On Monday, March 29, students can join Dr. Yumi Lee for a Zoom conversation with Nick Mitchell, associate professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz and co-founder of the Abolitionist University Studies group and the Cops Off Campus Research Collective, as they discuss policing, on and off campus, abolition, and the disciplines of Black Studies and Women's Studies.
The event starts at 7.00pm. You can register to receive the link here.
Congratulations to Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh, whose article, "The Roots of our Madness," which examines a new edition of the poet John Berryman's letters, was just published in the New York Review of Books. Check it out!
On Monday, March 10, students in GWS and English had the chance to meet with one of the founders of Ms. magazine, Patricia Carbine (pictured below with co-founder Gloria Steinem), who urged us students on in their fight for gender equity: "I salute all of you, and I envy all of you, and the thing that I want to say last is I am counting on you."
On Friday, March 19, Dr. Jean Lutes will be part of a panel titled "The Women's Pages: A Hard Look at Soft News," sponsored by the New-York Historical Society's annual Max Conference on Women's History. This year's conference theme is "Breaking News, Breaking Barriers: Women in American Journalism."
Listen to Dr. Megan Quigley, as she joins T. S. Eliot experts Frances Dickey and John Whittier-Ferguson on a podcast to discuss the revelations of the Hale archive: 1, 131 letters written by T. S. Eliot to his longtime love and correspondent, Emily Hale (pictured below). The letters, called the most famous sealed literary archive in the world, were under lock and key at Princeton’s Firestone library until 50 years after the deaths of Eliot and Hale.
Their contents have transformed what scholars thought they knew about Eliot, as he points out his sources, undermines key ways we interpret his works—such as Modernist impersonality—and confesses his dreams and goals. And then he burns her side of the correspondence!
Matt Seybold is the host on this episode of the American Vandal podcast.
Please join Dr. Megan Quigley and Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh for a conversation with Merve Emre, associate professor of English at the University of Oxford, author of The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing (2018) and Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (2017), and editor of a new annotated edition of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway
The event will take place on Zoom at 4pm on Tuesday, March 23. Please register here to receive the link.
Please join Villanova English faculty Dr. Jean Lutes and Dr. Travis Foster on Tuesday, March 16 for "We Have Been Here All Along: Gender, American Literature, and White Supremacy," an event to celebrate the publication of a new collection of essays on Gender in American Literature and Culture. The volume, co-edited by Dr. Lutes, will be published this month by Cambridge University Press and features essays by Dr. Lutes and Dr. Foster.
The book introduces readers to key developments in gender studies and American literary criticism. It offers nuanced readings of literary conventions and genres from early American writings to the present and moves beyond inflexible categories of masculinity and femininity that have reinforced misleading assumptions about public and private spaces, domesticity, individualism, and community. The book also demonstrates how rigid inscriptions of gender have perpetuated a legacy of violence and exclusion in the United States. Responding to a sense of 21st century cultural and political crisis, it illuminates the literary histories and cultural imaginaries that have set the stage for urgent contemporary debates.
Also speaking at the event will be Dr. Lutes's co-editor, Dr. Jennifer Travis, professor and chair of English at St. John's University, as well as two contributors to the volume: Dr. Brigitte Fielder, associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Dr. Seulghee Lee, assistant professor of African American and English literature at the University of South Caroline.
The event will be held on Zoom, starting at 7.30pm. You can register here.
Congratulations to Dr. Heather Hicks, whose timely chapter, "Disaster Response in Post-2000 American Apocalyptic Fiction," was just published in a collection of essays on Apocalypse in American Literature and Culture by Cambridge University Press.
Dr. Hicks's essay explores contemporary scholarship on apocalyptic fiction, noting that growing alarm about climate change has begun to raise pragmatic questions about this genre’s effects: What responses does apocalyptic narrative condition readers to have before, during, and after a catastrophic event? She observes that many critics have objected to the clichéd content of dystopian apocalyptic narratives, claiming that their bleak visions induce resignation in readers rather than a will to assert their political and personal agency. Meanwhile, a number of scholars associated with “disaster studies” have noted that the history of twentieth-century disasters suggests that people actually tend to be at their most compassionate after a catastrophe. In response to this tension, Dr. Hicks's essay takes a dialectical approach to understanding both the critical and reparative aspects of twenty-first-century American apocalyptic fiction. In the first half, it demonstrates that the violent mythmaking in this work is both symptomatic of the “elite panic” characterized by disaster studies and reflective of other decidedly American ideologies. The second half identifies how some of these same apocalyptic texts complicate or even counteract expectations of panic, theft, and violence, providing insights for how readers might cultivate cooperation and community in the wake of an apocalyptic event.
