Readings
Past Events
2022 - 2023
Author A.J. Verdelle will read from her book Miss Chloe: A Memoir of a Literary Friendship with Toni Morrison
Please Join a Lunchtime Conversation
On Books, Bibliography, Bibliophilia & Associational Literary History
with Anthony Grafton, Henry Putnam University Professor of History, Princeton University
and Denise Gigante, Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities, Stanford University
Prof. Gigante will discuss her new study: Book Madness: A Study of Book Collectors in America (Yale University Press, 2022), ISBN 978-0-300-24848-7
Lunch will be provided
Please join Labyrinth for a conversation between Dean of the Faculty and Professor of English at Princeton, Gene Jarrett, and his colleague in the English Department, Simon Gikandi, about Dunbar who, born during Reconstruction to formerly enslaved parents, excelled against all odds to become an accomplished and versatile artist.
Additional Information: https://www.labyrinthbooks.com/events/1310
Ian Davis, Department of English, Princeton University
This is an announcement for the third meeting of the 20th Century Workshop.
Sponsored by: The Department of English and the Bain-Swiggett Fund
2021 - 2022
Personal Limits is a conversation series with critics, authors, and poets about contemporary experiments in personal writing amidst our ongoing and overlapping crises hosted by Prof. Monica Huerta.
In the second half of this series, conversations turn from Professor Huerta’s own book Magical Habits to her guests’ writing and their thoughts about as well as desires for contemporary landscapes of personal writing.
"On Hugh Kenner" participants are Walter Benn Michaels, Oren Izenberg, Michael Clune, Megan Quigley, and Todd Cronan. Hosted by Joshua Kotin
University ID is required to attend. Masks must be worn.
register here: https://forms.gle/uisqnfpTPFjMHCJU8
Personal Limits is a conversation series with critics, authors, and poets about contemporary experiments in personal writing amidst our ongoing and overlapping crises hosted by Prof. Monica Huerta.
In the second half of this series, conversations turn from Professor Huerta’s own book Magical Habits to her guests’ writing and their thoughts about as well as desires for contemporary landscapes of personal writing.
Please join us. Dozens of readers, one great poem. To register for this ZOOM event, please contact Susan Wolfson (wolfson@princeton.edu) by January 17.
2020-2021
A Book Talk and Discussion of Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (NYU 2020) with Zakiyyah Iman Jackson. April 22, 2021 at 4:30pm via zoom.
Register here: https://forms.gle/WJ3pgqi9reurijgu5
Sponsored by: Intersections Working Group, The Department of English, African American Studies, American Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies and the Center for Human Values.
Join the Department of English in welcoming our Bain Swiggett Distinguished Visitor in Poetry & Poetics, Virginia Jackson, on March 25th at 4:30pm.
Professor Jackson will discuss a pre-circulated section of Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric in the Nineteenth Century.
The Department of English and the Council of the Humanities invite you to a rehearsed reading of Colm Tóibín’s Pale Sister by Lisa Dwan. Don’t miss this opportunity to witness this amazing performance.
Intersections Working Group presents a discussion of Realist Ecstasy: Religion, Race, and Performance in American Literature (NYU, 2020) with author Lindsay V. Reckson, Associate Professor of English at Haverford College.
To have the chance to discuss We the Animals in an informal and friendly setting, we're holding a book club meeting
October 15th, 4:30-6pm, moderated by graduate students Lindsay Griffiths and Alex Diaz-Hui. We encourage you to attend.
Intersections Working Group presents a discussion of Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man (Harvard, 2020) with author Joshua Bennett, Mellon Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://princeton.zoom.us/j/97620321672
Ingrid Norton
Katherine Anne Porter, “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” (a short story about the 1918 flu epidemic)
2019-2020
Russ Leo
Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Ursula K. Le Guin short story, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"
Susan Wolfson
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson
Maria DiBattista and Rebecca Rainof
James Joyce, “The Dead”; “Bloomsday” by Serena Alagappan (Princeton class of 2020)
Sponsored by "The Bain-Swiggett Fund, Department of English" and "The Lewis Center for the Arts."
https://arts.princeton.edu/events/a-poetry-reading-by-jay-wright/
2018-2019
Free and open to the public; no advance tickets required.
Details about the event are available at blackpoetry.princeton.edu.
2017-2018
Jenny Xie is the author of Eye Level (Graywolf Press, 2018), recipient of the 2017 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, and Nowhere to Arrive (Northwestern University Press, 2017), recipient of the 2016 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Prize. She holds degrees from Princeton University and New York University's Creative Writing Program, and has received fellowships and support from Kundiman, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and Poets & Writers. She teaches at New York University.
