Please join us on Monday, April 1 at 11:30am for our next Mellon workshop! We will meet in the English Department's Barker Room (70 Brown Street, Room 315). We are delighted to welcome (back!) Professor Gene Jarrett, Professor of English and African American Studies at Boston University, as our final visiting scholar to join us at the Mellon. Professor Jarrett specializes in African American literature and culture from the 18th century to the present; intellectual and literary history of the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries; race, ethnic, and cultural studies; and theories of literature, aesthetics, and intellectual historiography. He is the author of Representing the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature (NYU, 2011) and Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature (Penn, 2007). Jarrett has also edited and co-edited six volumes on African American literature and criticism, including most recently A Companion to African American Literature (Blackwell, 2010), The Collected Novels of Paul Laurence Dunbar (Ohio UP, 2009), and The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892-1938 (Princeton UP, 2007). Jarrett's current project is a monograph on the life, literature, and times of African American writer Paul Laurence Dunbar.
We will be reading selections from Professor Jarrett's recent book, Representing the Race, along with a 2012 article on "The Harlem Renaissance and its Indignant Aftermath: Rethinking Literary History and Political Action After Black Studies." All readings, and additional readings from Kenneth Warren's What Was African American Literature? (2011), are available on the google site (log-in required). With generous co-sponsorship from the Graduate Student Council, Professor Jarrett will deliver a paper entitled "Beyond Literacy and Literature: Rethinking Political Histories of Slavery, Agency, and Freedom" as part of his visit to the workshop. Please join us for Professor Jarrett's paper, lunch, and the workshop!
Please join us on Monday, March 4, 2013 at 12pm for our next Mellon workshop! We will be meeting at 12pm in the English department's Barker Room (70 Brown Street, Room 315). We are excited to host Professor Sean McCann, professor of English at Wesleyan University. He specializes
in post-Civil War American Literature, specifically in relation to
contemporaneous political developments and discourses. He is the author
of A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and
Presidential Government (Princeton UP, 2008) and Gumshoe
America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal
Liberalism (Duke UP, 2000), which received honorable
mention for the America Studies Association's John Hope Franklin Prize
for the best book in American Studies. His essays have appeared in
American Quarterly, The Common Review, ELH, Radical History Review,
Twentieth-Century Literature, Studies in American Fiction, the Yale
Journal of Criticism, as well as several edited volumes including Poetics/Politics: Radical Aesthetics for the Classroom (St. Martin's Press, 1999).
Professor McCann will be workshopping two pieces with the group, both of which are available on the google site, along with selections from his previous work (log-in required). Lunch will be provided. Please join us for our conversation!
Please join us on Friday, February 8, 2013 for our next Mellon meeting! We will be meeting at 12pm in the English Department (70 Brown Street), Room 315. We will be hosting Professor Jodi Dodi, professor of political science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY. She teaches broadly within modern and contemporary
political theory, ranging from feminism to fascism, consumption, and
citizenship. Her research interests include digital media;
poststructuralism and psychoanalysis; neoliberalism and consumerism;
cultural studies; and feminism theory. Dean's impressive list of
publications boasts numerous journal articles, contributions to collected volumes, and seven monographs including Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Duke UP, 2009),
Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy (Cornell UP, 2002),
and her forthcoming work, The Communist Horizon (Verso, October 2012).
Dean has edited and co-edited several collected volumes addressing
questions of feminism, empire, and information networks. Dean also
serves as co-editor of Theory and Event, an electronic academic journal published quarterly by John Hopkins University Press.
Professor Dean will come and talk with the workshop about some of her previous work, as well as a forthcoming project that she will be workshopping with the group. All readings will be available on the google site (log-in required). Lunch will be provided.
We are also delighted to sponsor a public talk that evening. Professor Dean will give a lecture entitled "Communicative capitalism: this is what democracy looks like" on Friday, February 8, 2013 at 4pm in Pembroke Hall, Room 305. This lecture is also co-sponsored through the generous support of the Department of Political Science, the Department of Sociology, and the Graduate Student Council at Brown University.
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.
RESCHEDULED! Due to Hurricane Sandy, we will be rescheduling Professor Dillon's visit for later in the semester. Please check the syllabus for the schedule changes.
Please join us for our next Mellon Workshop meeting on Monday, October 29 at 12pm, at 70 Brown Street (The English Department), Room 218. 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.
Please join us on Monday, April 1 at 11:30am for our next Mellon workshop! We will meet in the English Department's Barker Room (70 Brown Street, Room 315). We are delighted to welcome (back!) Professor Gene Jarrett, Professor of English and African American Studies at Boston University, as our final visiting scholar to join us at the Mellon. Professor Jarrett specializes in African American literature and culture from the 18th century to the present; intellectual and literary history of the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries; race, ethnic, and cultural studies; and theories of literature, aesthetics, and intellectual historiography. He is the author of Representing the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature (NYU, 2011) and Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature (Penn, 2007). Jarrett has also edited and co-edited six volumes on African American literature and criticism, including most recently A Companion to African American Literature (Blackwell, 2010), The Collected Novels of Paul Laurence Dunbar (Ohio UP, 2009), and The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892-1938 (Princeton UP, 2007). Jarrett's current project is a monograph on the life, literature, and times of African American writer Paul Laurence Dunbar.
