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. These events aim to foster interdisciplinary dialogue across fields and periodization between students, faculty, and the larger university community. Occurring a handful of times over the course of the academic year, they feature brief talks by speakers on a topic informed by their wide-ranging research expertise and interests.
“From this Land” is a special Critical Conversations event co-organized by EL&L PhD student Hann Scurlock (Chickasaw Nation). This event features UBC School of Music faculty member Dr.Dylan Robinson and EL&L PhD students Leah Alfred-Olmedo and Alexa Manuel.
The in-person venue, Buchanan Tower Room 323, is wheelchair accessible. This event series is also available virtually via Zoom. Please indicate your attendance preference via the RSVP form linked below.
Light refreshments will be made available for in-person attendees.
About the Speakers
Dylan Robinson is a xwélmexw (Stó:lō / Skwah First Nation) writer, artist, and gatherer. As an Associate Professor in the UBC School of Music, he spends his time devising interdisciplinary performance practices for art music, and experimenting with forms of art writing. Dylan is co-curator for the exhibition Soundings that tours internationally until 2025 and features an ever-growing number of art scores by Indigenous artists. His book Hungry Listening (2020), which examines Indigenous and Settler colonial forms of listening, won the Native American and Indigenous Studies best book award, and the Wallace Berry award from the Society Music Theory. His current research project “Caring for Our Ancestors” involves collaborating with Indigenous artists to create processes for reconnecting kinship with Indigenous life incarcerated in museums.
Leah Alfred-Olmedo (she/her) is a half-Kwakwaka’wakw half-settler scholar from Northern Vancouver Island, currently living and studying on the territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ peoples. She holds a bachelor’s degree in music and master’s degrees in music and in literatures in English. She is currently in the first year of the PhD program in English literatures at the University of British Columbia, under the supervision of Dr. Daniel Heath Justice. Her proposed dissertation research examines the intersections of monster studies with Indigenous story and the ways in which they both complement and complicate one another. Leah is an English tutor at UBC’s First Nations House of Learning, a research assistant for Dr. Sophie McCall, a member of City Opera Vancouver’s artistic advisory committee, and the graduate student representative for the Indigenous Literary Studies Association.
Alexa Manuel is Syilx and St’a’timc from the Merritt and Lillooet areas, and is a PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of British Columbia. She obtained her Bachelor of Arts from Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, and her Master of Arts from UBC Okanagan. Her research focuses on building a Syilx literary theory based in Syilx knowledges, discussing the ways that story is not only found within text but also within the land, within the body, and within our dreams. Alexa’s research centers and draws from Indigenous queer studies, Indigenous feminisms, and her own traditional upbringing to reimagine the ways we read and understand literature through our connections to land and to our relations.