2011-2012
Thursday, September 22, 2011
English Faculty Presentations Series
Hoffmann Room, Swan 154, 5-7 pm
Professor Travis Williams
"Homoerotic Indirection and Shakespeare's Child Characters"
Travis Williams specializes in the literature and rhetoric of the British Renaissance and the cultural history of science and mathematics. His most recent work, "The Bourn Identity: Hamlet and the French of Montaigne's Essais," recently appeared in Notes and Queries (June 2011). This talk will consider Shakespeare's child characters and how his use of them differs from the practices of his two most talented contemporaries, Marlowe and Jonson.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Read/Write Series
Poet-critic, Claudia Keelan
Hoffmann Room, Swan 154, 5-7 pm
Claudia Keelan is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Missing Her (New Issues) and The Devotion Field (Alice James). Her awards include the Jerome Shestack Award from the American Poetry Review, the Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books, among others. Her poetry is anthologized in The Body Electric (Norton), American Hybrid (Norton), and The Book of Irish American Poetry (University of Notre Dame Press). She is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. Click here for more information.
Thursday, October 27, 2011
English Faculty Presentation Series
Hoffmann Room, Swan 154, 5-7 PM
Professor Naomi Mandel
Fact, Fiction, Fidelity in the novels of Jonathan Safran Foer
Naomi Mandel specializes in contemporary literature and critical theory. She is the author of Against the Unspeakable: Complicity, the Holocaust, and Slavery in America, and the editor of Novels of the Contemporary Extreme (with Alain-Philippe Durand) and Bret Easton Ellis: American Psycho, Glamorama, and Lunar Park. This talk is drawn from her book in progress, Violent Fidelities: on Fiction, Ethics, and Being True.
Thursday, November 3, 2011
Read/Write Series
Nonfiction writer-poet Michael Klein
Lippitt Hall, Auditorium 5-7 pm
Michael Klein is the author of Track Conditions, a memoir, and a book of linked essays The End of Being Known both published by the University of Wisconsin Press and recently Kindle-ized. Recent work has appeared in Poets & Writers, Bloom, Fence and The Awl and forthcoming in Ploughshares and Tin House. His second book of poems, then, we were still living (GenPop Books) was a finalist for Lambda Literary Award and he has won the award for his books 1990 and Poets for Life: 76 Poets Respond to AIDS. He teaches in the MFA Program at Goddard College.
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Graduate Student Colloquium (Sponsored by the URI Center for Humanities)
Hoffmann Room, Swan 154, 5-7 PM
Mihaela Harper (PhD Candidate)
"Anomie and Literature: Postcommunist, Postmodernist, Postapocalyptic Modes"Mihaela Harper specializes in postmodern and contemporary literature and critical theory. She has presented her work at numerous conferences, including MLA and NeMLA. In 2010 she attended the London Critical Theory School, Birkbeck Institute, UK. Her essay “Drafting the Hyperreal: Ownership, Agency, Responsibility in Fantasy Sports,” co-authored with Andrew Ploeg, is forthcoming in S(t)imulated Realities: The Hyperreal in Popular Culture.Mihaela is the recipient of a Center for the Humanities Graduate Research Grant.
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Graduate Student Colloquium (Sponsored by the URI Center for Humanities)
Hoffmann Room, Swan 154, 5-7 PM
Andy Ploeg (PhD Candidate)
"Toward a New Numinous: The Divine in Postmodern Literature"
Andrew Ploeg specializes in postmodern and contemporary literature and critical theory. He is a recipient of a Tuition Scholarship from the URI Graduate School and a Center for the Humanities Graduate Research Grant. His essay, “‘I Will Remain Silence and Scream’: Edmond Jabès and the Wound and Witness of Language” is forthcoming in Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies (Spring 2012, Vol. 30, No. 3), and an additional essay “Drafting the Hyperreal: Ownership, Agency, Responsibility in Fantasy Sports,” co-authored with Mihaela Harper, is forthcoming in S(t)imulated Realities: The Hyperreal in Popular Culture.
Thursday, January 26, 2012
English Faculty Presentation Series
Hoffmann Room, Swan 154, 5-7 PM
Benjamin Hagen
"In Search of an Otherwise: On the Lookout with Woolf, Lawrence, and Deleuze."
Benjamin D. Hagen is a Ph.D. Candidate (ABD) in the Department of English at URI, studying Anglo-American modernism and continental philosophy with Stephen M. Barber. His dissertation—In Search of an Otherwise: On the Lookout with Woolf, Lawrence, and Stevens—conjoins the work of three canonical modernists with the philosophy of Deleuze. His work has been published in The Explicator, Virginia Woolf Miscellany, and Modernism/Modernity. In 2010 he participated at the summer session of Cornell University’s School of Criticism and Theory.
