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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Professor Debjani Bhattacharyya (Drexel History) on "Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta"
February 20, 2020 - 4:30pm to 6:00pm -
Professor Nikhil Anand (Penn Anthropology) on "The Promise of Infrastructure" and More
October 24, 2019 - 4:30pm to 6:00pm -
Discussion of Said and Aboul-Ela
October 10, 2019 - 3:00pm to 4:30pm -
Rovel Sequeira Work in Progress Presentation: "Don't Ask, Don't Tell: Sexual Science and the Biography of Sodomy in Colonial North India"
September 26, 2019 - 4:30pm to 6:00pm -
Prof. P.K. Datta, “Tagore’s Experiments in Nationalism: Viswabharati”
April 11, 2019 - 5:00pm to 6:30pm -
Discussion of Petrus Liu's "Queer Marxism in Two Chinas"
March 26, 2019 - 3:30pm to 5:00pm -
Prof. Christopher Taylor on Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism
March 14, 2019 - 4:30pm to 6:00pm -
Discussion of Excerpt from Prof. Christopher Taylor's "Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism"
March 11, 2019 - 3:00pm to 4:30pm -
Nasser Mufti, "C.L.R. James in the Nineteenth Century"
February 21, 2019 - 5:00pm to 7:30pm -
Vikrant Dadawala WIP: "What if Kafka Was an Indian Communist? Or; The Passing of Soviet India, 1942-1980"
February 7, 2019 - 12:00pm to 1:30pm