2026-27 Academic Year
Below are the details of the MLCS Research Conference Series talks previously offered in 2026-27.
Join us on Monday, September 28 from 3-4:30 p.m. in the 2-20A Visualization Lab (Digital Scholarship Centre in Cameron Library) for "The Missing Translations: Beyond the ‘Absent Presence’ of Black Canadian Voices", a talk by Dr. Sylvia Ijeoma Madueke.
This presentation examines the relative absence of translation in scholarship on Black Canadian writing. While my focus is specifically on Black Canadian writers and translation, I situate this inquiry within the broader history of Black Canadian writing and the bibliographic and scholarly efforts that have documented its development, diversity, and significance. These efforts have challenged what Yvonne Brown describes as the “absent presence” of Blackness in Canada by documenting, recovering, and critically engaging with Black Canadian literary histories and contributions. Yet the question of translation remains largely absent from this discussion. Against this background, I ask what happens when translation is brought into the picture. This preliminary inquiry maps existing scholarship and bibliographic records to identify translations and gaps, and considers what these presences and absences reveal about the circulation and visibility of Black Canadian writing in translation. By bringing translation into conversations about representation and literary recognition, the presentation seeks to open a space for further scholarly inquiry into the historical, institutional, and publishing conditions that shape the circulation of Black Canadian writing across languages and cultural contexts.
Join us on Wednesday, October 7 from 2-4 p.m. in the 2-20A Visualization Lab (Digital Scholarship Centre, Cameron Library) for "Writing Identity: Language Choice and Biscriptality in Belarus and Bosnia and Herzegovina: Digital Practices, Public Spaces, and the Symbolic Meaning of Script", the next lecture in our MLCS Research Conference Series which will be given by Dr. Maria Katarzyna Prenner, University of Graz (Austria).
Organized in partnership between the Department of MLCS and The Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies, the talk will examine how multilingualism and biscriptality interact with identity, medium, and communicative context in Belarus and Bosnia and Herzegovina. In Belarus, it focuses on the asymmetrical relationship between Belarusian and Russian, the coexistence of competing orthographic traditions, and the symbolic role of Latinica in digital discourse as a marker of cultural affiliation, differentiation, and opposition. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the analysis considers how Latinica and Kyrillica are distributed across institutional communication, public space, online discourse, and individual language use. The comparison shows that script choice is strongly shaped by communicative setting and by the distinction between institutional top-down practices and individual bottom-up usage. At the same time, language choice and script choice do not necessarily coincide, but may index different forms of belonging and social positioning. The talk therefore approaches multilingualism and biscriptality as dynamic semiotic resources through which identity is negotiated across different media and social spaces.
Light refreshments will follow.