Fellowships and Post-Docs at the Clark Library at UCLA

sponsored by

UCLA Center for 17th-& 18th-Century Studies

www.c1718cs.ucla.edu

and the

William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/clarklib/  

Combined fellowship information can be found here:

www.c1718cs.ucla.edu/fellowships.htm   

Post-doctoral application forms can be accessed directly via this link:

www.c1718cs.ucla.edu/postdoc-app.htm  

 

Clark Short-Term Fellowships

Fellowship support is available to scholars with research projects that require work in any area of the Clark's collections. Applicants must hold a Ph.D. degree or have equivalent academic experience. Awards are for periods of one to three months in residence.

Stipend: $2,500 per month in residence.

Application deadline: 1 February 2013

 

ASECS/Clark Fellowships

Fellowships jointly sponsored by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Clark Library are available to postdoctoral scholars and to ABD graduate students with projects in the Restoration or the eighteenth century. Fellowship holders must be members in good standing of ASECS. Awards are for one month of residency.

Stipend: $2,500 for one month in residence.

Application deadline: 1 February 2013

 

Kanner Fellowship in British Studies

These three-month fellowships, established through the generosity of Penny Kanner, support research at the Clark Library in any area pertaining to British history and culture. Fellowships are open to both postdoctoral and predoctoral scholars.

Stipend: $7,500 for three months in residence.

Application deadline: 1 February 2013

 

Clark-Huntington Joint Bibliographical Fellowship

Sponsored jointly by the Clark and the Huntington Libraries, this two-month fellowship (one month at each library) provides support for bibliographical research in early modern British literature and history as well as other areas where the two libraries have common strengths. Applicants should hold a Ph.D. degree or have equivalent academic experience.

Stipend: $5,500 for two months in residence

Application deadline: 1 February 2013

Ahmanson-Getty Postdoctoral Fellowships 

This theme-based resident fellowship program, established with the support of the Ahmanson Foundation of Los Angeles and the J. Paul Getty Trust, is designed to encourage the participation of junior scholars in the Center's yearlong core programs.

 The core program for year 2013–2014:

 

Iberian Globalization of the Early Modern World

Organized by Anna More (UCLA) and Ivonne del Valle (UC Berkeley)           

Iberian imperialism was one of the first attempts to link the globe through supposedly universal

values, in this case derived from Christianity. Yet Spanish and Portuguese monarchies strove to achieve this global reach with technological, scientific, and juridical practices that accompanied and at times competed with their evangelical pursuits. These attempts to overhaul vast cultural territories between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries resulted in a variety of consequences and responses, from absolute upheavals, to compromises and new syntheses. The purpose of this core program is to examine the radical changes that Iberian empires brought to areas such as land tenure, technological practices, racial classifications, and cultural expression in light of the deep histories of the indigenous, African, and Asian regions they affected. Through this investigation, we wish to arrive at a more precise concept of globalization in its early modern guise.

 

Session 1: Contested Cultures of the Sacred, Oct. 25-26, 2013

This conference will address the role of religion in the transformation of pre-Hispanic, African and Asian worlds into Westernized milieus. It will address Christianity not as dogma but as a flexible corpus of ideas and practices engaged by the different local populations in novel ways. Sessions may investigate the relationship between religion and the arts (theater, painting, music) as a source of popular culture that remains significant even now. Likewise, since evangelization had the double task of Christianizing and civilizing the native populations, another field covered will be the impact of religion, both Christian and native, in a variety of non-religious practices and institutions such as knowledge production, the university, and politics. Through these themes, the conference will question the sharp divide between a religious and a secular base for modern societies.

 

Session 2: Instrumental Transformations: Technology, Labor, Nature, Feb. 28-Mar. 1, 2014

While often supposedly a neutral instrument for gathering knowledge or transforming nature, technology, understood broadly as an instrumental practice toward a material end, had an enormous impact on the creation of a colonial world. Mining, cattle, agriculture, urbanism itself, radically transformed not only the environment of the newly acquired territories, but through this, the relationships of people to their surroundings, their practices and to themselves. Furthermore, the labor required for new endeavors such as mining, pearl diving, and textile production was frequently secured by the forced relocation of local or external populations, and therefore the uprooting of cultural practices, including technological and scientific, that had preceded the colonial ones.  Drawing on new work in history of science, labor and cultural studies, panels will address the material effects, both designed and unintended, of technological practices in the Iberian empires. 

