Colloquia and Conferences | Simpson Center for the Humanities

Panelists at the Activist Poetics Conference

Conferences include speaker series, international research, and working conferences, and are selected for support based on their crossdisciplinary and interdisciplinary focus. To receive updates when we are open to accepting proposals, subscribe to our newsletter.

Sound and Images still

Sound and Images: Video Essay Workshop

This two-day weekend workshop enabled twenty cinema and media scholars from the three UW campuses to experiment using moving-image media as a mode of scholarly rhetoric

Digital Humanities

Photo of an Indigenous woman with her arm raised chanting at a rally in front of other women

Plurifeminisms Across Abya Yala: “Art-Law” Dialogues, Scholarship, and Activism

This symposium focuses on contemporary Andean feminisms, particularly the “art-law” collaborations that have been a component of many struggles for transformation in the region.

American Indian and Indigenous Studies

Gender and Sexuality Studies

Jacob Lawrence Art Gallery smudged ink on what paper art installation

Colloquium on Transcultural Approaches to Europe

This colloquium advances crucial conversations on world language and literature through an interdisciplinary speaker series focused on issues of race, identity, colonialism, and migration within a broad European context.

Comparative Literature, Cinema & Media

Identity and Culture

Illustration of a family tree of "Old Word Language Families"

Studies in the History of the English Language Conference

Language and Literature

Literary Studies

Illustration of continents made out of books

Global Literary Studies

Language and Literature

Literary Studies

Feminist Media Histories

Feminist Media Histories Workshop

Comparative Literature, Cinema & Media

Gender and Sexuality Studies

Close-up of the Slavic branch of a languages family tree

29th Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics Annual Meeting

Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics offers a unique focus on the theoretical approaches to the study of Slavic languages.

Language and Literature

&Now Keynote Speakers

&Now Festival of Innovative Writing: Points of Convergence

&Now is a biennial literary festival known for presenting innovative writing, thinking about writing, and interdisciplinary explorations such as new poetics, performances, narrative, critical, electronic, and multimedia projects.

Creative Writing

Performing Arts

Sound waves in the shape of the Seattle city skyline

The Shifting Landscape of Public Communication

Digital Humanities

Painting of a large tree in the countryside named Childe Harold's Pilgrimage by Joseph Mallord William Turner.

Historical Poetics Symposium

birds-eye view of the Suzallo and Allen Libraries with the brick-laid quad in the middle. It is a sunny day morning with light clouds in the sky.

Faculty Retirement Seminar

The purpose of this seminar is to provide faculty with a structured setting to reflect, talk about what experiences may be available in retirement, and explore the steps needed to ensure those experiences will be positive.

Higher Education

Identity and Culture

Medieval musical score

Performing Lyric Cultures, Visible and Invisible

Old black and white photograph from the Yale Peruvian Expedition of people standing in front of a building

Ethics, Settler Colonialism, and Indigeneity in the History of the Human Sciences

American Indian and Indigenous Studies

Excerpt from a 13th century letter using Classical Chinese

Modality in Classical Chinese

Asian Languages & Literature

Two people look at a museum exhibit.

Curating in Conversation

Six inset images of different people wearing wings as facial accents.

Bugs and Beasts Before the Law

Salvidor Dali's The American Dream shows caricatures of people and objects representing the United States.

Neoliberalism and the (Dis)integration of the Political

Close-up of "Golden Legend," an engraving of angels in various poses designed by Edward Burne-Jones and wood-engraved by W.H. Hooper.

A Digitally-Networked International Conference on Ecology and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Studies

UW will be part of a pioneering consortium of universities that works to addresses the mutual influences of science, religion, and art at the birth of what we now call the Anthropocene.

Still image from Giselle.

Re-envisioning Giselle

Drawing of three dinosaurs, one red, one white, and one blue.

Politics and Discourse of Fifth Columns in Eurasia

Political Science

Birthday Canyon, Greenland Ice Sheet, James Balog

Anthropocene Film Salon

The Anthropocene Film Series catalyzes transdisciplinary conversations about our current social-ecological moment, with a view to generating a vibrant dialogue between UW environmental scientists and humanists and humanistic social scientists.

