Graduate Student Seminars
Seminar Descriptions and Registration
Seminars allow faculty and graduate students to engage in rich conversations and innovative scholarship with colleagues from a wide range of disciplines. Learn about upcoming seminars below, and sign up for one or more of the individual mailing lists. Propose a seminar here.
Co-directors: Alexis Finet (French and Italian) and Cameron Pattison (Philosophy)
AI and the Human Seminar aims to explore the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence (AI) on our understanding of intelligence and the human condition, focusing on redefining AI's impact on the humanities. It will foster interdisciplinary dialogue among faculty, graduate students, and visiting scholars, addressing questions about AI's challenge to traditional intelligence, ethical considerations, and the humanities' role in AI discourse. The seminar, held monthly, will offer hands-on experience with cutting-edge tools and will provide access to Vanderbilt’s Amplify platform featuring chatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek, and more. Sessions will combine in-depth reading discussions and presentations by leading experts in AI ethics. Participation from diverse academic departments and community leaders is strongly encouraged.This seminar seeks to advance interdisciplinary research and enhance understanding of AI's impact on research and teaching while fostering a community of scholars dedicated to examining the ethical and philosophical dimensions of AI. For upcoming speakers, resources, and more information, visit our website.
Co-directors: Brandon Byrd (History) and Anthony Reed (English)
The Black Worlds and World-Making Seminar is about Black people and the modern world. It attends to the historical and current thought and subjective experiences of the people who have claimed Blackness as a political, social, and cultural identity. It is about Black world-making too. Once a month, our meetings will convene scholars from Vanderbilt and beyond who will share new and in-progress research on topics such as interrelated struggles for racial justice, practices of resistance, and dreams of freedom across Africa and its Diaspora. Working across disciplinary and activist modes of scholarship, these meetings will establish a common ground on which students and scholars from a variety of backgrounds can collaborate for the mutual purposes of study and struggle.
Co-directors: Matt Worsnick (History of Art and Architecture) and Ben Sawyer (History, MTSU)
East Europe and Eurasia: Critical Engagements invites scholars from across disciplinary and institutional lines to join a community that seeks to enrich the scholarship of the presenter as well as those in attendance. The seminar explores humanistic topics related to Russia, Eastern Europe, and former Soviet Empire. This includes East European and Eurasian culture and politics; the complexities of empire (both past and present); questions of religion, law, and political authority; socialism and post-socialism; minority rights and mass violence; and the role of Russian scholarly paradigms in shaping disciplinary methods and conversations. A typical meeting consists of an open discussion of a pre-circulated work-in-progress approached with the dual aims of providing constructive feedback and provoking discussion and collegial debate. The author, in attendance, briefly contextualizes the piece and responds to inquiries and critiques. By hosting speakers and participants from multiple disciplines and academic institutions, this seminar brings multiple voices and perspectives to the table in an inclusive scholarly community that explores original questions and fosters new and innovative approaches to research.
Co-Directors: Teresa Goddu (English), Eric Gurevitch (Asian Studies), Anna Hill (English), and Matthew Plishka (Latin American Studies)
Members of the Environmental Humanities Seminar engage in lively interdisciplinary discussions about how people think about, represent, interact with, and change/are changed by their environments. Our invited speakers, works-in-progress talks, excursions, films, and reading groups provide a forum to discuss the history and culture of ecological sensibility, environmental management, climate change, and environmental justice, among other topics. We invite those interested in the environmental humanities to bring their interests, expertise, curiosity, and questions to our community.
Sign up for the Environmental Humanities Seminar mailing list.
Co-directors: Sasha Crawford-Holland (Cinema & Media Arts/Communication Studies), Jennifer Fay (Cinema & Media Arts/English), and Huan He (English)
The Film Theory and Visual Culture Seminar fosters dialogue among faculty and graduate students interested in film, visual culture, literature and media studies, as well as in philosophies of perception, aesthetics and critical theory, the politics of technology, and the history of vision. Each semester we host scholars, media-makers, and artists from leading film and media programs (and adjacent fields), as well as scholars from our own Vanderbilt community. See our line-up of speakers below and please join us for the conversation! To see a list of previous speakers, please click here. For more information about upcoming programming, click here.
Sign up for the Film Theory and Visual Culture mailing list.
Co-directors: Susan Dine (Art History), Helen Makhdoumian (RPW Center/English), and Clara Wilch (RPW Center/English)
The Indigenous Studies Seminar provides an opportunity for sharing research in critical Indigenous studies and for hosting events on current Native American and global Indigenous issues. The seminar is an interdisciplinary space where faculty, staff, graduate students, and postdocs come together to dialogue, discuss works-in-progress, share networks, and build community. The seminar supports relationship-building both within and outside the University and hosts discussions with local, national, and international Indigenous Scholars and Knowledge Keepers.
