Traub to deliver Comparative Drama Distinguished Lecture, Thurs., 11/13 @ 7:00pm (Center for Humanities)

VALERIE TRAUB (University of Michigan)

Comparative Drama Distinguished Lecture: “TALKING SEX”

Thursday, 11/13 @ 7:00pm / Center for the Humanities (2500 Knauss)




Professor Traub is this year’s Comparative Drama Distinguished Visiting Lecturer, an invitation issued each year to an internationally renowned scholar whose work engages with dramatic literature and culture. She is the Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, and currently serving as the Interim Director of the Department of Women’s Studies. Prof. Traub is the author of a body of influential work in literary and cultural studies, including The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2002), which won the Best Book of 2002 award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women, and Desire & Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (Routledge, 1992; reissued as part of the Routledge Revivals series in 2014), and is co-editor of Gay Shame (University of Chicago Press, 2009) and Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects (Cambridge University Press, 1996) and twice received the MLA Crompton-Noll Award for Best Essay of the Year. Her most recent book, Making Sexual Knowledge: Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns, will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2015. She is currently at work on another project on discourses of gender, sexuality, race, and class in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century anatomical and cartographic illustrations, entitled Mapping Embodiment in the Early Modern West: A Prehistory of Normality. She is the recipient of the University of Michigan’s John D’Arms Award for graduate mentoring and the Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award.

Traub will be giving a public talk on Thursday night entitled “Talking Sex.” This lecture will interrogate questions such as: How do early modern words materialize sexual acts? How effective are they in doing so? And what do their linguistic strategies tell us about what sex is, or was thought to be, in the early modern period? Scrutinizing the conceptual work of erotic puns and double entendres, this presentation puts early modern “sex talk” under pressure. By treating the concept of “bawdy language” as an object of inquiry, Traub will analyze how sex is operationalized through the linguistic resources that more often than not fail to indexically denote specific sex acts. Her presentation, in short, aims to reveal the epistemology, competencies, and pedagogies involved in “talking sex,” both in the early modern period and in contemporary scholarship. The talk, which draws on material from her forthcoming book, will be followed by a question and answer session with the audience, and a light reception in the WMU Center for the Humanities.

MAISHA WINN visit to WMU~Wed., 3/26

The WMU English Department’s
Anthony Ellis Scholarly Speakers Series
proudly presents

PROF. MAISHA T. WINN
University of Wisconsin-Madison


“Building a ‘lifetime circle:’
English Education in the time of Mass Incarceration”

Wednesday, March 26, 2014
4:00 PM
Center for the Humanities/Knauss 2500

The talk is free and open to the public.

A reception will follow.

Prof. Maisha T. Winn (formerly Maisha T. Fisher) is a former public school teacher. She earned her doctorate in Language, Literacy, and Culture at the University of California, Berkeley and competed a postdoctoral fellowship at Teachers College, Columbia University. Dr. Winn became a member of a community of scholars who are intent on examining everyday literacy practices among adolescents in the interest of expanding earlier work on literacy practices within families and neighborhoods. Her work is focused on expanding the discipline to include performance and oral traditions in the examination of what constitutes the study of literacy.

Winn's research spans a wide variety of understudied settings including her earlier work on the literate practices extant in bookstores and community organizations in the African American community to her most recent work in settings where adolescent girls are incarcerated. Her work is multidisciplinary in that she examines the cognitive dimensions of the literate practices, the micro-level\interactional processes through which knowledge is constructed in these settings, and the socialization functions that take place through both peer relation and adult-youth relations as they emerge in these various institutions. And the substance of Winn's investigations further illuminate the roles that these institutions play within the larger cultural-historical development of racially diverse and low income communities -- including populations of Dominican, Puerto Rican, Columbian and African American descent.

