°ÄÃÅÁùºÏ²ÊÔ¤²â

A Conversation with Professor Dennis Washburn
What's the Use: The Place of Literary Translation in Academic Research

Monday, November 25, 2024

4:00 p.m.

Location: Texana Room, °ÄÃÅÁùºÏ²ÊÔ¤²â Fondren Library

The °ÄÃÅÁùºÏ²ÊÔ¤²â Department of English is delighted to announce Prof. Dennis Washburn’s upcoming talk on translation studies on November 25th at 4:00 p.m. in Fondren's Texana Room. Dennis Washburn is a Professor of Comparative Literature, Asian Societies Cultures and Languages, and Film Studies at Dartmouth College. He completed the most recent translation of The Tale of Genji into English in 2015. His work joins the three other principle translations of this text in English. Reception to follow.

 

Marcela Fuentes Reading and Q&A: "The Power and the Passion of Malas"

Thursday, November 14, 2024

5:30 p.m.

Location: Moody Auditorium, Frances Anne Moody Hall

The °ÄÃÅÁùºÏ²ÊÔ¤²â Department of English and its Narrative Now Initiative are thrilled to announce an upcoming visit from Marcela Fuentes, Pushcart Prize-winning fiction writer, essayist, and author of Malas, one of the most talked-about novels of summer 2024 and a Good Morning America Book Club Pick.

 

Erika Meitner Poetry Reading and Book Signing

Monday, November 4, 2024

4:00 p.m.

Location: Bridwell Library

As part of her residency, Erika Meitner, the °ÄÃÅÁùºÏ²ÊÔ¤²â Project Poëtica Inaugural Artist in Residence, will present a public reading of recent work and sign copies of her newest book (available for purchase at the event). The event is free and open to all!

Pachinko Episode Screening and Q&A

Featuring: Chang-rae Lee with Screenwriters and Showrunners from Apple TV's Pachinko

Wednesday, October 23, 2024

7:00 p.m.

Location: Oren Family Auditorium in the Hughes Trigg Student Center

Hear from experts on screenwriting and production for television as guests from the hit Apple TV+ show Pachinko show a recent episode and answer moderator and audience questions. This special visit is part of °ÄÃÅÁùºÏ²ÊÔ¤²â English's Narrative Now Initiative and engages with the initiative's core desire to celebrate the power of story and voice.

Tolu Olorunnipa and Robert Samuels: A Conversation with Pulitzer Winners co-presented by Hay Festival Forum Dallas and °ÄÃÅÁùºÏ²ÊÔ¤²â’s Project Poëtica

Sunday, October 13, 2024

3:00 p.m.

Location: The Texas Theatre, 231 W. Jefferson Blvd

Join us for an enlightening evening with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Tolu Olorunnipa and Robert Samuels as they discuss their acclaimed book, His Name is George Floyd, and their impactful careers in journalism. With an introduction from Prof. Darryl Dickson-Carr, °ÄÃÅÁùºÏ²ÊÔ¤²â's Professor E.A. Lilly Professor in English, this event will offer a unique opportunity to hear from two prominent voices who have helped shape the national dialogue on race, justice, and inequality in America.

Robyn Warhol Narrative Now Lecture: “The Part Issue Project: Victorian Seriality and the Structure of Part Endings”

Thursday, October 10, 2024

6:00 - 7:00 p.m.

Location: The Texana Room in Fondren Library

Warhol will report on her latest research into the narrative structure of Victorian serial novels. Focusing on 19th-century British novels that appeared not in magazines or newspapers but as free-standing monthly or weekly pamphlets, she will demonstrate her website, Reading Like a Victorian, and share the findings of “Project Endings,” a medium-data study of how Victorian serial parts ended. (Spoiler: There were very few cliffhangers!).

Jenny Molberg Poetry Reading

Wednesday, September 11, 2024

7:00 p.m.

