”
Macarena Gómez-Barris (Modern Culture and Media, Brown University) is a writer and scholar with a focus on the decolonial environmental humanities, authoritarianism and extractivism, queer Latine epistemes, media environments, cultural theory and artistic practice. She is author of four books, including The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Duke University Press, 2017), which examines five scenes of ruinous extractive capitalism, and Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (UC Press 2018), a text of critical hope about the role of submerged art and solidarity in troubled times. She is also author of Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (2009), and co-editor with Herman Gray of Towards a Sociology of a Trace (2010).
Location: Levis Faculty Center, Room 300
Tues., April 11, 7:30 p.m. Central

David Shrobe creates multi-layered portraits and assemblage paintings made in part from everyday materials that he finds in multiple geographies, and especially from around his familial home. He disassembles furniture, separating wood from fabric and recombines them as supports for collage, painting, and drawing. Through these various modes of production his work brings notions of identity, history, and memory into question, while challenging conventions of classical portraiture. Shrobe produces new narratives, fragmented and nonlinear, that feel intimate and personal without being anchored to a specific time or place.
Location: Levis Faculty Center, Room 208
VIDEOS
Did you miss an event? When available, videos of past Interseminars events will be posted here.