Most recently, Winn’s continued work examining youth performing literacy and more specifically the intersection of arts in the lives of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated girls has been published in Girl Time: Literacy, justice, and the school-to-prison pipeline (Teachers College Press). Additionally, her research has been published in numerous journals including Harvard Educational Review; Review of Research in Education, Race, Ethnicity, and Education; Anthropology and Education Quarterly; Research in the Teaching of English, Journal of African American History, Written Communication, and English Education.

SSS Comparative Drama Distinguished Lecture: Loren Kruger (U Chicago), Thurs., Nov. 7@7:00PM

DEVONEY LOOSER VISITING LECTURE, Thurs., 11/29

DEVONEY LOOSER
University of Missouri

"Mary Wollstonecraft, Author-Ghost: Enlightenment Origins of Modern Feminism"

This lecture considers the ways in which Wollstonecraft has been imagined as speaking from beyond the grave and what that “haunting” means—and has meant—to the history of feminism. Drawing on a fascinating and previously unknown manuscript—the unpublished fictional work called “Ithuriel”—Looser will examine the origins and continued relevance of our centuries-old penchant for imagining Wollstonecraft as a speaking spirit in conversation with both the living and the dead.

Thursday, November 29, 2012
7:30 PM
Center for the Humanities (Knauss 2500)

A reception will follow.

Devoney Looser is Catherine P. Middlebush Chair of English at the University of Missouri, and the author of Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750-1850 (Johns Hopkins UP, 2008), the award-winning British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820 (Johns Hopkins UP, 2000; paperback 2005), and editor of Jane Austen and Discourses of Feminism (Palgrave Macmillan, 1995) and (with E. Ann Kaplan) Generations: Academic Feminists in Dialogue (U of Minnesota P, 1997). She is co-editor of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, has held numerous national and international fellowships, and recently led a 5-week NEH Summer Seminar on “Jane Austen and her Contemporaries.” In addition to being a frequent keynote and plenary speaker, she is also the recipient of multiple awards for teaching, and in her free time skates for a women's flat track roller derby team, the CoMo Derby Dames, under the name "Stone Cold Jane Austen".


Co-Sponsored by Gender and Women’s Studies, the University Center for Humanities, and the College of Arts and Sciences Interdisciplinary Committee.

For more information, please contact Prof. Christopher Nagle: christopher.nagle@wmich.edu

Fall Keynote Talk Features Perryman-Clark

The WMU English Department’s Scholarly Speakers Series

proudly presents our

Fall Keynote Lecture

Dr. Staci Perryman-Clark

"Rethinking Appropriateness and Inclusion:
Toward a Writing Programmatic Policy on Linguistic Diversity"

Thursday, September 20, 2012
7PM
Brown 3025

Free and open to the public


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Dr. Perryman-Clark is Assistant Professor and Director of First-Year Writing, with specialties in
 English and Rhetoric and Writing Studies as well as 
African American Language and Pedagogy. Her forthcoming book (under contract with Peter Lang Publishing), Afrocentric Teacher-Research: Rethinking Appropriateness and Inclusion, is a qualitative empirically-based teacher-research study that examines the ways in which African American students and all students perform expository writing tasks using an Ebonics-based Rhetoric and Composition focused first-year writing curriculum. As such, her work focuses on creating culturally-relevant pedagogies and curricular designs to support all students' expository writing practices.

[CANCELLED] Hoad on Wilde and Savagery - Visiting Lecture 11/10

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PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS EVENT HAS BEEN *CANCELLED* & WILL BE RESCHEDULED FOR A FUTURE DATE TBA!

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NEVILLE HOAD (University of Texas-Austin)

“Wildean Savagery”

In his lecture Hoad locates Victorian origin narratives, both Darwinian ontogeny/phylogeny recapitulation and Freud's theories of psychosexual development, as sites which produced curious and deeply imbricated discourses of the primitive and the homosexual. He proceeds to investigate how racial and imperial rhetorics of savagery and sexual deviance became entrenched in the writings of Oscar Wilde as well as in public declarations about the author, particularly during his infamous 1895 trial.

