13 September 2024 — 12:00 noon — GAR 1.102

Bassam Sidiki (UT English)

“Viral Rivalries: Influenza and Inter-Imperial Prestige in Colonial Samoa”

In this talk, Bassam Sidiki will briefly outline the main argument and structure of his first monograph in progress, Parasitic Empires, which is a cultural history of infectious disease in the Anglophone world in the long twentieth century and a novel theorization of British-US imperial relations in that period. He will then home in on the fourth chapter of the book— about the 1918 influenza pandemic in Western and American Samoa and the resulting inter-imperial disagreements and collaborations between New Zealand, the United States, and the British Empire. Drawing on government correspondence, short stories, newspapers, and physicians’ memoirs and archives which describe New Zealand’s and the United States’ disparate efforts to quarantine their islands from influenza, Sidiki will theorize a “poetics of archipelagic reference” in these documents which is at the same time a “politics of inter-imperial prestige.”

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Bassam Sidiki is an assistant professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin and an affiliate of the MA program in Humanities, Health and Medicine. He holds an MA in Medical Humanities and Bioethics from Northwestern University and a PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan. His work focuses on postcolonial and empire studies, health humanities, and disability studies.

29 March 2024 — 12:00 noon — GAR 1.102

Rebecca Falkoff (UT–French and Italian)

“Industrious Skies: Nitrogen Capture in Fascist Italy”

Rebecca Falkoff will present material from her manuscript-in-progress, Industrious Skies, which examines the role of Italy’s interwar initiatives to fix atmospheric nitrogen—that is, to take unreactive nitrogen gas from the air, primarily for use in fertilizers and explosives. The availability of synthetic fertilizers, and explosives, as well as other products made from fixed nitrogen, including pesticides and chemical weapons, powered major fascist initiatives, beginning with the Battle for Wheat in 1925, and including the draining of the Pontine Marshes, the demographic campaign, and imperialism. Attending to the materiality of the industrial processes and products of nitrogen capture, and to more abstract elemental and atmospheric poetics, she aims to offer a new perspective on Italian fascism and to shed light on a critical shift whereby discourses of global scarcity give way to ecological crisis better understood through attention to structural violence and injustice.

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Rebecca Falkoff, Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, is a scholar of Italian and comparative literature and critical theory with research interests in the medical humanities and science and technology studies. Prior to joining the UT faculty, she taught at Johns Hopkins University, University College London, New York University, and UC Berkeley, where she completed her Ph.D. in Italian Studies with a dissertation on autarky. Her first book, Possessed (Cornell University Press, 2021) traces a cultural history of hoarding across genres and disciplines. She has also published on illegibility, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Primo Levi, and Elena Ferrante. She is currently working on a book-length manuscript about nitrogen capture in fascist Italy.