Visiting scholar: Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, November 26

Please note that the location has changed to Room 315 from the originally scheduled October meeting.

Please join us for our next Mellon Workshop meeting on Monday, November 26 at 12pm, at 70 Brown Street (The English Department), Room 315.  We will be hosting Professor Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, professor of English at Northeastern University, whose research interests include Early American literature and drama; feminist, political and aesthetic theory; transatlantic print culture; Atlantic colonialism; and the early novel. In her first book, The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (Stanford UP, 2004), Dillon argues that narratives of citizenship and subjectivity within liberalism include - and, indeed, rely upon - depictions of women that encourage affective identification as an unspoken political act and thereby complicate the distinction between private and public spheres. Currently, Dillon is working on her manuscript for New World Drama: Theatre of the Atlantic, 1660-1850, as well as co-editing a volume of essays on early American culture and the Haitian Revolution.

For Monday's meeting, we will be reading selections from Dillon's The Gender of Freedom, a recent essay entitled "John Marrant Blows the French Horn," as well as a forthcoming essay from Professor Dillon.  All readings are available here (log-in required).  There are also additional, optional readings available for this week's discussion.