The annual Michaelson, Briner & Kildahl Literary Symposium celebrating the humanities is presented by the Harry and Polly Slife Professorship in Humanities. Thanks to a leadership gift from alumni Steven and Jane Noah and Dale and Judy Goeke, the annual event brings an author, poet or other literary figure to campus to engage students, faculty, staff and the broader community in activities to stimulate critical thought.
MBK Symposium 2024
Laila Amine
Thursday, September 19
6:30 p.m.
McCaskey Lyceum, Saemann Student Center
Harry and Polly Slife Professorship in Humanities
This year’s MBK Symposium will feature Laila Amine, an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of Postcolonial Paris: Fictions of Intimacy in the City of Light.
Amine’s presentation, Blaxit to Europe: James Baldwin’s Journey of Contradictions and Colorlines, will include a discussion about her not-yet-published second book, Native Sons: African Americans’ Search for Home in the Era of Decolonization, which challenges the conventional narrative of success for African American writers in post-World War II Europe by examining the recurring motifs of return and alienation in their fiction and life writing from 1940s to the 1970s.
This Michaelson, Briner & Kildahl Literary Symposium is presented by the Slife Professorship in Humanities with generous support from Steve and Jane Noah; the Saemann Chair in Global Communities; the Department of Languages, Literature and Cultural Studies; and other donors to the MBK Endowment.
Contact Dr. Zak Montgomery with questions.
Past symposium speakers
2024: Laila Amina, author and associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
2023: Sarah Cypher, author of “The Skin and Its Girl”
2022: Martin Espada, 2021 National Book Award for Poetry
2021: Laura I. Rendón, professor emerita at the University of Texas-San Antonio
2020: Carl Wilkens, Christian missionary and founder of World Outside My Shoes
2018: Aron Aji, director of MFA in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa
2017: Luis Argueta, award-winning filmmaker from Guatemala