Events

Join UCLA English on Thursday, April 10 and Friday, April 11 for the Barbara L. Packer lectures featuring Kirsten Silva Gruesz, acclaimed scholar of Latinx literature and the 19th century. In addition to her formal lectures, Professor Gruesz will lead a graduate workshop, which includes lunch, at 12pm on April 10. An RSVP is required to attend. Please RSVP at the link below.

Register here to attend the lectures and workshop.

Lecture Schedule:

Thursday, April 10 at 10:30am, followed by a lunch workshop at 12pm, in Kaplan 193:

Just My Type: Following Latin(X) Letters Through the C19 and Beyond

Letterforms, whether hand-drawn or reproduced in print, encode visual meanings that vibrate through texts. Following the traces of Spanish-serving printers and their equipment across the nineteenth-century US, this talk argues that a more literal understanding of “LatinX letters” helps connect these earlier writer-artisans to contemporary poets.

Graduate students and faculty are welcome to attend a lunch workshop with Professor Gruesz following this talk. The lunch workshop will take place at 12pm in Kaplan 193.

Friday, April 11 at 12:30pm. A light lunch will be served at 12pm, in Kaplan 193:

California Before America: Doing Without Dreams and Destinies

Where does California fit in American literary history? Pushing back against hypertrophic metaphors of golden dreams and disappointments, of Manifest Destiny pushed to its continental margins, this talk focuses instead on the early Pacific and on Indigenous world-making prior to and during the Spanish mission period to conjure alternate models of relating, and relating to, the past.

Kirsten Silva Gruesz is Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of over forty essays on Spanish-language print culture in the U.S. and LatinX literature and culture, stretching from the colonial period to the present day. Her books include Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing (Princeton, 2002) and Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons: A Story of Language, Race, and Belonging in the Early Americas (Harvard, 2022), which was recognized with the Albert J. Beveridge Award from the American Historical Association, the John Winthrop Award from the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, the History of the Book Prize from the Society for the History of Authorship, Readership, and Publishing, and the Early American Literature Book Prize. She is currently Co-PI of a multi-institutional Mellon Foundation-funded Crossing Latinidades working group, The Latinx Past.

Questions about the events?
Contact Marta Wallien: mwallien@english.ucla.edu