Thursday, February 23, 2012
English Faculty Presentation Series
Hoffmann Room, Swan 154, 5-7 PM
Professor Jean Walton
Jean Walton, URI Professor of English, Women's Studies, Film Media, and Comparative Literature will present "Creative Devolution: A Case of Reverse Peristalsis." In the context of what Simmel calls the "punctuality, calculability, exactness . . . forced upon life by the complexity and extension of metropolitan existence;" alongside Bergson's duration, the "continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances;" in the wake of Nietzsche's melancholy Will that "cannot will backwards . . . cannot break time and time's covetousness," a London doctor encounters a patient who seems, miraculously, to have reversed the immutable bodily laws of consumption, digestion, and excretion. In 1896, Rosa P. brought her astonishing symptoms to Doctor W. Parkes Weber, busied the hospital staff with attempts to prove her an impostor, and was eventually hired as a cook in the Kosher kitchen—thereby taking her place in the institution's larger peristaltic system.
While Parkes Weber concerned himself for the next fifty years with the strictly clinical aspect of this case (its etiology, its diagnosis, its prognosis and treatment), this talk will explore how it figures as a way to think the temporality of the body as a peristaltic subject within larger systems of flow, directionality, and human will.
Thursday, March 8, 2012
English Faculty Presentation Series
Hoffmann Room, Swan 154, 5-7 PM
Professor Sarah Eron
"Secular Enthusiasm: Inspiration in the Age of Enlightenment"
Sarah Eron’s research reconsiders the role of such aesthetic categories as “romanticism,” “enthusiasm, “secularization,” and “genius” within eighteenth-century thought. This talk is drawn for her book project, Inspiration in the Age of Enlightenment. Seeking to redefine what we mean by secularization in the early stages of the modern period, this book argues that secularization’s link to enthusiasm, or inspiration, often associated with Romanticism, is, in fact, an early eighteenth-century development, a change that alters both literary form and the relationship of Romanticism and the Enlightenment to the categories of the secular and the sacred.
Saturday, March 31, 2012
URI 2012 Graduate Student Conference
Swan Hall
Students from the Graduate Program in English will host the sixth annual URI Graduate Conference. This year's conference title, Innovations and Anxieties, speaks to a broad range of disciplines, and we anticipate an exciting mix of presentations. The conference is a unique opportunity for graduate students to present their scholarly work at URI in a formal conference setting. Each year conference attendees hear from two highly respected and provocative speakers—one a professor from the URI community, the other a renowned visiting scholar.
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
Hoffmann Room, Swan 154
Lisa Lampert-Weissig (UC San Diego)
"Reading the Palimpsest of Race: Medieval Traces in Modern Discourse"
Throughout the course of her career, Professor Lampert-Weissig's work has been interdisciplinary. She is the author of the acclaimed Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare (U Penn, 2004), and Medieval Literature and Postcolonial Studies (U Edinburgh, 2010). Her talk will consider contemporary racism, and examine ways that expanding our modes of thinking temporally and geographically can help to combat it.
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Read/Write Series
Hoffmann Room, Swan 154, 6 PM
Martha Rhodes is the author of four collections of poetry: At the Gate, Perfect Disappearance (Green Rose Prize), Mother Quiet, and most recently, The Beds.
She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She is the current director of the Frost Place Festival and Conference on Poetry and is a founding editor and the director of Four Way Books in New York City.
Thursday, April 12, 2012
Graduate Student Colloquium (Sponsored by the URI Center for Humanities)
Hoffmann Room, Swan 154, 5-7 PM
Don Rodrigues
"Truth may seem, but cannot be": Shakespeare's 'The Phoenix and Turtle' in Context
Don Rodrigues is a first-year PhD student in English at the University of Rhode Island. His scholarly interests are in early modern studies and contemporary literary nonfiction. While a master's student at URI, Donald was awarded a Graduate Tuition Scholarship and a Center for the Humanities Graduate Research Grant. Archival research for his thesis, ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’: Shakespeare’s Fuzzy Apocalypse, was conducted at the Folger Shakespeare Library and funded by URI’s Center for the Humanities.
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Read/Write Series
Doody Auditorium, Swan Hall, Reception at 5:30 PM followed by a Reading at7-8:30 PM
Bestselling Novelist and Screenwriter, Tom Perotta, is the author of six works of fiction, including his most recent The Leftovers (2011), The Wishbones, and Joe College. His novels Election and Little Children were made into award-winning movies; including a best screenplay nomination for the Academy Award for Perrotta's work on Little Children. He lives outside of Boston, Massachusetts. Click here for more information.
Thursday, April 26, 2012
4-6pm, Alumni Center Lounge
Christopher Freeburg (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
"Interracial Friendship and the Bottomless Deep in Melville's Moby-Dick"
The Edmund S. and Nathalie Rumowicz Endowed Literature and Sea Lecture and Seminar Series. Click here for more information.
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