Alison Lurie Memorial

Friday, July 1, 2022 @ 5pm
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall

For a calendar view, please visit the University's English Events Calendar.

Cornell ID required for admission — Masks required. Free & open only to attendees who are current Cornell students or employees. Cornell employees attending indoor events must complete the Daily Check prior to attendance.

Masks & adherence to university public health guidelines required. For the latest information visit covid.cornell.edu.

If you need additional accommodations to participate in an event, please contact us as soon as possible.

The Robert Chasen Memorial Poetry Reading by Ada Limón

Thursday, September 23, 5:00 p.m.
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall
View the event recording here

The Fall 2021 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series premieres with a reading by poet & National Book Critics Circle Award winner Ada Limón.

Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her book Bright Dead Things was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her work has been supported most recently by a Guggenheim Fellowship. She grew up in Sonoma, California and now lives in Lexington, Kentucky where she writes, teaches remotely, and hosts the critically acclaimed poetry podcast, The Slowdown. Her new book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in May 2022. Find out more at www.adalimon.net.

Books by Ada Limón will be available for purchase at the reading courtesy of Ithaca's local cooperative, Buffalo Street Books.

Book signing to follow.

The Robert Chasen Memorial Poetry Reading is a biennial event, featuring a public reading by a distinguished poet. It was established in 1980 by Margaret Rosenzweig, '32, in memory of Robert Chasen.

This is the first event in the Fall 2021 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series.

The A.R. Ammons Creative Writing Salon at Cornell University

Tuesday, September 28, 7:00-8:30 p.m.
Lincoln Hall 124, LNC 124

The Ammonite Series invites students to explore the craft of writing in a festive setting. Meeting once a month, participants share pieces written in response to a prompt. The prompts, which are provided in advance, serve as shared points of reference, as forms to draw us together in conversation and community while our writing explores widely and wildly.

Visit the Ammonites site for the September 28 prompt and more details!

Created thanks to a gift from Beverly Tanenhaus to honor A.R. Ammons, poet and Cornell professor from 1964-1998.

Literatures in English Department Roundtable (LEDR) featuring Seth Strickland

Friday, October 1, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Moderator: Sara Stamatiades

“Anchored in Malvern: Eremitic and Anchoritic Practice in Malvern Hills and Piers Plowman"
This paper is available in Canvas. If you aren’t able to access this link, please email: cf455@cornell.edu.

Seth Strickland is a sixth-year in LE; he works primarily on 12th-14th century manuscript production, book culture, history of science, and allegorical theory. When he is not throwing himself against the rocky shores of his dissertation or the job market, he occupies himself with cooking, photography, and keeping his cat Buster out of both of those hobbies.

The Literatures in English Department Roundtable (LEDR) is a forum for graduate students in the Department of Literatures in English to share ideas across a wide variety of fields, time periods, and methodologies. Open to students at all stages of the program, the LEDR gives graduate students an opportunity to present work in an informal setting to a group of peers, to get feedback about a current project, and to learn about the work being done by colleagues. Projects might include excerpts of dissertation chapters, article drafts, conference papers, FWS writing assignment sequences, or course syllabi. At a time in which the tremendous diversity of literary study has made it increasingly difficult to grasp the discipline as a whole on one’s own, the purpose of the LEDR is to foster a greater sense of intellectual community and cohesion within Cornell’s Department of Literatures in English, and to strengthen graduate work through increased collaboration. The LEDR meets 5 times a semester in the department lounge. In order to facilitate discussion by members of the audience (including a large number of graduate students as well as faculty), papers being presented at the LEDR are made available one week prior to each meeting; meetings themselves will focus primarily on discussion between the audience and the presenter.

“Refugeography: Vietnamese American Spoken Word Poet and Children's Book Author Bao Phi shares poems and stories about the writing life.”

Wednesday, October 13, 12:25-1:15 pm
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

Bao Phi is a two-time Minnesota Grand Slam champion and a National Poetry Slam finalist, whose poetry is included in the 2006 Best American Poetry anthology and published widely elsewhere, including two collections published by Coffee House Press as well as other collections and magazines such as Spoken Word Revolution Redux, Poetry Magazine, Asian-American Literary Review, and many others. His fiction and essays have appeared in Octavia's Brood: Stories from Social Justice Movements, A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota, and others. He is also known for his three children’s books: his A Different Pond received six starred reviews and multiple awards, including the Caldecott Honor, an Ezra Jack Keats Honor, the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association award for best picture book, the Minnesota Book Award for picture books, and other recognitions.

Phi is a Visiting Critic in the Department of Literatures in English during the 2021-2022 academic year. He will be in residence for several months this term and will be available for part of next, during which he will be offering readings and other talks as well as being available for individual conversations.

Reading by Ed Skoog

Thursday, October 21, 5:00 p.m.
DOORS OPEN at 4:30 p.m.
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall

The Fall 2021 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series continues with a reading by poet Ed Skoog.

Ed Skoog is the author of four books of poems, most recently Travelers Leaving for the City. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New Republic, and elsewhere. He lives in Portland, Oregon. 

Books by Ed Skoog will be available for purchase at the reading courtesy of Ithaca's local cooperative, Buffalo Street Books.

Book signing to follow.

Cornell ID required for admission — Masks required. Open only to attendees who are current Cornell students or employees. Cornell employees attending indoor events must complete the Daily Check prior to attendance. For latest guidelines visit covid.cornell.edu.

This is the second event in the Fall 2021 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series.

Literatures in English Department Roundtable (LEDR) featuring Sam Lagasse

Friday, October 22, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Moderator: Olivia Milroy Evans

"Realism in Furs: Malgonkar and the Middlebrow"
This paper is available in Canvas. If you aren’t able to access this link, please email: cf455@cornell.edu.

Abstract: My chapter addresses the renewed legitimation of the genre of the historical novel in India during the first two decades after Independence. It historicizes the ambiguity that generally attaches to the genre in its realist iteration as the result of a self-conscious process of “middlebrowing.” I identify the interstices and fractures between different modes of reading that are opened up by  the style of the middlebrow—considered here in its historically specific and culturally inflected form—as sites from which to theorize a certain conceptualization of postcolonial contramodernity.

Sam Lagasse is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. His research and teaching interests include the Anglophone Indian novel, postcolonial formalisms, realist fictionality, and genre theory. Comparing novels by Raja Rao, Arun Joshi, Manohar Malgonkar, and Shashi Deshpande to works by European and American writers such as Honoré de Balzac, Henry James, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, his work illuminates the formal and stylistic strategies by which postcolonial Indian writers self-consciously insert themselves into a wider realist genealogy.

His dissertation, titled “Realism at the Colonial Limit,” conceptualizes the realist tradition of the twentieth-century Indian novel in English as a highly reflexive interrogation and reformulation of modernity’s normative values. The project shows how, in questioning the epistemic bases of middle-class modernity, Indian writers deployed the realist novel as a means to conceptualize the condition of postcoloniality as a specific mode of response to and critique of the process of colonization and its legacies.

The Literatures in English Department Roundtable (LEDR) is a forum for graduate students in the Department of Literatures in English to share ideas across a wide variety of fields, time periods, and methodologies. Open to students at all stages of the program, the LEDR gives graduate students an opportunity to present work in an informal setting to a group of peers, to get feedback about a current project, and to learn about the work being done by colleagues. Projects might include excerpts of dissertation chapters, article drafts, conference papers, FWS writing assignment sequences, or course syllabi. At a time in which the tremendous diversity of literary study has made it increasingly difficult to grasp the discipline as a whole on one’s own, the purpose of the LEDR is to foster a greater sense of intellectual community and cohesion within Cornell’s Department of Literatures in English, and to strengthen graduate work through increased collaboration. The LEDR meets 5 times a semester in the department lounge. In order to facilitate discussion by members of the audience (including a large number of graduate students as well as faculty), papers being presented at the LEDR are made available one week prior to each meeting; meetings themselves will focus primarily on discussion between the audience and the presenter.

