Monica P. Moore Speaker Series: Steven Lee on "Left and Right Melancholy Across the Pacific"

You are invited to attend the 2021-2022 Monica Moore Speaker Series lecture and MTL End of Year Reception. Steven Lee (UC Berkeley) will be presenting “Left and Right Melancholy across the Pacific”, with MTL Committee -in-Charge faculty, Professor Roanne Kantor, and MTL Ph.D. candidates Jenny Evang, and Michelle Ha responding. Please join us for this talk on May 19, in the Terrace Room (Building 460, 4th Floor) from 3:30-4:30 with an End of Year MTL reception to follow with a wonderful spread catered by Tea Traditions including an assortment of tea sandwiches, sweets, scones, and spirits. 

Steven Lee (MTL PhD ’08) is Associate Professor in English at UC Berkeley. The author of The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution (Columbia UP, 2015) and co-editor of Comintern Aesthetics (University of Toronto Press, 2020), he is a scholar of comparative ethnic studies, critical theory, and American literature.

Respondents:

Roanne Kantor is Assistant Professor of English and, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature. Roanne Kantor's primary field is Global Anglophone literature and its relationship to other literary traditions of the Global South. She also works on the conditions for interdisciplinary research in the humanities, especially literature's interface with medicine and the humanistic social sciences. Kantor is also a translator and the winner of the Susan Sontag Prize for Translation. Before coming to Stanford, Kantor taught at Harvard, Boston University, Brandeis, and The University of Texas at Austin, where she earned her Master’s and Ph.D.

Jenny Evang’s research uses queer theory to address broader questions of knowledge production. She is particularly interested in rethinking the stakes of queer historiography and temporality. Her research focuses on how we produce and use archives in a broad sense, including national and institutional archives, contemporary media archives, and the status and the notion of the archive as such. Her current project explores the relation between Scandinavian history, the rhetoric of gender equality, and homonationalism. Before coming to Stanford, Jenny earned a BA in Physics and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Brown University.

Michelle Ha is researching the history of Korean indentured labor migration to Mexico in the early twentieth century as a case study for theorizing migration justice. In particular, her aim to situate this history within studies of racialized migration patterns across colonial and imperial contexts and explore how it reflects as well as departs from theoretical formulations of colonial migration advanced in normative scholarship. Her research is informed by her training in international human rights and refugee law and inspired by multidisciplinary approaches to studying the politics of knowledge production, translation, and transnational/racial solidarity.
 
Before coming to Stanford, she was based in the Yucatán Peninsula as a visiting researcher at el Benemérito Instituto Campechano in Campeche, Mexico. Her research term was supported by a 2020-2021 Fulbright-García Robles fellowship. She was also awarded Foreign Language & Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship funding to study Yucatec Maya. She received an MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago, a JD from Harvard Law School, and a BA in Government from Dartmouth College.

The Monica Moore Speaker Series is named after the administrator and soul of the interdisciplinary graduate program of Modern Thought and Literature for forty years. It is the only endowed lecture at Stanford that honors a staff member