Keynotes
Margaret Noodin
Margaret Noodin works in the Department of American Culture, Ojibwe Language & Literature at the University of Michigan. Her fields of study include Anishinaabe literature, poetry and drama, Native American linguistics, teaching Ojibwe as a second language, transcription and translation of Ojibwe stories, socio-linguistics, and computational linguistics as applied to language preservation.
Waawaateseg (Fireflies) by Margaret Noodin (with audio)
Guillermo Verdecchia (Saturday)
Guillermo Verdecchia is a writer of drama and fiction as well as a director and actor. He is the recipient of a Governor-General's Award for Drama for his play Fronteras Americanas and a four-time winner of the Chalmers Canadian Play Award. His work includes the Governor-General shortlisted Noam Chomsky Lectures (with Daniel Brooks), the Seattle Times' Footlight Award-winning Adventures of Ali & Ali (with Marcus Youssef and Camyar Chai), A Line in the Sand (with Marcus Youssef), bloom, and Another Country.
Currently an Associate Artist with Toronto's Soulpepper Theatre, where he heads new play development, Guillermo is also a PhD Candidate at the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto. His current projects include a translation of Federico Garcia Lorca's Asi Que Pasen Cinco Años (Once Five Years Pass), a new play entitled Galicia about subjectivity and globalization.
Claudia Sadowski-Smith (Sunday)
Claudia Sadowski-Smith is Associate Professor of English at Arizona State University. She is the author of Border Fictions: Globalization, Empire, and Writing at the Boundaries of the United States (University of Virginia Press, 2008), which explores cultural productions about the U.S. borders with Canada and Mexico in the context of inter-American studies and theories of globalization. She is the editor of a special 2011 issue on comparative border studies in Comparative American Studies as well as of Globalization on the Line: Culture, Capital, and Citizenship at U.S. Borders (Palgrave, 2002).
In addition, Claudia has published essays on cross-ethnic approaches to immigration, transnational adoption, border theory, literatures of the U.S.-Mexico and U.S.-Canada borders, and on the internationalization of American studies.