FALL KEYNOTE

Writing About Others

Thursday, October 16, 4–5:30pm | Valentine Overlook, Clifton Court Hall 5280 | Register

In sharing portions of his current nonfiction project on India, Amitava Kumar will examine the process through which a book gets assembled: a starting idea, what is repeated or developed as a theme, the changes in the work's conception, missteps, revisions. Professor Kumar has also been assembling a visual archive while doing this project and his talk will include a discussion of his interviewing technique and the rules he tries to follow during his travels. The questions he is struggling with include how to structure time and how to order the multiple narratives. He hopes that an interactive discussion will yield insights about how each one of us chooses to write. 

Amitava Kumar is the author of several works of nonfiction and four novels. The books of nonfiction include Husband of a Fanatic, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb, and A Matter of Rats. His novel Immigrant, Montana was on the best of the year lists at The New Yorker, The New York Times, and President Obama’s list of favorite books of 2018. His next novel A Time Outside This Time was described by the New Yorker as “a shimmering assault on the Zeitgeist.” Kumar’s latest, My Beloved Life, was praised by James Wood as “beautiful, truthful fiction.” Three volumes of his diaries and drawings were published by HarperCollins India. His work has appeared in Granta, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s, BRICK, Guernica, and The Nation. Kumar ‘s awards include a Guggenheim fellowship, a Cullman Center Fellowship at the NYPL, and residencies from Yaddo, MacDowell, the Lannan Foundation, and the Hawthornden Foundation. He is professor of English at Vassar College.

Hubert Harrison and the Forbidden Periods of Radical History

Monday, October 27, 4pm | Taft Research Center | Register

This talk by Brian Kwoba explores the political life of the journalist, activist, and educator Hubert Henry Harrison (1883-1927), who generated an array of visionary solutions to the systemic injustices of his day. Harrison blazed a trail for Black workers and organizers in the Socialist Party of America. He then emerged as the most prominent Black freethinker and free lover of his generation. Most spectacularly, Harrison's Liberty League of Negro Americans catalyzed the rise of Marcus Garvey and the largest international organization of Africana people in modern history. Because of his fearless radicalism, however, the full scope of Harrison's revolutionary legacy has been largely erased from popular memory. Until now.

Brian Kwoba is an associate professor of history and Director of the African and African American Studies Program at the University of Memphis. Over the past two decades, Dr. Kwoba has been an activist on issues including anti-imperialism, immigrant workers rights, climate justice, Falastin, and the movement for Black lives. In his spare time, he is a big time music lover (especially live jazz), an Afrobeats DJ, and a frequent traveler to Kenya where he visits his dad's side of the family. His new book, Hubert Harrison: Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism, is an intellectual biography of one of history's most under-appreciated political visionaries.

The 1911 Triangle Fire: A New York Story that Resonates across Time and Space

Friday, November 7, 1:30pm 

On March 25, 1911, a fire at the Triangle Waist Company in Greenwich Village, New York, killed 146 workers, mostly young Italian and Jewish immigrant women and girls. The fire horrified those who experienced it and those who witnessed it and galvanized a movement for worker justice and workplace safety that ultimately led to the New Deal. Unlike most events in US labor history, the passage of time has not erased memory of the Triangle fire. The story continues to inspire labor, immigrant, and women’s rights movements in New York, around the US, and in different parts of the globe. Triangle memory is nurtured by Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition, a stalwart band of volunteers who connect individuals and groups to the story through the annual commemoration ceremony and other initiatives. In October 2023, the Coalition, in partnership with the New York City Central Labor Council, Workers United SEIU and other labor unions, New York University, city and state officials, and a host of other entities, dedicated the Triangle Fire Memorial, installed on the Brown Building, where the fire occurred. Since its dedication, the memorial has been visited by countless individuals and groups from the city, the nation, and beyond who take inspiration from its message and the story of its creation about the power of activism to build a better world. The Triangle Fire Memorial illustrates how memory work that is grounded in a single moment and location can connect people across time and space. 

Mary Anne Trasciatti is Professor of Rhetoric and Director of Labor Studies at Hofstra University, and a member of the board of directors of Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition. Her research focuses on anti-capitalist social movements, social protest, public space, and the relationship between memory and activism. Her recent books includeElizabeth Gurley Flynn: The Rebel Girl, Democracy, and Revolution (2025) and two co-edited anthologies, Le ragazze della Triangle: saggi personali e politici sull’incendio della fabbrica newyorkese (2025), the Italian translation of Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire (2022), and Where Are the Workers?: Labor’s Stories at Museums and Historical Sites (2022). She led the project to build the Triangle Fire Memorial, dedicated on October 11, 2023. It is the first labor memorial and one of only a handful of monuments to women in New York City.