Location: Wild Detectives, 314 W Eighth St, Dallas, TX 75208

As part of her two-day °ÄÃÅÁùºÏ²ÊÔ¤²â visit, poet Jenny Molberg will read from her latest collection, The Court of No Record, and answer questions from The Wild Detectives’ Inner Moonlight Series host Logen Cure. The event is a coproduction between °ÄÃÅÁùºÏ²ÊÔ¤²â’s Project Poëtica and The Wild Detectives.

BIO: Jenny Molberg is the author of three poetry collections: Marvels of the Invisible (winner of the Berkshire Prize, Tupelo Press, 2017), Refusal (LSU Press, 2020), and The Court of No Record (LSU Press, 2023). She edited the Unsung Masters book, Adelaide Crapsey: On the Life & Work of an American Master. Originally from Dallas, TX, she earned her BA at Louisiana State University, her MFA at American University, and her PhD at the University of North Texas. She has received fellowships and scholarships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sewanee Writers Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and the Longleaf Writers Conference. Her poems and essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, VIDA, AGNI, The Missouri Review, The Rumpus, The Adroit Journal, Oprah Quarterly, and other publications. She is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Central Missouri, where she directs Pleiades Press and edits Pleiades: Literature in Context.




Academic Writing for the Public: A Workshop for Humanities Ph.D. Students

Monday, May 20 – Thursday, May 23, 2024

10:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m.

Location: Annette Caldwell Simmons Hall 208

This workshop will guide you through the craft of writing engaging and intellectually serious articles for general readers. You will analyze public-facing academic writing, do writing exercises, and workshop an essay of your own. You will learn valuable skills in narrative, argument, presenting information, and pitching, so that when the public needs your expertise and insight, you will be ready. Open to Ph.D. students in the humanities.

 

 

Martha J. Cutter Lecture, "The Many Resurrections of Henry Box Brown"

Wednesday, April 10, 2024

Lecture: 5:30 pm, Followed by reception

Location: Texana Room, Fondren Library 211

In 1849, an enslaved man named Henry Box Brown obtained a large postal crate and had himself mailed from slavery in Richmond, Virginia to freedom in Philadelphia, PA. Brown survived this voyage and went on to carve out a life for himself that entailed performing his story in the US, the UK, and Canada until his death in 1897. This talk traces his resurrections of himself as an abolitionist speaker, writer, hypnotist, actor, magician, concert singer, and even a ventriloquist. It shows how Brown’s multiple resurrections manipulate the traumatic legacy of enslavement to create subversive messages about the everywhere of slavery while also creating a unique and radical style of Black performance art. The speaker also discusses the nature of her own archival work, with a key emphasis on what literature and humanities scholars bring to the study of history.

BIO: Martha J. Cutter is a professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut and the Director of the American Studies Program. She is the author of four books: Unruly Tongue: Language and Identity in American Women’s Writing (University Press of Mississippi, 1998), Lost and Found in Translation: Contemporary Ethnic American Writing and the Politics of Language Diversity (University of North Carolina Press, 2005), The Illustrated Slave: Empathy, Graphic Narrative, and the Visual Culture of the Transatlantic Abolition Movement, 1800-1852 (University of Georgia Press, 2017), and The Many Resurrections of Henry Box Brown (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022). She is also the coeditor (with Cathy J. Schlund-Vials) of a collection of essays on multi-ethnic graphic narrative titled Redrawing the Historical Past: History, Memory, and Multiethnic Graphic Novels (2018, the University of Georgia Press). She has published more than forty articles or book chapters on women writers, American multi-ethnic literature, African American literature, abolition, and racial passing. She has received numerous awards, including the College English Association’s award for the best book in Literary Theory/Criticism in 2000, a University of Connecticut Humanities Grant for work on The Illustrated Slave in 2015, a Provost’s fellowship from the University of Connecticut in 2007, and the CELJ (Council of Editors of Learned Journals) Award for the Best Journal in North American Studies, for MELUS. Most recently, she was awarded an NEH academic year fellowship from 2019-2020 for research on her book on Henry Box Brown.