The A.R. Ammons Creative Writing Salon at Cornell University

Tuesday, October 26, 7:00-8:30 p.m.
Lincoln Hall 124, LNC 124

The Ammonite Series invites students to explore the craft of writing in a festive setting. Meeting once a month, participants share pieces written in response to a prompt. The prompts, which are provided in advance, serve as shared points of reference, as forms to draw us together in conversation and community while our writing explores widely and wildly.

Visit the Ammonites site for the October 26 prompt and more details!

Created thanks to a gift from Beverly Tanenhaus to honor A.R. Ammons, poet and Cornell professor from 1964-1998.

Reading by Angie Cruz
Thursday, October 28, 5:00 p.m.
DOORS OPEN at 4:30 p.m.
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall

The Fall 2021 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series concludes with a reading by novelist Angie Cruz.

Angie Cruz is the author of the novel Dominicana, shortlisted for the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction, and the novels Soledad and Let It Rain Coffee, a finalist in 2007 for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. She has published short fiction and essays in numerous magazines and journals, including VQR, Gulf Coast, Callaloo, the New York Times and Small Axe. Cruz has taught creative writing for over 15 years in academic and nontraditional settings. She is Editor-in-Chief of Aster(ix) Journal, a dedicated space for literature, art and criticism by and about women. Cruz holds a BA in English and MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. Born and raised in the Washington Heights section of New York City, she has returned to the neighborhood after living in Texas and Pittsburgh.

Books by Angie Cruz will be available for purchase at the reading courtesy of Ithaca's local cooperative, Buffalo Street Books.

Book signing to follow.

Cornell ID required for admission — Masks required. Open only to attendees who are current Cornell students or employees. Cornell employees attending indoor events must complete the Daily Check prior to attendance. For latest guidelines visit covid.cornell.edu.

This is the third and final event in the Fall 2021 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series.

The Philip Freund Prize for Creative Writing Alumni Reading by Julie Phillips Brown, Lena Nguyen, Michael Prior, & Renia White

Thursday, November 11, 5:00 p.m.
DOORS OPEN at 4:30 p.m.
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall

Recipients of the 2021 Philip Freund Prize for Creative Writing in recognition of excellence in publication will read from their works:

Julie Phillips Brown, MFA '08, PhD '11, Poet
Julie Phillips Brown is an interdisciplinary poet, artist, critic, and editor. She is the author of The Adjacent Possible, winner of the Hopper Poetry Prize, and the founding editor of House Mountain Review. She has held research fellowships in contemporary poetry and poetics from the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University and the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University. Recent work appears in Revolute, The Rumpus, Twyckenham Notes, Vassar Review, and elsewhere.

Lena Nguyen, MFA '16, Novelist
The daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, Lena Nguyen taught courses in English, writing, vampires, and zombies at Cornell, and has studied writing all over the country, including at Harvard, Stanford, and Brown University. Her science fiction and fantasy have won several accolades, and WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN HERE, her debut novel, was a Booklist starred review and an Amazon Editors' Pick for Best Science Fiction. Lena also works as a game developer and is currently writing her second novel.

Michael Prior, MFA '17, Poet
Michael Prior is the author of Burning Province (2020), which won the Canada-Japan Literary Award and the BC and Yukon Book Prizes' Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in places like The New Republic, Poetry, and the Academy of American Poets's Poem-a-Day Series. The recent recipient of fellowships from the New York Public Library's Cullman Center and the Jerome Foundation, Prior is an Assistant Professor of English at Macalester College. 

Renia White, MFA '16, Writer
Renia White is the author of Casual Conversation, a Blessing the Boats Selection forthcoming in Spring 2022. Originally from Maryland, she came of age in Riverdale, GA before earning her BA and MFA from Howard and Cornell University, respectively. She received the 2015 Hurston/Wright Foundation College Writers Award in poetry. Her work appears in publications such as The Offing, Slice, Witness, Southern Indiana Review, and elsewhere. She lives in NYC.

Books by the authors will be available for purchase at the reading courtesy of Ithaca's local cooperative, Buffalo Street Books.

Book signing to follow.

Cornell ID required for admission — Masks required. Open only to attendees who are current Cornell students or employees. Cornell employees attending indoor events must complete the Daily Check prior to attendance. For latest guidelines visit covid.cornell.edu.

Philip Freund ’29, MA ’32, was a novelist, short-story writer, poet, documentary film writer, playwright, television dramatist, essayist, and literary critic. The Philip Freund Prize for Creative Writing honors graduates upon their successful publication. 

Literatures in English Department Roundtable (LEDR) featuring Verdi Culbreath
Friday, November 12, CANCELED
Zoom

"Affective Citizenship, Masculinity, and the American Political Public Sphere"

The Literatures in English Department Roundtable (LEDR) is a forum for graduate students in the Department of Literatures in English to share ideas across a wide variety of fields, time periods, and methodologies. Open to students at all stages of the program, the LEDR gives graduate students an opportunity to present work in an informal setting to a group of peers, to get feedback about a current project, and to learn about the work being done by colleagues. Projects might include excerpts of dissertation chapters, article drafts, conference papers, FWS writing assignment sequences, or course syllabi. At a time in which the tremendous diversity of literary study has made it increasingly difficult to grasp the discipline as a whole on one’s own, the purpose of the LEDR is to foster a greater sense of intellectual community and cohesion within Cornell’s Department of Literatures in English, and to strengthen graduate work through increased collaboration. The LEDR meets 5 times a semester in the department lounge. In order to facilitate discussion by members of the audience (including a large number of graduate students as well as faculty), papers being presented at the LEDR are made available one week prior to each meeting; meetings themselves will focus primarily on discussion between the audience and the presenter.

Literatures in English Department Roundtable (LEDR) featuring Michael Lee

Friday, November 19, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
Hybrid: English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall or Zoom (contact ocm8@cornell.edu for remote options)
Moderator: Amaris Brown

"Western Expansion and the Apocalyptic Logic of White Male Freedom: An Exploration of Cormac McCarthy's Epics through a Morrisonian Africanist Framework"
This paper can be found under the LEDR module on Canvas here. If you aren’t able to access this link, please email: ocm8@cornell.edu.

Presenter Bio: Michael Lee is a Norwegian-American writer, educator and organizer. Michael is the author of the poetry collection The Only Worlds We Know (Button Poetry, 2019), and has received grants and scholarships from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the LOFT Literary Center, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Winner of the Scotti Merrill Award for poetry from the Key West Literary Seminar, his poetry has appeared in Ninth Letter, Poetry Northwest, Copper Nickel, and Best New Poets 2018 among others.

Abstract: In her 1992 work, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison posited that like a national identity formed out of Chattel slavery, America’s national literary imagination was similarly yoked to an unfree African population. It was not only, however, the caricatures produced by White writers which reflected this, but also an even more common complete lack of any Black characters at all within the American canon. Presence and absence of Black characters in the work of White writers reflected the centrality of Blackness in informing the popular understandings of Whiteness, Americanness and Freedom. In this essay, I will use Morrison’s Africanist framework to examine the genealogies and implications of White male freedom within Cormac McCarthy’s novels Blood Meridian and The Road. Equally apocalyptic, the former, a western expansion narrative, relies heavily on an Africanist presence whereas the latter, post-apocalyptic American hellscape, imagines itself as essentially raceless. It is through Playing in the Dark and the Africanist presence that not only can both of McCarthy’s novels can be best understood, but also the historical events as well as advent and function of White male freedom from which both books ultimately arise and explore.

