School of Arts & Sciences

2024-20245 Tucker Boatwright Festival of Literature & the Arts

The Nature of Representation

The Nature of Representation asks how our understandings of “nature” have been shaped by representational practices in both the aesthetic and political senses, exploring how the current climate catastrophe is inextricable from colonialism and anthropocentric worldviews. The festival features contemporary writers, artists, and thinkers who don’t take for granted that language is merely human, that there are other “natural” languages, and that attuning to those other languages allows us to tell stories that disrupt the violence of Man.

"Art as a Vehicle for Change: a Conversation with Cathy Park Hong" with Chad Shomura.
Thursday, January 23, 4:30 p.m. | Humanities Commons

Cathy Park Hong is professor and Class of 1936 Chair in the College of Letters and Sciences at the University of California – Berkeley. She is the author of three volumes of poetry — Translating Mo’um, Dance Dance Revolution, Engine Empire — and the award-winning collection of essays, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. She is the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the Windham-Campbell Prize, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Chad Shomura is assistant professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado, Denver. His research interests include political thought, affect, biopolitics, new materialism, and ecology. His recent publications are in Theory & Event, American Quarterly, Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture, and Empire and Environment: Ecological Ruin in the Transpacific. Chad’s current book project, A Life Otherwise, examines minor assemblies of life that upset the good life.

Hosted by the Department of English.

Meet the 2024-25 Beckman Scholars

A&S students Marcos Hendler, of Rye, New York, and Aine MacDermott, of Lexington, Virginia, have each been awarded a prestigious Beckman Foundation Scholarship to support faculty-mentored student research in the sciences.

Beckman Scholars are selected among undergraduate biology and chemistry students based on commitment to research, strong academics, and potential to become scientific leaders. UR has had 26 Beckman Scholars since 2006.

Hendler, a chemistry major, is studying computational chemistry focused on molecules related to anticancer, which has implications in possible treatments. Hendler’s faculty mentor is chemistry professor Carol Parish. MacDermott, a biochemistry & molecular biology major, is researching ancient DNA under the mentorship of biology professor Melinda Yang. MacDermott is focused on the evolution of the alcohol metabolism gene ADH1B in present-day and ancient East Asian humans.