 

Dr. William Nericcio Lecture

Wednesday, March 6, 2024

Dr.William Nericcio

Lecture: 2:00 pm

Reception: 4:00 pm

Overview:
Dr. William Nericcio, professor and cultural critic at San Diego State University, will be visiting °ÄÃÅÁùºÏ²ÊÔ¤²â (°ÄÃÅÁùºÏ²ÊÔ¤²â) for an engaging session with graduate students and faculty. Renowned for his insightful work on media, literature, and cultural studies, Dr. Nericcio's visit promises to spark stimulating discussions and provide valuable perspectives on contemporary cultural narratives. During his visit, he will meet with grad students, offering them a unique opportunity to delve into his research methodologies, theoretical frameworks, and his experiences in the field. Additionally, Dr. Nericcio will present a lecture on his latest work, showcasing his critical analysis and interpretations of media and cultural identity.

 

 

 

All's Conceit: Invention and Perspective in Elizabethan Poetics

Thursday, February 29, 2024

Dr.Will Roudabush

Reception: 5:00 pm

Lecture: 5:30 pm

Abstract:
This presentation examines how the invention of visual perspective occasioned a new understanding of artistic invention itself by the end of the sixteenth century. Drawing attention to the surprising number of references to “invention” and “perspective” in Elizabethan epyllia, their paratexts, and Elizabethan poetic theory, it argues that the short-lived yet influential genre was a prominent proving ground for new ideas surrounding artistic creation and aesthetic meaning. Situating invention alongside its synonym, “conceit,” it shows how contemporary developments in visual perspective and Elizabethan poetics displaced invention from its previously privileged humanist position — a quality inherent within a work of art to be extracted — to be viewed instead as an unstable meaning contingent upon the individual perspective and subjective opinion of readers. After charting the development of perspective, invention, and conceit across the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the remainder of the presentation discusses John Marston’s Metamorphosis of Pigmalion’s Image as a poetic adaptation of perspective’s eccentric offshoot, anamorphosis. Declaring “All’s conceit” of his poem’s substance, Marston returns his readers’ gazes and turns them into active participants in the production of its meaning. Marston reveals how invention has become anamorphic, etymologically “formed again” depending upon readers’ own individual, embodied perspectives.

 

A Conversation with John Guillory

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Dr. John Guillory

Location: Texana Room, Fondren Library

Lecture: 5:30 pm

Abstract:
The past two decades have seen a burgeoning commentary on the subject of “close reading,” now widely regarded as the core practice of literary study. In the previous decades—from the later 1960s to the first years of the new century—close reading was seldom remarked, or dismissed as a formalist practice incompatible with the new historicist paradigm. In this lecture, I take a step back from recent developments to consider the long history of close reading. I aim to solve two large puzzles in this history: The first is the question of why the term “close reading” was so infrequently invoked in the decades after its initial mention in I. A. Richards’s Practical Criticism. In fact, the term did not achieve consensus recognition in literary study until the 1960s, on the threshold of New Criticism’s decline. The second puzzle concerns the inability of scholars to define the procedure of close reading in any but the most uncertain terms, usually not much more than is implied by the spatial figure “close.” These two puzzles are intertwined. The premise of my argument is that the literary critics of the interwar period—both the representatives of “practical criticism” and the American New Critics—were not aiming at first to devise a method of reading at all. Following the lead of T. S. Eliot, these critics were most urgently concerned to establish the judgment of literature on more rigorous grounds than previously obtained in criticism. In the course of forming a conception of literature that would function as the basis for judgment, they developed a corollary technique of reading that confirmed the value of the literary work of art in an environment of new media and mass forms of writing. I read close reading as a specialization of reading as a cultural technique, a particular kind of methodical procedure that can be described but not proscribed, and that is transmitted largely by demonstration and imitation.

“To sit alongside Guillory … is not to dream or to mourn the present. It is to scan new horizons for the second coming of the critic.” --The New Yorker

“In Professing Criticism, [Guillory] takes on an even bigger question: What is literary criticism—specifically, the kind of highly specialized theoretically sophisticated textual readings generated by academic critics—really for?” –The New York Times

 

 

 

Live! for one night only: A Happening in Dallas Hall, Two Sketches: Realisms, Carceral and Abolitionist & Pedagogies, Passively Militant and Militantly Passive.

