The Department of French, Hispanic and Italian Studies (FHIS) invites you to attend the FHIS Research Seminar—an opportunity to delve into the latest research surrounding the languages, literatures, and cultures of the Romance language-speaking world. The seminar will feature presentations from guest speakers, faculty members, and graduate students. Enjoy coffee, tea, and light snacks while you engage with our vibrant academic community. Please RSVP in advance.
September 19, 2024 *** Completed ***
Re-Framing Disaster Narratives around Haiti
Presented by Cécile Accilien, University of Maryland
Date: September 19, 2024 (Thursday)
Time: 4:00-6:00 PM
Location: Buchanan Tower, Room 726
About the talk:
Dr. Accilien’s talk will delve into the complexity around simplistic disaster narratives surrounding Haiti by providing historical and cultural context. It will further consider how ensekirite in its various forms (physical, economic, emotional, psychological and structural), in addition to colorism, gender, class prejudice and ineffective aid, help maintain narratives of crisis and a failed state. The talk is part of UBC FHIS Research Seminar Series and will be followed by a conversation with Dr. Victoriano-Martinez, whose research focuses on the Dominican Republic.
About the presenter:
Cécile Accilien is Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Maryland. Her areas of study are Francophone African and Caribbean Literature and Cultures, Gender & Sexuality Studies and Film & Media Studies. She has co-written and co-edited several books, including Teaching Haiti: Strategies for Creating New Narratives, The Antiracism World Language Classroom and English-Haitian Creole Phrasebook. She recently published Bay lodyans: Haitian Popular Film Culture with SUNY Press. Since 2019, she has been serving as chair of the editorial board for Women, Gender and Families of Color. She currently serves as president of the Haitian Studies Association. She has written for Truthout and Latin American Commentator. She is co-founder (with Jessica Adams) of Soley Consulting, LLC.
This event is co-organized by the CMS Circulation: Africa and its Diasporas Research Group and the UBC Latin American Landscape Cluster.
September 25, 2024 *** Completed ***
Latinx-Canadian Cinema & the NFB (with Surprise Performance!)
Presented by Camilo Martín-Florez, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, FHIS
Date: September 25, 2024 (Wednesday)
Time: 3:00-4:30 PM
Location: Buchanan Tower, Room 726
About the talk:
Camilo Martín-Florez is a cinematographer, artist and curator with the National Film Board of Canada. Since its inception in 1939, the NFB has played a crucial role in modernizing Canada’s national cinema(s). Over the last eight decades, the NFB has produced social-documentary and experimental animated films (or, more specifically, non-mainstream fiction films or series) that have won awards across the globe. More importantly, from its earliest days the NFB has been keen on producing films about Indigenous Peoples, women, youth, Black people, Asians, 2SLGBTQI+ communities, or Latin-Americans, outstripping most (if not all) national cinemas around the world.
In the first part of the event, Camilo will introduce the different phases that Latinx-Canadian cinema has undergone at the NFB in its effort to promote the history, politics and arts/culture of this underrepresented Canadian community. The second part of the event will feature Camilo as a cinematographer (with a surprise guest, TBC).
October 9, 2024 *** Completed ***
Rewriting the History of the Enlightenment—or what happens when good intentions matter more than good evidence
Presented by Dr. Joël Castonguay-Bélanger (Associate Professor of French), FHIS
Respondent: Mary Cook (PhD Student of French), FHIS
Date: October 9, 2024 (Wednesday)
Time: 3:00-4:30 PM
Location: Buchanan Tower, Room 726
About the talk:
In The Dawn of Everything (2021), David Graeber and David Wengrow propose a bold reexamination of humanity's history, challenging the conventional narrative surrounding the origins of social inequality. Central to their thesis is the idea that 18th-century Enlightenment philosophers were significantly influenced by an "indigenous critique" arising in North America—a perspective that, they argue, has been largely overlooked by mainstream Enlightenment historiography. While their work has sparked objections from critics and historians on several fronts, it has also garnered considerable enthusiasm, reigniting public debate about 18th-century literature and intellectual history. In this talk, Joël Castonguay-Bélanger will discuss these polarized reactions and their implications for understanding the intellectual climate of our time.
October 23, 2024 *** Completed ***
Quand son corps de brise : Enjeux poétiques de la rémission
Presented by Dr. Vincent Gélinas-Lemaire (Associate Professor of French), FHIS
Respondent: Katie Marchant (MA Student of French), FHIS
Date: October 23, 2024 (Wednesday)
Time: 3:00-4:30 PM
Location: Buchanan Tower, Room 726
About the talk:
What role can writing play in facing a critical wound or illness? We will observe how three authors—Philippe Lançon, Charlotte Biron et Hervé Guibert—weave testimony, fiction, rage, and humour to recount their long medical journeys, with particular attention for their relationship to time. Their poetic choices will be shown to echo their hope of remission, be it certain, probable, or dashed.
While the presentation will be in French, the response and the Q&A will be in English.
November 7, 2024
Chinese Migrants’ Food Enterpreneurship and Italians’ Culinary Tourism, 1962-2020
Presented by Dr. Gaoheng Zhang (Associate Professor of Italian), FHIS
Respondent: Dr. Anna Casas Aguilar (Associate Professor of Spanish), FHIS
Date: November 7, 2024 (Thursday)
Time: 3:00-4:30 PM
Location: Buchanan Tower, Room 726
About the talk:
This presentation draws from my forthcoming book – Italian Dumplings and Chinese Pizzas: Transcultural Food Mobilities – to be published with Fordham University Press in 2025. During the 1980s, Chinese cuisine became the first non-European food widely available in Italy thanks to the widespread presence of Chinese eateries. Only American fast food, which established itself in Italy around the same time, enjoyed comparable popularity as a destination for Italians’ culinary tourism. Fast-forwarding to the late 2010s, local populations viewed Milan’s vibrant Chinese foodscape as enhancing the fashion capital’s cosmopolitanism. The larger context of this phenomenon is mass immigration to Italy which began in the 1980s, when Italy rapidly changed from an emigrant-sending to an immigrant-receiving country. Since then, the Chinese have remained the fourth largest migrant group in numbers.
In this talk, I first provide a historical overview of Chinese migrant-managed food entrepreneurship in Italy, using the 2003 SARS outbreak and the Covid-19 pandemic as two watershed moments. Then I analyze the depictions of Chinese food in Italy’s largest-circulating newspaper, Corriere della Sera, from the 1960s to the present day, showing how Italians’ Chinese culinary tourism in Milan interacted with Chinese American food culture in various stimulating ways. I want to understand why Chinese migrants’ cuisine was turned into “ethnic food” even when this food has had a longstanding and substantial presence within contemporary Italy’s foodscape.
View the Cultural Mobilities Between Italy and China website for supplementary materials to this talk.
Other topics to be announced. Stay tuned!
If you have questions, please contact Dr. Katharina Piechocki (katharina.piechocki@ubc.ca).
UBC Vancouver is situated on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam) People.
