Events

Pantano is a Swiss poet, essayist, literary translator, artist, critic, editor, and publisher. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared widely, and his poems have been translated into a dozen languages, including Albanian, Farsi, French, German, Italian, Kurdish, Russian, Slovenian, and Spanish. His conceptual and visual literatures as well as his noise poetry have been exhibited nationally and internationally.

After graduating from the USF Departments of English and Philosophy, as well as the Honors College (now the Judy Genshaft Honors College), Pantano taught and directed the Writing Center at the University of South Florida. He later served as the Visiting Poet-in-Residence at Florida Southern College, and taught at Edge Hill University, where he was Director of Creative Writing and Reader in Poetry and Literary Translation. He is currently Associate Professor (Reader) and Programme Leader for the MA Creative Writing at the University of Lincoln.

This was Pantano’s first visit to USF in fifteen years and coincided with the publication of his newest poetry collection: Home for Difficult Children (Broken Sleep Books/ Black Lawrence Press, 2022). More about Daniele Pantano can be found on his website.

In this true crime meets romantic comedy, PhD candidate, Phoebe Walsh, is analyzing the true crime genre for her dissertation when she is forced to return to Florida to clean out her family home after the death of her estranged father. While working at the house, Walsh becomes convinced that her nice-guy neighbor is actually a serial killer.

Thompson is, herself, a true crime devotee. Early reviews for Love in the Time of Serial Killers praise its wry humor, wit, and charm. Thompson is also the author of Psych Major Syndrome and co-authored The Go-for-Gold Gymnasts YA series with former Olympic gold medalist, Dominique Moceanu. She lives in Tampa with her husband and two children.

This event is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be provided and books can be purchased at the event. A book signing will follow the conversation with the author. 

We will take over the beautiful outdoor patio at Southern Brewing & Winery and bring together three USF faculty members conducting research in related fields so they can share their work with the community in an informal and approachable way. The taproom is open for guests 21 and over, and This Little Pig food truck will be on site. This event is free and open to all students, faculty, staff, and the public. For questions or accommodations, contact Jade von Werder.

Tangela Serls | Assistant Professor of Instruction and Director of Undergraduate Studies, Department of Women's and Gender Studies

"Enacting Critical Fabulation: An Analysis of Saidiya Hartman's 'Litany for Grieving Sisters'" The subjunctive mood—which expresses possibilities, doubts, desires, or conditional circumstances—plays an important role in helping us reimagine blackness and literature. In her presentation, Professor Serls analyzes Hartman’s “Litany” as an enactment of critical fabulation noting the instances where Hartman uses the subjunctive and other elements of critical fabulation to present sensibilities of the void.

McArthur Freeman | Associate Professor of Animation & Digital Modeling, School of Art & Art History

"Imagine_Blackness_AI" Freeman discusses his recent collaborative project that explores Black speculative image making and micro stories aided by AI tools and technology.

David Ponton III | Assistant Professor and Undergraduate Director, School of Interdisciplinary Global Studies

"Black Studies and the Impossibility of History" Historians have long debated whether our craft is an empirical science or more closely related to literature. Meanwhile, Black Studies has exposed various ways that conventional history fails to address the tensions and implications of this debate. Using a single primary source document concerning a police attack on black university students in 1967, Ponton will elaborate on this problem for historians and how Black Studies might help reinvent the profession.

We want to bring Humanities & Hops to the USF St. Petersburg and Sarasota-Manatee campuses! Faculty interested in presenting their work, please contact Liz Kicak. 

Hosted by the USF Department of Philosophy 

A Colloquium with Dr Sharad P. Paul | Adjunct Professor, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand | Senior Lecturer (skin cancer) University of Queensland, Australia

Skin color has been discussed by naturalists, philosophers, priests, and physicians—with Georg Foster, Immanuel Kant, Carolus Linnaeus, and Nicolas Le Cat, among others, proposing color-based hierarchies of people. Explaining the evolutionary biology of skin, Dr Sharad Paul argues that the concept of race is a myth. This fascinating lecture looks at our largest organ and explains how this unique and universal organ determines much more than population health and fitness. Professor Sharad Paul shares his research and views on skin patterns and pigment, and how the biology of skin color affects populations differently. Covering human diets and diaspora, this fascinating lecture presents unexpected and unknown facts about skin science, structure, and societal (and healthcare) implications.

About Professor Sharad Paul, MD

Professor (Dr) Sharad P. Paul is a skin cancer specialist, family physician, academic, evolutionary biologist, storyteller, social entrepreneur, and an adjunct professor at Auckland University of Technology. Born in England, with a childhood in India, he is a global citizen who lives Down Under. In 2008, he was featured in international editions of TIME (“Open Heart Surgeon”). A noted polymath, he was named “Renaissance Man” by the New Zealand Herald and was awarded the NZ Medical Association's highest award - awarded only to one doctor at a time. In 2015, at APAC, Asia-Pacific’s largest health conference, he received the Ko Awatea International Excellence Award for "Leading Health Improvement on a Global Scale, and for fostering patient-centered medicine across several countries.” He is considered unique as he has authored works of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and medical textbooks. His book, The Genetics of Health was recently released in the USA as a paperback by Simon and Schuster.

Facebook/Twitter/Instagram @drsharadpaul

It is with great sadness that we share the news that Dr. Jay Hopler passed away in June after a lengthy battle with cancer and just one week after the publication of his third poetry collection, Still Life, which he began writing the day he was diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer. Dr. Hopler was a beloved teacher and colleague in the English Department at USF, and his death is a great loss for all who had the joy of knowing him.

Jay’s passion for language began at a very early age, and he always intended to be a writer. His first collection of poetry, Green Squall, won the 2006 Yale Younger Poets Prize, selected by Nobel laureate Louise Glück, who would become a dear friend. His second collection of poetry, 2016’s The Abridged History of Rainfall, was a finalist for the National Book Award that year. His many literary honors included a Whiting Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, two Florida Book Awards, and a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Although Jay enjoyed great success as a writer, his true treasure was his private life. As he wrote in one of his late poems, he “loved his wife his wife his ocean was & his mountain range spent in blue gentian.” He felt honored to be stepfather to two beloved boys, Elijah West Greenfield and Bennett Zion Greenfield, whom he called his “suns.”

Prior to his passing, Jay and his wife, Kimberly Johnson, requested the establishment of the Jay Hopler Memorial Fund at the Humanities Institute. This fund will be used to support poetry related projects at USF including guest readings, travel funds for students, or other initiatives.

The memorial celebration for Jay Hopler will feature readings by friends, students, and colleagues. Refreshments will be served. There is a livestream option available for those who wish to view the event but cannot travel to attend in person. Contact Liz Kicak for questions or more information.

This November, HI welcomes one of the leading scholars in the emergent field of trans  philosophy,Talia Mae Bettcher. Bettcher is a Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Los Angeles. She has published dozens of scholarly articles and her new monograph, Intimacy and Illusion: An Essay in Trans Philosophy, is under contract with University of Minnesota Press.

In her talk, “Between Appearance and Reality: On Transphobia, Intimacy, and the Multiplicity of Worlds” Bettcher will discuss “interpersonal spatiality” or the idea that all sensory and discursive encounters between people admit intimacy (closeness) or distance. She will explore the notion of liminal intimacy/distance—the state of being “betwixt and between” entirely different systems of interpersonal spatiality and how the constitution of trans people as mere “pretenders” can be understood as the structural foreclosure of intimacy and the failure to fathom the possibility of intimacy beyond a given structure.