FIS Faculty Meeting
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Padelford Hall (PDL). Campus room: PDL C-242. Accessibility Contact: Sariah Burdett, frenital@uw.edu. Event Types: Meetings.
Friday, October 3, 2025, 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM.
Graduate Student Coffee & Conversation at the Simpson Center
The Simpson Center for the Humanities invites current graduate students at the masters and doctoral levels to a morning meet-and-greet event to make connections across the many departments and disciplines of the humanities and social sciences at the University of Washington. The Simpson Center offers UW scholars varied opportunities for intellectual community, professional development, and financial support that advance crossdisciplinary understanding, collaboration, and research. Stop by to learn more about our fellowships, events, and graduate research clusters, and to talk about shared interests over a cup of coffee or tea with colleagues beyond your department.
All graduate students are welcome.
Questions? Contact Rachel Arteaga, Simpson Center Associate Director, at rarteaga@uw.edu. To stay updated on Simpson Center events and opportunities, subscribe to our email newsletter.
Free and open to UW graduate students. Accommodation requests related to a disability or health condition should be made by…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Communications Building (CMU). Campus room: 202. Accessibility Contact: Simpson Center, 206.543.3920, humanities@uw.edu. Event Types: Information Sessions. Student Activities. Target Audience: UW Graduate Students.
Wednesday, October 22, 2025, 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM.
Katz Distinguished Lecture: Michael Rothberg, "Comparison Controversies: Historical Analogy and the Politics of Holocaust Memory"
Comparison Controversies: Historical Analogy and the Politics of Holocaust Memory, Why do we turn to the past in order to confront the crises of the present? Michael Rothberg approaches this question from the perspective of “comparison controversies,” which occur when impassioned public debates emerge from provocative historical comparisons. Since October 7, 2023, political speeches, protests, magazine articles, and social media posts have generated controversy by connecting recent events in Israel and Gaza to the Holocaust. In this talk, Rothberg will consider post-October 7 examples in relation to a larger context of comparison controversies and a longer trajectory of Holocaust memory to reflect more generally on the possibilities and pitfalls of historical analogy. Michael Rothberg (1939 Society Samuel Goetz Chair in Holocaust Studies and Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of California, Los Angeles) researches the social and cultural implications of political violence and its…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Kane Hall (KNE). Campus room: 210. Accessibility Contact: Simpson Center, 206.543.3920, humanities@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Tuesday, November 4, 2025, 6:30 PM – 8:00 PM.
FIS Faculty Meeting
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Padelford Hall (PDL). Campus room: PDL C-242. Accessibility Contact: frenital@uw.edu. Event Types: Meetings.
Friday, November 14, 2025, 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM.
Exquisite Corpus. A Practical Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Creative Expression
This workshop, led by Laura Luna Castillo (UW, DX Arts), merges computational linguistics and creative experimentation. We will use Python’s Natural Language Toolkit (NTLK) to analyze, deconstruct and algorithmically expand text corpora in a Dadaist spirit. Participants will be guided through hands-on code examples to learn techniques for data augmentation and synthetic data generation. We will explore grammatical patterns, linguistic visualizations and randomization as meaning-making tools that introduce surreal linguistic styles into a corpus, generating endless variations of source texts. This process provides insight into how Large Language Models learn and adapt to linguistic styles, albeit on a much larger scale. Time allowing, we will use our augmented corpus to fine-tune our own, rustic, language model. A laptop is required for this hands-on session.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Suzzallo Library (SUZ). Campus room: Open Scholarship Commons. Accessibility Contact: text@uw.edu. Event Types: Workshops. Target Audience: Faculty and students.
Tuesday, November 18, 2025, 2:00 PM – 5:00 PM.
FIS Faculty Meeting
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Padelford Hall (PDL). Campus room: PDL C-242. Accessibility Contact: frenital@uw.edu. Event Types: Meetings.
Friday, December 5, 2025, 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM.