When Italian playwright/performer Dario Fo gave his Nobel Prize lecture in Stockholm in 1997, he distributed a 25-page booklet of drawings to audience members. Instead of following a prepared text, he delivered his speech impromptu, referring to the various sketches. In so doing, he demonstrated the art of improvisation in performance, a device essential to the Commedia dell’arte in Europe and to oral traditions around the world. Guest lecturer Antonio Scuderi will discuss the mechanisms of improvisation intuited by Fo and explicated by scholars of folklore.

Antonio Scuderi is Professor of Italian at Truman State University in Missouri, where he founded the Italian program. His interdisciplinary articles on Italian performance traditions have appeared in leading journals of theatre, folklore, and literary studies, among them Theatre Journal, New Theatre Quarterly, Oral Tradition, and The Modern Language Review. He is the author of Dario Fo and Popular Performance; Dario Fo: Framing, Festival, and the Folkloric Imagination; and co-editor of Dario Fo: Stage, Text and Tradition. He has contributed essays to books, including The Cambridge History of Italian Theatre and The Routledge Companion to Commedia dell’Arte. He has recently edited Remembering the Consummate Playwright/Performer: Essays on Dario Fo, a collection of essays by young scholars.

"Understandings around “race”, religion, and ethnicity in foreign policy:  Ecuador's geopolitics against the Jewish community during World War II" by Maria Amelia Viteri, a visiting scholar at UK.

Dr. Maria Amelia Viteri holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from American University in Washington D.C., with a concentration on Race, Gender and Social Justice, a M.A. in Gender and Development, and a B.A. in Linguistics.  She's currently an Associate Professor and Senior Researcher of Anthropology at Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ), and a Visiting Scholar at University of Kentucky, Departments of Anthropology and Linguistics.  

Welcome reception for undergraduate MCLLC majors.

Professor Byrd is a scholar of nineteenth-century German literature who investigates how literary and print history intersect with the history of visual media. In addition to his first book, A Pedagogy of Observation: Nineteenth-Century Panoramas, German Literature, and Reading Culture (Bucknell UP, 2017), he has published on topics related to the history of books and periodicals, museum studies, environmental humanities, commemoration, and graphic novels. His research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, Max Kade Foundation, Klassik Stiftung Weimar, and the Quadrangle Historical Research Foundation. He is committed to serving the profession. He was elected to be a Director-at-Large of the Goethe Society of North America (2019–22), a member of the Executive Committee of American Friends of Marbach, as well as a member of the MLA Executive Committee (2018–22) and the MLA Delegate Assembly (2018–20). He is on the German Studies Association's Program Committee (19th Century) and represents German on the ADFL Executive Committee (2020–23). He is proud to serve on the Rare Book School's NEH-Global Book History Initiative scholarship program, which helps support non-western and immigrant book history and bibliography as well as applicants from underrepresented groups who want to attend Rare Book School. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. from the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania and a B.A. in History and German from the University of Georgia.

In this talk Dr. Rucker-Chang explores the uses and meanings of "Blackness" in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1945-1992) and its successor states of Serbia and Montenegro. To reflect on the mechanisms of cultural and social incorporation of “Blacks” in Yugoslavia, she highlights how, in defiance to Yugoslav narratives of ethnic and racial inclusion, post-Yugoslav identity has adopted a normative ethnic value of  "whiteness" as an inalienable, exclusive feature of belonging.

Sunnie Rucker-Chang is an Assistant Professor of Slavic and East European Studies and Director of European Studies at University of Cincinnati. Her primary interests lie in cultural and racial formation(s) in the Balkans. She is a co-editor of and contributor to the book Chinese Migrants in Russia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe (Routledge, 2011). Her work has appeared in the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Critical Romani Studies, Journal of Transatlantic Studies, and Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. Her co-authored book, Roma Rights and US Civil Rights: A Transatlantic Approach, is currently in press with Cambridge University Press, and her co-edited volume Balkan Migrants: to, from, and in the Balkans: Identity, Alterity, and Culture is under contract with Liverpool University Press. For the 2019-2020 academic year Sunnie will work on her monograph focusing on racial formations and Blackness in Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav space for which she has been awarded an American Association of University Women Postdoctoral Research Leave Fellowship.

Sponsored by the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Department of African American and Africana Studies, Department of History, International Studies, Department of Anthropology and the College of Arts and Sciences.

Dr. Leni Ribiero Leite lecture "Minorities and Their Contested Narratives in Brazil: Teaching for Inclusion" as part of the Year of Equity series.