 

Session 3: New Ideas and their Global Locations, May 2-3, 2014

This conference will explore the changes brought about to the traditional epistemologies and imaginary structures of both Europeans and non-Europeans when faced with the consequences of Iberian expansion.  Reflecting the creative spaces in which ideas took form, it will consider not only such emerging genres as the novel but also those more prevalent in Iberian colonies, such as histories, sermons, theater and poetry.  Through these it will address the responses of European and colonial authors to the massive challenges posed by the novelty, violence and desire unleashed in global expansion.  At the same time panels will also consider the impact of non-written cultures on erudite culture, as well as ways that ideas circulated outside of the written word.  Panels will thus explore how knowledge was produced through processes of exchange that involved all sectors of society, including African and indigenous peoples.

 

Scholars will need to have received their doctorates in the last six years, (no earlier than July 1, 2007 and no later than September 30, 2013). Scholars whose research pertains to the announced theme are eligible to apply. Fellows are expected to make a substantive contribution to the Center’s workshops and seminars. Awards are for three consecutive quarters in residence at the Clark.

Stipend: $39,264 for the three-quarter period together with paid medical benefits for scholar and dependents.

Application deadline: 1 February 2013

 

Clark Summer Institute

To support our fellows in residency at the Clark we offer the Clark Summer Institute. Each year a professor from UCLA leads this interdisciplinary research group based at the Clark. Each Summer Institute focuses on new developments in the field and shared works-in-progress. Attending the Summer Institute is encouraged but is not a requirement of the fellowship. This coming summer’s Institute is:

The Future of Early Modern Studies (July 22 thru August 10, 2013)
led by Helen Deutsch (UCLA).

Spring Courses from the Office of Graduate Education's Graduate Academy

GRAD 594 Seminar: Leadership Essentials

This 1-credit course will help graduate students develop fundamental leadership skills that contribute to career success in any field. The instructor, Robert Wickboldt, Jr., retired from the United States Navy as a Master Chief Petty Officer (E/9), following a 30+ year career that included assignments to ship and shore commands from the Far East to Eastern Europe. He was directly responsible for training and leadership qualification of senior enlisted personnel and junior officers. CRN: 18193

        

GRAD 710 Scholarly Teaching

This pedagogy course provides teaching strategies drawn from current research on college education. Students will practice and apply these teaching skills in their own disciplines in order to become effective college instructors.

Instructor: Dr. Michelle Withers. CRN: 15123

 

GRAD 794A Seminar: 21^st Century Teaching

This course will offer strategies for combining effective teaching with research. The course explores the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning to develop research that is based on teaching. Instructor: Dr. Jessica Deshler. CRN: 17259 

 

GRAD 694B Seminar: Preparing Future Faculty

This seminar helps graduate students chart their course into faculty careers by exploring types of faculty positions, current issues in higher education, and even careers outside of academia. Instructor: Dr. Jenny Douglas. CRN: 16453

 

GRAD 685: Teaching Capstone

This is the capstone course for the Certificate in University Teaching and is intended to help students prepare teaching portfolios for university faculty positions. Instructor: Dr. Jenny Douglas. CRN: 17118

CFP: MELUS in Pittsburgh, March 14-17, 2013

 The 26th MELUS Conference

Call for Papers
March 14-17, 2013
Downtown Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Theme: The Changing Landscapes of American Multiethnic Literature through Historical Crisis 

When we look back, what kinds of historical, global, national, institutional, political, cultural, racial, socio-economic, and sexual crises has American multiethnic literature engaged in, critiqued, reflected, challenged, reacted to artistically, and moved beyond? How have the various landscapes of American multiethnic literature changed? How has the American multiethnic literature challenged and enriched the American national literature and culture as well as contributed to the Anglophone global literature? How has the multiethnic genre changed and evolved? How have the multiple critical categories of language, race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, culture, power, history, nation and geography complicated and enriched our scholarship and pedagogy in American multiethnic literature?

