University College

🎬 Experience ‘Aki’ (2025) live with University College, Cinema Studies and the Canadian Film Forum. Meet the director Darlene Naponse at the ensuing panel discussion and Q&A with Julia Pegahmagabow and the 2025-26 Barker Fairley Distinguished Visitor Wanda Nanibush.

📆When:
Sunday, April 26th, 2026
Doors open at 2:30 pm ET
Programming starts at 3:00 pm

📍Where:
Innis Town Hall, Innis College
2 Sussex Ave., Toronto, ON
M5S 1J5

The event is free, and all are welcome, though registration is required. Learn more & register via the QR code in post or the UC website!

Darlene Naponse is an Anishinaabe Kwe from Atikameksheng Anishnawbek, Northern Ontario. She is a writer, film director, and video artist. Naponse completed a Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts and was the 2017 Writers’ Trust McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize Finalist. Her features include ‘Cradlesong’ (2003), ‘Every Emotion Costs’ (2010), ‘Falls Around Her ‘(2018) and ‘Stellar’ (2022). ‘Aki’ (2025) is her latest film.
Wanda Nanibush is the 2025-26 Barker Fairley Distinguished Visitor at University College. She is an Anishinaabe-kwe image and word warrior, curator and community organizer from Beausoleil First Nation. She is the Helen Frankenthaler Visiting Professor in Curating in the PhD Program in Art History at CUNY in 2025 in the Graduate Department of Art History. Nanibush is part of the curatorial team for Counterpublic 2026, St.Louis’ Triennial. She is also the founder of aabaakwad, an international yearly gathering of over 80 Indigenous curators, writers and artists.


Julia Pegahmegabow is the founding executive director (eniigaanizid) of Akinoomoshin Inc. an anishinaabe being (aadiziwin) education organization situated in the community of adikamegshiing (Atikameksheng Anishnawbek). The work of Akinoomoshin Inc. is dedicated to transforming the learning experience for anishinaabek through Anishinaabemowin (language) immersion, anishinaabe kendasowin (knowing), and aki kendaman (earth learning) in a teaching lodge learning environment called akinoomoshin wiigwam.

Join us as The University of Oxford’s Nandini Das presents ‘On Belonging’. Belonging is commonly understood as a matter of identity, attachment, or legal recognition. The 2025-26 Alexander Lecture approaches it instead as a precarious public condition: the capacity to appear, act, and be judged within a shared world. Drawing on sixteenth and early seventeenth-century England, a society simultaneously obsessed with borders and shaped by movement, ‘On Belonging’ argues that belonging was neither natural nor secure, and examines literature as a site where it was tested under pressure. The figures and texts at its center reveal belonging as a reversible position, shaped by language, faith, usefulness, and narrative continuity, and always vulnerable to withdrawal. 
  
📅 When:    
Tuesday, March 31st, 2026 
4:30-6:00 p.m. ET  
  
📍Where:   
Paul Cadario Conference Centre at Croft Chapter House 
University College 
15 King’s College Circle, Toronto, ON,  
M5S 3H3  
  
Featuring Nandini Das, Professor, Early Modern English Literature and Culture 
Exeter College, University of Oxford 
 
The Alexander Lecture is being held in person at University College with live online streaming for home viewers. Faculty, students, staff, and the public are cordially invited to this hybrid lecture. 
  
💡The event is free and all are welcome, though registration is required and seating is limited for in-person attendance.  
  
Please let us know if you require accessibility accommodations upon registration. For more information, contact [email protected]  
  
Learn more & register on the UC website via our Instagram story link or through the event post QR code.