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.
Upcoming Events
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Reading Series: Selections from Edward Said's The Question of Palestine (1979)
February 19, 2025 - 5:30pm to 7:30pm -
Book Launch: Ugliness by Moshtari Hilal
March 3, 2025 - 5:00pm to 7:00pm -
Reading Series: Elia Suleiman's Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996) and Selections from Walid Khalidi's All That Remains (1992)
March 5, 2025 - 5:30pm to 7:30pm -
Reading Series: Jumama Manna's Blessed Blessed Oblivion (2010) and A Magical Substance Flows Through Me (2016)
March 20, 2025 - 5:30pm to 7:30pm -
Reading Series: Wissam Rafeedie's The Trinity of Fundamentals (2023)
March 26, 2025 - 5:30pm to 7:30pm -
Reading Series: Wissam Rafeedie's The Trinity of Fundamentals (2023)
April 9, 2025 - 5:30pm to 7:30pm
Past Events
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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 -
Adam Shellhorse, "Affect, Immanence, and Politics, in Latin American Anti-Literature."
October 13, 2017 - 5:00pm to 7:00pm -
Conversation with Dr. Ania Loomba and Dr. Melissa Sanchez on "Studying Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Earlier Periods: Lessons, Limits, and Intersections"
September 27, 2017 - 4:30pm to 6:00pm -
South Africa, Writing & Social Justice
September 25, 2017 - 3:30pm to 6:00pm -
Prof. Natalie Melas (Cornell) @ Latitudes, "The Rise and Fall of Postcolonial Critique: Reflections on Situatedness"
September 14, 2017 - 12:00pm to 2:00pm -
Brooke Stanley, "Eating and Environment in Amitav Ghosh's Fiction and Nonfiction."
April 14, 2017 - 2:00pm to 3:30pm -
Candace Barrington (Central Connecticut State University)
April 11, 2017 - 4:30pm to 6:00pm -
WIP “Rewriting Vietnam: Fallen Fathers and Enemy Brothers in The Zenith.”
April 3, 2017 - 3:30pm to 5:00pm -
David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, "Memorializing Disability: Contemplating Less Capacitated Alternative Citizenries."
March 16, 2017 - 6:00pm to 7:30pm