Thursday, February 22, 2024

Dr. Shea Hennum

Reception: 5:00 pm

Lecture: 5:30 pm

Abstract:
This presentation is composed of two complementary halves. In the first, I develop the concepts of carceral realism and abolitionist speculation, which refer to two forms of consciousness, and to the literary modes that express those subjectivities. Building upon last semester's lecture, this presentation introduces the concept of abolitionist realism and performs a reading of the 2005 novel, The Uncomfortable Dead. In the second half, I develop the concept of abolitionist study, which refers to practices and processes of learning oriented toward the abolition of their conditions of possibility. Building upon last semester's lecture, I introduce a complement of pedagogical practices: passively militant and militant passive pedagogy, which refer to pedagogical moods, attitudes, modes, and principles that serve as products of an adjuncts to abolitionist study.

 

 

Close Enough But Not Too Far: The Chronotopes of Prison Abolition and The Excesses of Realism 

Thursday, November 16, 2023

Dr. Shea Hennum

Reception: 5:30 pm

Lecture: 6:00 pm

Abstract:
This presentation develops two concepts: carceral realism and abolitionist speculation. While the former refers to the widespread sense that prisons and the police represent the only (“realistic”) response to harm and social disorder, the latter refers to the act of imagining the abolition of prisons and/or the conditions necessary for such a world to exist. Locating these concepts in cultural productions spanning from the short fiction of Jorge Luis Borges to the music of Arctic Monkeys and the video games of Hideo Kojima, this presentation highlights the relationship between consciousness and its representations in literature in order to identify a literary tendency toward prison’s abolition, which represents a form of realism in excess of itself.

 

 

A Conversation with Roxanne Gay

Thursday, November 9, 2023

Dr. Roxane Gay

Reception: 6:30 pm

Lecture: 7:00 pm

Bio:

World -renowned writer, editor, and social commentator, Roxane Gay, is the author of the New York Times best-selling, “Bad Feminist,” the short story collection “Aiyti,” the novel, “An Untamed State,” the award-winning memoir, “Hunger,” the best-selling “Difficult Women,” and “World of Wakanda” for Marvel, among many other works. She is a contributing opinion writer to The New York Times, the founder of Tiny Hardcore Press, as well as a professor, and editor. In 2019, Gay co-created a  podcast titled Hear To Slay, which featured influential black women as guests. In 2022, the podcast was relaunched as The Roxane Gay Agenda.

Ms. Gay’s many awards include the PEN Center Freedom to Write Award; the Guggenheim; and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She holds a PhD in Rhetoric and Technical Communication and a master’s in creative writing.

 

 

Reading 'Perspectively' in Renaissance England

Thursday, November 2, 2023

Dr. Will Roudabush

Reception: 5:30 pm

Lecture: 6:00 pm

Abstract:
The term “perspectively” is a Shakespearean coinage and nonce word. In its original context, it uneasily refers to the optical merging of a maiden princess with a ravished countryside. But in the context of the rest of Shakespeare’s work and other contemporary texts and images, it also suggests different ways of seeing and reading that promote diverse points of view through ambiguity and multiplicity. To read perspectively is thus also to read receptively, open to paradox and the potential for shifting meanings. Reading ‘Perspectively’ in Renaissance England examines how English poets and playwrights engaged with new modes of painting, translating them into their own aesthetic theories, and poetic and dramatic forms. By comparing experiments with visual perspective across painting, poetry, and drama, it reveals a surprising shared aesthetic among Continental painting and early modern English poetics. 

 

 

A Conversation with Andrew Solomon

Thursday, October 12, 2023

Dr. Andrew Solomon

Reception: 4:30 pm

Lecture: 5:00 pm

Bio:

Dr. Andrew Solomon is a writer and activist in the fields of culture, psychology, LGBTQ rights, mental health, politics, and the arts. He is Professor of Psychology at Columbia University Medical Center and former President of PEN American Center. His best-seller, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and has become a documentary film. His memoir, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, won the National Book Award. Solomon holds a PhD in Psychology from Cambridge University; an MA in English from Cambridge; and a BA from Yale. He writes regularly for The New York Times; The New Yorker; Travel & Leisure and many other publications. He is the father of two children, and lives with his husband in New York City and London.

