Olivia DrakeNatasha Korda, professor of English, professor of feminist, gender and sexuality studies, is the author of Labors Lost: Women's Work and the Early Modern English Stage, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in September 2011. Labors Lost offers a fascinating and wide-ranging account of working women's behind-the-scenes and hitherto unacknowledged contributions to theatrical production in Shakespeare's time. Korda reveals that the purportedly all-male professional stage relied on the labor, wares, ingenuity, and capital of women of all stripes, including ordinary crafts- and tradeswomen who supplied costumes, props and comestibles; wealthy heiresses and widows who provided much-needed capital and credit; wives,…
Ruth Nisse, associate professor of English, associate professor of medieval studies, received a $40,000 fellowship grant from the American Council of Learned Societies for 2011-12. During the fellowship, she will complete her book Jacob’s Shipwreck. The study focuses on the “co-emergence” of Christians and Jews in12th and 13th century England and Northern France. She argues that the the two communities mediated their relations through the reception, translation and rewriting of ancient texts.
Khachig Tölölyan, professor of letters, professor of English, has been actively involved in the launching of the University of Oxford's Diasporas Programme in June. Tölölyan is the editor/founder of Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies and an internationally known expert on diasporas and transnationalism. On June 2, Tölölyan delivered the inaugural lecture titled "Diaspora Studies: Past, Present and Promise" at the program's launch. He is a scholar in residence at Wolfson College (one of the 40 colleges and halls that make up the university), where he is a tutor and consultant to various graduate students, postdoctoral faculty and researchers at several…
Khachig Tölölyan, Typhaine Leservot, Ashraf Rushdy and Indira Karamcheti were invited to speak at a conference hosted by the Universite Paul Valery, Montpellier III June 20-23. The event is titled "Diasporas and Cultures of Mobility." Rushdy and Karamcheti are invited visiting professors. Tölölyan, professor of letters, professor of English, editor/founder of Diaspora will be the keynote speaker. He will speak on "Twenty Years of Diaspora Studies: Success through Confusion." Typhaine Leservot, associate professor of letters, associate professor of romance languages and literatures, will speak on ""Maghrebo-Quebecois and Franco-Maghrebi: towards Distinct Identities?" Ashraf Rushdy, professor of English, professor of African American…
In honor of the centennial of the writer Sybille Bedford, and in conjunction with The Paris Review, Lisa Cohen, assistant professor of English, organized an evening of readings of her work on March 24 in New York City. Cohen writes about Bedford in The Paris Review. Cohen’s writing has appeared in Fashion Theory, Bookforum, Ploughshares, The Boston Review, and other journals and anthologies. Her book, All We Know—portraits of the neglected modernist figures Esther Murphy, Mercedes de Acosta, and Madge Garland—will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2012. Sybille Bedford (1911-2006) was one of the great 20th-century stylists of the English language.
Matthew Garrett brings research interests in American literature, narrative theory, literary and social history, and social theory to Wesleyan’s Department of English. Garrett, an assistant professor, joined the department in 2008. He has a B.A. from Bard College, a M. Phil. from Cambridge University, and a M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford University. “I came to Wesleyan to work with superb scholars and to teach students who are famous as some of the best in the world. That combination of active scholarship and exciting teaching is truly exceptional, and I think it distinguishes Wesleyan from both its liberal-arts and big-university peers,”…
Elizabeth Willis, the Shapiro-Silverberg Associate Professor of Creative Writing, associate professor of English, is the author of a poetry collection titled Address, published by Wesleyan University Press in March 2011. According to Wesleyan UniversiyAddress draws readers into visible and invisible architectures, into acts of intimate and public address. These poems are concentrated, polyvocal, and sharply attentive to acts of representation; they take personally their politics and in the process reveal something about the way civic structures inhabit the imagination. Poisonous plants, witches, anthems, bees—beneath their surface, we glimpse the fragility of our founding, republican aspirations and witness a disintegrating landscape artfully…
Ruth Nisse, associate professor of English, and Matthew Garrett, assistant professor of English, received a 2011-12 American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship. The ACLS is a competitive fellowship for scholars in all disciplines of the humanities and humanities-related social sciences. Applications are peer reviewed by scholars in the applicant's field. The fellowship is designed to provide scholars with devoted time for their research and writing. Seventy national scholarly organizations below to the ACLS. Nisse will use her fellowship to complete her book called Jacob's Shipwreck. “The book focuses on Jewish-Christian relations and the transmission of ancient texts into both medieval…
Susan Howe, the English Department's Distinguished Visiting Writer for 2010-11, was awarded the prestigious Bollingen Prize in American Poetry at Yale University. Previous recipients include Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore and Adrienne Rich. Two of Howe's most influential books, Singularities (poetry) and The Birthmark (essays), were published by Wesleyan University Press. Of Howe’s most recent book, the three-member judging committee said: “Susan Howe is a fierce elegist. That This, prompted by the sudden death of the poet’s husband, makes manifest the raw edges of elegy through the collision of verse and prose, visionary lyricism and mundane incident, ekphrasis, visual patterning, and the…
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Khachig Tölölyan, professor of letters, professor of English, founder and editor of Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, was interviewed by the French weekly publication L’Express about Thomas Pynchon on Oct. 6. The article is online, in French.
Olivia DrakeComposer Nicholas Stoia has written three songs based on poems by Elizabeth Willis, the Shapiro-Silverberg Associate Professor of Creative Writing, associate professor of English. Stoia performed the songs at the Monadnock Music Festival July 15, 16 and 18 in New Hampshire.