MLCS Research Conference Series
The MLCS Research Conference Series brings together faculty and researchers from the University of Alberta, invited professors from across Canada, and distinguished scholars from around the world to share their latest research, ideas, and perspectives. Taking place throughout the academic year, the series offers opportunities for intellectual exchange, interdisciplinary dialogue, and meaningful connections within and beyond the university community.
All talks are open to the public and free of charge, with registration required. Students, researchers, faculty members, and members of the broader community are warmly invited to join us.
Please see the upcoming events below for details about each talk, including the speaker, topic, date, and time. Kindly register individually for each event you wish to attend.
We look forward to welcoming you to the MLCS Research Conference Series!
MLCS Research Series Coordinator: Dr. Aude Jehan
2026-27 MLCS Research Conference Series
Next Conference
Join us on Monday, October 26 from 2-3:30 p.m. in the 2-20A Visualization Lab (Digital Scholarship Centre, Cameron Library) for "A Cannibal Writes Herself: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera", the next lecture in our MLCS Research Conference Series which will be given by Dr. Ana Carolina Mesquita.
Drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s reflections on the violent gaps of the archive and on relational approaches to subjectivity, I explore Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) as a form of anarchival self-writing, in which individual and collective selves may emerge through encounters with different languages, histories, bodies, and epistemologies, against the logic of the colonial archive. Borderlands/La Frontera’s poetics of mestizaje may thus be understood as experimenting with models of relating to alterity in which incorporation does not require the erasure of difference and can therefore configure a creative resistance to dispossession. This possibility brings the text into productive conversation with the figure of cannibalism developed within Amerindian thought, while also foregrounding the literary and political stakes of Anzaldúa’s multilingual practice. It thus raises a question about anarchival practice as a writing of the self: whether writing against the archive might also involve unsettling the systems of division through which subjects and histories become archivable in the first place.
Dr. Ana Carolina Mesquita is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Campinas (Unicamp), supported by a FAPESP grant, and currently a visiting postdoctoral researcher at the University of Alberta, Canada. A translator and writer, she holds a PhD in Literary Theory from the University of São Paulo (USP) and conducted doctoral research at Columbia University in New York, where she worked with the manuscripts of Virginia Woolf’s diaries at the New York Public Library.
Future Events
Join the departments of History, Classics, and Region and Modern Languages and Cultural Studies on Friday, November 20 at 3 p.m. in Tory 2-99 for the 2026-27 Tompkins Lecture.
“In Crimea… was the true Eretz-Isroel”: The agricultural settlements and the projects of the Jewish autonomous Republic in Crimea, 1920s-1940s" by Dr. Kostiantyn Moharychev, Stuart Ramsay Tompkins Visiting Professor.
This lecture will discuss the origins and development of the proposal within Jewish political thought and Soviet Nationalities policy, why many considered it as a major rival for Zionism and how it contributed to the development of the modern conspiracy theories in Eastern Europe. Professor Kostiantyn (Kostia) Moharychev will introduce his old-new book project Our New Soviet Zion: Projects and Creation Attempts of the Jewish National Territorial Unit, 1920s-1940s.
Speaker Bio: Kostiantyn (Kostia) Moharychev is currently a Stuart Ramsay Tompkins Visiting Professor at the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies. Previously, he was a visiting scholar in the Department of History at Purdue University (USA). His research explores Jewish political history in twentieth-century Eastern Europe, with a focus on Soviet Jewish unit projects. In 2021, he defended his dissertation (Belgorod State University, Russia) and published the book Our New Soviet Zion: Project and Creation Attempts of the Jewish National Entity in Crimea (in Russian), which examines the “Crimean Project” — an effort to establish a Jewish national entity in the Soviet Union. He is currently working on a refined and expanded English translation of his book, as well as a digital humanities project related to the 1897 Russian Empire Census and Jewish demography. He is also interested in Gaming Studies.
Join the Departments of East Asian Studies and Modern Languages and Cultural Studies on Tuesday, November 24 from 1:30-3 p.m. in Pembina 3-58 for "Principled AI: From AI Affordances to Purposeful Language Learning", a talk by Dr. Wei Cai.
While generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) offers affordances for language learning, the expanding range of possibilities can overwhelm teachers and learners without a clear sense of purpose and guiding principles. This talk connects second language acquisition theories and language teaching methodologies with GenAI affordances and presents principles for purposeful language learning with GenAI. Through concrete examples, it illustrates how these principles inform activity design, guide pedagogical decisions, and support learners in using GenAI purposefully. The talk offers a theoretically grounded, practical approach to integrating GenAI and invites participants to consider how its use can serve learning goals and engage learners in processes that facilitate language development.
Wei Cai is a Professor in the School of Languages, Linguistics, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Calgary, Canada. She previously served as the Director of the Graduate Program in Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Chair of the Division of Chinese Studies and Japanese Studies, Director of the Language Research Centre, and President of the Chinese Language Teaching and Research Association. Her main research interests include second language listening, second language acquisition, artificial intelligence in language learning and teaching, and teacher education. She received the Robert Roy Award from the Canadian Association of Second Language Teachers (CASLT) in 2023, and the Leadership and Mentorship Award from the Faculty of Arts in 2025. Her book Teaching and Researching Chinese Second Language Listening was published by Routledge (Taylor & Francis Group) in 2022. The edited volume Researching and Teaching the Chinese Language: Voices from Canada was published by Springer in 2024. Her book, Using Artificial Intelligence in Language Education: Principles and Prompting Activities, was published by Bloomsbury in 2026.
Light refreshments will be served.