We invite you to join us Thursday, March 20th, 2025 for this year’s Ruth and Mark Phillips Professorship (RMPP) Lecture! The current holder, Dr. Philip Kaisary welcomes to deliver her talk, titled “Literary Trials and the Possibility of Justice” (abstract below). The lecture begins at 4:00pm, Room 2017 Dunton Tower (�Ӱ�ԭ�� University), with a Q&A to follow!

Dr. Carolyn Ownbey (she/her) is a scholar of anticoloniality, citizenship, and human rights in literature and other media since the mid-20th century. She is presently at Golden Gate University in San Francisco, where she previously served as Chair of English, Communications, and Literature and Faculty Director of the Degrees+ Programs. Her scholarship and teaching focus on anticolonial literature and other media; law, human rights and narrative; and theories of democracy and citizenship. Her current book in progress is an interdisciplinary project focused on questions of law, human and civil rights, nation, and state in several modes of political resistance writing since 1945.

“Literary Trials and the Possibility of Justice”
Abstract:

What purpose does the discipline of law and literature studies, as well as the literature and other media utilized within the discipline, serve? Many scholars have argued that their purpose is properly to serve law—that is, to illuminate the ways in which law and legal practice may be improved to better serve justice. This lecture will consider whether and how the scope and function of law and literature studies and its objects exceeds those legal bounds, and to what end, through a consideration of literary trials. Trials (and the law more generally) do not functionally “make a sharp and necessary break with the social relations that underpin” their crimes, to quote Rinaldo Walcott in a different context. It is difficult to overstate the stakes of this failure, though often relatively easy to cite its consequence—repetition of the crime because the conditions of that crime’s happening have not fundamentally changed. Does law (and/as the form of the trial) have the capacity to make such a break, and if so, might literary studies be an avenue through which to do so

To consider the place of literature in helping us to understand the capacity of law as it relates to trials and the social underpinnings of their crimes, I will focus on the work of two authors as primary case studies: Rebecca West and Caryl Phillips. Writing at different moments in the 20th��and early 21st��centuries, West and Phillips nonetheless cover curiously common ground. The trials that appear in their works, nonfiction and/or fiction(alized), highlight in particular the social conditions before and social legacies after crimes and trials—in Nuremberg, Leeds, and elsewhere—in addition to the ways in which trials narrate, or fail to narrate, their crimes. Each author provides a lens through which to focus on the place of literature and the possibilities of justice within and outside of the law.

Event Details:

7:30 Thursday-Saturday

Join award-winning interdisciplinary artist Jesse Stewart for a one-person show that weaves together storytelling and music to celebrate individuals who have left an indelible mark on the playwright’s life. With a blend of humour, emotion, and introspection, each character comes to life through engaging anecdotes and musical interludes performed on a variety of unusual musical instruments. From an enigmatic factory worker with a teardrop tattoo, to a US-marine-turned-Buddhist-priest-and-sculptor, Characters delves deep into the profound impact that diverse personalities can have on our own lives and stories.

Suitable for all ages.

Run time approximately 2h

Holding degrees in music, visual art, and English and theatre studies, Oshawa-born/Ottawa-based interdisciplinary artist Jesse Stewart is dedicated to reimagining the spaces between artistic disciplines. His music has been documented on over twenty recordings including Stretch Orchestra’s self-titled debut album, which was honoured with the 2012 “Instrumental Album of the Year” Juno award. Having been widely commissioned as a composer and artist, he has created instruments, music, performance art works, and interactive sound art installations using such diverse materials as stone, ice, water, fire, glass, books, turntables, chemical reactions, and more.

His work has been heralded by critics, journalists, and creative practitioners from around the globe who have described it as “truly exciting” (Musicworks 76), “exceptional” (Cadence Oct. 2002), “phenomenal” (Cadence Nov. 1999), and “ingenious” (Exclaim! June 2006). “Stewart quietly opens the door for us to a limitless world of delicate sonic beauty” writes Randy Raine-Reusch in Musicworks 97. “Highly recommended ear-cleansing” states a review in Italy’s Touching Extremes (2007). “Jesse Stewart is an eloquent and poetically powerful percussionist, composer, improviser and teacher—a man of ideas and inventions,” writes jazz legend William Parker. “Jesse is an incredibly innovative artist. He’s a performance artist, he’s a jazz drummer, he’s an incredible creative force” states Roman Borys, cellist with the internationally acclaimed Gryphon Trio. “He’s extraordinary,” states creative polymath Michael Snow, “he is constantly surprising.”

