Contemporary Literature Colloquium
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The Contemporary Literature Colloquium welcomes suggestions for topics and speakers. If you are interested in organizing a colloquium roundtable, panel, discussion, or lecture, please contact Rebecca Walkowitz.
Workshops
Monthly dissertation workshops provide graduate students in the dissertation stage with an opportunity to present their written work for critically engaged peer review with graduate students and faculty working in contemporary literature. Participants are encouraged to attend regularly. If you are a dissertator who is interested in participating in or presenting a work-in-progress for the CLC Dissertator Workshop, please contact Taryn Okuma with a brief description of your work/project.
Thursday, September 20, 12:30 pm
Roundtable: TBD.
Room: 7101 Helen C. White. Organizer: Amy Johnson.
Thursday, September 20, 4pm
Lecture: “Josephine Baker: Skins, Tattoos, and the Making of Modern Surfaces" Professor Anne Cheng.
What is "bare skin" at the intersection of bodies and buildings? This talk explores through the iconographic figure of Josephine Baker how readings of racial skin shape and are shaped by modernist theorization of surface in the plastic arts and its meanings. Contrary to the universally agreed understanding that Baker exemplifies a long tradition of colonial representations, this paper argues that Baker instead marks a significant break in the visual culture surrounding the black female body. This departure demands a re-reading of the encounter between Modernism and Primitivism and holds expansive implications for the philosophic and political construction of the "modern object" and its roles in the ethics of the gaze and the politics of democratic recognition.
Room: 7191 Helen C. White. Organizer: Amy Johnson.
Thursday, October 11, 4pm
Workshop: Open -- Contact Tim Glenn if you are a member of the CLC and would like to workshop a dissertation chapter on this day.
Room 7101. Organizer: Tim Glenn.
Thursday, November 1, 4pm
Workshop: "Thinking Small: Ian McEwan on fiction and Politics of Modesty," Thom Dancer.
Room 7101. Organizers: Tim Glenn
Thursday, November 15th, 4 pm
Workshop: "Repentance, Justice, and the Heroic War Narrative in Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honor Trilogy," Taryn Okuma.
Room 7101. Organizer: Tim Glenn.
Thursday, November 29, 4 pm
Lecture: “Feminist Reading," Professor Jennifer Wicke
Room: 7101 HCW. Organizer: Middle Modernity Colliquium.
Thursday, December 7th, 4 pm
Workshop: "TBD: Norman Mailer," Brian Williams
Room 7101. Organizer: Tim Glenn.
Thursday, March 6th, 4 pm
Workshop: "T.S. Eliot: The Poetics and Politics of Conversion," Mitch Nakaue.
Room 7101. Organizer: Tim Glenn.
Thursday, March 27, 4 pm
Lecture: “The Event of Shame in J.M. Coetzee," Professor Timothy Bewes.
Room: 7191 HCW. Organizer: Thom Dancer.
Friday, March 28, 12:30 pm
Roundtable with graduate students: “The Materiality of Language.”
Professor Timothy Bewes. Room 7190. Moderator: Thom Dancer. Reading.
Thursday, April 10th, 4 pm
Workshop: On Lyn Hejinian's My Life, John Bradley.
Room: 7101 Helen C White. Organizer: Tim Glenn.