Co-sponsored by the Contemporary Poetry Colloquium
Style is everywhere, but it evades criticism—especially now, when an age of interpretation asks us to look right through it. And yet style does so much tacit work, telling time, telling us apart, telling us who we are. What place does it have among our moment’s favored categories of form, history, meaning? What do we miss if we fail to look at it, to talk about it? Please join two of our most stylish literary critics as they deliberate these questions. Full event details
Rhodri Lewis and Leonard Barkan will discuss Lewis’s radical new interpretation of the most famous play in the English language. By exploring Shakespeare’s engagements with the humanist traditions of early modern England and Europe, Lewis reveals a Hamlet unseen for centuries: an innovative, coherent, and exhilaratingly bleak tragedy in which the governing ideologies of Shakespeare’s age are scrupulously upended. Please join us. More event details
What are you grateful for? Join Princeton Writes for a night of stories about grace, relief, support, love, honesty, good hair days--whatever brings you gratitude.
Please join us tomorrow, Thursday, 11/30, from 6:30-8:00 p.m., in the Mathey College common room, my program, Princeton Writes, will host its second annual University-wide story slam, to be emceed by Bill Gleason, Department of English.
2016-2017
Postwar New York: A Workshop Series
Organized by Joshua Kotin, Department of English
Write jkotin@princeton.edu for precirculated papers.
Sponsored by the David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Project in the Council of the Humanities
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Full Series:
Deborah Nelson (University of Chicago), “Susan Sontag: An-aesthetics and Agency,” Tuesday, February 28, 4:30pm, McCosh 40
Postwar New York: A Workshop Series
Organized by Joshua Kotin, Department of English
Write jkotin@princeton.edu for precirculated papers.
Sponsored by the David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Project in the Council of the Humanities
------------
Full Series:
Deborah Nelson (University of Chicago), “Susan Sontag: An-aesthetics and Agency,” Tuesday, February 28, 4:30pm, McCosh 40
Postwar New York: A Workshop Series
Organized by Joshua Kotin, Department of English
Write jkotin@princeton.edu for precirculated papers.
Sponsored by the David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Project in the Council of the Humanities
----------
Full Series:
Deborah Nelson (University of Chicago), “Susan Sontag: An-aesthetics and Agency,” Tuesday, February 28, 4:30pm, McCosh 40
Postwar New York: A Workshop Series
Organized by Joshua Kotin, Department of English
Write jkotin@princeton.edu for precirculated papers.
Sponsored by the David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Project in the Council of the Humanities
--------------
Full Series:
Deborah Nelson (University of Chicago), “Susan Sontag: An-aesthetics and Agency,” Tuesday, February 28, 4:30pm, McCosh 40
We are holding a marathon reading of John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost this Friday, 3 March in the the Hinds Library, McCosh Hall basement; enter through entrance 2. We will begin at 5 PM and continue until we finish the poem, probably around 3 AM, but with a dinner break c.
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Acclaimed French author of The Heart, Maylis de Kerangal, and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen read from and discuss their work.
2015-2016
POEMS BEFORE LUNCH. Friday, May 27, 2106. 10:30am - 11:30am, McCosh 40
What do we reach for, when we reach for a poem? Professors Bill Gleason, Anne Cheng, Kinohi Nishikawa, Susan Wolfson, and Esther Schor will be answering this question by sharing some of our favorite poems. The reading will be followed by discussion and refreshments. Come and listen, discuss if you feel so moved, and if you're inclined to recommend a poem to us, we'd love to hear from you. Everyone will receive a list of recommended poems for summer reading. We look forward to welcoming you back to McCosh!
Colonial Americas Workshop presents Peter Mancall
Co-sponsored by the Department of History and the Department of English
We will take turns reading from this magnificent work, and proceed across twelve books, from beginning to end, to meditate together on Milton's fundamental questions of knowledge and temptation, predestination, sex and gender, the order of things, the origins of evil and the fate of mankind.
Poetry reading and music. Reception to follow. Registration required: http://www.unitedkingdompoets.eventbrite.com
Featuring:
Stuart Calton http://www.barquepress.com/authors.php?i=6
Verity Spott http://twotornhalves.blogspot.co.uk/
The Intersections Working Group presents
Natalie Diaz, poet and Hodder Fellow, language conservationist and Mojave activist, will be speaking on November 19th, at 4:30pm, in McCosh 60. The title of her talk is "The Paradox of Gesture and Language: Can I enact what I have no words for?" We hope you'll join us for the lecture and the reception afterwards.
"Imagining an English Jamaica"
Professor Carla Pestana will present a pre-circulated paper from her new work on the early modern Caribbean.
Co-sponsored by the Department of History and the Department of English.
http://www.princeton.edu/cch/events/workshops/caw/?utm_source=CCH+Weekly...
Intersections Working Group presents: Julia Lee. Julia Lee is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. She is the author of The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel (Oxford, 2010) and has published articles in Symbiosis, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and African American Review.
A panel discussion with Princeton alumni speaking about their careers after graduating with a degree in English. Refreshments will be served.
*This event is OPEN TO ALL PRINCETON STUDENTS, UNDERGRADS & GRADS.
Michele Wallace, a feminist scholar, writer and educator, was born on January 4, 1952 in New York City to Robert Earl Wallace, a musician, and Faith Ringgold, a well-known artist and author. In 1978, at age 26, she published her first book, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, setting off a maelstrom of controversy in the black community and beyond. In 1990 Wallace published Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory.