 

 

Brown Father in Contemporary Media: A Slow Approach to Race, Class, and Gender

Thursday, October 5, 2023

Dr. Domino Perez

UT Austin

Reception: 6:00 pm

Lecture: 6:30

Abstract

We invite you to engage in an enlightening dialogue with Professor Domino Renee Perez as she delves into the nuanced portrayal of Brown fathers in contemporary media. Drawing insights from her latest book,Fatherhood in the Borderlands: A Daughter's Slow Approach(UT Press, 2022), Dr. Perez unveils the intricate dynamics of how form, genre, and subject matter shape the roles that Mexican American fathers are permitted to embrace. 

Through a captivating blend of personal anecdotes and literary analysis, Dr. Perez will lead us through a thought-provoking exploration, challenging prevailing stereotypes within the borderlands. This event promises to offer a fresh perspective on the representation of Brown fathers, shedding light on their legibility and illegibility in the media landscape.

Bio

Dr. Domino Renee Perez is a professor in the Department of English and the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. With a vast and multidisciplinary expertise encompassing Young Adult Fiction, Mexican American and Latinx Literature, 20th and 21st Century American Literature, Film, Popular Culture, and Cultural Studies, Dr. Perez is a luminary in the field of academia. 

Among her other notable contributions to scholarship, her book There Was a Woman: La Llorona from Folklore to Popular Culture (UT Press, 2008) stands as a foundational work, unpacking the enigmatic figure of La Llorona, the weeping woman, a cultural icon deeply rooted in both US and Mexican folklore. Dr. Perez has also made significant editorial contributions, co-editing a noteworthy volume on Race and Cultural Practice in Popular Culture (Rutgers UP, 2018). 

Dr. Perez's intellectual prowess extends further through her prolific body of work, comprising numerous book chapters and articles. Her research spans a wide array of subjects, from the intersection of film and Indigeneity in Mexican American studies to insightful explorations of young adult fiction and folklore.

 

 

A Craft Conversation

Thursday, September 28, 2023

Laura van den Berg

Asheen Farhadi

Texana Room, Fondren Library

Reception: 6:00 pm

Lecture: 6:30 pm

 

 

 

 

Texas Medieval Association 33^rd Annual Conference

Saturday, September 23, 2023

Please visit the site below for more information:

 

 

 

 

 

Beowulf, She Wrote

Thursday, September 21, 2023

Irina Dumitrescu

Texana Room, DeGoyler Library

 Lecture: 5:00 pm

 

 

 

 

 

C.W. Smith Lecture and Book Signing

6:30 p.m. - Reception

7:00 p.m. - Program

Book signing to follow. Books available for purchase at the event.

C.W. Smith's new story collection, The Museum of Marriage, showcases characters struggling with the demand and mysteries of solitary life, romance and marriage. Co-sponsored by DeGolyer Library, Friends of °ÄÃÅÁùºÏ²ÊÔ¤²â Libraries and the °ÄÃÅÁùºÏ²ÊÔ¤²â English department.

RSVP at degolyer@smu.edu

https://libcal.smu.edu/event/11030618

 

 

 

 

Liberal Education: What, Why, & for Whom?

Thursday, March 30, 2023

Dr. Roosevelt Montás

Hyer Hall 100

Reception: 6:00 pm

Lecture: 6:30 pm

Abstract: Montás tells the story of how a liberal education transformed his life, and offers an intimate account of the relevance of the Great Books today. In a time of historic socioeconomic inequality and political polarization, who is liberal education really for? What are its premises and its promises? To what extent does it reproduce and to what extent does it challenge inherited structures of social privilege? Why is it under threat in colleges and universities?

