Vanderbilt EGSA

On Friday, October 21, the EGSA hosted its biannual Graduate...

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 21:32:15 -0400

On Friday, October 21, the EGSA hosted its biannual Graduate Student Reading Series. Ph.D candidate Emma Ingrisani presented “A Stitch in the Side, a Sword in the Heart: Fine Feeling and the Physical in Walker Percy and Laurence Sterne,” and MFA candidate Amanda Abel presented poems from her collection The Mattress Chronicles. Thanks to our presenters and all who attended!

On Friday, 4/22, Yeo Ju gave a talk entitled “Private...

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 16:08:19 -0400

On Friday, 4/22, Yeo Ju gave a talk entitled “Private Performances: Mesmerism in Henry James’ The Bostonians” as part of the EGSA Dissertation Talk Series. Yeo Ju delivered a fabulous paper on the private and public lives of mesmeric mediums to an audience that filled up Benson 200. Here are some photos from the event; thanks to everyone who was a part of it!

Slavery, Political Culture, and the Archive

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 18:20:00 -0400

Slavery, Political Culture, and the Archive

with

Vincent Brown, Stephen Best, and

Saidiya Hartman

March 25, 2011

9:30 am – 5:00 pm

Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center

Sponsored by:

The College of Arts and Science, The Department of English, African American and Diaspora Studies, Vanderbilt History Seminar, The Department of History, The Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center, and The Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities

Program Schedule:

9:30

Carolyn Dever, Welcome

Colin Dayan, Opening Remarks

10:00

Vincent Brown, Duke University, “History Attends to the Dead”

Tiffany Patterson, Vanderbilt University, Introduction

Catherine Molineux, Vanderbilt University, Response

1:30

Stephen Best, UC-Berkeley “The History of People Who Did Not Exist”

Samira Sheikh, Vanderbilt University, Introduction

Peter Hudson, Vanderbilt University, Response

3:00

Saidiya Hartman, Columbia University, “The Picture Not Taken”

Hortense Spillers, Vanderbilt University, Introduction

Ifeoma Nwankwo, Vanderbilt University, Response

Reception to follow

Vincent Brown, Professor of History and of African and African American Studies, is a multi-media historian with a keen interest in the political implications of cultural practice. He teaches courses in Atlantic history, African diaspora studies, and the history of slavery. Brown is the author of The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2008) and producer of an audiovisual documentary about the anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits broadcast on the PBS series Independent Lens.

Stephen Best is an Associate Professor of English at UC-Berkeley. Professor Best is an alumni of Williams College (B.A., 1989) and the University of Pennsylvania (M.A., 1992; Ph.D., 1997). He is the author ofThe Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession (University of Chicago, 2004), a study of property, poetics, and legal hermeneutics in nineteenth-century American literary and legal culture. Currently, he is working on a new project on rumor, promiscuous speech, and slavery’s archive.

Professor Best is a member of the editorial board of the journal Representations. Recently, he co-convened a research group with Saidiya Hartman at the University of California’s Humanities Research Institute on “Redress in Law, Literature, and Social Thought” (funded through the Mellon Foundation). His work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Hellman Foundation, the Humanities Research Institute (University of California), and the Ford Foundation.

Saidiya Hartman is a specialist in African American literature and history whose theoretical and literary contributions to our understanding of slavery are profound and original. Professor Hartman’s first book, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America is an erudite and subtle exploration of the intersections of enslavement, gender, desire, and the making of liberal reason in the United States. Worked through an engagement with a variety of cultural materials – slave narratives, song and dance, legal texts, journals, diaries, and narratives — Hartman explores the unstable institution of slave power. Her forthcoming book Lose Your Mother:A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route is, as she puts it, an exercise in literary fieldwork. It lyrically confronts the disturbing relationships among memory, representation, and narrative. She focuses on the “non-history” of the slave, the way in which the unnamable catastrophe of slavery erased any conventional modality for writing an intelligible past. Weaving her own biography into an imaginative historical construction, she explores and evokes the non-spaces of black experience—the experience through which the African captive became a slave, became a non-person, became alienated from personhood.

JERICHO BROWN READING

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 14:01:00 -0500

Jericho Brown

The author of

Please (New Issues Poetry & Prose)

Reading from his latest work of poetry

Thursday January 20, 2011

7:00 pm

at the Bishop Joseph Johnson

Black Cultural Center

Gertrude & Harold S. Vanderbilt Visiting Writers Program and the Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center

KATE DANIELS

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 00:42:00 -0500

Kate Daniels

Author of:

A Walk in Victoria’s Secret

Four Testimonies

The Niobe Poems

The White Wave

Reads from her work:

Wednesday

November 17

7:00 pm

Buttrick 102

Vanderbilt University

Gertrude & Harold S. Vanderbilt Visiting Writers Program

CARL PHILLIPS Reading

Mon, 08 Nov 2010 17:07:00 -0500

Carl Phillips

Kingsley Tufts Award Winner,

National Book Award & NBCC Award Finalist,

& author of eleven books of poetry, including

(with Farrar, Straus & Giroux):

Double Shadow (2011, forthcoming)

Speak Low (2009)

Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems 1986-2006

Reading from his latest work:

Thursday

November 11

7:00 pm

Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center

Vanderbilt University

Gertrude & Harold S. Vanderbilt Visiting Writers Program

Office of Houston Baker

Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center

EGSA GSRS!!

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 19:12:41 -0400

Mark your calendars for the next installment of the Graduate Student Reading Series!

Aubrey Porterfield (PhD) will be presenting a paper called “Scattering Space and Time: The Posthuman Subject in Streets of Fiendish Ghosts”

Matt Baker (MFA) will be reading from THE OTHER EDMUND, part one of his ongoing electronic novel.

