The English Department’s 2026-27 speaker series, Circulations, features scholars working in literary and film studies whose work centers transnational contact and global circulation. The series is funded through the generosity of the Russel B. Nye endowment. Read more about our fall 2026 speakers below.
Nasser Mufti (University of Illinois, Chicago)
"Eric Williams and the Dialectics of Postcolonial Enlightenment”
In this talk, Mufti reads Eric Williams’s long-neglected British Historians and the West Indies (1964) as a counterpoint to the story of Victorian modernity that has been foundational to literary studies. Written at the dawn of Trinidad and Tobago’s independence, British Historians surveys a range of Victorian historians and critics to produce a theory and history of nationalism that centers nineteenth century race-thinking and historicism. But rather than the familiar story of progress that we usually associate with Victorian culture, Williams recasts the Victorians as preoccupied with the tendency for stagnation and the regressive quality of for liberal incrementalism. These Victorian lessons, he argued, were crucial for postcolonial thought and confronting the new regime of neocolonialism.
Tanya Agathocleous and Janet Neary (Hunter, CUNY
"Misalliance: Abolition, Race-Caste Comparison, and the Rise of Afro-Asian Solidarity”
Co-authors Janet Neary and Tanya Agathocleous will discuss their forthcoming book, Misalliance: Abolition, Race-Caste Comparison, and the Rise of Afro-Asian Solidarity, and the process of collaborating and forging connections across genre, period, and field. Misalliance traces what they call Afro-Asian cross-referencing from the rise of abolitionism in the U.S. and the birth of the anti-caste movement in India in the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, when explicit Afro-Asian dialogues and gestures of solidarity emerged in the form of conferences and experimental periodicals. The study, divided into three parts, examines a wide range of genres—including periodicals, pamphlets, novels, poetry, essays, conference proceedings, and case law—to chart a literary history of antiracist, anti-caste, and anti-imperial organizing based in transnational comparison that spans continents and decades.
Kaneesha Parsard (The University of Chicago)
"Desiring Freedom: Counter-Imaginaries of Work, Sex, and Family after West Indian Emancipation”
This talk looks to British West Indian emancipation (1834/8) and its legacies for conflicting discourses on and philosophies of freedom. The print culture of emancipation reveals that colonial administrators and planters envisioned freedom as a training ground by which the formerly enslaved would come to manage their own affairs through wage labor and domestic life, and indentured labor from India and China arriving at roughly mid-century would follow suit. So, however preferable freedom was to the condition of bondage, it arrived as another kind of obligation. Yet, the literature and visual culture of the long century after emancipation reveals counter-imaginaries by which everyday West Indians were imagined to flout the values of liberal freedom, and instead embraced freedom as desire. In conversation with philosophies of freedom from the ancients to Black and Caribbean studies, and examining literature from Harriet Martineau to V. S. Naipaul, Parsard theorizes desirous freedom as amorousness, the drive to hustle and experiment rather than produce, and the condition of reexamining the very terms of freedom.