2014-2015
The Avant-Garde 1900-1940
Workshop Series
Organizers: Joshua Kotin (Princeton Department of English), Effie Rentzou (Princeton Department of French)
Co-sponsors:
David A. Gardner Magic Project, Department of English, Department of French and Italian, Department of Comparative Literature, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Program in European Cultural Studies, Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities
Sea Changes: A Conversation with Ruth Ozeki (A Tale for the Time Being) and Chang-rae Lee (On Such a Full Sea)
Moderated by Anne Cheng and Sarah Chihaya
Open to the public
Sponsored by the Department of English, Program in American Studies, Jaqueliyne Hata Alexander '84 P14 Fund for Japanese American Studies, Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton Environmental Institute, Council for the Humanities, Fund for Canadian Studies, University Center for Human Values and the Department of Comparative Literature
Note: Updated location, now McCosh Hall 10
A reception will follow the reading. Join us in 20 McCosh Hall (Thorp Library).
Craig Dworkin is the Bain-Swiggett Visiting Lecturer in Poetry at the Department of English, Princeton.
Lunchtime discussion event. Jennifer Scappettone will present a pre-circulated paper. Email osxr@princeton.edu for a pdf of the paper.Lunch provided.
The Avant-Garde 1900-1940
Workshop Series
Organizers: Joshua Kotin (Princeton Department of English), Effie Rentzou (Princeton Department of French)
Co-sponsors:
David A. Gardner Magic Project, Department of English, Department of French and Italian, Department of Comparative Literature, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Program in European Cultural Studies, Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities
Slavoj Žižek: FIGURES OF NEGATIVITY
Slavoj Žižek: FIGURES OF NEGATIVITY
Robert Adamson is one of Australia's most eminent poets, and is a writer, editor and publisher. He has published 15 books of poetry. He has acted as President of the Poetry Society, editor of the Poetry Society of Australia's magazine, New Poetry, and poetry reviewer for Australia's national newspaper, The Australian.
Slavoj Žižek: FIGURES OF NEGATIVITY
Slavoj Žižek: FIGURES OF NEGATIVITY
Slavoj Žižek: FIGURES OF NEGATIVITY
Slavoj Žižek: FIGURES OF NEGATIVITY
An evening discussion featuring (among others):
Emily Nussbaum, Television critic for The New Yorker
Elizabeth Minkel, Fandom/digital culture columnist at The New Statesman and The Millions
Jamie Broadnax, Creator of the groundbreaking website and podcast Black Girl Nerds
Heidi Tandy, Intellectual Property Attorney and long time fangirl
Anne Jamison, Associate Professor of English, University of Utah, and author of Fic: Why Fanfiction is Taking over the World (2013)
The Avant-Garde 1900-1940
Workshop Series
Organizers: Joshua Kotin (Princeton Department of English), Effie Rentzou (Princeton Department of French)
Co-sponsors:
David A. Gardner Magic Project, Department of English, Department of French and Italian, Department of Comparative Literature, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Program in European Cultural Studies, Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities
David Ball - False Starts: The Rhetoric of Failure and the Making of American Modernism
Thursday, December 4th, 2014 at 6:00 PM - Labyrinth Books Princeton
Intersections Working Group presents: Nick Sousanis
Nick Sousanis is the first academic to compose his entire dissertation in comics form. Get a sneak-peek of his forthcoming book Unflattening and hear how his groundbreaking work can change the way you think about academic writing. Sousanis earned his doctorate in education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and is currently Eyes High Postdoctoral Fellow in Comics Studies at the University of Calgary.
Sponsored by the Intersections Working Group.
Wilson College Signature Lecture Series
algorithm & blues:
a reading by Joshua Bennett
Oct. 7 2014
McCosh 10
5 pm
More info: www.princeton.edu/wilsoncollege/signatureseries/
Lecture and poetry reading.
Nathaniel Mackey, Reynolds Price Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University, Princeton University Alumnus, Author and Award-Winning Poet reads from his work.
Sponsored by the Intersections Working Group in the Department of English and the Center for African American Studies.
Reception to follow.
2013-2014
Reading by poet, Tan Lin, followed with conversation between graphic artist and inaugural Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts at the Lewis Center for the Arts, Danielle Aubert and Professor Anne Cheng.
Reading group open to faculty and graduate students. Contact Andrew Cole at acole@princeton.edu for more details.
Intersections Joint Lecture/Conversation: A Jazz Studies Critical Conversation
Brent Edwards: http://english.columbia.edu/people/profile/381
Kevin Young: http://www.blueflowerarts.com/booking/kevin-young
Kevin Young, biography:
The Department of English's History of a Book seminar is a biannual series of lectures/discussions on how a book of criticism came to be. Guest speakers bring to the table not a work in progress, but a finished book, between covers, and they explain how it got made.
For further information, see: http://www.labyrinthbooks.com/events_detail.aspx?evtid=713
2012-2013
"W.S. Graham and Abstract Lyric"
The American Whig-Cliosophic Society and Labyrinth Books Present Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Massie, author of Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman for a discussion of his book. Book signing to follow.