Latitudes
The Latitudes Working Group is coordinated and funded by the Department of English.
Housed at Penn English, Latitudes is a graduate reading group that examines discourses of race, coloniality, empire, and globalization across time and space. We provide an encouraging forum for intellectual exchange across a vast range of disciplines, including literature, anthropology, history, economics, sociology, and gender and sexuality studies. Every year, Latitudes welcomes critics, writers, artists, and filmmakers from the region and beyond to present and discuss their new work. In addition to faculty from Penn, past speakers have included Neferti Tadiar, Saree Makdisi, Yogita Goyal, and film directors Grace Lee Boggs (American Revolution: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs) and Sanjay Kak (Red Ant Dream). We also warmly invite English graduate students in their dissertating stage to use the forum as a workshop for their research in progress. Alongside our speaker series, we host a more informal reading group. In Spring 2025, we will be discussing a number of Palestinian writings and films.
LATITUDES Graduate Reading Group for Empire, Race, Postcolonialism, Transnationalism, & Globalization |
Should you wish to join our mailing list or have any questions or comments, please contact our coordinators: |
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In Spring 2021, Latitudes launched a companion publication, Longitudes, an online forum for graduate students to publish short, peer-reviewed responses to our speakers and co-sponsored events. Please visit Longitudes for the latest posts by our members, an archive of our past events, and submission guidelines should you wish to write a post.
Past Events
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Saree Makdisi (UCLA)
February 5, 2024 - 5:00pm to 6:00pm -
Sangina Patnaik (Swarthmore): "What We Owe: Reparations in Literature and Law”
November 30, 2023 - 5:00pm to 6:30pm -
Monica Huerta (Princeton): Something Irreducible: Bleistein v. Donaldson and Propertied Imaginations
October 26, 2023 - 5:00pm to 6:30pm -
Zarena Aslami (Michigan State University): The Afghan Political Sublime: Race and Sovereignty in Pre-Victorian Travel Writing
October 19, 2023 - 5:00pm to 6:30pm -
Michaela Bronstein (Stanford): On Crimes For All Humanity: Revolution and the Modern Novel
April 20, 2023 - 5:00pm to 6:30pm -
Yogita Goyal (UCLA): Genres of Anticolonialism: Rethinking Failure, Plotting Revolution
April 3, 2023 - 5:30pm to 7:00pm -
Ashley Cohen (USC): The Global Indies: British Imperial Culture and the Reshaping of the World, 1756–1815
March 13, 2023 - 5:30pm to 7:00pm -
Discussion of Patricia Stuelke's The Ruse of Repair: US Neoliberal Empire and the Turn from Critique (2021)
November 11, 2022 - 2:00pm to 3:30pm -
Sanjay Kak: "Archive of Now: Photography in Kashmir"
October 11, 2022 - 5:30pm to 7:00pm -
Nico Millman (Penn): "Maoism and Memoir: Political Life Writing across India and Peru"
September 30, 2022 - 2:00pm to 3:30pm