The Literatures in English Department Roundtable (LEDR) is a forum for graduate students in the Department of Literatures in English to share ideas across a wide variety of fields, time periods, and methodologies. Open to students at all stages of the program, the LEDR gives graduate students an opportunity to present work in an informal setting to a group of peers, to get feedback about a current project, and to learn about the work being done by colleagues. Projects might include excerpts of dissertation chapters, article drafts, conference papers, FWS writing assignment sequences, or course syllabi. At a time in which the tremendous diversity of literary study has made it increasingly difficult to grasp the discipline as a whole on one’s own, the purpose of the LEDR is to foster a greater sense of intellectual community and cohesion within Cornell’s Department of Literatures in English, and to strengthen graduate work through increased collaboration. The LEDR meets 5 times a semester in the department lounge. In order to facilitate discussion by members of the audience (including a large number of graduate students as well as faculty), papers being presented at the LEDR are made available one week prior to each meeting; meetings themselves will focus primarily on discussion between the audience and the presenter.

The A.R. Ammons Creative Writing Salon at Cornell University

Tuesday, November 30, 7:00-8:30 p.m.
Lincoln Hall 316*

The Ammonite Series invites students to explore the craft of writing in a festive setting. Meeting once a month, participants share pieces written in response to a prompt. The prompts, which are provided in advance, serve as shared points of reference, as forms to draw us together in conversation and community while our writing explores widely and wildly.

Visit the Ammonites site for the November 30 prompt and more details!

*To get to LNC316, everyone needs to go through the main entrance to the music library on the second floor in Lincoln Hall. There is a sign for the stairs and LNC316 inside the music library. If someone needs to use the elevator, please ask the librarian for help at the main entrance.

Created thanks to a gift from Beverly Tanenhaus to honor A.R. Ammons, poet and Cornell professor from 1964-1998.

Literatures in English Department Roundtable (LEDR) featuring Ama Bemma Adwetewa-Badu

Friday, December 3, CANCELED
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

"Digital Poetics"

The Literatures in English Department Roundtable (LEDR) is a forum for graduate students in the Department of Literatures in English to share ideas across a wide variety of fields, time periods, and methodologies. Open to students at all stages of the program, the LEDR gives graduate students an opportunity to present work in an informal setting to a group of peers, to get feedback about a current project, and to learn about the work being done by colleagues. Projects might include excerpts of dissertation chapters, article drafts, conference papers, FWS writing assignment sequences, or course syllabi. At a time in which the tremendous diversity of literary study has made it increasingly difficult to grasp the discipline as a whole on one’s own, the purpose of the LEDR is to foster a greater sense of intellectual community and cohesion within Cornell’s Department of Literatures in English, and to strengthen graduate work through increased collaboration. The LEDR meets 5 times a semester in the department lounge. In order to facilitate discussion by members of the audience (including a large number of graduate students as well as faculty), papers being presented at the LEDR are made available one week prior to each meeting; meetings themselves will focus primarily on discussion between the audience and the presenter.

Spring 2021 Schedule

For a calendar view, please visit the University's English Events Calendar

All events are free & open to the public

If you need additional accommodations to participate in an event, please contact us as soon as possible

The Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading by Valzhyna Mort & Nafissa Thompson-Spires
Thursday, February 25, 7:00 p.m. ET
View the event recording here

The Spring 2021 Barbara & David Zalaznick Creative Writing Reading Series kicks off with the Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading featuring poet Valzhyna Mort and author Nafissa Thompson-Spires.

Valzhyna Mort is a poet and translator born in Minsk, Belarus, and she writes in English and Belarusian. She is the author of three poetry collections, Factory of Tears, Collected Body and, mostly recently, Music for the Dead and Resurrected. Her work has been honored with the Lannan Foundation fellowship, the Amy Clampitt fellowship, and the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry. Her work has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for the Best Single Poem, and has appeared in Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, Poetry, Poetry Review, Poetry International, Granta, and many more. Mort translates between English, Belarusian, Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish. She has received the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation and the National Endowment for the Arts grant in translation for her work on Polina Barskova’s book of selected poems, Air Raid. With Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris, Mort co-edited Gossip and Metaphysics: Russian Modernist Poems and Prose. Valzhyna Mort’s poetry collections have come out in translation in Germany, Sweden and Ukraine, while single poems have been translated into a dozen of languages. Outside the US, she has received the Burda Prize for Eastern European authors (Germany) and the Crystal of Vilenica prize (Slovenia). Mort is Assistant Professor of Literatures in English at Cornell University.

Nafissa Thompson-Spires is the author of Heads of the Colored People, which won the PEN Open Book Award, the Hurston/Wright Award for Fiction, and the Los Angeles Times’ Art Siedenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her collection was also longlisted for the National Book Award, the PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Award, and several other prizes. She is also the recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award. She earned a doctorate in English from ­­­­Vanderbilt University and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from ­­­­­­the University of Illinois. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in The Paris Review Daily, The Root, The White Review, StoryQuarterly, Lunch Ticket, and The Feminist Wire, among other publications, and work is forthcoming in multiple anthologies. Thompson-Spires is the Richards Family Assistant Professor of Literatures in English at Cornell University, teaching creative writing in both the MFA and undergrad programs. 

The Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading was created in 2002 by family and friends of Richard Cleaveland, Cornell Class of ’74, to honor his memory.

This is the first virtual event in the Spring 2021 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series: Together. Livestream powered by our friends at eCornell.

Talk by Rita P. Davis
Thursday, March 11, 7:00 p.m. ET
View the event recording here

Executive Counsel Rita P. Davis will talk about her personal journey into activism from an English major.

Ms. Davis majored in English at Washington and Lee University. After graduating, she spent three and a half years as a police officer with the Lynchburg City Police Department. Ms. Davis attended the T.C. Williams School of Law at the University of Richmond. After graduating magna cum laude, Ms. Davis clerked on the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in Little Rock, Arkansas. Following her clerkship, she joined Hunton and Williams LLP, now known as Hunton Andrews Kurth. After 15 years, Ms. Davis joined the Office of the Attorney General for the Commonwealth of Virginia as Section Chief for Trials in the Civil Litigation Division. She was the first female and the first African American to hold that position. The Honorable Ralph S. Northam, Governor of Virginia appointed Ms. Davis as Counsel in January of 2018. She is the first woman to hold that position.

This is the second virtual event in the Spring 2021 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series: Together. Livestream powered by our friends at eCornell.

The Eamon McEneaney Memorial Reading by Charif Shanahan
Thursday, March 18, 7:00 p.m. ET
View the event recording here

Poet Charif Shanahan will read from his work.

Charif Shanahan is the author of Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (SIU Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award, and winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Shanahan’s poems appear in American Poetry Review, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, PBS NewsHour, Poetry, and in the recent anthologies, American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time (Graywolf Press, 2018; ed. Tracy K. Smith) and African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (Library of America, 2020; ed. Kevin Young). Shanahan is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship; the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University; and a Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant to Morocco, among other awards and recognitions. Currently, he is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing in the undergraduate and Litowitz MFA+MA programs at Northwestern University.

This reading is made possible by Eamon McEneaney’s Cornell teammates, family, and friends. In addition to being one of Cornell’s most talented and best-loved athletes, Eamon McEneaney ’77 was a dedicated husband and father, loyal friend, prolific writer and poet, and an American hero. He died on September 11, 2001, in the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

This is the third virtual event in the Spring 2021 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series: Together. Livestream powered by our friends at eCornell.

Reading by Camonghne Felix
Thursday, April 8, 7:00 p.m. ET
View the event recording here

Poet, writer, and political strategist Camonghne Felix will read from her work.

