CANCELED: Postponed until Fall ’22: Elizabeth McHenry
Black Literature and the Business of Printing
Aarthi Vadde
Communication, Computation, and the Icon-Novel
Kandice Chuh lecture
On the Politics of Hate and Aesthetics of Mutuality
Anahid Nersessian talk
Violets and Crucibles: Impressions of Forough Farrokhzad
The Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad (1934-1967) had a short, difficult, and stubbornly secret life. This talk reads in and around Farrokhzad’s work, in translation and in relation to some personal family histories, as a way of thinking about diaspora, displacement, and the uses of intimate knowledge for literary criticism.
Marquis Bey
The Story of a Theory: Coming to Black and Trans Thought
This talk will concern not so much a conveyance of the speaker’s theorizing in black studies, trans studies, and black feminism; rather, it will share the surrounding narrative journey of how such theorizing emerged at the personal, epistemological, and relational level. In short, this talk will tell the story of how the speaker came to think and theorize the radical nexus of blackness, black feminism, and transness.
Dora Zhang lecture
Reading in Detail: Type and Difference in Unmarked Texts
This talk examines what happens to the detail in texts that refuse certain norms of specification. My focus will be on Anne F. Garréta’s experimental novel, Sphinx (1986), and Toni Morrison’s short story “Recitatif” (1983). Drawing on Lukács’s discussion of realism and typicality, I consider the ways that these unmarked texts mediate between individual and type, as well their approaches to the representation of difference.
Alex Marzano-Lesnevich: Both and Neither
[email protected] Lecture Series
Alex Marzano-Lesnevich will read from their next book, BOTH AND NEITHER, a transgender and trans-genre look at life beyond the binary. Marzano-Lesnevich is also the author of THE FACT OF A BODY: A Murder and a Memoir, which received a Lambda Literary Award, the Chautauqua Prize, the Grand Prix des Lectrices ELLE, and the Prix des libraires du Quebec. It has been translated into eleven languages and is in development with HBO.
Sophie McKibbon: Stories in Sound
[email protected] Lecture Series
Sophie Crane McKibben, podcast showrunner and producer, will tell us the stories behind her stories. Sophie is a Brown alumni who co-founded Now Here This. She was the lead producer for FRONTLINE Dispatch and is currently the co-Director of the Society and Culture Department at Pushkin Industries. This event will be hosted by the Nonfiction Writing Program via Zoom on November 3rd at 6pm.
Vi Khi Nao: A Bell Curve is a Pregnant Straight Line
[email protected] Lecture Series
Vi Khi Nao, acclaimed cross-genre writer, will read from her recent book, A Bell Curve is a Pregnant Straight Line. Major Jackson calls the collection, “Nothing short of a miracle for the future of the body: an avalanche of the imagination that disintegrates the lines separating feelings from thought, the spirit from the natural world, to reveal how language, light and touch thread us into a fuller sense of ourselves.” Hosted by the Nonfiction Writing Program in Pembroke 305 on October 6th at 6 pm.
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson Lecture
Architectures of the Flesh
Early Career Journalists at Work: A Conversation with Six Recent Brown Grads Who Are Making Their Mark as Reporters
To register, please email [email protected]
by 5:00 pm on Thursday, April 1, 2021.
Zoom links will be sent out the day of the event.
Anjuli Raza Kolb
Epidemic Empire, Pandemic Implications
The rhetoric of contagion has been prominent in the discourse of empire. It dates back to the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and its metaphorical association with cholera epidemics but continues through the American “War on Terror” as waged against terrorism as a “cancer.” This talk will consider how the present COVID-19 global pandemic raises new literary and political extensions of this image.
Feisal Mohamed
On Race and Historicism: A Polemic in Three Turns
A Conversation and Q&A with Dan Barry
A Conversation and Q&A with Dan Barry
(Moderated by Tracy Breton, a fellow member of the Pulitzer Prize winning team.)
