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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Aaron Bartels-Swindells WIP: "Of 'Masks and Marx': Ayi Kwei Armah's Afrocentrism and Decolonial Aesthetics, 1967-1984"
January 23, 2019 - 12:00pm to 2:00pm -
Event featuring Prof. Mukoma Wa Ngugi on The Rise of the African Novel: Politics of Language, Identity, and Ownership
October 11, 2018 - 6:00pm to 7:00pm -
Aaron Bartels-Swindells WIP - CANCELED
September 24, 2018 - 12:30pm to 2:30pm -
Ania Loomba, "Revolutionary Desires: Women, Communism, and Feminism in India"
September 20, 2018 - 6:00pm to 7:00pm -
Maya Joshi (U of Delhi), "Reading Sankrityayan's Twenty-Second Century today: Sleep of Centuries, Dreams of Utopia"
April 18, 2018 - 6:00pm to 7:30pm -
Mukti Lakhi Mangharam @ Latitudes
April 13, 2018 - 3:30pm to 5:00pm -
Environments of Modernity Conference
March 22, 2018 - 5:00pm to 7:00pm, March 23, 2018 - 9:00am to 6:30pm -
Environments of Modernity Conference
March 22, 2018 - 5:00pm to 7:00pm, March 23, 2018 - 9:00am to 6:30pm -
Panel with Prof. David Kazanjian and Prof. María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo (NYU)
February 1, 2018 - 5:00pm to 7:00pm -
Affect, Immanence and Politics in Latin American Anti-Literature
November 16, 2017 - 5:00pm to 6:30pm