CAHSS Faculty Speaker Series

Elias al-Musili was a late 17th-century Chaldean Catholic priest and ethnic Assyrian traveler from Baghdad who wrote the oldest known Arabic-language account of the Americas, recently translated as: An Arab’s Journey to Colonial Spanish America: The Travels of Elias al-Mûsili in the Seventeenth Century.

Presentations by
Dr. Hugo López Chavolla and Weam Namou.

• November 4, 2026

• 2:45 - 4:30pm, Vasche Library, L102

• Free and open to all

Dr. Hugo López Chavolla earned his Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Humanities from UC Merced, where his research focused on migration, identity, and cultural production across the Americas (with a focus on the chronicles of Elias al-Mûsili). His teaching and scholarship include Chicano/a/x and Latinx studies, Mexican American history, Latin American literature and culture, Indigenous studies, and comparative ethnic studies. His work has been published in journals such as Theory in Action, Chasqui, Connections, Hispanofilia, and Latin American Literature Today.

Weam Namou is an Eric Hoffer award-winning author of over 20 books and a filmmaker with two feature films that have collectively won over 40 international awards, including a Kresge Arts Fellowship as a film director, further solidifying her commitment to cultural preservation.  Born in Baghdad as a Chaldean/Assyrian, Namou came to the U.S. in 1981 and is fluent in Arabic and Aramaic. She is the author of Elias Al-Musili: A Chaldean Priest’s Journey to the New World in the 1600s and Chaldean Chronicles.

Join us for a reading and discussion by Stan State Professor Jesse Wolfe. Professor Wolfe will read from his new book: Breathe Again: A Polyphony

• Wednesday, November 18, 1- 2 p.m.
• Vasche Library, L102
• Free and open to all
• Books will be available for purchase

As the word "polyphony" in the book's subtitle indicates, these poems feature an array of voices: men and women, young and old, from the present and the past. Readers are invited to see how each voice is individual and how they all connect.

Wolfe is the author of one poetry chapbook, En Route (2020), and one poetry book, the recently published Breathe Again: A Polyphony, both from Cathexis Northwest Press. He has enjoyed sharing from this book at various venues, including recent literature festivals in Merced and Fresno, and has upcoming readings in Reno, Nevada and De Pere, Wisconsin, among other places. Stan State has been a supportive community both for his creative writing and his scholarship. As a scholar, he has written two books about twentieth-century British literature and the evolution of intimacy, and he is at work on a third book about African American modernist literature and ideas of progress.