Thursday, November 10, 2011
7:00PM / Knauss 2500 (Center for the Humanities)
a reception will follow


Neville Hoad is an associate professor of English and affiliated faculty with the Center for Women's and Gender Studies, the Center for African and African American Studies, and the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice. He authored African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality and Globalization (Minnesota, 2007) and co-edits (with Karen Martin and Graeme Reid) Sex & Politics in South Africa (Double Storey, 2005) and currently is writing a book on the literary and cultural representations of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Sub-Saharan Africa. His areas of research include African and Victorian literature, queer theory, and the history of sexuality.

Christoph Irmscher of Indiana U. to Speak about American Literature and Sustainability on 10/28

On Thursday, October 28, 2010, Christoph Irmscher, professor of English at Indiana University, will visit WMU to participate in the English Department’s Scholarly Speakers Series.
Dr. Irmscher will give the lecture “Straw Leaves, Table Bugs, and Birch-Bark Poems: Sustainability in American Literary Culture” at 7 pm in Brown Hall 3025. In this lecture, he will discuss an art exhibit on literature and sustainability that he curated this fall at IU’s Lilly Library.
Prof. Irmscher teaches and writes about nineteenth-century American and Canadian literature and culture, and has a particular interest in ecocriticism. His published books The Poetics of Natural History: From John Bartram to William James (Rutgers UP, 1999), an edition of the writings of John James Audubon (Library of America, 1999), Longfellow Redux (UP of Illinois, 2008), and the anthology A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History (Temple UP, 2009), co-edited with Alan Braddock. He recently completed a book about the nineteenth-century anti-Darwinist Louis Agassiz, which also seeks to understand the beginnings of graduate instruction in this country.
This speaker has worked extensively with public institutions, the National Park Service, the Field Museum in Chicago, the Maine Historical Society, and Harvard University’s Houghton Library, where he guest-curated the recent Bicentennial Longfellow exhibit.
Dr. Irmscher’s visit is being co-sponsored by WMU’s Environmental Studies Program.
Please contact Professor Anthony Ellis of the English Department for further information at (269) 387-2606 or anthony.ellis@wmich.edu.

Renowned Educator, NCTE President to Speak about Teaching in the Digital Era

On Thursday, September 30-Friday, October 1, 2010, CAROL JAGO, the president of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), will participate in the WMU English Department’s Scholarly Speakers Series.

Ms. Jago will appear at three events. On Thursday at 7 pm, she will give the lecture “Read Write Now: Teaching in a Digital Age” in 1260 Chemistry Building.
On Friday morning, at 10:30 am, she will lead the workshop “Writing for Publication: Changing the World Word by Word” in Brown Hall 3025. In this event, she will discuss how to write for publication and see your work in print and online.
For those who would like to learn more about the speaker’s ideas before her Thursday lecture, a special presentation by local teachers, “Carol Jago’s Published Work,” will take place from 5:30 to 6:45 pm Thursday in Brown 3045.
Ms. Jago has taught English in middle and high school for 32 years and directs the Writing and Literacy Project at UCLA. She served as AP Literature content advisor for the College Board and now serves on its English Academic Advisory committee. She has published six books with Heinemann, including With Rigor for All: Teaching the Classics to Contemporary Students (2000) and Papers, Papers, Papers (2005). She has also contributed books on Nikki Giovanni, Alice Walker, Sandra Cisneros, and Judith Ortiz Cofer to the NCTE series “In the Classroom.”

The speaker was an education columnist for the Los Angeles Times, and her essays have appeared in English Journal, Language Arts, and NEA Today, as well as in other newspapers across the United States. She edits the journal of the California Association of Teachers of English, California English, and served on the planning committee for the 2009 NAEP Reading Framework and the 2011 NAEP Writing Framework.

Ms. Jago’s visit is being co-sponsored by the Third Coast Writing Project and WMU’s Department of Education and Human Development.

For even more information, you can visit the event wiki at http://caroljago.wikispaces.com/