Dr. Adrienne Perry To Read Her Work at Zoom Event

Come and hear Dr. Adrienne Perry read her work on Tuesday, August 18 at event on Zoom organized by Belladonna* Collaborative. The evening will also feature several other contributors to Matters of Feminist Practice: Frances Richard, Rachel Levitsky, Serena Chopra, and Yanara Friedland.

The reading begins at 7 p.m. EST. Belladonna* promotes the work of women and feminist writers who are adventurous, experimental, politically involved, multi-form, multicultural, multi-gendered, impossible to define, unpredictable, and dangerous with language." This event is free and open to the public.

Tickets available here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/matters-of-feminist-practice-reading-2-tickets-116502858185

Facebook event here: https://www.facebook.com/events/2619763564956231/

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.

Villanova English Responds to @blackvillanova

Villanova English issued the following statement on Instagram in response to the Black at Villanova University account:

"The English Department urges all Villanovans to read the stories being shared on the @blackvillanova account, including posts that call out the English Department for instances of racism. We are listening, and we are committed to taking action to combat racism and white supremacy in our department and across campus."

Dr. Adrienne Perry wins Elizabeth Alexander Creative Writing Award

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Adrienne Perry, who has received the inaugural Elizabeth Alexander Creative Writing Award from the journal Meridians: Feminisms, Race, Transnationalism. Dr. Perry received the award for a prose composition entitled Lamaze, which will be published in the journal.

In their citation for the award, the judges wrote: "Lamaze is the story of two mixed-race sisters, growing up in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and grappling with teenage pregnancy, racism, alcoholism, and domestic violence. Summarized like this, the story sounds bleak; it is anything but. The sure, powerful voice of the narrator, 15-year old Adrienne, is utterly compelling as she leads us backward in time, peeling back layers of her family's experience to discover the almost magical heart of her love for her older sister. The judges were captivated by the quality of this narrative voice, paired with the rigorous and sophisticated formality of the story's structure and the way it complicates in subtle and meaningful ways, issues of race, sexuality, class, and gender in rural America."

The judges added: "The Elizabeth Alexander Creative Writing Awards celebrates "an author whose work embodies the lyrically powerful and historically engaged nature of Dr. Alexander's writing. The award aims to highlight different forms of knowledge production that emerge from the artistic, political and cultural advocacy for transformative change undertaken by women of color nationally, transnationally, and globally. Our goal is to make knowledge production by and about women of color central to contemporary definitions of feminisms in the explorations of women's economic conditions, cultures, sexualities, as well as the forms and meanings of resistance and activist strategies."

Just Published: Dr. Yumi Lee on Police Violence in Toni Morrison's Home

Congratulations to Dr. Yumi Lee, whose article, "Repairing Police Action after the Korean War in Toni Morrison's Home," was just published in the journal Radical History Review.

Dr. Lee's timely essay looks at the way Toni Morrison's 2012 novel Home links the violence of US military “police action” in Korea in the early 1950s to the long history of police violence at home. She argues that the novel's critical portrayal of the Korean War punctures two enduring myths with origins in the 1950s: the myth of a peaceful domestic “color-blind” society and the myth of heroic US military intervention abroad. In Dr. Lee's reading, Home is an allegory that invites readers to imagine forms of justice outside of a policing framework, both globally and domestically, through its narrative of repairing trauma and harm through community care rather than punishment or retribution. Morrison’s rewriting of the 1950s in Home therefore places the contemporary idioms of police and prison abolition and transformative justice in a broader historical and global imaginative frame.