Saidiya Hartman’s multi-award-winning work spans the fields of African American literature and cultural history, slavery studies, law and literature, gender studies, and performance studies.
Microseminars

The Simpson Center offers microseminars at the graduate level that reflect its commitments to crossdisciplinary research, digital humanities, and public scholarship. These courses are typically one-credit, credit/no credit, allowing students to fit them into regular departmental coursework. They are frequently structured around the work of a visiting speaker, letting students grow familiar with a speaker's work and deepening the possibility of real exchange while they are here.
Image: Meeting of the Black Embodiments Studio
This microseminar engages deeply with the emergent framework of “trans care,” which models radical strategies and rituals of survival for supporting trans futures.
In conjunction with an upcoming symposium, this microseminar focuses on contemporary plurifeminisms across Abya Yala,* particularly the “art-law” collaborations that have been a component of many feminist struggles for transformation in the region.
In a time of crisis and austerity, what strategies can we use to imagine a safe and thriving future for trans, nonbinary, Two Spirit, intersex, gender-variant, and gender-creative people and communities?
With support from the Mellon Foundation and Social Science Research Council (SSRC), this microseminar is a workshop in the art of writing proposals to fund international dissertation research.
In this microseminar we explore art of the Northwest Coast and how it functions within the political realm of Canada’s Truth and Reconcilation (TRC) Commission and in the face of extractive industries on unceeded territory and the devestation they can bring to Indigenous lands and sovereignty.
This microseminar explores the political importance of art in responding to the violence of dictatorship, war, and extractive economies. It is organized around the spring 2020 visits of four scholar-artists from Puerto Rico and Peru.
Summary
Faculty in area studies or literature and language departments are increasingly asked to organize film series, yet PhD and MA programs rarely prepare graduate students for such endeavors.
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This microseminar asks students to consider the meaning and practice of scholarship as universities become more racially and economically exclusionary than even a decade past.
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This microseminar is for graduate student “residents” of The Black Embodiments Studio, a critical arts writing incubator and public lecture series that queries how definitions of blackness are produced and
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This microseminar is for graduate student residents of The Black Embodiments Studio, a critical arts writing incubator and public lecture series that brings graduate students from a range of disciplines and knowledge-based practices together to query how definitions of
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This microseminar serves as preparation for and engagement with an April 2018 colloquium that brings together six dance/ing scholars for two days of lectures, w
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Students in this seminar will acquire a rigorous background in a concept that informs the fields of new media studies, communication studies, television studies, as well as political philosophy and cultural studies.
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This course surveys the work of comics scholar Ramzi Fawaz, chiefly through a reading of his book The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (NYU Press, 2016) and related work.We will discuss Fawaz’s application of queer theory and utopi
“As a filmmaker, you don’t wait for reality; you call it to the camera.” —Rithy Panh
Summary
Frederick Lawrence will visit the UW in October 2017. We will use this occassion to study normative controversies relating to freedom of speech. Among the questions we consider: On what grounds, if any, should governments and universities restrict speech?