Camonghne Felix, M.A. is a poet, a writer, speaker, & political strategist. She received an M.A. in Arts Politics from NYU, an MFA from Bard College, & has received Fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo & Poets House. Formerly the Director of Surrogates & Strategic Communications at Elizabeth Warren for President, Camonghne is the VP of Strategic Communications at Blue State. Her first full-length collection of poems, Build Yourself a Boat (Haymarket Books), was long-listed for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry and a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award and the Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry. Felix's forthcoming collection of poems, Dyscalculia, & essay collection, Let the Poets Govern, are forthcoming from One World, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Felix's work has been published in BuzzFeed, Poetry Magazine, Apogee, The Offing, the Academy of American Poets website, & more.  

This is the fourth virtual event in the Spring 2021 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series: Together. Livestream powered by our friends at eCornell.

Reading by Susan Choi
Thursday, April 22, 7:00 p.m. ET
View the event recording here

Alumna, novelist, and winner of the National Book Award Susan Choi will read from her work.

Susan Choi’s first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction. Her second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. Her third novel, A Person of Interest, was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2010 she was named the inaugural recipient of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award. Her fourth novel, My Education, received a 2014 Lammy Award. Her fifth novel, Trust Exercise, won the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction. Her first book for children, Camp Tiger, was also published in 2019. Born in South Bend, Indiana to a Korean father and a Jewish mother, Choi was raised there and in Houston, Texas. She studied literature at Yale and writing at Cornell (MFA '95) and worked for several years as a fact-checker for The New Yorker. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, she teaches fiction writing at Yale and lives in Brooklyn.

This is the fifth virtual event in the Spring 2021 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series: Together. Livestream powered by our friends at eCornell.

Reading by Carolyn Forché
Thursday, April 29, 7:00 p.m. ET
View the event recording here

Poet and memoirist Carolyn Forché will read from her work.

Carolyn Forché's first volume of poetry, Gathering the Tribes, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, was followed by The Country Between Us, The Angel of History, and Blue Hour. In March 2020, Penguin Press published her fifth collection of poems, In the Lateness of the World. She is also the author of the memoir What You Have Heard Is True, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Juan E. Mendez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America. Her famed international anthology, Against Forgetting, has been praised by Nelson Mandela as “itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice.” In 1998 in Stockholm, she received the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award for her human rights advocacy and the preservation of memory and culture. She has received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Lannan Foundation Fellowship and Award. She is one of the first poets to receive the Wyndham Campbell Prize from the Beinecke Library at Yale University, and is a University Professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

This is the sixth and final virtual event in the Spring 2021 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series: Together. Livestream powered by our friends at eCornell.

Fall 2020 Schedule

For a calendar view, please visit the University's English Events Calendar

All events are free & open to the public

If you need additional accommodations to participate in an event, please contact us as soon as possible

Reading by Michael Prior | Poet: Burning Province
Thursday, September 24, 7:00 p.m.
View event recording here

Poet, professor, and alumnus Michael Prior (MFA '17) reads from his magnificent new collection, Burning Province.

"In 1942, after Pearl Harbor, my Japanese grandparents and their families were stripped of their property and assets and put in an internment camp in British Columbia. The book responds to this injustice by thinking through how those years in the camp and the resulting diaspora (Japanese-Canadian families weren’t allowed back to the coast for four years after the War) have affected my family and shaped my own mixed-race experience."

Michael Prior is the author of two poetry collections, Burning Province (2020) and Model Disciple (2016), which was named one of the best books of the year by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. His poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies across North America and the UK, including The New Republic, Poetry, Narrative, Oxford Poetry, PN Review, Global Poetry Anthology, and the Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day series. The recipient of awards and honors for poetry and teaching, and a former Hawthornden and Banff Centre Fellow, Michael holds graduate degrees from the University of Toronto and Cornell University. He divides his time between Vancouver, British Columbia and Saint Paul, Minnesota, where he is an Assistant Professor of English and Mellon Faculty Fellow at Macalester College. Find out more at michaelpriorwriter.com.

This is the first virtual event in the Fall 2020 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series: At Home. Now from the intimacy of their homes to ours, the Zalaznick literary series brings renowned writers to Cornell to share their work. Livestream powered by our friends at eCornell.

Craft Talk by M. Evelina Galang | Writer & Activist
Thursday, October 15, 7:00 p.m.
View event recording here

Truth or Dare: Grounding Beautiful Sorrow, Beautiful Sky in Historical Accuracy

This craft talk by writer, activist, and professor M. Evelina Galang asks, “What is a writer’s responsibility in creating fiction? How does a fiction writer fact-check herself?” This talk provides insight into the research process—with a glimpse into Galang's newest manuscript—and explores the importance of doing research when writing fiction.

"I once had a teacher say that fiction is a fine blend of memory and imagination, but as I continue to explore the lives of characters rooted in the experience of my ancestors, my community, and in response to specific moments in time, I see the importance of getting not only detail, but context, atmosphere and perspective right. I revise my teacher’s definition of fine fiction to read—a fluid blend of memory, imagination and historical research."

M. Evelina Galang has been named one of the 100 most influential Filipinas in the United States and at-large by the Filipina Women’s Network. She is the author of the story collection Her Wild American Self, novels One Tribe and Angel De La Luna and the Fifth Glorious Mystery, and the editor of Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images. Lolas’ House: Filipino Women Living With War is Galang’s creative nonfiction work documenting the testimonies of 16 surviving Filipina “comfort women” and their fight for justice. Among her numerous awards are the 2004 Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Prize for the Novel, the 2007 Global Filipino Literary Award for One Tribe, the 2004 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Awards Advancing Human Rights, and a 2002 Senior Research Fellowship from Fulbright. Galang teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Miami and is core faculty and President of the Board of Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA/Voices). Find out more at mevelinagalang.com.

This is the second virtual event in the Fall 2020 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series: At Home. From the intimacy of their homes to ours, the Zalaznick literary series brings renowned writers to Cornell to share their work. Livestream powered by our friends at eCornell.

Shop Talk by Wah-Ming Chang | Writer & Editor
Thursday, October 29, 7:00 p.m.
View event recording here

Conversation with other writers has been foundational to Wah-Ming Chang’s work, from her graduate student years, through the arc of her career in the publishing industry—successful freelancer to Senior Managing Editor at Catapult—and in the cultivation of her rich post-MFA community. Writer, editor, and alumna (MFA ’06) Wah-Ming Chang will share insider experiences and insights, and her approach to the creative process.

“This work we've committed ourselves to involves a constellation of action and inaction around writing, thinking, collaborating, and dreaming.”

Wah-Ming Chang received an MFA in creative writing from Cornell University, and received grants in fiction from the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, twice for the New York Foundation for the Arts, and other organizations. Her writing has appeared in Mississippi Review, Joyland, Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere, and she is writing an album of fiction called Dreamstamps. She has worked in publishing for the past twenty years, and is currently the Vice President of Company Culture and Senior Managing Editor at Catapult. The Low-Key Reading Party gatherings started meeting on Zoom in March 2020. Find out more at wmcisnowhere.com.

This is the third virtual event in the Fall 2020 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series: At Home. From the intimacy of their homes to ours, the Zalaznick literary series brings renowned writers to Cornell to share their work. Livestream powered by our friends at eCornell.

Triangle Breathing: A Conversation with Hortense Spillers and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, moderated by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon
Tuesday, November 10, 7:00 p.m.
View event recording here

"We will think through the implications of the 2020 elections, including the necessity for police reform, and discuss how, since the murder of George Floyd, what has happened in the U.S. has become a matter of global attention. Topics will include the Black Lives Matter movement and the state of law and order. How can 'law and order' be assured in a society of such breathtaking lawlessness?"

