Sir Run Run Shaw Lecture
2026 Series

Adriana Michelle Campos Johnson

Associate Professor of Comparative Literature
Univeristy of California, Irvine

"River Lines"

Monday, February 16, 2026 | 12:30 pm - 1:50 pm
Humanities Institute 1008

What is the place of rivers in projects variously called Blue Humanities, Hydrohumanities, Wet Ontologies? Campos Johnson will consider this question by reading the Parana Ra’anga project, a 2010 expedition organized by Graciela Silvestri and Martin Prieto that traveled by boat from Buenos Aires up to Asunción, retracing the 1534 voyage of Ulrich Schmidl. She reads the trip as both a happening as well as the archive that emerged in its wake. 

Adriana Michele Campos Johnson is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Affiliate in Spanish & Portuguese at UC-Irvine. She is author of Sentencing Canudos: Everydayness and Subalternity in the Backlands of Brazil (2010) and a forthcoming book on visual infrastructures in Latin America. She is beginning a new project on forms of water in the Latin American cultural archive, including rivers, oceans, rain and drought. Recent publications include “Excess of Visibility/Scarcity of Water” (Discourse), “An Expanse of Water” (Liquid Ecologies in the Arts), “Infrastructure.” (Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics), “The Impropriety of Piracy” (Matraga: Estudos linguisticos e literarios) and “Off Screen, Unsighted, Unthought” (Forma: A Journal of Latin American Criticism & Theory)

Presented by the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature

Aziza Ahmed

Professor of Law and N. Neal Pike Scholar
Boston University School of Law

 

 

"Risk and Resistance: How Feminists Transformed the Law and Sciences of AIDS"

Monday, March 2, 2026 | 5:00 pm - 6:30
Humanities Institute 1008

How did women come to be seen as 'at-risk' for HIV? In the early years of the AIDS crisis, scientific and public health experts questioned whether women were likely to contract HIV in significant numbers and rolled out a response that effectively excluded women. Against a linear narrative of scientific discovery and progress, Risk and Resistance shows that it was the work of feminist lawyers and activists who altered the legal and public health response to the AIDS epidemic. Feminist AIDS activists and their allies took to the streets, legislatures, administrative agencies, and courts to demand the recognition of women in the HIV response. Risk and Resistance recovers a key story in feminist legal history – one of strategy, struggle, and competing feminist visions for a just and healthy society. It offers a clear and compelling vision of how social movements have the capacity to transform science in the service of legal change.

Aziza Ahmed is Professor of Law and N. Neal Pike Scholar at Boston University School of Law.  She is the co-founder and co-director of the Boston University Program on Reproductive Justice.

Co-sponsored by the Departments of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, History, and Sociology; Program in Public Health, School of Social Welfare, Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, and the Center for Changing Systems of Power