Whose Elegy?: Mourning and the Poetics of Black Imagination
This talk will concern the different modulations of mourning practiced by black cultural producers when the space to mourn is restricted. Using Robert Burns Stepto’s “discourse of distrust,” the talk will engage the double rubric of sight and sound organizing expressions of black suffering.
Kimberly Juanita Brown is an associate professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.
“Vague Dream-head Lifted Out of the Ground”: Autism and the Sensory
“Vague Dream-head Lifted Out of the Ground”: Autism and the Sensory
A Reading by DJ and Ralph James Savarese
The concept of neurodiversity has encouraged people not only to accept autism but to embrace it as a valuable form of difference. How might autistic people teach neurotypicals to appreciate the nonhuman? What role might literature play in environmental activism?
All Hallows’ Read
Come to a Nonfiction Writing Program “All Hallows’ Read!”
To celebrate Halloween in this unusual, socially-distanced year, you are invited to a Zoom reading of the scariest nonfiction and fiction texts, featuring the faculty in the Nonfiction Writing Program, on the night before Halloween.
Come to see and support your friends in the English Department, and to celebrate Halloween and our virtual Brown community in style!
Cancelled: Corey McEleney
Event Cancelled
The Art of Overanalyzing
POSTPONED: Alumni Writers Forum, Nonfiction Writing Program
POSTPONED: The Alumni Writers Forum is being rescheduled for Fall 2020.
Siraj Ahmed
Sovereign and Martyr: Necropower, Terrorism, Nonviolence
Gayle Salamon: The Basis of Sex: Trans Identity and the Law
This talk will examine the relation between sexual orientation and gender identity set forth in the prosecution of the Latisha King murder case and the current Supreme Court cases taking up gay and trans employment discrimination.
Grace Lavery: It Really Works: George Eliot, Trans Studies, and the Rhetoric of Technique
Between the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century, the number of skills that people claimed to be able to teach and learn dramatically increased, as a host of activities previously understood as either innate or spontaneous - stuttering, singing, masturbating, and recovering from alcoholism or other neurotic conditions - were increasingly brought under the remit of acquirable technique.
Amy Pickworth, [email protected] Lecture Series
Bigfoot for Woman
Amy Pickworth’s poems have appeared in Delirious Hem; Dusie; Forklift, Ohio; Love’s Executive Order; New Ohio Review; Smartish Pace; The Journal (Ohio State); Two Serious Ladies; and other publications. Her book Bigfoot for Women (Orange Monkey Book Prize, intro by Matt Hart) was released in 2014.
Francisco Cantú, [email protected] Lecture Series
The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the US-Mexico Border
David Simon Lecture
Gratuitous Violence
Comic Experience and Lyric Misogyny
Nora Khan, [email protected] Lecture Series
The Artificial and the Real
Daniel Denvir, [email protected] Lecture Series
All American Nativism: How the Bipartisan War on Immigrants Explains Politics as We Know It
Daniel Denvir is an award-winning journalist, Visiting Fellow in International and Public Affairs at Brown University’s Watson Institute and the host of “The Dig,” a podcast from Jacobin magazine. He will be presenting All-American Nativism, his book on the history of immigration politics.
Saidiya Hartman: A Poetics of the Document
Saidiya Hartman is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and author of the newly published Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval.
Yogita Goyal: “Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery”
This talk tracks the emergence of slavery as the defining template through which current forms of human rights abuses are understood. To fathom forms of freedom and bondage today–from unlawful detention to sex trafficking to the refugee crisis to conscription in war–Professor Goyal shows how contemporary literature draws on the antebellum genre of the slave narrative, reinventing such key genres as sentimentalism, the gothic, satire, ventriloquism, and the bildungsroman.
Gene Jarrett: ‘I am Entirely White!’: The Life and Times of Paul Laurence Dunbar in Late Victorian England
This lecture narrates the journey of Paul Laurence Dunbar, the first professional African American writer born after slavery, through parts of England during the first half of 1897. Newly engaged to aspiring writer Alice Ruth Moore, Dunbar reflects on the implications of their brief but already tumultuous courtship, but also on how his life and literature may be forever changed after they marry.