Reed College

A talk by Glynnis Fawkes.

How does a cartoonist go about adapting a work of history, specifically Eric H. Cline’s 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed? In this talk Fawkes will describe the process of interpreting Cline’s text in comics, an exercise during which she repeatedly asked herself how she might tell this story visually. Through page compositions and dramatizations in which historical figures (such as Ramses III) speak, she imagined characters for whom we have no record offering commentary and opinions. To guide the narrative, she introduced two new young characters, Pel (of the Sea Peoples) and Shesha, (an Egyptian scribe) who ask the central question of the book: Why after three prosperous centuries did the civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age suddenly come to an end?

Glynnis Fawkes is the co-author with Eric H Cline and illustrator of 1177 BC: A Graphic History of the Year Civilization Collapsed (Princeton University Press). She is also the author-illustrator of Charlotte Brontë before Jane Eyre (Little, Brown)and Persephone’s Garden (Secret Acres), among other books, and her comics have appeared on the website of The New Yorker. She has worked as an archaeological illustrator around the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean and teaches at the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont.

Sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America and Reed's department of Greek, Latin, and Ancient Mediterranean Studies. Free and open to the public.

The talk addresses the deep connection between the Jewish German-language poet Paul Celan (1920–1970) and his most prolific translator, the contemporary translingual American poet Pierre Joris (1946–2025). Taking Joris's recent and final translated volume of Celan's poetry—Memory Rose into Threshold Speech (2020)—as its discursive perch, this talk constellates various key interlocutors between the two poets and examines Joris's tremendous half-century-long feat in translating the complete Celan into an American idiom. The force and lasting power of Joris's translation project lies in its rare ability to retain in English the mutilated music of Celan's umfarshtandlekh (incomprehensible) poetics, itself a form of German reimagined through a post-Holocaust expanded Yiddish.

Ariel Resnikoff is a poet, translator, editor and educator. Resnikoff’s recent works include Raisin in Every Bite (Furniture Press, 2022), A Paradise of Hearing (The Swan, 2021), and Unnatural Bird Migrator (The Operating System, 2020), which was awarded an Anne and Robert Cowan Writers Prize. His newest poetry collection, Poems with Friends and Ghosts, is forthcoming from Chax Press in 2027. With Pierre Joris, he is also the co-editor of In Between, Keep Moving: A Pierre Joris Reader (Contra Mundum, 2026). Resnikoff translates Yiddish, Hebrew and Spanish poetry and prose. His own writing has been translated into German, French, Russian, and Mandarin, among other languages. In 2019, he received his PhD in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania, and in 2020 he was selected as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar. In 2025 he was a visiting writer and translator in China at Central China University in Wuhan and the University of Fudan in Shanghai. With E. Tracy Grinnell, he is the Co-Director of Litmus Press and Ether Sea Projects.

Sponsored by the departments of Russian and German and the Division of Literature & Languages. Free and open to the public.

Join us for a free music recital featuring Reed music students and faculty. The event is free, and no tickets are required.