Environmental Humanities

Still images of from Intersection video essay by Catherine Grant

Sound and Images: Video Essay Workshop

Comparative Literature, Cinema & Media

A person in a red shirt dances while surrounded by other people.

Improvisational Crossings: Social Dance as Interdisciplinary Intervention

Three women sit or stand near a building's doorway with colorful laundry hanging around them.

Poetics of Subaltern Life-Worlds: New Research, New Imaginaries of Informal Economies in Contemporary India

Public Scholarship

Excerpt from the Jain manuscript "Unhappy Yaśodhara does his duty"

Memory Construction and Emotion in India, Past and Present

Asian Languages & Literature

International Comic Arts Forum

Comparative Literature, Cinema & Media

Cultural Studies

Language and Literature

Sign for the Infectious Diseases Institute headquarters in Kampala, Uganda

Humanistic Perspectives on Global Health Partnerships

Health Humanities

Stacks of books at a book fair

Teaching World Literature

Comparative Literature, Cinema & Media

Language and Literature

Literary Studies

Artwork featuring a distorted dictionary page

Affect & Audience in the Digital Age: Translational Poetics

This symposium investigates contemporary scholarly, aesthetic, and activist projects that engage the processes and thematics of translation, exploring translational crossings that move from analog to digital, notation to embodiment, and one interface to another.

Digital Humanities

Translation Studies

A black and white photo of a man holding a sign written in Dutch that reads Refugees Welcome in Enschede

Immigration, Toleration, and Human Rights

Lighthouse raising at Iwaki, Fukushima Prefecture, after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami

Socially Engaged Art in Japan

A collage by Alexis Pauline Gumbs in honor of Audre Lorde consisting of images of flowers, a typewriter, envelopes and a black and white image of Audre Lorde.

Affect & Audience in the Digital Age: Activist Poetics

This symposium examines notions of activist poiesis and activist poetics to investigate the intersections between digital activism, contemporary experimental writing and performance, and new media practices.

Digital Humanities

Performing Arts

Yellow, pink, and red photos of Roman bust and an eye with chromatic aberration

Feminism and Classics

Gender and Sexuality Studies

The Intellectual Chimera of South Asia

Hebrew alphabet blocks

Hebrew and the Humanities

Identity and Culture

Translation Studies

Sheet music next to a portrait of William Shakespeare

Shakespeare, Music, and Memory

Performing Arts

Engraving of a passage from Roman author Virtruvius, featuring the philosopher Aristippus

The Roles of Fiction in Early Modern Philosophy

ArtTalk—Conversations with Northwest Native Art

This symposium will feature artists and scholars from the U.S. and Canada and highlight current research in the field of Northwest Coast art history.

American Indian and Indigenous Studies

Bird's eye view of the Tongass National Forest

The Cascadia Seminar: Ethnographic Adventures in Medical Anthropology

Medical Sciences

A classic calligraphic expression of the bismillah or the verse that opens the Qur’an and every chapter with the prayer for mercy and compassion

Islam and Forgiveness: Reflections on Justice and Conflict Resolution in Muslim Contexts

Cultural Studies

A bouquet of flowers sits at the base of a dark wall with names etched in white.

Access to Information as a Human Right

A team from the University of Washington Center for Human Rights has gathered evidence of crimes against humanity in rural Salvadoran communities, sharing this with the broader public through empirical research and digital storytelling.

Peace, Violence, and Security

Image of a sound wave.

Mediating Difference: Sights and Sounds

Still image from the film Leviathan in which seagulls fill the air.

Ethnographic Aesthetics: Image, Sound, Word

Comparative Literature, Cinema & Media

Close-up of the page of a book with a circuit board pattern overlaid on top of it

Histories and Futures of the Book

Digital Humanities

Literary Studies

A marginal illustration of a person and horse ploughing of the fields, from the medieval manuscript the Luttrell Psalter

International Piers Plowman Society Conference

Slavic Linguistics Society Conference

Convergence on Poetics

Creative Writing

Five people walk by each other, blurred by their motion while one person is still looking at her reflection in a bank of monitors.

