The Academic Minute for 2020.12.07-2020.12.11

The Academic Minute from 12.07 – 12.11

Monday, December 7th
Naminata Diabate – Cornell University
Naked Agency
Naminata Diabate is an associate professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. A native of Côte d’Ivoire in West Africa, Naminata Diabate is a scholar of African and African diaspora studies with an emphasis on questions of sexuality and gender studies. Her solid linguistic expertise in Malinké, French, English, and Spanish translates into a rich and expansive scholarship on how we understand specific forms of embodied agency in the neoliberal present in global Africa. Given the specificity of her discipline, Comparative Literature, Diabate’s many sites of exploration include novels of 20th and 21st centuries, online and social media, pictorial arts, film, journalism, and oral traditions from Africa, black America, Afro-Hispanic America, and the French Antilles.

Tuesday, December 8th
Derrick Spires – Cornell University
Antebellum Social Media
Derrick R. Spires is Associate Professor of English at Cornell University. He specializes in early African American and American print culture, citizenship studies, and African American intellectual history. His first book, The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States (Pennsylvania Press, 2019), won the 2020 Bibliographical Society/St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize and the 2019 M/MLA Book Prize. Spires’s work appears or is forthcoming in African American Review, American Literary History, Early American Literature, and edited collections on early African American print culture, time and American literature, and the colored conventions movement.

Wednesday, December 9th
Daniel Gallagher – Cornell University
Latin Alive!
Daniel B. Gallagher is the Ralph and Jeanne Kanders Senior Lecturer in Latin at Cornell University. Having served as Latin Secretary to Popes Benedict XVI and Francis at the Vatican, he dedicates himself to passing on the language in a “living” way that involves speaking, listening, and writing to enhance reading fluency.  He has offered a wide range of tutorials and workshops at high schools and colleges throughout the United States and abroad and is the translator of Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid into Latin (Commentarii de Inepto Puero).

Thursday, December 10th
Erik Born – Cornell University
WiFi Signal Icon
Erik Born is an Assistant Professor in the Department of German Studies at Cornell University. His work brings insights from contemporary German media theory to bear on diverse historical contexts. With a focus on relations among “old media” and “new media”, Born explores constellations of literature, science, and technology, from manuscripts to print, analog to digital film, and wireless telegraphy to Wi-Fi. He is the author of articles on medieval media theory, early German science fiction, and the media history of cinema and television, as well as translations and book reviews on topics in literature, film, and media studies. Born examines the history of the wireless icon further in this short essay and in his current book project Wireless Futures: Aesthetics, Experiment, Infrastructure.

Friday, December 11th
Andrew Campana – Cornell University
Taking the Video out of Video Games
Andrew Campana is an assistant professor of modern and contemporary Japanese literature in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University. In his current book project on Japanese poetry across media, he explores how poets in the 20^th and 21^st centuries engaged with new technologies, such as cinema, tape recording, the internet, and augmented reality. He is also working on a second project—on the intersections between electronic literature, video games, and disability arts in contemporary Japan—drawing from his experiences as part of the Trope Tank at MIT, a lab dedicated to developing new understandings of computation and literary practice. He has performed and published widely in both English and Japanese as a multimedia poet and translator.