As we look forward, what are the new directions in American multiethnic literature in the 21st century? How do globalization, transnationalism, postcoloniality, and diaspora impact the studies and teaching of American multiethnic literature? What are the new studies in American multiethnic women’s literature? What are some of the cross-ethnic comparative literary analyses that can be exciting?

We invite paper abstracts and complete panels, workshops, and roundtable proposals on all aspects of the American multiethnic literatures of the United States. We are particularly interested in proposals that explore the changing landscapes of American multiethnic literature either in the past centuries and decades through multiple global, national, institutional, or cultural crises, or the various new directions in American ethnic literature in the 21st century. Any proposal for a complete panel, roundtable, or workshop should include a short description of the central topic, supplemented by brief individual abstracts. Please also indicate clearly if you need audiovisual equipment.

Deadline for abstracts and proposals (250 words in Microsoft Word): Oct. 31, 2012
Please email abstracts to both Professors Lingyan Yang (lingyan@iup.edu) and Kim Long (Kim.Long@delval.edu), MELUS 2013 Conference Committee co-chairs.

EGO/COW Book & Bake Sale this coming Monday 29 Oct.

For those of you who haven't heard (or hadn't heard before the title of this post), this coming Monday 29 Oct. EGO and COW are hosting our annual Fall Book & Bake Sale. From roughly 10-4 on Monday EGO members will be staffing the Sale in Colson 130 and COW members will be selling baked goods at a table in front of the Mountainlair.

As many of you know, this is our main fundraiser for the year, so please try to stop in and buy some cheap lovely books and some delicious baked goods. Your grad students very much appreciate the support.

Also, on Sunday 28 Oct. we will need assistance bringing the books down and unpacking them, then help on Monday after 4 to repack them. Anyone who shows up will be much appreciated (and we will be having pizza Sunday).
The last call for assistance is to anyone with a truck. We will be getting several shoping carts from the Giant Eagle on Green Bag Road, and a truck (or van, or SUV) would be a great help in transporting them (I only have a Chevy Cobalt, so I might be able to fit two carts in there, but it will be awkward).

Many thanks in advance.

Sigma Tau Delta Initiation Tonight (10/24/12)

This just in from Anna Elfenbein:

 

Greetings! 

We want to invite you to tonight's [10/24/12] initiation ceremony at 7:30 p.m., in E. Moore Hall.  We will be conferring membership in the English honorary Sigma Tau Delta on 20 new members. They are:

 

Caleb Alvarez, Stephanie Anderson, Khali M. Blankenship, Melissa Ferrone, Mariah Fowler, Emily Christine Greene, Cassie Griffith, Paige Jarvis, Andrew Lovejoy, Shawnee Moran, Kellene Lila O’Hara, Suzanne Ripley, Billette Ripy, Kassandra Roberts, Abby Rebecca Steele, Mike Secret, Madeline Lois Vandevender, Kevin Walden, Margery Webb, and Brendan Wood.
   

We know that many of you have had them in your classes.  Here is your chance to raise a cup or two of punch to honor them.   Feel free to congratulate them if they are currently in one of your classes.

 

We are hoping to see you tonight!

Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Article Prize

NCSA Article Prize

The Article Prize recognizes excellence in scholarly studies from any discipline focusing on any aspect of the long 19th century (French Revolution to World War I). The winner will receive a cash award of $500 to be presented at the annual meeting of NCSA in Fresno, California (March 7-9, 2013).

Articles published between September 1, 2011 and August 31, 2012 are eligible for consideration for the 2013 prize and may be submitted by the author or the publisher of a journal, anthology, or volume containing independent essays. Submission of interdisciplinary studies is especially encouraged. The winning article will be selected by a committee of nineteenth-century scholars representing diverse disciplines.

Send three copies of published articles/essays to the chair: Professor Christine Roth, Department of English, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, 800 Algoma Boulevard, Oshkosh, WI 54901. Questions should be sent to: roth@uwosh.edu. Applicants must verify date of actual publication for eligibility and provide an email address so that receipt of their submissions may be acknowledged. One entry per scholar or publisher is allowed annually. Essays written in part or in whole in a language other than English must be accompanied by English translations. Deadline for submission is November 15, 2012.

Now's a good time...

to read John Keats' "To Autumn," though I read the poem a lot over the summer when I was teaching that lyric poetry class, and summer felt like a pretty good time to read it too. I guess great poems truly are season-less as well as timeless.

