The UBC English Graduate Student Caucus, with the support of the Department of English Language & Literatures, is pleased to invite you to “Infrastructure, Development, and Environment,” as part of the 2025/2026 Critical Conversations series. On Wednesday, October 22, join us for a critical conversation between Dr. Janice Ho, Dr. Kimberly Bain, and Dr. Tolulope Akinwole.
Critical Conversations is a faculty research series organized by both the UBC Department of English Language and Literatures and the UBC English Graduate Student Caucus. The events aim to foster interdisciplinary dialogue across fields and periodization between students, faculty, and the larger university community. These events, which occur a handful of times over the course of the academic year, feature brief talks by speakers on a critical topic informed by their wide-ranging research expertise and interests.
Speakers
Janice Ho
Janice Ho has research and teaching interests in twentieth- and twenty-first-century British literature and culture; British and transnational modernisms; postcolonial and world Anglophone literatures; contemporary fiction; histories and theories of the novel; human rights studies; and infrastructure studies. Her monograph Nation and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century British Novel (2015) explored the changing definitions of citizenship in response to a range of sociopolitical events over the course of the century. Her current book project, titled Culture, Empire, and Development at the Midcentury, traces transnational genealogies of welfare—based on welfare policies articulated by the British empire for governing its colonies—and argues that these shaped international and postcolonial conceptions of development in the postwar era.
Kimberly Bain
Kimberly Bain is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia—Vancouver. Her most pressing and urgent concerns have consolidated around questions of the history, theory, and philosophy of the African diaspora. She is currently at work on two scholarly monographs. The first, entitled On Black Breath, traces a genealogy of breathing and Blackness in the United States. Her second book, Black Alchemy: Dirt, Soil, and Other Dark Matter, turns to dirt for understanding how Blackness has refused the extractive relations of racial capitalism.
Tolulope Akinwole
Dr. Akinwole’s teaching and research coalesce around African literatures, African screen media, cultural and critical theory, global Black literatures, urban studies, infrastructure studies, and Black geographies. His current book project, Moving Parts: Automobile Aesthetics in Postcolonial Africa, examines cultural expressions of spatial anxieties through literary and artistic representations of the public bus in African cities. He studies the archives of literary, artistic, musical, and filmic texts that have formed around the public bus in order to offer the public bus as a key material through which to reorient current understandings of the global Black city.
