Literature | Graduate Speaker Series | College of Arts and Sciences, American University, Washington, DC

Questions?

Literature
202-885-2971
Fax: 202-885-2938
lit@american.edu
Battelle Tompkins, Room 237

Johnson, Catherine A
Administrative Coordinator

Mailing Address

The Graduate Speaker Series brings two to three outside scholars to speak to students and faculty in the Literature Department each semester. The series has attracted diverse dynamic intellectuals of national and international standing to speak about their work. We attempt to key the speakers to graduate classes offered each semester in order to highlight the scholarly debates occurring in the academy around a particular subject. Topics such as aesthetics, philosophy, history, biography, historiography, and critical history have found a place alongside critical and theoretical readings of texts, performances, and films.

Students are strongly encouraged to attend all talks since the discussion after each presentation offers invaluable opportunities for an exchange of questions and ideas between scholars and students.

Past Speakers

Laura Rosenthal
"Georgian Gender Trouble"

Negar Mottahedeh
"Circulating Photographs:
Iranian Women in Revolt 1953, 1979 and 2009"

Amanda Anderson
“The Liberal Aesthetic”

Reid Barbour
“Faith, Reason, and Monstrosity:
Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici”

Elizabeth Barnes
“’Bloody Instructions’:
John Brown and the Radical Reproduction of Sensibility”

David Crystal
"Pronouncing Shakespeare"

Lee Edelman
“Anechronology: Why The Birds Is Still Coming”
"Queer Theory Degree Zero: Almodóvar’s Bad Education"

Lisa Gitelman
“A Short History of [Blank]”

Stephen Guy-Bray
“Against Reproduction”

Jonathan Gil Harris
“H4: Henry, History, Histrionics, Hegel”

Joan Tasker Grimbert
"Romantic(Mis)readings of the Medieval Legend of Tristan and Iseult: Richard Wagner, Joseph Bedier, and Denis de Rougemont"

Kathryn Hume
“The Grotesque as Fantasy”

Theodore Leinwand
“Shakespeare: To the Great Variety of Readers”

Ruth Leys
"The Turn to Affect: A Critique"

Michael McKeon
“Scientific Experiment, Drama, and the Origins of the Novel”

Negar Mottahedeh
"Circulating Photographs:
Iranian Women in Revolt 1953, 1979 and 2009"

Martin Puchner
“Plato’s Shadows: Shaw and the Comedy of Ideas”

John Rogers
“Milton’s Paradise Lost and the Heresy of Individualism”

Laura Rosenthal
"Georgian Gender Trouble"

George S. Rousseau,
"Modernity and the Two Paranoias:
The Neurology of Persecution?"

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
“The Difference Affect Makes:
Melanie Klein and Others”

Jonah Siegel
“Wonders Taken for Signs:
The Institution of the Museum in Nineteenth-Century Britain”

Susan R. Suleiman,
"Moments of Self-Consciousness in Holocaust Memoirs"

Paul C. Taylor
"Blackness after the End of History; or,
Who You Calling Post-Racial?"

Clara Tuite
“Rank Thing:
Dandy Glamour, Ruination, and Ephemeral Endurance”

2012-2013 Series

Spring 2013

Timothy Yu
University of Wisconsin-Madison
April 5, 5:00
"Diasporic Poetics"

Fall 2012

Gerrard Passanante
University of Maryland
October 19, 5:00

"Little Big World:
Disaster and the Materialist Imagination"

This paper will look at the habit of moving from small things atoms, details, fossilized seashells, words) to vast processes, universal narratives, and ideas of the world. Tracing this disaster-courting habit from the poetry of Lucretius to the geological speculations of the seventeenth-century polymath Robert Hooke to the philosophy of Leibniz, I argue that this most familiar business of making much of little has deep roots in the ways that early modern readers came to terms with the hidden violence of the materialist imagination.

Tanya Agathocleous
CUNY
November 16, 5:00

"Choosing between Country and Friend:
Modernism, Syncretism and Disaffection in the Imperial Encounter"

Ideals of East-West syncretism abound in a range of early twentieth-century works, from the theosophical lectures of Annie Besant to the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore. The cultural union of East and West was imagined as a solution to global political conflict and often allegorized as an affective relationship, such as a romance or friendship. Yet it was also represented as a relationship destined to fail; this lecture explores the formal and political significance of disaffection in works such as Forster's Passage to India and the modernist magazine East and West.

Vincent Carretta
University of Maryland
November 30, 5:00

"Strangers in Strange Lands:
Figures in the Eighteenth-Century African Diaspora"

This talk will focus in particular on William Ansah Sessarakoo (1720?-1770), who traveled first (involuntarily) from Africa to the West Indies, where he was redeemed from slavery by the Royal African Company, then sent to England, where he was treated as a celebrity before being repatriated to Africa to engage in the transatlantic slave trade, and Julius Soubise (1754?-1798), who was brought from Jamaica as a slave to England, where he was given to the Duchess of Queensberry, who gave him the education of a gentleman, and hustled him off to India to escape his debts and a rape charge. Although neither Sessarakoo not Soubise was an author, their lives inspired contemporaries (including John Newton) to write about them. The talk will be illustrated.