Poet Stanley Plumly says that three of Keats' odes—"Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and "Ode on Melancholy"—are "almost beyond praise." "To Autumn," he says, "is beyond praise."

Plumly also says that Keats is the inventor of the modern lyric, "the poem that both acts out and contemplates itself." Have I told you this before? Even so, it's interesting to think about and thus worth repeating.

So with those recommendations—as well the recommendation of autumn itself, which seems in a particularly good mood today—here is that rightly famous poem.

You might even read it aloud; it does sound nice.

To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

   Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

   With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

      To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

   With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

      For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

   Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

   Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

   Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

      Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

   Steady thy laden head across a brook;

   Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,

      Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?

   Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

   And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

   Among the river sallows, borne aloft

      Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

   Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

   The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

      And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Ethel Smith Reads at "Sheer Good Fortune"

 

Professor Smith reading at Virginia Tech

There are so many recent achievements that the Tenants have to confess that they can barely keep up with them, so fast and furiously do they come upon us and then speed by. The very latest is that Ethel Smith was a featured reader at "Sheer Good Fortune":  Celebrating Toni Morrison, a celebration of the Nobel Laureate held recently on the Virginia Tech campus.  The event was hosted by Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovani and Joanne Gabbin, and among the other featured readers were Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Edwidge Dandicat and Angela Davis.

 

Faithful readers of the blog will already know that Professor Smith is scheduled to read tonight (Friday, Oct. 19th) at 7:30 in Colson 130.

CFP: English Graduate Conference at UVA

Subject to Change: Nature, Text, and the Limits of the Human

The University of Virginia Department of English Graduate Conference
March 22-24, 2013

We invite you to join us as we explore the ontological, environmental, ethical, and aesthetic implications of living in a world in which the primacy of the human has been called into question.  

What does it mean to read an object if we, too, are objects? Do inanimate subjects have a claim to the agency that humans have usually taken to be theirs alone? How are artists and scholars supposed to see into the life of things: the animal, the synthetic, the digital, the inert, the abject?  How do we read after nature in a world of things?

Keynote Speech by Timothy Morton

A Roundtable Discussion with

Timothy Morton and University of Virginia professors

Bruce Holsinger and Jennifer Wicke

 

Subjects (or is it objects?) of interest include, but are not limited to:

-Object-oriented ontology and the "democracy of objects"
-Whither the human?
-The anthropocene and anthropocentrism
-Nature and the unnatural

-Systems and ecosystems, digital and analog, network and wetwork

-Animism and a living world
-Environment and catastrophe
-Dark ecology and black ecology

-Speculative Realism
-Posthumanism

-Feminist and postcolonial possibilities after nature
-Translation and metaphor

-Textual history; books as physical objects

-Words for things/things for words
-Humanities without the human

-New ecology and community
-Ethics and bioethics in a posthuman world
-The limits of the body
-Animalism
-Monstrosity
-Conceptual art and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry
-Natural supernaturalism
-Goethean science

-The sublime; Romanticism and its afterlife

 

This conference is interdisciplinary: We welcome submissions from a variety of fields.  Send an abstract (of up to 350 words) for your 15-minute presentation to gesaconference2013@gmail.com. Include your name and institutional affiliation.

 

Responses are due by November 30, 2012.

 

Find more information, updates, and a growing forum on the nonhuman at

http://tochangethesubject.blogspot.com/

 

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair of English at Rice University. He is the author of Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (forthcoming), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (forthcoming), The Ecological Thought (2010), Ecology without Nature (2007), seven other books and eighty essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, food, and music.

Bruce Holsinger is Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror (2007), The Premodern Condition (2005) and Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture (2001).  His interests include Critical Theory and Medieval Literature.

 

Jennifer Wicke is Professor of English at the University of Virginia.  She is the author of Feminism and Postmodernism (1994) and Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement, and Social Reading (1988).  Her interests include Critical Theory and 20^th-Century Literature.

Recent Achievements October Edition

Recent Achievements in English (October 2012):

 

Under Sandy Baldwin’s direction, the Center for Literary Computing just published the second book in its series "Computing Literature." The only scholarly series devoted to digital literature, and featuring renowned authors and an international peer review board, books are entirely developed by students in the CLC, from copyediting through layout and ePub conversion.