Hortense Spillers is considered a foundational figure in Black feminist scholarship. A literary critic and brilliant essayist, Spillers is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Since receiving her PhD from Brandeis, she has taught at Wellesley College, Haverford College, Emory and Cornell Universities, among others. She lectures widely both at home and abroad, and is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards. Her collection of scholarly essays, Black, White, and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2003), includes her landmark 1987 article, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”—one of the most cited essays in African American literary studies. Her co-edited works include Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition and Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text. She co-founded with Tamura Lomax The Feminist Wire, an online magazine dedicated to providing socio-political and cultural critique of anti-feminist, racist, and imperialist politics.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a self-described Queer Black Troublemaker and a Black Feminist Love Evangelist. As the first person to do archival research in the papers of Audre Lorde, June Jordan and Lucille Clifton while achieving her PhD in English, Africana Studies and Women’s Studies at Duke University, she honors the lives and creative works of Black feminist geniuses as sacred texts for all people. Her triptych of experimental works, published by Duke University Press, includes Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity (2016), M Archive: After the End of the World (2018) and Dub: Finding Ceremony (2020). Gumbs’ poetry and fiction appear in many creative journals and has been honored with inclusion in Best American Experimental Writing, a Pushcart Prize nomination, and honors from the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize and the Firefly Ridge Women of Color Award. She is currently Creative Writing Editor at Feminist Studies, as well as in residence as a National Humanities Center Fellow. Find out more at www.alexispauline.com.

This is the fourth & final virtual event in the Fall 2020 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series: At Home. Livestream powered by our friends at eCornell.

Writers & Poets Faculty Reading Series
Mondays, Wednesdays, & Fridays, November 30 – December 21, 10:00 a.m.

Faculty in the Creative Writing Program recorded short videos throughout the Fall 2020 semester, each reading a selection from their own work. An exhortation by alumna Toni Morrison (M.A. ’55) was the inspiration for the project. Morrison famously wrote, “we speak, we write, we do language,” in considering the artist’s task in troubled times.

“The video project is to reaffirm to our students and wider community how seriously we take our twin duties as artists and professors,” said Creative Writing Program director Ishion Hutchinson. “‘We do language’ is our ethos. It is intrinsic to our writing, teaching, and programming.”

The Writers & Poets Faculty Reading Series begins on Monday, November 30 and continues with a new video release every other weekday until its final reading on Monday, December 21. The reading video release time will be 10 a.m. ET on the following dates: 

Monday, November 30
Valzhyna Mort (Poetry) - View reading recording here

Wednesday, December 2          
Nafissa Thompson-Spires (Fiction) - View reading recording here

Friday, December 4                   
Helena María Viramontes (Fiction) - View reading recording here

Monday, December 7                 
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon (Poetry) - View reading recording here

Wednesday, December 9          
J. Robert Lennon (Fiction) - View reading recording here

Friday, December 11                    
Ernesto Quiñonez (Fiction) - View reading recording here

Monday, December 14            
Ishion Hutchinson (Poetry) - View reading recording here

Wednesday, December 16        
Robert Morgan (Fiction) - View reading recording here

Friday, December 18
Emily Fridlund (Fiction) - View reading recording here

Monday, December 21                
Joanie Mackwoski (Poetry) - View reading recording here

Links to view the readings will be found above and on Facebook. The link for each reading will become active on its release date at 10 a.m. ET, and released videos will remain available for viewing on the department YouTube channel.

We hope that these video readings connect and inspire students and the wider community during these last, virtual weeks of the semester.

Spring 2020 Schedule

For a calendar view, please visit the University's English Events Calendar

ALL EVENTS ARE FREE and open to the public

The venues are wheelchair accessible. If you need additional accommodations to participate in an event, please contact us as soon as possible.

The Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading by Emily Fridlund & Joanie Mackowski
Thursday, February 6, 4:30 p.m.
Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, 132 Goldwin Smith Hall

The Spring 2020 Barbara & David Zalaznick Creative Writing Reading Series kicks off with the Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading featuring Emily Fridlund, fiction writer, and Joanie Mackowski, poet.

Emily Fridlund’s first novel, History of Wolves, was a finalist for the 2017 Man Booker Prize and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. It was awarded the American Academy of Arts and Letters Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. Fridlund’s debut collection of stories, Catapult, won the Mary McCarthy Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in a variety of journals, including Boston Review, ZYZZYVA, and Southwest Review. She grew up in Minnesota and teaches writing at Cornell University.

Joanie Mackowski’s collections of poems are The Zoo and View from a Temporary Window. She has won awards from the Kate and Kingsley Tufts Foundation, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and the Poetry Society of America. An associate professor in Cornell University’s English Department and Creative Writing Program, she has previously worked as a French translator, a journalist in the San Francisco Bay Area, and a juggler.

The Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading was created in 2002 by family and friends of Richard Cleaveland, Cornell Class of ’74, to honor his memory.

Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation will be provided for this reading

English Department Roundtable: Laura Francis
“Imperial Ideals and Subversive Imports: Spanish Translations in the Early English Empire”
Friday, February 28, 2:30 p.m.
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Moderator: Rocío Corral García

Laura Francis, Ph.D. candidate in the Cornell Department of English, will present. 

Copies of the paper will be available in the English Department Roundtable (EDR) mailbox in the English Department mailroom (250 GSH), on the far right of the wall of English grad student boxes.

The English Department Roundtable is a forum for graduate students in the English Department to share ideas across a wide variety of fields, time periods, and methodologies.  Open to students at all stages of the program, the EDR gives us an opportunity to discuss our work in an informal setting with a group of our peers, to give and receive feedback about current projects, and to learn about the work being done by our colleagues. At a time in which the tremendous diversity of literary study has made it increasingly difficult to grasp the discipline as a whole, the purpose of the EDR is to foster a greater sense of intellectual community and cohesion within Cornell’s English Department, and to strengthen our work through increased collaboration with our peers.

Refreshments will be served

Sponsored by the Class of 1916 Chair

CANCELED (May be rescheduled) - Reading by M. Evelina Galang
Thursday, March 12, 4:30 p.m.
Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, 132 Goldwin Smith Hall

The Spring 2020 Barbara & David Zalaznick Creative Writing Reading Series continues with a reading by writer & activist M. Evelina Galang, Zalaznick Distinguished Visiting Writer of the Cornell University Department of English for Spring 2020.

M. Evelina Galang is the author of the story collection Her Wild American Self, novels One Tribe and Angel De La Luna and the Fifth Glorious Mystery, the nonfiction work Lolas’ House: Filipino Women Living With War, and the editor of Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images. Among her numerous awards are the 2004 Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Prize for the Novel, the 2007 Global Filipino Literary Award for One Tribe, the 2004 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Awards Advancing Human Rights, and a 2002 Senior Research Fellowship from Fulbright. Galang teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Miami and is core faculty and President of the Board of Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA/Voices). She is the Zalaznick Distinguished Visiting Writer of the Cornell University Department of English for Spring 2020.

Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation will be provided for this reading.

English Department Roundtable: Austin Lillywhite
Friday, March 13, 2:30 p.m.
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Moderator: TBA

Austin Lillywhite, Ph.D. candidate in the Cornell Department of English, will present.

Copies of the paper will be available in the English Department Roundtable (EDR) mailbox in the English Department mailroom (250 GSH), on the far right of the wall of English grad student boxes.

Austin Lillywhite is a PhD candidate in English focusing on 20th and 21st century American and Caribbean literature, continental philosophy, and theory, with an emphasis on issues of embodiment, race, gender and sexuality. His dissertation research surveys the poetic powers of queer world-making at stake in contemporary Afro-diasporic and Native literature. He argues that such world-making functions through the twinned practices of the embodied, sensuous fabrication of lived spatialities, and the imaginative, linguistic fabulation of different possibilities of life beyond the human. As a critical and creative practice of moving beyond what is deemed possible and real within the present aesthetic and epistemological orders of existence, fabulist literary forms provide a crucial response to the pessimistic, racialized forces of social death and planetary degradation looming ever larger in the era of the Anthropocene. His past work on posthumanism and new materialism has been published in Diacritics and Chiasma. Most recently, his work theorizing an embodied phenomenological approach to literature was awarded Honorable Mention for the 2019 Ralph Cohen Prize from New Literary History. His work has been funded by a grant for research in sustainability from the Society for the Humanities. He is also the recipient of the Society for the Humanities’ Mellon Foundation Graduate Fellowship for the 2020-2021 academic year, centered on the theme of “Fabrication.”