Co-directors: Joel Harrington (History/German, Russian, and East European Studies), Daniel Sharfstein (History/Law), and Kimberly Welch (Law/History)
The Legal History Colloquium (LHC) is a speaker series and workshop that brings together historians and other scholars interested in the history of law, socio-legal questions, methods, and theories, and law and society research. The workshop spans across time and place—from ancient Rome, medieval Spain, and colonial Peru to late imperial China and the modern United States. Workshop paper topics vary depending on the speaker’s interests and expertise, but have included themes such as comparative constitutionalism, the legal consciousness of ordinary people, and battles for citizenship and rights. The LHC meets approximately six times per academic year to read and discuss work-in-progress by both Vanderbilt and outside guest scholars.
Co-directors: Julia Phillips Cohen (Jewish Studies) and Samuel Dolbee (History)
The Ottoman History Workshop explores the dynamism of the Ottoman world and its impact beyond the empire’s borders and into the present in southeast Europe, southwest Asia, north Africa, and beyond. To promote collaboration, the seminar partners with various units across campus and focuses on works-in-progress. Seminar topics in the past have included American oil interests in the empire, the political ecology of charcoal and forests in Ottoman Kurdistan, science and sexology, and the question of race and the British Mandate in Iraq.
Co-directors: Mabel Denzin Gergan (Asian Studies), Adeana McNicholl (Religious Studies), and Akshya Saxena (English)
The Remaking South Asia Seminar examines the complex histories of bordering, migration, and religion that have shaped South Asia as a political region and scholarly area. This year our programming focuses on South Asian, Dalit, Indigenous, Muslim, Feminist, and other Subaltern Futurisms. Our programming recognizes that literature, art, and music are vital components to conceptualizing visions of the future. Our visiting speakers include scholars, writers, and artists who are crafting new conceptions of time, temporality, community, mythology, and rituals. Together, they offer collective reflection on how many modern-day challenges in South Asia—climate change, displacement and dispossession, caste oppression, ethno-religious nationalism, and new technologies—can be traced to how we relate to the past, present, and future.
Co-directors: Elizabeth Covington (GSS/English), Kristin Rose (GSS), Stacy Clifford Simplican (GSS/Political Science), and Danyelle Valentine (GSS/American Studies)
Working across disciplinary boundaries in a dynamic and inclusive scholarly community, the Rights and Resistance Seminar addresses significant cultural issues, politics, and scholarship that describe the current state and consider the future of human rights in the United States. The seminar will use both scholarly and popular texts as a jumping-off point to discuss human rights and resistance to power structures related to race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability.
Co-directors: Peter Chesney (History of Art and Architecture) and Re'ee Hagay (Jewish Studies)
Contemporary urban spaces at times seem at risk of being subsumed into a derealized universe displayed on digital devices. Cyberculture may have colonized our attention, but we retain potential for autonomy at multisensory and embodied registers of experience. At the Sensory Urbanism seminar, we center sensory experiences based on which critical knowledge about cities can be created. Across disciplinary boudaries, we invite participants from the Vanderbilt community and beyond to explore the radical potentials of the sensory in urban studies as both a “turn” to be embraced and a “tradition” to be excavated.
Co-directors: Ellen Osborn (Human Genetics), Tasha Rijke-Epstein (History, CES), and Laura Stark (MHS, History, CES)
Science and Technology Studies is a multidisciplinary seminar focused on science, power, and justice. Through collective reading, conversations, and events, this seminar series will bring together faculty and students from across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences to explore the processes and power structures through which knowledge is collectively crafted, as well as the impacts and erasures of collective knowledge. The premise of the seminar is that critical humanistic perspectives are needed now more than ever to shed light on the possibilities and limits of science and technology for addressing profound global challenges—with the benefit of insights from a range of geographic locations, time frames, and political positionalities.
Co-directors: Nicholas Goodell (History) and Gavin Riley (Sociology)
Social movements are a near omnipresent part of modern political life. The rise of right-wing populism and the ongoing Gaza War have compelled activists of diverse political orientations to march and protest for social change. But what does it take to start a social movement? Who participates in them? Can they actually catalyze social and political reform? The Social Movements Seminar will provide a forum to ponder these questions with scholars at the forefront of social movement research. We will recruit a diverse lineup of movement scholars during the 2025-2026 Academic Year to present their work to the Vanderbilt community. These talks will enrich our understanding of how movement actors can (and do) promote societal change. For upcoming speakers, resources, and more information, visit our website.
Co-directors: Jay Clayton (English/CMA) and Scott J. Juengel (English)
The Novel Seminar brings together the Vanderbilt community and visiting scholars to engage with groundbreaking scholarship on the history, theory, and politics of the novel form, from its early modern provenance to its contemporary persistence in a hyper-mediated public sphere. Our sessions explore matters of fictional world-building and narrative form as they intersect with pressing questions in multiple fields of inquiry, from climate change to racial capitalism, sexual politics to social justice. While largely focused on the Anglophone world, the seminar welcomes scholars working in a range of national literatures and disciplines to share work and join the discussions.