Join Dagmawi Woubshet at Kelly Writers House for a conversation with Nicholas Boggs, author of Baldwin: A Love Story, the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades.
March 16, 2026 - 3pm
Register here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
March 20, 9am-6pm - A Symposium on Indigenous Philosophy across the Americas: Epistemologies and Ontologies outside the Settler Colonial Hegemony, with a keynote by Dr. James Maffie.
Find out more and RSVP using the QR codes on the poster!
wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/events/indig...
3/17, 4pm, Penn Museum: Join us for Künü, a film by Francisco Huichaqueo, that explores how Mapuche lands have been occupied by a forestry company & how native communities work to reclaim their ancestral land. Conversation with Huichaqueo will follow.
wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/events/kunu
On March 27, Wolf Humanities Center's Undergraduate Research Fellows present their projects on this year's theme, Truth. Unlocking the Truth is the 25th annual UHF Research Conference.
3/27, Van Pelt Library & online: tinyurl.com/dc9uavu8
wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/events/unloc...
Join Dagmawi Woubshet at Kelly Writers House for a conversation with Nicholas Boggs, author of Baldwin: A Love Story, the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades.
March 16, 2026 - 3pm
Register here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
A photo studio in Pakistan serves as a vibrant cultural hub where personal dreams and community connections are brought to life. As customers share unique fantasies and desires, each photo emerges as powerful representation of their aspirations, reflecting the interplay between identity and longing.
Weds 3/18: Following a screening of his award-winning documentary, filmmaker Danial Shah joins Jamal J. Elias, for an illuminating conversation about truth, lies, and their blurred boundaries. (Note: Danial Shah will join via Zoom.) wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/events/make-...
Image 2-3: Covers of Alekeseyeva’s books, Antifascism and the Avant-Garde: Radical Documentary in the 1960s (2025) and Soviet Daughter (2017)
Image 4: Still from Agnes Varda's Salut les Cubains (1963) short film, featuring a cameo from director Alain Resnais with a Bolex.
Image Descriptions:
Image 1: Portrait of Julia Alekseyeva (credit Jason Varney)
Ultimately, her book argues that understanding the complex and ambivalent history of Truth in documentary filmmaking is crucial to addressing the chaos and instability of our political moment.
Alekseyeva’s project unveils a truly transnational history of cinéma-vérité, beginning with a study of Vertov’s own complex films and writings, weaving through European “misprisions,” and then to Vertovian afterlives in contemporary experimental documentary, from Bolivia to Benin, to Japan.
The French term Cinéma-vérité was first used by French sociologist Edgar Morin, who was inspired by the then-little understood early Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Pravda (cinema-truth) newsreel series (1922-1925).
For the Wolf Center’s Truth Seminar, Alekseyeva is working on a book project titled "Cinema-Truth and its Discontents: Prehistories and Afterlives." Cinéma-vérité is central to our contemporary conceptions of documentary “truthfulness,” but the term has a contested and murky history.
Most recently, Alekseyeva published a translation of an article by antifascist documentary filmmaker Matsumoto Toshio in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (JCMS). She is also the guest editor of three forthcoming issues for Arts, JCMS, and The Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema.
Alekseyeva is author-illustrator of the award-winning graphic memoir Soviet Daughter (Microcosm, 2017). She has also published several articles on film, art, and politics in Film History, The Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, ARTMargins, The Nib, The Sixties, Jewish Currents, and elsewhere.
Alekseyeva's research is on interactions between global media and radical leftist politics, with a particular attention on Japan, France, and the former Soviet Union. Her first academic book is Antifascism and the Avant-Garde: Radical Documentary in the 1960s (University of California Press, 2025).
*Fellow Spotlight* 2025-26 Wolf Humanities Center Penn Faculty Fellow Julia Alekseyeva is an Assistant Professor of English and Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
www.jalekseyeva.com
substack.com/@jalekseyeva
In advance of Dr. Althea Wasow’s keynote lecture, we invite you to watch her short film, the wannabe (2006, 24m), which can be accessed on the event webpage. wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/events/priso...
Fri 2/27, 9:30am: What constitutes a moving image practice of abolition? Scholar and filmmaker Althea Wasow explores crucial approaches to moving-image practice committed to abolition as our "Truth in Crisis" Symposium keynote speaker.
Image 4. eclipse: This image depicts a lunar eclipse occurring around 1720 CE, along with planetary positions and astrological implications related to the event.
Image 3. horoscope chart: This is an image of a horoscope chart from perhaps the 18th-19th centuries. Charts of this kind were commonly used in the region and many similar specimens survive in manuscript collections.
Image 1. Portrait of Priyamvada Nambrath (credit Jason Varney)
Image 2. skt mss: This is an image of a Sanskrit manuscript of about 50 folios of a grammatical work. It was composed sometime in the 13th-14th centuries, and this manuscript was written around 1550 CE.
Tracing the archive’s displacement, from western India to Europe via refugee custody during the Second World War, Nambrath’s paper shows that its survival depended less on recognition of its scientific truth than on contingent judgments of value made under radically different historical conditions.
Materially, the archive preserves partial texts, pedagogical exercises, scribal tools, and practical records alongside mathematical and astronomical works, revealing a logic oriented toward practice, apprenticeship, and familial transmission rather than disciplinary canons.
Focusing on a heterogeneous manuscript collection at the Bodleian Library that has been described as a scientific archive, her paper argues that this designation reflects not an inherent epistemic coherence but a series of interpretive acts that stabilized certain truths while marginalizing others.
For the Wolf Humanities Center’s Truth Seminar, Nambrath is working on a paper that examines how claims to truth are produced and constrained through archival encounter, scholarly classification, and material survival.
Nambrath's papers are forthcoming in Puṣpikā: Tracing Ancient India Through Texts and Traditions: Contributions to Current Research in Indology and the Journal for the History of Astronomy.
Nambrath's research has been supported by the Fulbright Scholarship program, the American Philosophical Society and the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine.
Language and literature, textual culture, and visual art constitute additional related areas of focus around Nambrath's project. She is also interested in folk traditions of art and knowledge in South India, and ocean-facing histories of the region.
Nambrath's dissertation is on the applied practice of mathematics and astronomy in the sociocultural life of medieval/pre-modern Kerala. More broadly, she is interested in the intellectual and scientific history of India, focusing on cultural encounters, archaic modernisms, patronage and pedagogy.
