Ambassador Virginia "Ginny" E. Palmer is a career diplomat with over three decades of service in the U.S. Foreign Service. She most recently served as U.S. Ambassador to Ghana (2022–2025), leading engagement on bilateral ties, democratic governance, and economic partnership. Her postings since 1986 span Beijing, Zimbabwe, Hong Kong, Kenya, Vietnam, and Canada. She also served as U.S. Ambassador to Malawi (2015–2019) and as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary in the State Department's Bureau of Energy Resources, shaping U.S. energy diplomacy and the clean-energy rollout. She holds a B.S.

The department of American Studies presents an evening of discussion and poetry reading with OxyArts 2019/20 Wanless Artist in Residence Shizu Saldamando and Raquel Gutiérrez in celebration of Gutiérrez’s new poetry volume Southwestern Reconstuction, a disquieting journey through the uncharted dreamspace of memory and loss, expulsion and shelter, family and recognition in a sonic brown butch vernacular strumming notes out of sorrow and mettle.

Co-organized by English and Art/Art History

Funded by Remsen Bird

Drawing inspiration from Audre Lorde’s seminal essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” participants will unpack how erotic power challenges systems of domination, reclaiming desire as a source of knowledge, resistance, and collective transformation.

Through discussion, guided reflection, and small-group activities, this session will connect queer pleasure politics with practices of consent, boundaries, and healing, using the lens of BDSM as both metaphor and praxis for radical autonomy and relational care.

Drawing from her experience as a repatriation coordinator and museum conservator, Hamburger will discuss repatriation, the rhetoric of kinship, and Indigenous traditions towards an Aboriginal critique of violence that asks Western institutions to consider relations to Indigenous people. 

Bringing together histories of feminized labor with ethnographic scenes of stenographers captioning for d/Deaf students in the classroom, this experimental film considers how captioners and their clients make sense of demands for invisibility, neutrality, and access. Formally, by interrupting the normative coherence of sound and image, Invisible Machines reflexively undermines the fluency of its own audio track to make palpable the nuanced interpretive work that goes into transcribing across modalities. 

Prof. Miura argues that the emergence of deified peasants, commemorated through local “martyr shrines,” represented a widespread religious current in Tokugawa society and a new mode of deification previously unobserved.

Rosie Stockton is the author of Fuel (Nightboat Books 2025) and Permanent Volta (Nightboat Books 2021), which was a finalist for the California Book Awards in Poetry. Recent writing has been published by Lithub, Poetry Society of America, Social Text Journal, Parapraxis Magazine, and Tripwire. They hold an M.A. in Creative Writing from Eastern Michigan University and are a Ph.D. Candidate in the Gender Studies Department at UCLA. Rosie lives and works in Los Angeles.

The screening will be followed by a post-film discussion that discusses the central themes of identity, power, autonomy, and self-worth.

Have thoughts on the film? Offer your perspective and take on the nuanced portrayal of class dynamics, emotional resilience, and societal perceptions of sex work. Anora raises compelling questions about self-perception, healthy and unhealthy relationship dynamics, and power imbalances in relationships that we hope to investigate and analyze together!

Those of us who drink coffee often use it to awaken the senses; to get through the day; or to feed a long-standing habit. But most of us don’t know that our coffee consumption practices come from the Middle East, and are rooted in a worldview that initially treated coffee as a sacred substance. This talk examines some of the earliest Muslim sources on coffee. In examining coffee treatises; material cultures like cups and bean coolers; and coffeehouse architecture, we will see what coffee can tell us about Islam--as well as what it can tell us about ourselves.