The English Department Roundtable is a forum for graduate students in the English Department to share ideas across a wide variety of fields, time periods, and methodologies.  Open to students at all stages of the program, the EDR gives us an opportunity to discuss our work in an informal setting with a group of our peers, to give and receive feedback about current projects, and to learn about the work being done by our colleagues. At a time in which the tremendous diversity of literary study has made it increasingly difficult to grasp the discipline as a whole, the purpose of the EDR is to foster a greater sense of intellectual community and cohesion within Cornell’s English Department, and to strengthen our work through increased collaboration with our peers.

Refreshments will be served

Sponsored by the Class of 1916 Chair

CANCELED (May be rescheduled) - The Wendy Rosenthal Gellman Lecture on Modern Literature by Brent Hayes Edwards (Columbia University; Cornell University 2019-20 Invited Society Scholar, Society for the Humanities)
"Black Radicalism and the Archive: Inventories of Fire"
Thursday, March 19, 4:30 p.m.
Guerlac Room, A.D. White House

What would it mean to consider archiving (documentation, classification, preservation) not as passive and retrospective, but instead as interventionist and aspirational—an integral component of black radical practice? This lecture explores this question through the example of civil rights activist James Forman's extensive research in the late 1960s for his unfinished biography of Frantz Fanon.

Brent Hayes Edwards is the Peng Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he is also affiliated with the Center for Jazz Studies. His publications include The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism, the co-edited collection Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies, and scholarly editions of classic works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Joseph Conrad, and Claude McKay. His most recent books are his translation of Michel Leiris’s monumental 1934 Phantom Africa and Edwards’s own Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination, which won the 2018 ASCAP Foundation Virgil Thomson Award for Outstanding Music Criticism as well as the 2019 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. Edwards was a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow. He is a 2019-20 Invited Society Scholar for the Cornell University Society for the Humanities.

The Gellman Lecture, featuring a distinguished scholar of modern literature, was established by a generous gift from Wendy Rosenthal Gellman '81, who majored in English at Cornell.

Reception to follow in the Dining Room, A.D. White House

This lecture is preceded by a graduate student seminar with Brent Hayes Edwards on March 17 at 4:45 p.m. Please contact Kina Viola, kv89@cornell.edu, if you are interested in attending the seminar.

CANCELED (May be rescheduled) - Seminar by Dr. L.H. Stallings
"Creative Research Methodologies and Black Sexuality Studies" 
Thursday, April 9, 12:00 noon
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

How do we construct alternative methodologies less reliant upon the biocolonial systems of classification, the juridic, and bioeconomies of biological and social science disciplines used to generate knowledge about sexuality?

Dr. L.H. Stallings is Chair and Professor of African American Studies at Georgetown University. Prior to Georgetown, she held appointments at the University of Maryland College-Park, Indiana University, and the University of Florida. Most recently, she is the author of A Dirty South Manifesto: Sexual Resistance and Imagination in the New South, an examination of the new sex wars in the U.S South, as well as a celebration of the decolonial, anti-racist, and transnational resistance movement countering them. Her first book, Mutha’ is Half a Word!: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture, critically engages folklore and vernacular theory, black cultural studies, and queer theory to examine the representation of sexual desire in fiction, poetry, stand-up comedy, neo-soul, and hip-hop created by black women. She is also co-editor and contributing author to Word Hustle: Critical Essays and Reflections on the Works of Donald Goines, which offers a critical analysis of street literature and its most prolific author. Her second book, Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures, explores how black sexual cultures produce radical ideologies about labor, community, art, and sexuality. It has received the Alan Bray Memorial Award from the MLA GL/Q Caucus, the 2016 Emily Toth Award for Best Single Work by One or More Authors in Women’s Studies from the Popular Culture Studies Association/American Culture Association (PCA/ACA), and it was a 2016 Finalist for the 28th Annual Lambda Literary Awards for LGBTQ Studies. 

She has also published essays in African American Review, South-Atlantic Quarterly, GLQ, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Journal of Bisexuality, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, Black Camera, Obsidian III, Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, CR: The New Centennial Review, Western Journal of Black Studies, Feminist Formations, MELUS, and numerous edited collections.

RSVP by Thursday, March 26 to lbl3@cornell.edu to sign up for the seminar and receive the readings.
The first ten graduate students to sign up to attend the seminar with L.H. Stallings will receive a copy of A Dirty South Manifesto.

Refreshments will be served

This seminar is followed by a Lecture by L.H. Stallings on April 9 at 4:30 p.m.

CANCELED (May be rescheduled) - Lecture by Dr. L.H. Stallings (Georgetown University)
"To Be Without Form: Sexuality Without a Publics in the 21st Century"
Thursday, April 9, 4:30 p.m.
Guerlac Room, A.D. White House

In this talk, Stallings will discuss portions of her transdisciplinary funk studies project: Black Saeculum: An Erospatiography, which discusses the end of sex and gender as we know it through an experiment with forms of writing and film about sex and race: erotica, pornography, and academic writing on sex.

The first half of the new world order was spent heralding the biological/physiological realness/naturalness of sexuality, as well as accepting the cultural factors that denaturalize sex, gender, and society. This next quarter of human development and evolution needs to be spent theorizing its galactic/cosmic meaning: that is to speculate on how our theories of the universe and theories of sex are intertwined, how this knowledge might matter to new genres of the human not addressed in existing publics and counter publics.

Dr. L.H. Stallings is Chair and Professor of African American Studies at Georgetown University. Prior to Georgetown, she held appointments at the University of Maryland College-Park, Indiana University, and the University of Florida. Most recently, she is the author of A Dirty South Manifesto: Sexual Resistance and Imagination in the New South, an examination of the new sex wars in the U.S South, as well as a celebration of the decolonial, anti-racist, and transnational resistance movement countering them. Her first book, Mutha’ is Half a Word!: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture, critically engages folklore and vernacular theory, black cultural studies, and queer theory to examine the representation of sexual desire in fiction, poetry, stand-up comedy, neo-soul, and hip-hop created by black women. She is also co-editor and contributing author to Word Hustle: Critical Essays and Reflections on the Works of Donald Goines, which offers a critical analysis of street literature and its most prolific author. Her second book, Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures, explores how black sexual cultures produce radical ideologies about labor, community, art, and sexuality. It has received the Alan Bray Memorial Award from the MLA GL/Q Caucus, the 2016 Emily Toth Award for Best Single Work by One or More Authors in Women’s Studies from the Popular Culture Studies Association/American Culture Association (PCA/ACA), and it was a 2016 Finalist for the 28th Annual Lambda Literary Awards for LGBTQ Studies. 

She has also published essays in African American Review, South-Atlantic Quarterly, GLQ, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Journal of Bisexuality, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, Black Camera, Obsidian III, Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, CR: The New Centennial Review, Western Journal of Black Studies, Feminist Formations, MELUS, and numerous edited collections.

This lecture is the latest in a series of talks focusing on current topics in African American literary studies, the African American Studies Speaker Series. Past speakers have included Hortense Spillers, Nahum Dimitri Chandler, GerShun Avilez, and Erica Edwards. The talks in the series are supported by the Department of English and College of Arts and Sciences.

