Magne Mogstad (UChicago)

Come by for snacks, and tea with Literature Section friends, instructors, students, etc. What are you reading? What 21L classes are you taking or hoping to take? This event is specifically geared towards undergrads; but open to friends of the community that engage in the literary and humanities at MIT.

Speaker: Aaron Landesman (MIT/Harvard University)

MIT-Africa and MIT-MENA invite you to a presentation on the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Moises Saman, focusing on his photography of the conflicts in Syria and Sudan.Saman blends traditional conflict photography with a deeply personal point of view. For more than 10 years, he has been concerned with the humanitarian impact of war in the Middle East, documenting both the front line of daily suffering and the “fleeting moments on the periphery of the more dramatic events.”Join us in the Vannevar Bush Room (MIT Building 10-105) on Monday, October 27th at 4:30pm for a talk by Saman, followed by audience Q&A. Light refreshments will be provided.RSVP for the event here. This event is open to the public.

The Cost of AI (2023), 52 minutes / Marjie Meerman (director)Introduction by Eric Robsky Huntley (DUSP)Topic: AI, Its Social and Environmental ImpactsGenerative AI is the latest buzzword in Silicon Valley. The Big Tech giants all launch chatbots and incorporate AI assistants, based on large-scale language models, into their products. The credo is: we are building the most powerful technology since the invention of electricity, and it is about to change everything. And all this happens in 'The Cloud'.Are we once again blinded by the shine of Silicon Valley and the promise of artificial intelligence? The recent success of AI comes with the use of even more raw materials, even more data, even more computing power and even larger server parks. If you zoom out, AI is a hungry beast that needs to be fed with the fastest chips, huge data sets and poorly paid labour. In the form of silicon mines, endless rows of power-guzzling servers or Syrians labeling data for the next generation of generative AI. AI turns out not to be a divine machine, but an industry that costs blood, sweat and metals. A system of extraction and exploitation on an industrial scale with major consequences for the earth and humanity.Cinema at the Nexus is an institute-wide film series which showcases films/documentaries that grapple with pressing issues of our day aiming to make sense of what we are experiencing today.Other events in the series:Cinema at the Nexus: Citizenfour | Introduction by Mariel Garcia-Montes (HASTS) and Michelle Spektor (SERC), November 4Cinema at the Nexus: Prisoner No. 626710 is Present | Introduction by Sana Aiyar, November 13Supported by the SHASS Dean's grant, hosted by the MIT Libraries.Pizza and light refreshments will be served.

Presented by Subha Xavier Associate Professor of French and African Studies at Emory UniversityAbstract: This talk will consider how China has been imagined by the Western imaginary since the Opium wars of the last century, especially in France, and how Sino-French immigrant writers and artists have responded to this misrepresentation over the years. Examining how empires rise and fall, and the role of fantasy and opioids in political strategy and literary representation, this presentation will argue for a longue durée approach to where China and France collude and collide in the migrant imaginary.Bio: Subha Xavier is Associate Professor of French and African Studies at Emory University. She is author of The Migrant Text: Making and Marketing a Global French Literature and forthcoming work on Sino-French Literary Exchange. She is a specialist of global French, with articles and essays on migrant writing and film in journals in several languages.Global France Seminar Fall 2025 | Website09/24/2025 Mohamed Amer Meziane (Brown University). “How the Fall of Heaven Overturned the Earth: Empire, Capital and the Secularocene” (MIT Hayden Library 14S-110 @ 5:15pm) 10/20/2025 Julien Gelas (Théâtre du Chêne Noir, Avignon, France). Live Performance in France 2025 (MIT 4-253 @ 5:15pm) 10/27/2025 Subha Xavier (Emory University). “From Opium to Fentanyl Wars: China in the Western Imaginary” (MIT 14E-304 @ 5:15pm) 11/19/2025 Tamara Chaplin (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign). Becoming Lesbian (MIT 14N-112 @ 5:15pm) 12/2/2025 Keith Baker (Stanford University). Jean-Paul Marat. Prophet of Terror. (MIT-TBD @ 5pm) 12/3/2025 Judith Miller (New York University). (14E-304 @ 5:15pm)