A-1  コーネル大学、孫崎玲コース:
Cornell society for Humanities Coirse proposal  
Wartime IncarcerationLiteratureReiMagosaki
Society for the Humanities - Cornell University
Japanese American wartime incarceration literature seminar
Juniors, Seniors, Grad Students, enroll today!
SHUM 4720/6720 Japanese American Wartime Incarceration Literature in the Twenty-First Century
Rei Magosaki
3 Credits
T 2-4:30pm
This seminar engages with the wide range of perspectives and imagination in recent Japanese American literature to think through the changing possibilities and responsibilities of survivance and memory work in the twenty-first century. Our focus will be on works of poetry collections, narrative fiction, graphic novels, and creative nonfiction from selected U.S. writers who are descendants of Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. The selections center around Topaz (UT), which was, from the beginning, a particularly vibrant site of cultural production, but will also engage with lesser-known sites like Gila River (AZ) and Missoula (MT). These works display an array of literary sensibility reflecting their collective cultural inheritance of memory, taking agency in providing their readers with critical consciousness about the way in which descendant lives are complicated in the twenty-first century.
Image: Mt Swasey and Moonlight by Charles Erabu Suiko Mikami
https://classes.cornell.edu/.../roster/FA26/class/SHUM/4720
A-2: Cornell society for Humanities
2026-27: The Year of Survival
5/08/2026
Announcing the 2026-27 Fellows at the Society for the Humanities:
Society for the Humanities Visiting Fellows
/Lucy Alford:English, Wake Forest University,Vital Signs: Precarity in Poetic Form
/J. Andrew DuftonArchaeology, Dickinson College,The Neighborhoods of Ancient North Africa
/Amanda Gaggioli,istory, University of Memphis,The Politics of Resilience: Earthquakes and Terraces in the Structuring of Greco-Roman Society
/Ungsan Kim,Asian Languages and Literature, University of Washington,
Fture Imperfect: Queer Asian Cinema and the Temporality of Survival
/Jérémie Foa, History, Aix-Marseille University, Surviving in the Renaissance: Facing Violence and Climate Change in the Late Sixteenth Century
/Rei Magosaki, English, Chapman University, Poetics of Japanese American Incarceration Literature
2026-27 Focal Theme: Survival
We invite humanistic engagement on what it means to live in moments that are marked by precarity, fragility, and catastrophe. What might it mean to flourish in a world on the brink of extinction or exhaustion? Survival can be individual or collective, shaped by cultural imperatives, ideological commitments, or existential negotiations in the face of political, economic, environmental, social, and technological upheavals. Under these conditions, survival is more than living: survival can be a form of living on, a form of sustenance. We ask: what practices and imaginaries survive as individuals, movements, or species confront erasure? How does sudden or slow violence produce ways of surviving? Is refusal, dissent, resilience, or renewal sufficient to counter destructive forces?
We draw inspiration from ideas about “survivance,” and ask what it means to endure and transform amid the catastrophes (past and present) that challenge our existence. As Audre Lorde asks, what does it mean to craft a good life in a world structured so that some were never meant to survive? Have our visions of the good life become sources of cruel optimism, to follow Lauren Berlant?
In posing these questions, we invite humanistic research that engages or critiques the idea of survival. From environmental challenges (hurricanes, floods, droughts, wildfires, famine, and rising sea levels) to political landscapes (wars, military action, regime change), we invite research that considers survival through questions of poetics, aesthetics, ethics, history, or biopolitics. Could we rethink the literary, material, psychic, and symbolic survival of the past? Is one avenue for survival to embrace the fugitive possibilities of living on amongst the ruins?  We welcome projects that collectively press us to confront the survival of care, creativity, freedom, prosperity, and knowledge.