 

Brown Father in Contemporary Media: A Slow Approach to Race, Class, and Gender

Dr. Domino Perez

UT Austin

Wednesday, April 12, 2023

 

 

6:00 pm: Reception

6:30: Lecture

Abstract:

Join us for an insightful discussion with Professor Domino Renee Perez from the University of Texas at Austin's Department of English, as she unpacks the legibility and illegibility of Brown fathers in contemporary media. In her bookFatherhood in the Borderlands: A Daughter’s Slow Approach, Perez reveals how form, genre, and subject work to determine the roles Mexican American fathers are allowed to occupy. Through personal anecdotes and literary analysis, Perez will provide a thought-provoking discussion on challenging stereotypes in the borderlands.

 

A Conversation About Creativity

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Natasha Trethewey

February 20, 6:00 pm:

Natasha Trethewey reading, Bridwell library, room 121 (The Blue Room), cosponsored by the English Department and Bridwell library. A reception will follow

February 21, 6:00 pm:

Natasha Trethewey and Viet Thanh Nguyen discussion of creativity, McCord Auditorium, Dallas Hall. Cosponsored by the English Department, the Dallas Literary Festival, and the Department of World Languages and Literature.  A book signing will follow.

February 22, 12:00 pm:

Viet Thanh Nguyen reading, Bridwell library, room 121 (The Blue Room), cosponsored by the English Department and Bridwell library

Bio: Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He has published two novels, a short story collection, and two nonfiction books, including Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction.

Natasha Trethewey won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for her collection, Native Guard, and served two terms as Poet Laureate of the United States. The author of five poetry collections and two nonfiction books, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

 

 

Title: Jekyll and Hyde: Fiction, Film, and Broadway Musical

Thursday, November 3, 2022 

Dr. Sharon Weltman

McCord Auditorium, Dallas Hall 306 

Bio: Sharon Aronofsky Weltman is Professor and Chair of English at TCU and Belcher Visiting Fellow in Victorian Studies at St Hugh’s College, Oxford University. Her research ranges across time and discipline from the Victorian author John Ruskin to the Broadway musical Sweeney Todd. A co-editor of Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film, her publications include Victorians on Broadway: Literature, Adaptation, and the Modern American Musical, winner of the 2021 SCMLA book award (University of Virginia Press, 2020); Performing the Victorian: John Ruskin and Identity in Theater, Science, and Education (Ohio State University Press, 2007), and Ruskin’s Mythic Queen: Gender Subversion in Victorian Culture (Outstanding Academic Book, Choice magazine, Ohio State University Press, 1999). Her article “Melodrama, Purimspiel, and Jewish Emancipation” on the first Anglo-Jewish woman playwright—Elizabeth Polack—won the 2020 Nineteenth Century Studies Association Best Article Prize, and her essay “Performing Goblin Market” was named Kurt Weill Foundation Award Finalist for Best Essay on Musical Theater in 1999. In 2014, she directed the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers “Performing Dickens: Oliver Twist and Great Expectations on Page, Stage, and Screen.” She has won multiple teaching and research awards as well as grants and fellowships.

 

 

What We Can Learn About Error From the Renaissance

 

Amanda Atkinson, Ph.D.

Tuesday, November 15, 2022

McCord Auditorium, Dallas Hall 306 

Abstract: Early Modern England is often perceived as a culture obsessed with correcting and eliminating error. But this talk explores how many Renaissance poets, scientists, and philosophers understood error as a process of wandering exploration. These authors embraced error – both its potential and real effects – as necessary for learning, creativity, and discovery.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thursday, October 20, 2022

A Reading by the °ÄÃÅÁùºÏ²ÊÔ¤²â Hughes Fellows in Creative Writing

McCord Auditorium, Dallas Hall 306 

 

 

Afsheen Farhadi & Samyak Shertok

Bio: Join us for a joint reading by the English Department's inaugural Hughes Fellows in Creative Writing. Afsheen Farhadi is the Fellow in Prose and Samyak Shertok is the Fellow in Poetry.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Title: Ecstasy

Thursday, February 10, 2022 

Jia Tolentino  

Jia Tolentino reads from an essay about ecstasy as the link between virtue and vice, drugs and religion, and answers questions about the writing process.

