Sign Up for Sunrise Movement Campus Organizing Bootcamp

Sunrise Movement, a youth-led organization dedicated to addressing climate change, is offering a leadership program for students looking to develop leadership skills in climate change and racial justice.

Students who register to be part of the Sunrise Campus Corps will be taught lifelong and valuable skills, such as how to build strong relationships with community members, how to organize effective teams, and how their teams can affect real change in their community. Now that many summer internships and leadership programs were cancelled this summer because of COVID-19, Sunrise is especially eager to provide development opportunities to students.

Luis Marchese, Sunrise's campus organizing lead, said: "Climate change is the gravest threat humanity has ever faced, and our generation will be hit hardest. This is especially true for frontline communities experiencing environmental inequality. Our futures are at stake, but our government lacks the political will to act to save the planet.

"At Sunrise Movement, we know that young voices across class and race will be the change-makers of our generation. Our latest program aims to develop crucial leadership skills in college students across America, giving them the tools and the confidence to make a difference in their local communities."

Any student is welcome, regardless of experience—the trainers are all young people who want to make a difference. The Sunrise community is a place of inclusion, growth, and passion that wants to help our generation have an impact. If you successfully complete our Sunrise Campus Bootcamp, you'll be mailed a campus swag pack and be accepted into the Sunrise Campus Corps, along with hundreds of other students from across the country.

You can read more information about Sunrise and the new Campus Corps program here: smvmt.org/campus.

The deadline for signing up is Monday, August 3.

Just Published! Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh on Virginia Woolf's Letters in The New Yorker

Congratulations to Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh, whose article, "How Viriginia Woolf Kept Her Brother Alive in Letters," was recently published in The New Yorker.

Dr. Javadizadeh's article focuses on the letters Woolf wrote to her friend Violet Dickinson in the weeks following her brother Thoby's death from typhoid in 1906, in which she tells a series of lies about her brother's improving condition. Woolf's letters, he argues, express a desire to escape the threat of illness and death and imagine a different future that resonates with the anxieties and uncertainties of our current moment.

"From where I sit today and write," Dr. Javadizadeh writes, "Virginia’s desire to leave behind a climate of illness, to get up and go away, to be transported to a future one can’t quite see—and which may not exist—feels familiar and intense. I want to get in my car and drive; sometimes I catch myself thinking that if I drive far enough, for long enough, I will have found my way not only into a different place but into a different time, released from today’s grief and dread. The fantasy is interwoven with worry: in our fond talk of what we’ll do after “all this” is over, are we, like Virginia, deceiving one another, and ourselves? Or might our dreams of escape make room for other possibilities, worlds we want to live in but can’t yet describe? Can desire be a way of knowing?"

Just Published! Dr. Megan Quigley on Virginia Woolf and Wittgenstein

Congratulations to Dr. Megan Quigley, whose article, "Reading Virginia Woolf Logically: Resolute Approaches to Woolf's The Voyage Out and Wittgenstein's Tractatus, was just published in the journal Poetics Today in a special issue focusing on the relationship between logic and literature.

Dr. Quigley's article argues for a “resolute reading” of Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out, akin to Cora Diamond and James Conant’s reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. She argues that, like some recent readers of the Tractatus, we should think of The Voyage Out as therapeutic nonsense. What does that mean? The “resolute" approach to the Tractatus argues that we should embrace Wittgenstein’s own assertion that the Tractatus is finally nonsense. Accordingly, the Tractatus acts as a kind of therapy, enabling us to dispense with certain types of philosophical, linguistic, and analytical claims. Dr. Quigley proposes that Woolf’s The Voyage Out takes a similar approach to the nineteenth-century novel, fully investing in the conventions of the Bildungsroman and the marriage plot only to ruthlessly dispense with them. Both works use a particular kind of modernist therapeutic pedagogy reliant on logic and form. 

See here for more information on the article and the special issue.