Reception to follow in the Dining Room, A.D. White House

This lecture is preceded by a graduate student seminar with L.H. Stallings on April 9 at 12:00 noon.

CANCELED (May be rescheduled) - Lest Silence be Destructive: A Conference on Latina/x Feminisms—Past, Present, & Future
Inspired by the work of Helena María Viramontes
April 23-25 (Thursday – Saturday)

Thursday, April 23
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, 114 Central Ave, Ithaca, NY 14853

4:00-7:00 p.m. – Welcome Reception, Hirsch Lecture Lobby

5:00-6:00 p.m. – A Conversation with Helena María Viramontes, Wing Lecture Room
Featuring guest of honor & scholar alums:
Helena María Viramontes, Goldwin Smith Professor of English & Director of Creative Writing at Cornell University
Michael Hames-García, Professor of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon
Paula M.L. Moya, Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor of the Humanities & Professor of English at Stanford University

Concurrent Exhibit
On display through June 7
Envisioning Futurity:  The Aesthetics of Chicana Resistance and Resilience, The Donald and Judith Opatrny Gallery
This special installation, displayed upon the traditional homelands of the Gayogohó:nǫʼ (Cayuga) Nation, is designed to celebrate Chicana/x political visual culture as it emerged alongside the Chicana/o Movement of the 1980s and ’90s. This Movement entailed a series of national protests revolving around civil rights, labor, land dispossession, and decolonization for Indigenous and Chicana/o/x peoples across the United States. This installation was organized by Gilda Posada, PhD student in Cornell’s Department of the History of Art and Visual Studies.

Having played critical roles in developing the iconography and visual power of the Chicana Movement, these artists offer work that speaks to and corresponds with many of the themes Viramontes explores in her exquisite and groundbreaking fiction. These artists examine the practices of resilience, survival, and joy amidst conditions of subjugation and precarity. The works meditate upon the experience of working as migrant laborers, coming into feminist consciousness through voice and vision, and honoring the profound relational connections to Indigenous traditions and ways of life, including land, fire, air, and water. 

Friday, April 24

4:00 p.m.-5:30 p.m. – Reading by Jennine Capó Crucet & Manuel Muñoz
Guerlac Room, A.D. White House
121 Presidents Drive, Ithaca, NY 14853

Jennine Capó Crucet is the author of Make Your Home Among Strangers, winner of the International Latino Book Award and cited as a best book of the year by NBC Latino, the Guardian, and the Miami Herald; and of How to Leave Hialeah, which won the Iowa Short Fiction Award and the John Gardner Book Prize. A Contributing Opinion Writer for The New York Times and a recipient of an O. Henry Prize, she is currently an associate professor at the University of Nebraska. Her essay collection, My Time Among the Whites, was published by Picador in September 2019.

Manuel Muñoz is the author of a novel, What You See in the Dark, and the short-story collections Zigzagger and The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, which was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.  He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts.  He has been recognized with a Whiting Writer’s Award, three O. Henry Awards, and an appearance in Best American Short Stories. Muñoz teaches creative writing at the University of Arizona-Tucson.

8:00 p.m. – Their Dogs Came With Them: A Virginia Grise Staged Reading 
Featuring Live Music by Quetzál
Hamblin Hall (3^rd Floor), Community School of Music & Arts (CSMA)
330 E State St, Ithaca, NY 14850

What happens to a community, and the people that live there, when four intersecting freeways are built right through the heart of their neighborhood? Adapted from the novel by Helena Maria Viramontes, Their Dogs Came With Them ascribes new meanings to gang life dramas, gender queer identities, and Chicana/o/x coming of age barrio tales. Much like the structure of a freeway, the lives of four Mexican-American youth intersect and intertwine, unearthing the effects and aftereffects of the Vietnam War, displacement, mental illness, and state violence.

Musical director Martha González of the Grammy Award-winning band Quetzál brings together band members Juan Perez (bass), Tylana Enomoto (violin) and legendary guitarist Bob Robles (Thee Midnighters) to compose the original score. The musical score is intended to express the East Los sonic landscape of the 1970s. In this way, the multifaceted sounds/songs of the score are a material trace of the people’s history that is an amalgam of Mexican boleros, classic rock, doo wop, R&B, and gospel. Like the 5, 10 and 710 freeways, these sounds intersect in the heart of the Mexican-American experience that Virginia Grise and Helena Viramontes bring to life for us.

Virginia Grise writes plays that are set in bars without windows, barrio rooftops, and lesbian bedrooms. Her published work includes Your Healing is Killing Me, blu, The Panza Monologues co-written with Irma Mayorga, and an edited volume of Zapatista communiqués titled Conversations with Don Durito. Virginia is a recipient of the Yale Drama Award, Whiting Award, the Princess Grace Award in Theater, and the Playwrights’ Center Jerome Fellowship. She is an alum of the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab & the Women's Project Theatre Lab. In addition to plays, she has created a body of work that is interdisciplinary and includes multimedia performance, dance theater, performance installations, guerilla theater, site specific interventions, and community gatherings. As a curator, artist, and activist she has facilitated organizing efforts amongst women, immigrant, Chicano, working class, and queer youth. Virginia has taught writing for performance at the university level, as a public school teacher, in community centers, women’s prisons, and in the juvenile correction system. She holds an MFA in Writing for Performance from the California Institute of the Arts.

Quetzál has made considerable impact in the Los Angeles Chicano music scene. The relevance of Quetzál’s music and lyrics have been noted in a range of publications, from dissertations to scholarly books. Their latest release is titled “Puentes Sonoros” and will be out on Smithsonian Folkways in the summer of 2020.

Saturday, April 25
4:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m. – Reading by Helena María Viramontes
Guerlac Room, A.D. White House 
121 Presidents Drive, Ithaca, NY 14853

Helena María Viramontes is the author of Their Dogs Came with Them, a novel, and two previous works of fiction, The Moths and Other Stories and Under the Feet of Jesus, a novel. Named a Ford Fellow in Literature for 2007 by United States Artists, she has also received the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, a Sundance Institute Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship and a Spirit Award from the California Latino Legislative Caucus. Viramontes is Goldwin Smith Professor of English at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, where she is at work on a new novel.

Presented by the Minority, Indigenous, and Third World Studies (MITWS) & Dept. of English, with co-sponsorship from the Critical Race Lecture Series, the Picket Family Chair of English, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, the Latina/o Studies Program, the Society for the Humanities, & the Creative Writing Program.

MITWS originated in the mid-1980s as a faculty caucus in the English Department.  It is now a research group that includes faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students in the humanities and the social sciences from various departments in the College of Arts & Sciences—& beyond.

CANCELED (May be rescheduled) - Reading by Patrick Somerville
Thursday, April 30, 4:30 p.m.
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall

The Spring 2020 Barbara & David Zalaznick Creative Writing Reading Series comes to a close with a reading by screenwriter & novelist Patrick Somerville.

Patrick Somerville is a Cornell alum (MFA ’05) and the creator of the series Maniac (Netflix), as well as two upcoming series, Station 11 and Made For Love (HBO Max). He got his start writing for television on the FX drama The Bridge and later wrote for the second and third seasons of HBO's The Leftovers. Somerville is the author of two short story collections and the novels This Bright River and The Cradle. He grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and lives with his wife and three kids in Los Angeles.

Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation will be provided for this reading.

CANCELED (Will be rescheduled for Fall 2020) - James McConkey Memorial
Saturday, May 2

CANCELED (May be rescheduled online) - Creative Writing Prize Ceremony
Date TBA

The in-person ceremony is cancelled, but judging will continue and prizes will be posted online!  Submissions by 4/15/20.

Visit http://english.cornell.edu/prizes-competitions to find information on each prize as well as submission instructions.