 

The CLC continues to publish and host Electronic Book Review, one of the oldest all-online peer-reviewed scholarly journals. Sandy Baldwin is Executive Editor of the journal and works with an editorial team of scholars from around the work. Graduate and undergraduate students in the CLC keep the journal running, including copyediting and markup, and also work with authors and other aspects of the editorial process.

 

In September, Sandy Baldwin was asked to lead the Consortium for Electronic Literature, an agreement between eight research teams at universities in seven countries, all with databases dealing (in part or in whole) with electronic literature. The current goal of the consortium is synchronization of databases and a shared metadata/name authority enabling search across the databases, and - more broadly - enabling the first authoritative "vocabulary" for the field.

 

In October 2012, Sandy Baldwin's essay "Pervy Intimate Avatars," dealing with embodied performance in Second Life appeared, in the edited collection Intimacy Across Visceral and Digital Performance (Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology).

 

Sandy Baldwin and CLC graduate interns Ben Bishop and Dibs Roy are participating the "crossed perspectives" project funded by the LabEx (laboratory of excellence) at the University of Paris 8, a collaboration by teams at four universities to understand cross-cultural perspectives on electronic literature. Data collection for the project is almost complete and will lead to a collaborative publication.

 

Gwen Bergner gave an invited talk on Oct. 1 at University of Texas--Austin, sponsored by Women's and Gender Studies and African and African Diaspora Studies, titled: "One and One is Three: Edwidge Danticat's Vodou Transnationalism."

 

Mark Brazaitis's short story "Cancer is a Killer, and So Am I" appears in Talking Writing: http://talkingwriting.com/cancer-is-a-killer-and-so-am-i/ His short story "The Meet" is forthcoming in Mid-American Review. A kind stranger reviewed his short story "Blackheart" on line: http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/blackheart-mark-brazaitis He is in serious study for his role as Cinderella's father in the on-ice version of the fairy tale, scheduled for March 9 and 10 at the Morgantown Ice Arena. It's the role of a lifetime. Or two-and-half minutes of terror.

 

Amanda Cobb’s "You Owe Me a Coke," a poem, will appear this winter in The Boiler Journal.  Her poems, "Dummy," and "Because I Said So," will appear this Fall in a special print edition of Temenos journal, themed "Trap Doors and Little Triggers."  Excerpts from, "Low-Self Esteem: My Jesus Year," a memoir, will appear this winter in Spittoon.

 

Lowell Duckert moderated a panel ("Ecomaterialism") and gave a paper ("Do Glaciers Dream?") at cruising in the ruins: the question of disciplinarity in the post/medieval university: 2^nd Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group, Boston, September 2012.

 

Lara Farina's article, "Once More with Feeling: Tacility and Alterity, Medieval and Modern," was published in Postmedieval 3.3 (Fall 2012).  She also organized and chaired  a panel, "Synaesthetics" (on sensory organization and academic disciplines) at the 2nd Biennial conference of the BABEL Working Group in September: http://babel-meeting.org/2012-meeting/2012-program/

 

Marilyn Francus presented "'Where does discretion end, and avarice begin?': The Mercenary and the Prudent in Austen" at the national conference of the Jane Austen Society of North America, in October in New York.  Her panel was mentioned in the New York Times' article on the event:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/09/books/jane-austen-society-of-north-america-meets-in-brooklyn.html

John Jones presented papers at the 2012 Computers and Writing Conference and the 2012 Rhetoric Society of America Conference in May, 2012. He had a paper, titled "Creating Networks Through Search: PageRank, Algorithmic Truth, and Tracing the Web," accepted for inclusion in the conference proceedings, Selected Papers in Internet Research, and another paper, "Programming in Network Exchanges," accepted for publication in the journal Computers & Composition. 

 

Jim Harms has a poem, “The New Moon Economy,” in the current issue of Shenandoah http://shenandoahliterary.org/621/the-new-moon-economy/ and a long poem, “Orpheus Beach,” in the current issue of Ping-Pong.  His essay, “Jean Valentine:  Remnants and Recognition,” has just been reprinted in Jean Valentine:
This-World Company, published by the University of Michigan Press.