Bio: Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of the essay collection Trick Mirror. Formerly, she was the deputy editor at Jezebel and a contributing editor at the Hairpin. She grew up in Texas, received her undergraduate degree at the University of Virginia, and got her MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan. In 2020, she received a Whiting Award as well as the Jeannette Haien Ballard Prize. Her work has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine and Pitchfork, among other places.

 

 

 

 

 

Title: Writing about Family

Thursday, November 18, 2021 

 

 

Abstract: “The family,” Dodie Smith writes, “that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor, in our inmost hearts, ever quite wish to.” Much of the literature we encounter is in some sense writing about family—an attempt to represent and/or maneuver between real or imagined familial tentacles. This talk focuses specifically on contemporary creative nonfiction, and the flourishing genres of essays and memoir about family such as Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy. What are some of the motivations, preconditions, ethical considerations, and practical challenges involved in writing about one’s own family? What forms and methods do writers use and why? And what does this kind of writing have to teach us about the relational nature of creative work?

Bio: Dr. Briallen Hopper is the author of Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions (Bloomsbury, 2019), a Kirkus Best Book of the Year, CBC Best International Nonfiction Book of the Year, and finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her essays have appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Republic, New York Magazine/The Cut, The Paris Review, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. She is co-editor-in-chief of the online religion and culture magazine Killing the Buddha and a contributing editor at the independent press And Other Stories. She teaches creative nonfiction in the MFA program at Queens College, CUNY, where she is Assistant Professor at English. 

 

 

 

Title: How to Think Like Shakespeare, in 14 Stages of Mind

Thursday, October 21, 2021 

Dr. Scot Newstok

 

 

Abstract: The educational assumptions that shaped Shakespeare were strikingly at odds from our own. Yet thinkers trained in this unyielding system generated world-shifting insights, founding fields of knowledge that we still study. Thinking like Shakespeare disentangles a whole host of today’s confused educational binaries. We now act as if work precludes play; imitation impedes creativity; tradition stifles autonomy; constraint limits innovation; discipline somehow contradicts freedom; engagement with what is past and foreign occludes what is present and native. Yet Shakespeare’s era delighted in exposing these kinds of dilemmas as false: play emerges through work; creativity through imitation; autonomy through tradition; innovation through constraints; freedom through discipline. It’s by revivifying the foreign country of the past that we can make the present our own.

Bio: Dr. Scott Newstok is a Professor of English at Rhodes College and is the Director of the Pearce Shakespeare Endowment. He teaches literature of the English Renaissance as well as film, rhetoric, education, lyric poetry, and the humanities. Professor Newstok has received the 2012 Campus Life Award for Outstanding Faculty Member; the 2016  for Outstanding Teaching; and the 2021 for Outstanding Research and Creative Activity. Dr. Newstok has published five books: a scholarly edition of ; a collection of essays on  (co-edited with ); a monograph on ; an edition of Michael Cavanagh's  (CUAP 2020); and  (Princeton, 2020).

Title: Braids and Rows: Notes on Notes

Thursday, April 29, 2021 

Fred Moten

 

 

Abstract: "Tiling, Lining Notes" and Tilling, Limning Notes" are two poems written in response to great artists - the extraordinary saxophonist and composer Sam Rivers and the great painter Jack Whitten. They are linked by their co-presence in the downtown New York art world in the 1970s, by their commitment to black aesthetic experimentation. Both poems attempt to extend that commitment and to draw some parallels between music, painting, criticism and city life.

