2025-26 MLCS Research Conference Series
Below are the details of the four MLCS Research Conference Series talks previously offered in 2025-26.
Join us for "The Balancing Act of Diversity: Implementing Intercultural Education in Language Teaching Practice", a talk by Dr. Jasmin Peskoller (University of Innsbruck) on September 17, 2025 at 2:30 p.m. in the Arts building Student Lounge (Main & Convocation Hall).
This talk explores findings from Austrian lower secondary English classrooms, where textbook analyses, classroom observations, teacher interviews, and student surveys revealed both opportunities and challenges of intercultural learning.
The results highlight concrete classroom examples, but also persistent hurdles and risks for student wellbeing. A central insight is the need for teacher reflexivity – the ability to critically examine assumptions and practices – as a key to navigating diversity responsibly.
The talk invites educators and researchers to reflect on intercultural education as a vital part of teacher development and global conversations on equity and learning.
Join us on Monday, November 24, 2025 from 2:00-3:45 p.m. in the Senate Chamber (326 Arts & Convocation Hall) for Infrarealist Conversational Poetry and Hora Zero on Mexico City and Lima, a talk by Peruvian poet, publisher and scholar Miguel Coletti.
This presentation focuses on a comparative analysis of the conversational poetry produced by Infrarrealismo (Mexico) and the Hora Zero movement (Peru) during the 1970s and 1980s. The research explores how these avant-garde movements addressed the urban experience of Mexico City and Lima, employing direct and colloquial language to challenge hegemonic literary structures and capture everyday life, marginalization, and social discontent.
A Meet-and-Greet will follow at 3.45 p.m. in the Student Lounge (212 Arts Building). Coffee will be served.
Join the Department of History, Classics, and Religion and the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies for the 2026 Tompkins Lecture. "What Was a Ghetto in Ukraine and Poland, during the Holocaust? Rethinking Space and Everyday Life of Jews and Roma" by Tompkins Professor Hanna Abakunova will take place on Friday, January 9 at 3 p.m. in Tory 2-58. There will be a light reception following the talk.
Talk description: The talk re-examines the concept of ghetto in Ukraine and Poland during the Holocaust by focusing on how survivors described and interpreted these spaces versus archival documents. Drawing on Jewish and Roma testimonies from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, the Yale Fortunoff Video Archive, and other oral history collections, as well as German, Ukrainian, and Polish archives, the speaker argues that existing historiography fails to capture the lived reality of confinement. Survivors’ accounts reveal ghetto as a fluid social and moral landscape, inviting a broader rethinking of everyday life under the occupation in Eastern Europe during WWII.
Speaker bio: Hanna Abakunova is Stuart Ramsay Tompkins Visiting Professor at the University of Alberta. She received her PhD in Holocaust History from the University of Sheffield (UK, 2019) and earlier completed a Candidate of Science in History (Ukraine, 2010) as well as an MA in Psychology (Ukraine, 2005). Prior to her Tompkins Professorship, she worked as the Research Director and Content Manager (contractor) for the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos Refresh Project at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and as a researcher and lecturer at Uppsala University (Sweden). Abakunova’s research focuses on the history and memory of the Holocaust in Ukraine and Poland, the genocide of Roma, and interethnic relations in the former Soviet Union.
Join us on Wednesday, February 25, 2026 at 12 p.m. in the Student Lounge (Room 232, Arts & Convocation Hall) for the next talk in the MLCS Research Conference Series.
"Academic Reading, Cultural and Linguistic Diversity, and Equity in Teacher Education: Speculative Pedagogies of Qualitative Inquiry" will be presented in-person by Dr. Rachel Heydon (Western University) and by Zoom by Dr. Emma Cooper (University of Cambridge) and Dr. Zheng Zhang (Western University).
Drawing on the Reading Pedagogies of Equity Project (RPEP), a professional learning initiative, our guest speakers will explore how academic reading practices in teacher education shape equity for culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students. They invite participants to rethink academic reading as a pedagogical practice, challenging deficit discourses of CLD and expanding flexibility in reading modalities and syllabus policies. The talk concludes by considering how teacher education might become a more transformative space for cultural, linguistic, and epistemic diversity.
Please join the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies for the 2026 Tompkins Lecture: “Winter of Terror: The GPU's Mass of Operation and the Holodomor” by Tompkins Fellow Dr. Andriy Kohut. The lecture will take place on Monday, March 23, 2026 at 3:00 p.m. in the Digital Scholarship Centre, 2-20 A (Cameron Library).
Based on declassified documents from the former KGB archives, the lecture presents new findings on a previously unrecognized mass operation conducted by the Soviet secret police during the winter of 1932–1933. Statistical and spatial analysis reveals a near-perfect correlation between the GPU's repression plan and the regional distribution of Holodomor losses, demonstrating that the operation was an integral element of the deliberate policy initiated in Moscow.
Dr. Andriy Kohut is a Director of the Sectoral State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine. SSU Archive stores today the largest collection of the declassified KGB files. He received his Ph.D. in History from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, and his M.A. in History from Ivan Franko Lviv National University.