Friday, November 5th
11:30- 1:00 PM
325/327 Sarratt

Please join us for this event!

TOM SLEIGH

Mon, 01 Nov 2010 21:28:00 -0400

TOM SLEIGH

Author of 7 books of poetry including:

Space Walk

Far Side of the Earth

A full-length translation of Euripides’ Herakles

A book of essays, Interview With a Ghost

Reading from his latest work of poetry

Thursday

November 4

7:00 pm

Buttrick 102

With an interview by

Alice Quinn,

Executive Director

of the Poetry Society of America

AIMEE BENDER

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 11:04:00 -0400

Aimee Bender

Author of:

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

Willful Creatures

An Invisible Sign of my Own

Reads from her work:

Thursday

October 28th

7:00 pm

Buttrick 101

Vanderbilt University

Gertrude & Harold S. Vanderbilt Visiting Writers Program

KATE FLINT

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 11:38:05 -0400

The 18th-/19th-Century Colloquium and the Department of English present:

Kate Flint (Rutgers, English)

“Books in Photographs”

Public lecture

Thursday, October 21 at 4:00 p.m.

205 Buttrick Hall.

MARY KINZIE

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 11:38:00 -0400

Mary Kinzie

Author of:

California Sorrow

Drift

The Ghost Ship

Autumn Eros and Other Poems

The Cure of Poetry in an Age of Prose: Moral Essays on the Poet’s Calling

The Judge is Fury: Dislocation and Form in Poetry

A Poet’s Guide to Poetry

And others

Reading from her work

Thursday

October 21

7:00 pm

Buttrick 102

Gertrude & Harold S. Vanderbilt Visiting Writers Program

FALL RHENEY LECTURE

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 12:29:30 -0400

The Department of English and

The English Graduate Student Association Present:

Rebecca

Walkowitz

Associate Professor of English

Rutgers University

Born-Translated and Born-Digital:

Comparative Writing in an Age of Electronic Literature

October 22, 2010

4:10 pm

Furman 114

The Rheney Lecture Series

Michael Groden Lecture

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 17:05:00 -0400

Vanderbilt’s Department of English Presents:

Michael Groden

Distinguished University Professor

University of Western Ontario

& Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada

Public Lecture:

Why Study Manuscripts?

Living and Working With Ulysses and With Joyce’s Manuscripts for His Novel

Thursday

October 7, 2010

4:00 pm

Buttrick 306

For more information, contact

Margaret Quigley
Vanderbilt Creative Writing
615.322.6527

EDWARD HIRSCH POETRY READING

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 15:06:00 -0400

Edward Hirsch

Author of

How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry

The Living Fire

Lay Back the Darkness

The Night Parade

and others

Reading from his latest work of poetry

Thursday

September 16

7:00 pm

Vanderbilt Universty

Buttrick 101

MFA Student Reading, 4/15, 6 p.m.

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 12:53:52 -0400

Please come listen to the second-year MFA students read from their work!

Featuring: Leigh Holland, Ben Lesousky, Alex Moody, Stephanie Pruitt, Valerie Sullivan, and Andrew Rahal

This terrific event will be held in Buttrick 202 on Thursday, April 15, at 6 p.m.

The Many Events of Friday, March 26

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 11:31:00 -0400

12:30- 2:00 pm

116 Sarratt

Megan Minarich (PhD) will be presenting “‘[A] literary asylum for the feeble-minded’: Eugenics, Visibility, and Narrative Propagation in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!”, and Zachary Greenberg will be reading from his collection entitled *Grace Notes.*

2:20-4:00 pm

Lower Level Room 2, Student Life Center

2:20 PM —- Constructing the Gothic Body in Edgar Allan Poe’s American Tales
Donika Ross
2:40 PM —- ―”The Last of the Ancient Race”: Transatlanticism and the construction of whiteness in Edgar Allan Poe‘s Southern Gothic
Amanda Johnson
3:00 PM —- “The very image of them”: Female Relationships and Competing Narratives in the Illustrations of Bleak House
Heather Freeman
3:20 PM —- Fossils and Fragments: The Discontinuous Histories of Charles Darwin and Walter Pater
Caroline Hovanec
3:40 PM —- “Putting the Sun Back in the Sky”: Temporality and Translation in D’Arcy McNickle’s *Wind From an Enemy Sky*
Christopher Pexa

3:00-4:00 pm

Sarratt 216/220

Susan Kuyper has agreed to conduct a grant workshop for all current and former English graduate students.

4:00-5:00 pm

Sarratt 216/220

EGSA Meeting

Michael Alijewicz at the Baseball Game Throwing the First Pitch

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 20:21:50 -0400

Michael Alijewicz at the Baseball Game Throwing the First Pitch

Graduate Student Reading Series, January 29, 2010. Thanks to...

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 12:59:00 -0500

Donika and Ben presenting.

Graduate Student Reading Series, January 29, 2010.

Thanks to our presenters, Donika and Ben! Lovely poems and trenchant analysis. In a snowstorm. Sorry most of the pictures were too blurry to use; now I know flower ≠ zoom.

Graduate Student Reading Series

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 12:14:00 -0500

Hi all,

It is my pleasure to announce that the semester’s first installment of the Graduate Student Reading Series is coming up. Please mark your calendars and plan to attend!

Donika Ross (PhD) will be presenting “Framing the Subject in Natasha Tretheway’s ‘Belloq’s Opheliam,’” and Ben Lesousky (MFA) will be reading from his manuscript, FOR MOTION SICKNESS AND REFUSE.

Friday, January 29th

12:30

116 Sarratt

See you there!

Jane