Prisoner No. 626710 is Present (2023), 60 minutes. | Lalit Vachani (director) Introduction by Sana Aiyar (History) Topic: Citizenship Laws in India, Student Activism, Coming of Age On September 13, 2020, Umar Khalid, a charismatic student leader who recently finished his PhD at India’s prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University, was arrested under the draconian UAPA (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act) – a law that designates individuals as terrorists and allows the Indian state to imprison people without due process. His crime? As an Indian Muslim, he had dared to protest against the new citizenship law that the Indian state was trying to impose on its people. Using found footage of his past speeches along with a forensic analysis of how he was framed by the right-wing, Hindu nationalist media, Umar Khalid’s close friends Banojyotsna Lahiri and Shuddhabrata Sengupta reconstruct the chronology of events that led to his tragic imprisonment. There have been 15 bail hearing adjournments. His case has not yet come up for trial. He and his friends still await a fair hearing in court. Cinema at the Nexus is an institute-wide film series showcasing films/documentaries that grapple with pressing issues of our day aiming to make some sense of what we are experiencing today. […]

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 […]

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 […]