When: Every Monday (except Holidays) during the semester Time: 4:15pm - 5:45pm Where: Room 14N-417 Come by for snacks, and tea with Literature Section friends, instructors, students, etc. What are you reading? What 21L classes are you taking or hoping to take? This event is specifically geared towards undergrads; but open to friends of the community that engage in the literary and humanities at MIT.
Presented by Tamara Chaplin Professor of Modern European History and Lynn M. Martin Professorial Scholar University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Research Associate at Université de Paris Panthéon-Assas Abstract: Historian Tamara Chaplin has spent the last fifteen years researching what it meant to “become lesbian” in twentieth century France. Her book, Becoming Lesbian: A Queer History of Modern France (University of Chicago Press, 2024) argues that this process was inextricable from access to public space and public media. Contradicting the belief that WWII and the rise of Vichy quashed a golden age of lesbian emancipation in France, Becoming Lesbian reveals instead how the subcultural spaces of sapphic desire that emerged in the cabarets of interwar Paris outlasted the war and were instrumental to the politicization of lesbian identity in the decades after May ’68. The individuals implicated in this trajectory revolutionized lesbian life (expanding social access, cultural representation, and legal rights) while making possible new forms of sexual citizenship that have challenged the divisions between public and private that shape contemporary France. In so doing, their stories also contradict dominant understandings of the French past. At a moment when queer lives around the globe are increasingly under attack, join us for a conversation about […]
Join the MIT Global Humanities Initiative (GHI) and Korea University to imagine what STEMAH could be and do and help build the basis for the new STEMAH pillar to add to GHI’s nine big-challenge research-and-action platforms! Once upon a time the study of the natural, human, and social worlds we inhabit belonged to a unified pursuit of knowledge. The modern birthing of sciences and social sciences from the studia humaniora catalyzed the development of sophisticated and highly specialized disciplinary toolboxes that are vital to the functioning of our complex societies and institutions. Yet, in the face of daunting ecological, political, economic, social and biological global challenges we need to continue our bold disciplinary innovation, while also advancing it by recovering the cross-pollination across all knowledge fields. Together we need to prototype knowledge-to-action systems for social transformation that help us build the University of the Future—a space to produce STEMAH research and curricula oriented towards a compass of human flourishing and planetary stewardship, echoing stemma, our “family tree” of human knowledge. Check out our Visual Abstract attached to get a sense of our scope, goals, and resonance with your interests. The conference will be held over two days, in […]
When: Every Monday (except Holidays) during the semester Time: 4:15pm - 5:45pm Where: Room 14N-417 Come by for snacks, and tea with Literature Section friends, instructors, students, etc. What are you reading? What 21L classes are you taking or hoping to take? This event is specifically geared towards undergrads; but open to friends of the community that engage in the literary and humanities at MIT.
Register / Zoom Link: https://mit.zoom.us/meeting/register/QtpO6vZpQ0C08BhaRuFBZw Presented by Devdutt Pattanaik, India’s ‘Chief Belief Officer’ whose unconventional 2009 TED talk radicalized the way the world saw science, myth, and reality Moderated by Professor Wiebke Denecke (MIT, Literature) and students of the Fall 2025 class, 21L.707 Problems in Cultural Interpretation: The Art of War and Peace.
When: Every Monday (except Holidays) during the semester Time: 4:15pm - 5:45pm Where: Room 14N-417 Come by for snacks, and tea with Literature Section friends, instructors, students, etc. What are you reading? What 21L classes are you taking or hoping to take? This event is specifically geared towards undergrads; but open to friends of the community that engage in the literary and humanities at MIT.
Presented by: Sarah Olsen (Associate Professor of Classics at Williams College) and Naomi Weiss (Professor of the Classics at Harvard University) Euripides’ Orestes, first produced in 408 BCE, was one of the most popular tragedies in the ancient Greek and Byzantine worlds. It is also a play suited to a range of current scholarly and cultural interests, from ancient music to queer reimaginations of antiquity to the construction of race in ancient Greece, while the ways it pushes the boundaries of form and genre look increasingly at home among today’s postmodern and experimental theater. At present, however, work on Orestes is hampered by the absence of a modern English commentary. In this talk, we will discuss our approach to creating such a commentary, as well as broader questions about the purpose, audience, and unexamined assumptions of the commentary as a scholarly genre in the 21st century. The commentary, a vital resource in the study of any ancient Greek drama, is considered the most traditional and conservative form of scholarship in Classics. It is typically presented as objective, with a single answer for each apparent problem with the text, from confusing syntax to questions about performance. Yet in fact the commentary is a […]
Presented by Judith Miller Professor, Department of French Literature, Thought and Culture, New York University Abstract: With its many languages and cultures, the African continent has always had a plethora of vibrant theatrical traditions, of rituals that can be understood as dramatic, of artists who embody characters -- including those from the spirit world. Within this expressive landscape, there is also now what we might call a rich and fraught tradition of theatre in French. As early as the 1930s, young African writers and intellectuals, prompted by their colonial schoolmasters, began producing works inspired by French classics, but already inflected by African expressive forms. Today, in 2025, Professor Sylvie Chalaye, of the University of Paris III, and the foremost authority on Francophone African theatre, has catalogued several hundred plays written in French and staged both in France and in the fourteen countries that comprise what were once French colonial “possessions” in Africa -- as well as in the former Belgian colonies of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi. For many years, Judith Miller has been teaching these works, staging them with students, and translating them -- always with the goal of making known to US-based readers and audiences the […]
When: Every Monday (except Holidays) during the semester Time: 4:15pm - 5:45pm Where: Room 14N-417 Come by for snacks, and tea with Literature Section friends, instructors, students, etc. What are you reading? What 21L classes are you taking or hoping to take? This event is specifically geared towards undergrads; but open to friends of the community that engage in the literary and humanities at MIT.
