Swarthmore College
Publications
Mary Beltrán, Latinx TV: Latina and Latino Storytellers Making an Impact

Mary Beltrán, Latinx TV: Latina and Latino Storytellers Making an Impact

Thursday, March 28, 2024 at 4:30pm, Scheuer
Mary Beltrán, Latinx TV: Latina and Latino Storytellers Making an Impact
Anna Shechtman, The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle

Anna Shechtman, The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle

Wednesday, March 20, 2024 at 7pm, LibLab, McCabe Library
Anna Shechtman, The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle
Liberal Arts in the Age of Austerity: A Conversation with Robert Meister

Liberal Arts in the Age of Austerity: A Conversation with Robert Meister

Tuesday, March 5th, 4:30-6pm Scheuer, Kohlberg Hall
Liberal Arts in the Age of Austerity: A Conversation with Robert Meister
Decentralizing online safety: The promises and perils of federated social media, featuring Yoel Roth ’11

Decentralizing online safety: The promises and perils of federated social media, featuring Yoel Roth ’11

Monday, March 4, 4:30-6pm Scheuer, Kohlberg Hall
Decentralizing online safety: The promises and perils of federated social media, featuring Yoel Roth ’11
Roderick Ferguson and Kandice Chuh in conversation on Gender & Sexuality Studies

Roderick Ferguson and Kandice Chuh in conversation on Gender & Sexuality Studies

Friday, March 1, 4:30-6pm, Scheuer, Kohlberg Hall
Roderick Ferguson and Kandice Chuh in conversation on Gender & Sexuality Studies
Spring 2024 Event Calendar

Spring 2024 Event Calendar

Upcoming Events from the Aydelotte Foundation
Spring 2024 Event Calendar
Projects + Programs
Race, Racism, and the Liberal Arts

We are investigating and assembling work on underrepresented histories of how Black people, institutions, and ideas have existed outside of, pushed against, or reshaped from within the ideas and institutions of the liberal arts.

Race, Racism, and the Liberal Arts
Podalot – The Aydelotte Podcast

Podalot is the podcast of the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College, an interdisciplinary research center that supports the creation and dissemination of knowledge about liberal arts education as it exists across the broadest possible range of contexts and institutions.

Podalot – The Aydelotte Podcast
Scholarly Promotion

The Aydelotte Foundation and Swarthmore College Libraries can help you plan a launch event for the Swarthmore community, your extended disciplinary interlocutors, and/or the wider public. 

Scholarly Promotion
Interdisciplinary Initiatives Development Grant

This grant program offers funding for interdisciplinary programs and departments to research, develop, and strengthen interdisciplinary curricula within their unit and/or across the College.

Interdisciplinary Initiatives Development Grant
Courses

Courses and the curriculum as a whole are at the heart of the Aydelotte Foundation’s mission.

Courses
Curricular Grants

Curricular Grants support Swarthmore faculty developing assignments, projects, or entire courses that include research, writing, discussion, and reflection on topics related to the history, present, and future of liberal arts and/or higher education.

Curricular Grants
Get Involved

Are you publishing a new book or other significant work?  Read how the Aydelotte Foundation and Swarthmore Libraries can support a launch event.

Are you teaching a course with faculty or students from other institutions? Let us know.

Events
Wednesday, March 20, 2024, 7 – 9pm 

Anna Shechtman ’13 Reading: The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle

McCabe LibLab, Full Space, Conference Room

Aydelotte Foundation Media, Art, and Technology Series
Anna Shechtman ’13 reading from her new book
The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle (March 2024)
Wednesday, March 20, 2024 at 7pm, LibLab, McCabe Library, Swarthmore College

Anna Shechtman ’13 published her first crossword puzzle in the NY Times when she was nineteen and later spearheaded the The New Yorker’s popular crossword section. Working with a medium often criticized as exclusionary, elitist, and out-of-touch, Anna is one of very few women in the field of puzzle making, where she strives to make the everyday diversion more diverse. 

After graduating with highest honors in English Literature from Swarthmore, Anna received her Ph.D in English and Film and Media Studies Yale. She currently Klarman Fellow at Cornell University, where she will begin as an assistant professor in the English department in Fall 2024. The Riddles of the Sphinx, about the history of the crossword puzzle and the sexual politics of wordplay, will be published by HarperOne in March 2024. Anna’s writing has appeared in Critical Inquiry, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Representations, The Yale Review and Los Angeles Review of Books, where she is an editor-at-large.

On March 21 at 4:30 in McCabe Library LibLab, Anna will be leading a seminar on her scholarly work-in-progress, The Media Concept: A Genealogy. To attend please rsvp here.

