Mary Mullen to present research at Harvard

Mary Mullen will present her research on Irish famine novels on Wednesday, April 3 at the Novel Theory Seminar at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. She will participate alongside scholars Claire Connolly and Mary Burke in an event titled, "Irish Fiction Then and Now." This is a hybrid event that will take in person and online, you can register here.

Here is the abstract for her talk:

Irish famine novels often begin by addressing a skeptical public fatigued by stories of Irish suffering. Many authors passively “place” or “lay” their novels before the public, insisting that however strange their narrative seems, they depict the truth. The preface to William Carleton’s The Squanders of Castle Squanders (1852) is defensive, suggesting that despite his concern “for the general welfare of my countrymen,” he expects that all parties will be disappointed with the novel’s politics. Considering these prefaces and other public addresses within Irish famine novels, this talk considers how these Irish novels reveal the limits of liberal publics and liberalism’s emphasis on consensus and shared public interest. These novels not only depict multiple publics but irreconcilable understandings of public interest as they demonstrate liberalism’s inability to account for colonial catastrophe.

Just Published: Travis Foster, "White Supremacist Submission"

 Travis Foster just published an article titled "White Supremacist Submission" in Transgender Studies Quarterly. 

The article received the American Literature Society’s 1921 Prize honorable mention for the year’s best essays on American literature, tenured category.  

Here's the abstract to the article:

Scholars tend to envision the sexual politics of settler colonialism and slavery through masculinist conceptions in which penetration designates mastery and receptiveness subjugation. This article asks instead how white desires for sexual submission to nonwhite men operate within white supremacy. It augments white trans and queer studies' conceptualizations of bottoming with theories of white submission found in Black thought, particularly Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin. And it argues that both sets of ideas find themselves anticipated in the mid-nineteenth-century writings of the white, gender-variant author Theodore Winthrop—particularly their most popular novel, Cecil Dreeme (1861). For Winthrop, bottoming desires occasion two modes of self-expression. First, they facilitate transfeminine embodiment, staging an experience of womanliness predicated on the racist contrast between their own white body and that of nonwhite men they see as exceptionally virile. Second, they allow Winthrop to imagine ways of being other than the self-possession and corporeal autonomy of white subjectivity. In both instances, Winthrop's fantasies rely on the plasticity of the white body under the influence of nonwhite men, even as they underscore the biopolitical unidirectionality of plasticity, tracing patterns in which Black, brown, and Indigenous men exert influence on whites while remaining fundamentally incapable of transformation. This history of racialized access to malleability provides a cautionary tale about the incorporative nature of whiteness and how contemporary politics of self-determination might unwittingly replicate white supremacist logics.

Just Published: Joe Drury on Humans, Machines, and Automatons

Professor Joe Drury has a chapter coming out next week in the new Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English, edited by Nicole Aljoe, Sarah Eron, and Suvir Kaul. The title of Professor Drury's essay is “Humans, Machines, and Automatons.”

Here is the abstract of Professor Drury's chapter:

Lord Macartney’s assumptions about the Chinese taste for spectacular ornamental machinery during his unsuccessful 1793–1794 embassy reflected changing attitudes toward technology within Britain’s Industrial Enlightenment. Where machines had previously been valued for their aesthetic qualities, the labor required to produce them, and the luxurious consumption they excited, late eighteenth-century commentators such as Adam Smith increasingly emphasized their utility, the productive labor they saved, and the frugality required of the capitalists who introduced them. Responding to this shift, Frances Burney’s Evelina and William Beckford’s Vathek reimagined the longstanding British enthusiasm for ornamental mechanical exhibitions and toys as a barbarous form of “Oriental” fetishism.

To learn more and to read the chapter, you can visit the book's website.