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.
[email protected] - Alumni Writers Forum
Four alums from the Nonfiction Writing Program will offer insights on careers in nonfiction writing, editing, publishing, and teaching. Essayist and n+1 publicity coordinator, Elisabeth Borst ’17.5; Studio Theatre grants coordinator and writer, Sarah Cooke ’17; award-winning writer and producer, Jessica Weisberg ’06; and award-winning writer and teacher, Cutter Wood ’06, will read from their work and talk about writing beyond Brown.
Rita Barnard: “Dictator Games: On Shame, Shitholes, and Beautiful Things”
Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears provides a springboard to meditate upon contemporary structures of feeling as the frontier effects of migration and gentrification, inclusion and exclusion. Along colonial and postcolonial sites of shame, the affect is produced in contexts of revolution, violence, and tyranny. In the USA, the affect is produced through the experience of racial difference, disempowerment, and the denial of the American dream. A spur for this meditation is Donald Trump’s public drama of narcissism and humiliation — of winner
What I Am Thinking About Now: Dixa Ramírez, “Moving Photographs: An Aesthetics of an Anagrammatical Blackness”
Please join us for a “What I Am Thinking About Now” presentation by Dixa Ramírez, Assistant Professor of American Studies and English at Brown University.
Cancelled: Eva Hayward: “Spiderwomen”
Genders are proliferated, pronouns are indeterminate, inclusivity is prioritized, and everywhere in Transgender Studies sex and sexuality are displaced with investments — however fluid — in identification. What problem does sex/uality pose to indeterminacy and fluidity, and to the current field of Transgender Studies?
Emily Hipchen: “Matters of Fact: Practicing Nonfiction”
Department of English lecture series
Nonfiction Writing as Thinking and Practice
Alissa Quart: [email protected] Lecture Series
Squeezed: why you can’t afford America!
D. Gilson: “Reading & Remixing: Nonfiction as Interdisciplinary Nexus”
Department of English lecture series
Nonfiction Writing as Thinking and Practice
D. Gilson is Assistant Professor at Texas Tech University. He received his Ph.D. in American literature and cultural studies from the George Washington University in 2016. He works in narrative nonfiction, cultural criticism, and the digital humanities, and his books include I Will Say This Exactly One Time: Essays (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015); Jesus Freak (Bloomsbury, 2018) and the forthcoming Boyfriends (NYU Press, 2019).
Adrianne Kalfopoulou: “No Self Outside the Text: Of Mutability and Experience”
Department of English lecture series
Nonfiction Writing as Thinking and Practice