The University of Hartford Humanities Lecture Series for Spring 2024, focusing on the theme “Fiction, Fabulation, Futurity,” begins Monday, Feb. 5, from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m., in Hillyer Hall 229.
The first talk in the series, “Quarantine Constellations: Queer Resilience, a Covid Love Story, and Critical Nostalgia as a Path toward Futurism and Queer Worldmaking,” will be given by Kristin Comeforo, Humanities Center Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor of Communication (A&S). Here, they will present a reworking of a critical autoethnography they did during the Covid lockdown that explored this period, juxtaposed with the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and early 1990s, as an experience of “déjà vu all over again” for many marginalized queer, trans, Black and brown individuals. For their talk, Professor Comeforo will reimagine this work by leaning more heavily into speculative literary fiction (in the vein of Octavia Butler and Jewel Gomez) as a method that will more tightly tie these past traumas to present realities and point to futures of queer worldmaking that inform, and activate, the present.
The Humanities Center Lecture series is developed and led by Rashmi Viswanathan, Assistant Professor of Art History. For more information, contact Nicholas Ealy, director of the Humanities Center (ealy@hartford.edu), visit our website, or follow us on Facebook.