Shechtman’s visit is part of the Aydelotte Foundation’s Spring ’24 series Media, Art and Technology. Cosponsored by Art History, Film and Media Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the Libraries

Thursday, March 28, 2024, 4:30 – 6pm 

Latinx TV: Latina and Latino Storytellers Making an Impact

Kohlberg Hall Scheuer Room - Multi-Purpose Room
Aydelotte Foundation Media, Art, and Technology Series
Mary Beltrán Latinx TV: Latina and Latino Storytellers Making an Impact
4:30-6pm, Scheuer, Kohlberg Hall, Swarthmore College

Based on her research for the book Latino TV: A History, Dr. Beltrán explores how Latino and Latina writers and TV show runners since the 2000s have produced compelling programs that depict Latina/os with complexity and nuance, and how Latina series creators have made a particular impact since the 2010s.

Mary Beltrán is Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Radio-Television-Film and a faculty affiliate of Mexican American & Latina/o Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her publications include Latino TV: A History, Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes, and the co-edited anthology Mixed Race Hollywood.Co-sponsored by the Department of Film & Media Studies and the Latin American & Latino Studies Program
Friday, April 5, 2024, 4:30 – 6pm 

Jodi Melamed and Chandan Reddy in conversation on Command Power

Hormel/Nguyen Intercultural Center at Sproul Hall Room 201 Dome Room

The Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College is pleased to invite you to a conversation with Jodi Melamed and Chandan Reddy. They will discuss their collaborative work on “command power,” their descriptive term for how liberalism functions as a racial capitalist world-making praxis, rather than as a philosophy of freedom or just order. Andy Hines will moderate the conversation.

The event will be held on Friday, April 5 at 4:30pm ET in the IC Dome at Swarthmore. It is open to all in the Tri-Co community and to the public. 

The event is part of the Aydelotte Foundation’s project on “Race, Racism, and the Liberal Arts.” This project assembles work on underrepresented histories of how people, institutions, and ideas have existed outside of, pushed against, or reshaped from within the ideas and institutions of the liberal arts. It also investigates and recounts curricular, epistemological, and institutional genealogies that challenge how or whether the term liberal arts has silenced histories and ways of knowing developed by Black people, indigenous people, and people of color. 

More information about the featured speakers can be found below. Please visit our website for updates on this research initiative, including additional events and publications.

Jodi Melamed is professor of English and Race, Ethnic, and Indigenous Studies at Marquette University. For spring semester 2024 she will serve as the Norman Freehling Professor at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minnesota UP, 2011), co-editor of Economies of Dispossession: Indigeneity, Race, Capitalism (with Jodi A. Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, and Chandan Reddy), a special issue of the journal Social Text.  Her influential essay, “Racial Capitalism,” is among the most cited articles in the journal Critical Ethnic Studies. Her current book project, Operationalizing Racial Capitalism: On Liberalism’s Command Powers (with Chandan Reddy) is under contract with Verso Books. 

Chandan Reddy is Associate Professor in the departments of the Comparative History of Ideas and the Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. His book, Freedom With Violence: Race, Sexuality and the U.S. State (2011) from Duke University Press won the Alan Bray Memorial award for Queer studies from the MLA as well as the Best Book in Cultural Studies from the Asian American Studies Association, both in 2013. He is co-editor (with Jodi Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, and Jodi Melamed) of the special issue, “"Economies of Dispossession: Indigeneity, Race, Capitalism," Social Text (Spring 2018). His current book project, Operationalizing Racial Capitalism: On Liberalism’s Command Powers (with Jodi Melamed) is under contract with Verso Books. 

Andy Hines is Senior Associate Director of the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College. He is the author of Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism and the University (Chicago, 2022) and the editor of University Keywords (under contract, Hopkins).

Tuesday, April 9, 2024, 12 – 1pm 

Aydelotte Foundation Tuesday Cafe with Alejandra Azuero-Quijano

Kohlberg Hall Scheuer Room - Multi-Purpose Room

RESCHEDULED!

We hope you can join us!

Our first cafe of the spring semester will feature Alejandra Azuero-Quijano, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, and will take place from noon to 1:00pm on Tuesday, March 5th in the Scheuer Room.

The Aydelotte Foundation's Tuesday Cafes are a chance for faculty and staff to come together and enjoy a lunch while learning about other faculty and staff's varied roles on campus. 


Tuesday Cafe's format is a cross between Vogue’s 73 questions and a Reddit “Ask Me Anything,” hosted by former Aydelotte Co-Director, Timothy Burke. Each informal interview session features a faculty or staff member answering questions about what they do (and don’t do) every day. We hope it's a fun and interesting way to learn about the profound and mundane dimensions of the different kinds of work done at Swarthmore. 

Boxed lunches are provided and vegetarian/vegan options will be available. Tuesday Cafes are open to all faculty and staff so please spread the word!

RSVP’s are encouraged but not required.
If you plan on attending, please let us know here.

See you there!
- The Aydelotte Foundation

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