 

Kirk Hazen travelled on September 12-14, 2012 to Centre College (in the now wet Danville, KY) to give an invited-talk entitled “The Competing Myths of Appalachian Speech”. The talk was for a convocation at the college, and it drew 180 people. It was Kirk's first private, liberal arts college, and it was a learning experience. Kirk also spoke to three classrooms of Centre students, including an introduction to language and two cultural anthropology courses.

 

Sarah Neville been invited to deliver a seminar lecture on "Reassessing the Reprint in the Early English Book Trade" in the Open University's Book History Research Group Seminar Series in London in January. Amongst the 9 speakers of established/emerging scholars discussing recent developments in new theatre history and Shakespeare, I'm the only North American who was invited to take part. (http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/english/book-history/documents-shakespearean-performance.shtml)

 

Renée K. Nicholson’s essay “Coda: Partnering” is forthcoming in Blue Lyra Review and her essay “Hair: A Short History” is forthcoming in Switchback.

 

Renee Nicholson and Natalie Sypolt will present “Radio Girls: Our Journey in Book Podcasting” at the annual Winter Wheat Writers’ Conference sponsored by Mid American Review at Bowling Green State University. Their podcast, SummerBooks, went from idea to over 700 hits in three months.

 

Morgan O’Grady’s poem "Elegy to R.M.O, Not Yet Dead" has been accepted by the Susquehanna Review and will be featured online and in their next print issue.

 

In August, Katy Ryan and Ryan Claycomb both presented at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education Conference on a panel on Political and Protest Theatre Post 9/11.  Katy's paper was entitled "A View of the Brig: From the Cage to the Street," and Ryan's was entitled "Voices of the Other: Documentary and Oral History Performance in Post-9/11 British Theatre."

Mary Ann Samyn published three poems—"Flute-like, or You Didn't Know Me Then," "Another Christ or Two," and "Desire"—in Eleven Eleven (Cal Arts) and two poems—"Stupidity, Crabbiness, Moorings & Love" and "Long Sunday"—in The Kenyon Review.  

Nevena Stojanovic's article "'Like a Dazzling Curtain of Light': Fanny Assingham's Performances of Jewishness in The Golden Bowl" has been accepted for publication by the Henry James Review.

 

 

The Department of English presents:

The Faculty Research Colloquium

One and One is Three: Edwidge Danticat’s Vodou Transnationalism

by Gwen Bergner

The dynamic religion of Vodou in Haiti indicates the modern character of this island nation formed at the crossroads of cultural and economic exchange in the Black Atlantic. Yet ever since the Haitian Revolution produced the Atlantic world’s first free black nation in 1804, U.S. commentary persistently invokes a savage and sinister “voodoo” as shorthand for and evidence of Haiti’s political incompetence and cultural barbarism. Such fantasies of voodoo have worked to rationalize U.S. interventions in a presumably failed state while simultaneously preserving the illusion that Haiti remains isolated from modern civilization. In her novel Breath, Eyes, Memory, Edwidge Danticat reclaims Vodou to imagine a new geography of transnational citizenship that bridges the imagined distance between Haiti and the U.S. opened by this primitivizing voodoo discourse. Danticat deploys the Marasa, the spirit twins of Vodou, not only to characterize the paradoxical dualities of diasporic citizenship but also to connect the ordinarily untold “social” history of sexual violence against women to the politics of the nation. In this way, the novel’s Vodou sensibility reconfigures the transnational feminist approach to framing sexual violence against women within the discourse of human rights.

October 24, 2012 2:30 p.m., 130 Colson Hall

Reflections of the Other: An EGO Arts Series Presentation

The EGO Arts Series

Hosted by EGO Presents:

A Reading from the Newly Published Book by Ethel Morgan Smith

Friday 19 Oct. 2012, at 7:30

Colson 130

Praise for Mark Brazaitis' latest book

It's no small thing to have your book reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement.

Positively.

Alongside a book by Steven Barthelme.

Except Mark's new book of stories, The Incurables, gets, oh, several paragraphs of the review and Barthelme's gets, well, a lot less.

Because, as you probably know, Mark's book is pretty great; after all, it's not every collection that "deserves a lasting place among regional story cycles."

Yep. That's what the review says.

Sounds good to us.