, his first one-person show that was performed at the Gladstone Theatre in July 2023, received rave reviews. A film of that show has been making waves internationally as an official selection at multiple film festivals and was named “Best Feature Film” by the Experimental Dance & Music Film Festival in Toronto.

Jesse Stewart is a professor of music in �Ӱ�ԭ�� University’s music program and an adjunct professor in the visual arts department at the University of Ottawa.

Regular $41

Regular(65+) $37

Student/Artist/Unwaged $26

Angel $75**

*All prices include taxes and non-negotiable facility fee

**Angel tickets are for any “Angel” who wants to go above and beyond in supporting Jesse Stewart.

The Gladstone only retains the facility fee.

The event will take place at the National Gallery of Canada Lecture Hall. Free event, no registration required.

The book can be��purchased in the NGC Boutique and is available online at��. The author will be available to sign copies following the event.

In English, with simultaneous French-language translation.

For full details:��/ctca/cu-events/sarah-phillips-casteel-black-lives-under-nazism-making-history-visible-in-literature-and-art/

This event is organized by the Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis in partnership with the National Gallery of Canada. The CTCA gratefully acknowledges the support of the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art, and Culture, and the Department of English Literature and Language at �Ӱ�ԭ�� University.

Organized by Dr. Philip Kaisary, holder of the Ruth and Mark Philips Professorship (RMPP) with support from Dr. Sarah Brouillette. Sponsored by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and ICSLAC.

Download event poster: Anna_Kornbluh_2024_Chris_Faulkner_Poster New Time

You can find more information about this event on the CUAG website . The Institute continues its support of this most recent of CUAG’s “Disruptions: Dialogues on Disability Art” series.

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Please register in advance For more information, please consult CUAG’s website

Co-curators Anna Shah Hoque and Cultural Mediations PhD candidate, artist and curator, Cara Tierney, discuss the theme of queerness in diaspora and highlight several artists whose work reflect on these ideas

You can find more information about the workshop Imagining Wiser Futures Through the Senses on the CUAG website The Institute continues its support of this most recent of CUAG’s “Disruptions: Dialogues on Disability Art” series.

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Thinking Modernity from the Perspective of the Capitalocene

This talk examines a cluster of related concepts – modernity, ‘enlightenment,’ the Anthropocene – in response to recent debates around how to theorize, and periodize, what might be called the natural history of capital. The year 2020 has already seen the intensification of a series of so-called natural disasters (firestorms in Australia, Siberia and the American West; flooding in Indonesia, China, Sudan and Bangladesh; locust swarms in East Africa and South Asia; and, not least, the global outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic), disasters that continue to highlight the untenability of conventional divisions between human and natural history. At the same time, this year has witnessed a storm surge of social conflict in intimate relation with these seemingly natural phenomena, from refugee crises to hunger riots to ‘civil unrest’ over the systemic application of racialized state violence. Fossil-fueled sponsorship of climate skepticism notwithstanding, the case for reading social and natural environments as part of a singular, if profoundly uneven and striated history stretching back at least to the ‘age of enlightenment’ – not coincidentally, the age of plantation slavery and carbon-driven industrialism – has never been more compelling.

In this context, it may be worth revisiting some of the foundational texts of critical theory – in particular, Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940) and Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s��Dialectic of Enlightenment��(1944, 1947) – in order to excavate the place of extra-human nature within their understandings of enlightenment and capitalist modernity. How do these works speak to more recent attempts at grasping the logic of climate breakdown from the perspective of global environmental justice? How might we bring the range of concerns highlighted in 1940s critical theory – from the dynamics of class struggle to the domination of nature to the industrial production of culture – into common focus? And what do they suggest about ways of theorizing environment and culture together today?

Dr. Warwick is a member of the (WReC) at the University of Warwick and co-author of Combined and Uneven Development Towards a New Theory of World-Literature

This lecture is open to all ICSLAC faculty and all students in the Cultural Mediations PhD program. Please email Dawn Schmidt��to obtain the link for this event.