In conjunction with Lanie Millar’s Romance Languages graduate seminar this term, she and Leah Middlebrook have organized a two-day symposium “Gender, Race, and Empire” on May 1 and 2, 2025. The event brings three influential scholars to campus.
Estefanía Bournot is a Research Fellow at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, where she leads the project Forgotten Routes across the Atlantic (1960-1990). Her forthcoming monograph explores Pan-African encounters and cultural diplomacy as pivotal nodes in transatlantic exchanges between Brazil and West Africa, set against the backdrop of Cold War politics.
Nicholas R. Jones is an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University. His most recent book is Cervantine Blackness (2024), in which he addresses the silence about Miguel de Cervantes’s compelling literary construction and cultural codification of Black Africans and sub-Saharan Africa. Jones reconsiders in what sense Black subjects possess an inherent value within Cervantes’s cultural purview and literary corpus.
Johanna Montlouis-Gabriel is Assistant Professor of Decolonial Pedagogy in the Department of French and Italian at Emory University. Her book, The Afrofeminist Creative Praxis of Black French Women, is forthcoming from Nebraska University Press in their Expanding Frontiers Series (Winter 2026-2027). This work celebrates how Black women in France are building communities and transforming perspectives through their art, literature, and performance.
In a series of paired presentations, each of the scholars will deliver a paper and engage in dialogue with UO faculty respondents. These conversations will provide an overview of new research and developments in postcolonial thought, with a focus on gender and agency.
The symposium seeks to build on the groundbreaking arguments made by Afro-Brazilian feminist and decolonial thinker Sueli Carneiro in Dispositif of Raciality (2023)—that Black and women intellectuals are theorists of their own existence, as active producers of knowledge. Expanding the scope of this insight to include trans and queer individuals, “Gender, Race, and Empire” seeks to inspire participants to engage in a wide-ranging conversation that spans formal and informal venues.
Students in Millar’s seminar, also named “Gender, Race, and Empire,” will read and discuss work by the featured scholars before they come to campus. They will also have begun to explore Sueli Carneiro’s thought, in addition to other key texts and thinkers in gender and empire studies. These studies will prepare the students to participate in and gain enrichment from the symposium’s sessions.
In addition to the featured discussions between the guest scholars and faculty, brown-bag lunch sessions will be held each day directed to junior faculty and graduate students, as well as to undergraduates contemplating research careers. One will be a roundtable in which the guest scholars discuss their work creating institutional spaces for scholarship on the Global South, especially in non-Anglophone traditions and in comparative frameworks. They will share the challenges and opportunities they have faced in their work, as well as practical tips for publishing and disseminating cutting-edge research in these fields. The second session will feature faculty with experience in publication and the dissemination of research in non-academic venues, such as op-eds, Substack, popular podcasts, etc.
The symposium is open to the public and cosponsored by the OHC’s Endowment for Public Outreach in the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities. For more information, including finalized schedule and location, please contact Leah Middlebrook (middlebr@uoregon.edu) or Lanie Millar (lmillar@uoregon.edu).