Surveillance & Privacy: Art, Law, and Social Practice

Black and white photo of a Javanese outrigger canoe

Politics of Story Telling in Island Imperial Formations

Artwork of scholar and activist Angela Davis with the words "Power to the People" around her head and "Power & Equality" on the bottom

African American Political Thought: Past and Present

This conference brings together nationally recognized scholars from political science, philosophy, English, history, and Black studies to reflect on historical meaning and contemporary significance of African American political thought.

American Ethnic Studies

Political Science

A sculptural installation by Alicia Martin at Casa de America, Madrid, of a wave made of thousands of books falling from a second-story window to the ground.

Scale and Value: New and Digital Approaches to Literary History

Digital Humanities

Pixel art of four yellow and purple hearts.

Affect & Audience in the Digital Age

This one-day symposium explores emergent modes of creative public scholarship, especially scholarly, pedagogical, curatorial, and creative practices that attend to the digitally mediated character of contemporary poetry.

Digital Humanities

Poster for "Spaces of Possibility: Korea and Japan, In, Between, and Beyond the Nation," hosted on 21-23 September 2012

Spaces of Possibility: Korea and Japan, In, Between, and Beyond the Nation

Cultural Studies

Political Science

Pencil sketch of a junkyard by Shaun Roberts.

The Future of the Environmental Humanities: Research, Pedagogies, Institutions, and Publics

Environmental Humanities

Public Scholarship

Photo of Wu Mali art installation called Secret Garden in which a flower garden rises from a path formed by two tall rock walls.

New Geographies of Feminist Art: China, Asia, and the World

Close-up image of water.

Transatlantic Dialogues on the Environment

Environmental Humanities

Jean François Porchez

Letters from France: Jean François Porchez on Culture and Identity in Type Design

French & Italian Studies

Rethinking Marxism Conference: Stranger Economies

Close up image of a computer screen showing a coding language.

Information Ethics and Policy: Intellectual Property, Privacy, and Freedom of Speech

Photograph of Carolee Schneemann naked drawing on a room-sized paper and attached to a swing.

Carolee Schneemann

Welcome figure and canoe positioned in Burke Museum's Northwest Native Art gallery.

A Curatorial Colloquium on the Reinstallation of Permanent Galleries of Native American Art: Working with Artists and Communities

American Indian and Indigenous Studies

group canoing on the coast

Indigenous Borderlands in North America: Borders, Crossings, Histories, and Futures

Environmental Humanities

ASAP/14 Arts of Fugitivity

Organized collaboratively by faculty in the UW School of Drama and the UW Bothell MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics, ASAP/14 will take place October 4-7, 2023 on UW’s Seattle and Bothell campuses.

Creative Writing

Cultural Studies

Interdisciplinary Research

Literary Studies

Performance Studies

Jack O'Dell

Reckoning with the Black Radical Tradition: A Conference in Honor of Jack O'Dell

On January 13, 2024, the Harry Bridges Center and the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest host activists, scholars, and others to present and discuss the Black Radical Tradition in honor of Jack O’Dell’s life and work.

Miguel Ballumbrosio performing Afro-Peruvian zapateo with UW students, December 7, 2022

Seattle Participatory Arts Network

This project is part of a larger effort to create functional structures that support interdisciplinary and campus-community collaborations through participatory arts at the University of Washington.

Cultural Studies

Black and White illustration of steampunk spiders and other creatures

Political Software: Mapping Digital Worlds From Below

Digital Humanities

Science & Technology Studies

An emu's face against a green background

EVENT24 Seattle Hub

Environmental Humanities

Black and white page graphic of motion picture camera with name of film festival

From Film Festivals to Songbooks: A Collector's Assemblage of Indian Cinema

Grandfather clock on rocky surface of alien planet

Giant Leaps for Humankind: Outer Space & Intergenerational Ethics

abstract background texture on rusty zinc

Transnational Feminisms and Categories of Sexual Violence

Cultural Studies

Gender and Sexuality Studies

Peace, Violence, and Security

A figure sitting in water holds a fish inside of a net. The water is reflecting the sun

Grounding Relations: Indigenous Political Ecologies & Environmental Humanities

American Indian and Indigenous Studies

Environmental Humanities

Passages – Tracing Routes to the Future: A Symposium of Northwest Native Art

American Indian and Indigenous Studies

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