Join our online 2025 GHI Forum Series to hear about GHI’s research and action plan for each pillar from our pillar coordinators, explore common passions and interests, and discuss how you can join our efforts and particular projects. We convene each month on a mid-month Thursday or Friday from 10 am to 11:30 AM EDT/EST. 5th GHI Forum Title: Public Literacies: Civic Systems, Media & Emotional Intelligence Date: December 12, 2026, 10:00–11:30 AM EST Speakers: Mikael Jakobsson, Richard Eberhardt, Lana Cook, Rilla Shabnam Khaled 6th GHI Forum Title: PILLAR 9: Humans and Their Literatures Date: January 9, 2026, 10:00–11:30 AM EST Speakers: Ugo Mondini, Michael Angerer, Marina Bazzani, Di Wang, Wiebke Denecke 7th GHI Forum Title: PILLAR 5: Environment, Biodiversity & Planetary Stewardship Date: February 13, 2026, 10:00–11:30 AM EST Speakers: Tristan G Brown, Or Porath 8th GHI Forum Title: PILLAR 4: Good Governance in Bad Times (2) Date: March 6, 2026, 10:00–11:30 AM EST Speakers: Gregory Nagy, Leonard Muellner 9th GHI Forum Title: PILLAR 6: Music Across Borders Date: April 10, 2026, 10:00–11:30 AM EDT Speakers: Makoto Takao, Mike Block, David R.M. Irving 10th GHI Forum Title: PILLAR 3: Medicine & the Healing Arts Date: May 8, 2026, 10:00–11:30 AM EDT Speakers: Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim, Michael Stanley-Baker, Joaquín Terrones
Join our online 2025 GHI Forum Series to hear about GHI’s research and action plan for each pillar from our pillar coordinators, explore common passions and interests, and discuss how you can join our efforts and particular projects. We convene each month on a mid-month Thursday or Friday from 10 am to 11:30 AM EDT/EST. 5th GHI Forum Title: Public Literacies: Civic Systems, Media & Emotional Intelligence Date: December 12, 2026, 10:00–11:30 AM EST Speakers: Mikael Jakobsson, Richard Eberhardt, Lana Cook, Rilla Shabnam Khaled 6th GHI Forum Title: PILLAR 9: Humans and Their Literatures Date: January 9, 2026, 10:00–11:30 AM EST Speakers: Ugo Mondini, Michael Angerer, Marina Bazzani, Di Wang, Wiebke Denecke 7th GHI Forum Title: PILLAR 5: Environment, Biodiversity & Planetary Stewardship Date: February 13, 2026, 10:00–11:30 AM EST Speakers: Tristan G Brown, Or Porath 8th GHI Forum Title: PILLAR 4: Good Governance in Bad Times (2) Date: March 6, 2026, 10:00–11:30 AM EST Speakers: Gregory Nagy, Leonard Muellner 9th GHI Forum Title: PILLAR 6: Music Across Borders Date: April 10, 2026, 10:00–11:30 AM EDT Speakers: Makoto Takao, Mike Block, David R.M. Irving 10th GHI Forum Title: PILLAR 3: Medicine & the Healing Arts Date: May 8, 2026, 10:00–11:30 AM EDT Speakers: Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim, Michael Stanley-Baker, Joaquín Terrones
Join our online 2025 GHI Forum Series to hear about GHI’s research and action plan for each pillar from our pillar coordinators, explore common passions and interests, and discuss how you can join our efforts and particular projects. We convene each month on a mid-month Thursday or Friday from 10 am to 11:30 AM EDT/EST. 5th GHI Forum Title: Public Literacies: Civic Systems, Media & Emotional Intelligence Date: December 12, 2026, 10:00–11:30 AM EST Speakers: Mikael Jakobsson, Richard Eberhardt, Lana Cook, Rilla Shabnam Khaled 6th GHI Forum Title: PILLAR 9: Humans and Their Literatures Date: January 9, 2026, 10:00–11:30 AM EST Speakers: Ugo Mondini, Michael Angerer, Marina Bazzani, Di Wang, Wiebke Denecke 7th GHI Forum Title: PILLAR 5: Environment, Biodiversity & Planetary Stewardship Date: February 13, 2026, 10:00–11:30 AM EST Speakers: Tristan G Brown, Or Porath 8th GHI Forum Title: PILLAR 4: Good Governance in Bad Times (2) Date: March 6, 2026, 10:00–11:30 AM EST Speakers: Gregory Nagy, Leonard Muellner 9th GHI Forum Title: PILLAR 6: Music Across Borders Date: April 10, 2026, 10:00–11:30 AM EDT Speakers: Makoto Takao, Mike Block, David R.M. Irving 10th GHI Forum Title: PILLAR 3: Medicine & the Healing Arts Date: May 8, 2026, 10:00–11:30 AM EDT Speakers: Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim, Michael Stanley-Baker, Joaquín Terrones
Literature Section
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Avenue 14N-407
Cambridge, MA 02139
tel: (617) 253-3581