Bio: Fred Moten is Professor in the Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts. He holds an A.B. from Harvard and a Ph. D from the University of California, Berkeley. Moten teaches courses and conducts research in black studies, performance studies, poetics and critical theory. He is author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Hughson’s Tavern (Leon Works, 2009); B. Jenkins (Duke University Press, 2010); The Feel Trio (Letter Machine Editions, 2014), The Little Edges (Wesleyan University Press, 2015), The Service Porch(Letter Machine Editions, 2016), a three-volume collection of essays whose general title is consent not to be a single being (Duke University Press, 2017, 2018) and All that Beauty (Letter Machine Editions, 2019). Moten is also co-author, with Stefano Harney, of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions/Autonomedia, 2013) and A Poetics of the Undercommons (Sputnik and Fizzle, 2016) and, with Wu Tsang, of Who touched me? (If I Can’t Dance, I Don't Want to be Part of Your Revolution, 2016). Moten has served on the editorial boards of Callaloo, Discourse, American Quarterly and Social Text; as a member of the Critical Theory Institute at the University of California, Irvine; on the board of directors of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, City University of New York; and on the advisory board of Issues in Critical Investigation, Vanderbilt University.

Title: Profaning the Passions: Modern Drama After the Anti-Christ

Dr. Rebecca Kastleman

Thursday, February 25, 2021

 

 

Abstract: This talk examines modern reinventions of the passion play, showing how this genre facilitated far-reaching artistic experiments on twentieth-century stages. Playwrights including Yeats, Djuna Barnes, and Sadakichi Hartmann harnessed this form to reconsecrate the theater for aesthetic inquiry, while disrupting secular humanist narratives that had prevailed over the bourgeois theater.

Bio: Dr. Kastleman is a research professor from °ÄÃÅÁùºÏ²ÊÔ¤²â. Her scholarship tracks the global trajectories of modern theater and performance, with an emphasis on British and American drama in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her work has appeared in venues including Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, Theatre History Studies, American Theatre, The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, and Modernism/modernity Print Plus.

Thursday, October 22, 2020

Mary Gaitskill 

 

 

Bio: Gaitskill’s honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002 and a PEN/Faulkner Award nomination for Because They Wanted To in 1998. Veronica (2005) was a National Book Award finalist, as well as a National Book Critics Circle finalist for that year. Her story “Secretary” was the basis for the film of the same name and her most recent work, “This is Pleasure,” a long short story about the #MeToo movement that first appeared in The New Yorker, was recently published by Pantheon

Gaitskill has taught at UC Berkeley, the University of Houston, New York University, The New School, Brown University, in the MFA program at Temple University[4] and Syracuse University. She was the Writer-In-Residence at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. As of 2020, Gaitskill is a visiting professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College.

Title:“Am I a Soldier?”: Photography and Identity in World War I African American Poetry 

Kelsey Kiser, Ph.D.

Wednesday, November 13, 2019 

Abstract: Walter E. Seward’s recently recoveredNegroes Call to the Colors and Soldiers Camp-life Poems(1919) depicts black soldiers’ experiences during WWI. This talk carves out a place for Seward’s work within the African American literary tradition and examines how his multidimensional use of photography and poetry posits black identity and life into the national consciousness.

Thursday, September 26, 2019

Who Stole the Planet?: Colonization, Capital, and Enslavement

Dr. Priscilla Ybarra, University of North Texas

Abstract: Capital and colonization dominate hierarchies of power and compel widespread destruction up to today, but they do not do so uncontested. Chicana/x writings, over a long period of time that dates to the overlapping temporalities of Mexican American, mestiza/x, and indigenous eras, make this contestation visible.

Thursday, February 28, 2019

Tilling the Wings: Poems from Tractors and Sandhill Cranes

Abraham Smith, Poet

Abstract: Abraham Smith is the author of five poetry collections--Destruction of Man (Third Man Books, 2018); Ashagalomancy (Action Books, 2015); Only Jesus Could Icefish in Summer (Action Books, 2014); Hank (Action Books, 2010); and Whim Man Mammon (Action Books, 2007)--and one coauthored fiction collection, Tuskaloosa Kills (Spork Press, 2018). In 2015, he released Hick Poetics (Lost Roads Press), a co-edited anthology of contemporary rural American poetry and related essays. His creative work has been recognized with fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA, and the Alabama State Council on the Arts. He lives in Ogden, Utah, where he is Assistant Professor of English at Weber State University.