Colloquia
Past Events
Whereas the historical trauma of the Middle Passage and enslavement has been a prominent subject of Caribbeanist scholarship, there is surprisingly little sustained consideration of how poems and other imaginative works mourn this violent past, even though melancholic grief is a crucial component of the literary response to it. Building on…
CAConrad has worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. Their latest book is Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books / UK Penguin 2024). They received the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize, a PEN Josephine Miles Award, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, and a Lambda Award. The Book…
- CAConradAffiliationPoet, Writer; Creative Writing Instructor, Columbia University, Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam
- AffiliationPoet, Speaker, Educator
Among his poetic contemporaries, George Herbert stands out as a virtuoso of containers and containment: The Temple’s strong architectural conceit implies a delimited physical structure, within which lyric poems — often featuring boxes, cases, bags, and other vessels — call attention to their own formal limits of line and…
This talk approaches the Victorian sculptor Edmonia Lewis (1844-1907) as an artist whose neoclassical works and life narrative transform our understanding of art, materiality and racial formations in the 19th century Atlantic world. As among the first professional, colored sculptors in the West (she was of Black and Anishinaabe…
Asian Americans are conventionally described as “middle-man minorities,” outside of dominant racial paradigms of white and Black, adjunct to white privilege and exempt from the brunt of systemic violence directed against Black people. Historical accounts trace the origins of the in-betweenness of Asian Americans to the…
This talk retells the social and environmental upheavals of the Klondike Gold Rush through stories from two kinds of beavers: the furry 50-pound dam building kind, and Beaver — a critical figure in the origin stories and legal ideas of the Han Hwech'in, the Indigenous people of the Klondike region. It asks how thinking with such sources of…
Now and then, humanity shocks itself into brief moments of introspection. We think a bit about the species and the world we have collectively created. For the cultural critic Walter Benjamin, these are moments of danger in which memory flashes up to elucidate — briefly, fleetingly — the violence inherent in everything we tend to touch. Two…
Maureen N. McLane is a poet, scholar, and critic whose work often arises from the conjunction of romanticism and/or now. She has published seven books of poetry: Same Life (FSG, 2008); World Enough (FSG, 2010); This Blue (FSG, 2014); Mz N: the serial (FSG, 2016); Some Say …
- Affiliation
Tara Houska, Couchiching First Nation, will present “Reconnection, Resistance, and Land Back.” This is the third talk in the fall 2023 Environmental Humanities and Social Transformation Colloquium.
An Indigenous perspective on climate and frontline action. What can we do, how do we heal, how does connectivity play a role in movement?
As mainstream theater slowly adopts more transgender-informed casting practices, plays like The Roaring Girl, Middleton and Dekker’s city comedy featuring the notorious and historical Moll Frith, become attractive vessels for nonbinary and genderqueer character readings and staging. While infusions of contemporary stakes…
Filipino Time: Affective Worlds and Contracted Labor(2022) explores cultural productions around migrant practices that mark other ways of sensing, making sense of, and feeling time with others. Migrant subjects harness time and the imagination in their creative, life-making capacities to make communal worlds out of one steeped…
In making incarnation a key term for her fiction, George Eliot exemplifies a broader Victorian effort to transmute Christian sentiment into a secular ideal of sympathy and an aesthetic of realism. At the same time, the critical tendency to situate Eliot in relation to a New Testament paradigm has obscured her engagement…
Kevon Rhiney, the 2023 Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and the Humanities in the High Meadows Environmental Institute, traces post-Irma hurricane disaster relief and rebuilding efforts on the eastern Caribbean island of St Martin to…
In this talk, Tita Chico will speak about her current book project, Wonder: Literature and Science in the Long Eighteenth Century (under contract with Cambridge University Press), which looks at wonder as a defining epistemology for what we now understand as literature and science in the period. The Enlightenment has long been…
Pulitzer Prize winning science writer, Ed Yong will draw from his new book An Immense World to reveal the hidden realms of animals’ senses and their astonishingly varied ways of perceiving the world. Yong’s talk will explore why the pandemic was so devastating, and necessary future…
ENGLISH in 50 Years is the Class of 2023's English Major's Colloquium featuring faculty speakers and open to English and English-associated faculty, and the current English concentrators in the Class of 2023, 2024, and 2025.
Colloquium begins at 4:30 pm in East Pyne 010 with a reception dinner to follow at Prospect House.
…- William Gleason
- Autumn Womack
- Jeff Dolven
Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies at Yale University and Author of Uncommon Tongues: Eloquence and Eccentricity in the English Renaissance (Penn Press, 2014).
Barbara Browning is Director of Undergraduate Studies and Associate Professor of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.
Lynn M. Festa, Rutgers University
Associate Professor of English and author of Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France.
Professor of American Studies and English and Associate Dean of the Humanities at Rutgers University. He received his BA from Williams College and His PhD in Comparative Literature from NYU.