CANCELED (May be rescheduled for Fall 2020) - Creative Writing MFA Graduation Reading 
Saturday, May 9, 3:00 p.m.

The Department of English Program in Creative Writing proudly presents the MFA Graduation Reading! Fiction writers Anum Asi, Kathryn Diaz, Carlos Rafael Gomez, Ashley Hand, and Sophia Veltfort, & poets Chi Le, Yessica Martinez, Anastasia McCray, and Jasmine Reid will share from their theses or other works-in-progress.

Visit http://english.cornell.edu/prizes-competitions to find information on each prize as well as submission instructions.

POSTPONED - English Department Recognition Ceremony
Friday, May 22, 3:00 p.m.

In keeping with the latest university policy, the English Department Recognition Ceremony scheduled for May 22 has been postponed for a later date yet to be determined. 

Statement from President Pollack
Commencement 2020 Updates

Fall 2019 Schedule

For a calendar view, please visit the University's English Events Calendar

ALL EVENTS ARE FREE and open to the public

Reading by Jenny Xie
Thursday, September 19, 4:30 p.m.
Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, 132 Goldwin Smith Hall

The Fall 2019 Barbara & David Zalaznick Creative Writing Reading Series kicks off with a reading by acclaimed Chinese American poet & National Book Award finalist Jenny Xie.

Jenny Xie was born in Hefei, China, and raised in New Jersey. She is the author of Eye Level, which was selected by Juan Felipe Herrera for the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. Eye Level also received the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University, was named a finalist for the National Book Award and a PEN Open Book Award, and was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her chapbook, Nowhere to Arrive, won the Drinking Gourd Prize. Xie holds degrees from Princeton University and NYU, and has received grants and support from Kundiman, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and Poets & Writers. Her work appears in POETRY, The New York Times Magazine, and Tin House, among other publications. She has taught creative writing at NYU and Princeton University, and currently lives in New York.

Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation will be provided for this reading.

MorganFest: A Robert Morgan Celebration
Thursday, October 3, 8:30 a.m. - 6:30 p.m.
*Silver Birch Suite, Statler Hall (5th Floor Tower Suite)
*unless otherwise noted - see directions to Silver Birch Suite below schedule

The Department of English is planning a major celebration to honor Robert Morgan. The event will include panels, a conversation, a reading, and other tributes to one of Cornell’s most beloved professors. An award-winning poet, fiction writer, novelist, historian and biographer and scholar, Morgan remains an inspiring teacher and beloved colleague. Please join us in celebrating his remarkable achievements and profound influence in American Letters.

8:30 a.m. - Coffee and Bagels
9:00 a.m. - Welcome Remarks

Derk Pereboom, Senior Associate Dean for Arts and Humanities
Caroline Levine, Picket Family Chair of the English Department

9:30 a.m. - On Morgan’s Poetry

Panel featuring:
Bhisham Bherwani (Independent scholar & writer)
Jesse Graves (East Tennessee State University)
John Lang (Emory & Henry College (emeritus))
Robert West (Mississippi State University)
Moderated by: Roger Gilbert (Cornell University)

11:00 a.m. - Coffee Break
11:30 a.m. - On Morgan’s Prose 

Panel featuring:
Nicole Drewitz-Crockett (Emory & Henry College)
Martha Greene Eads (Eastern Mennonite University)
Rebecca Godwin (Barton College)
Randall Wilhelm (Anderson University)
Moderated by: Paul Sawyer (Cornell University)

1:00 p.m. - Lunch Provided
2:00 p.m. - A Conversation with Robert Morgan

Featuring:
Alice Fulton (Cornell University)
Randall G. Kenan (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Kenneth A. McClane (Cornell University (emeritus))
Moderated by: Stuart Davis (Cornell University)

4:30 p.m. - MorganFest Reading
*Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall

The Fall 2019 Barbara & David Zalaznick Creative Writing Reading Series continues with this celebration in honor of poet, novelist, and professor Robert Morgan. Morgan and three of his former students will read from their own works:

Robert Morgan, Poet & Novelist
Robert Morgan was born on October 3, 1944 in Hendersonville, North Carolina, near the Blue Ridge Mountains. His early studies included music, science, and engineering, but writing proved to be his truest passion. His first published books were collections of poems, earthy in style and grounded in the rhythms of work. Though he continues to write poetry, Morgan has devoted much of his creative energy to short stories and novels that draw on the rich history of Appalachia, including the bestseller Gap Creek (1999) and Chasing the North Star (2016). Most recently Morgan has turned to biography, on subjects ranging from Daniel Boone to Edgar Allan Poe. Since 1971 he has taught at Cornell University, where he is now the Kappa Alpha Professor of English and much loved as a writer, poet, colleague, and mentor. 

Elizabeth Holmes MFA '87, Poet
Elizabeth Holmes is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Passing Worlds: Tahiti in the Era of Captain Cook (LSU Press, 2018). She lives in Ithaca, New York, and works as a writer at Cornell University.

Lynn Powell MFA '80, Poet & Nonfiction Writer
Lynn Powell has published three books of poetry, including Season of the Second Thought, and a nonfiction book, Framing Innocence. Her honors include an NEA Fellowship, the Brittingham and the Felix Pollak Prizes in poetry, and the Studs & Ida Terkel Award for nonfiction. She teaches at Oberlin College.

Robert Schultz MFA '76, MA '78, PhD '81, Author & Artist
Robert Schultz’s work includes three poetry collections, a novel, a nonfiction work, and an art book. He has received an NEA Award, The Virginia Quarterly Review’s Balch Prize, and Cornell’s Corson Bishop Poetry Prize. Schultz’s artwork is held by the U.S. Library of Congress, the University of Virginia, and private collectors.  

American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation will be provided for this reading.

6:15 p.m. - Reception and Book Signing
*English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Purchase books by the MorganFest Reading authors from the Campus Store before the reading to have them signed. Look for the MorganFest display.

September 19 - November 15, 2019 - “Robert Morgan at 75:  A Celebration”
*Olin Library (Near the “New and Noteworthy” shelves)
*Kroch Library Rare & Manuscript Collection (Reference room, near the Gettysburg Address facsimile)
The exhibits feature never-before-seen manuscripts & personal items.

Directions to Silver Birch Suite (5^th Floor Tower Suite)There is only one elevator in Statler Hall that can take you to the 5^th floor Tower Suite, and the only room on that floor is the Silver Birch. Statler Hotel and Statler Hall staff refer to the Silver Birch Suite (donor name) as the 5^th Floor Tower Suite.

- From Statler Hotel lobby, when facing the stairs that lead from the lobby to Taverna Banfi, follow signage for MorganFest Silver Birch Suite (5^th Floor Tower Suite) to the left down the hallway and continue to follow the free-standing signage through the Hotel towards Statler Hall. Pass through the doors into Statler Hall, which will bring you out towards the Statler Auditorium, and follow the hallway in front of you, and to the right of the Auditorium, towards the back wall that says “SHA Tower”. Take the elevator on the right near the end of the hallway to the fifth floor, exit to the left, and enter the Silver Birch Suite (room sign says “Multipurpose Room 589”).

- From East Avenue, enter Statler Hall, follow the staircase up and, when facing the Statler Auditorium, take the hallway to the right of the Auditorium, towards the back wall that says “SHA Tower”. Take the elevator on the right near the end of the hallway to the fifth floor, exit to the left, and enter the Silver Birch Suite (room sign says “Multipurpose Room 589”).

- From Statler Drive, enter Statler Hall, following the hallway to the Statler Auditorium. When facing the Statler Auditorium, take the hallway to the right of the Auditorium, towards the back wall that says “SHA Tower”. Take the elevator on the right near the end of the hallway to the fifth floor, exit to the left, and enter the Silver Birch Suite (room sign says “Multipurpose Room 589”).

For campus parking information please visit https://www.cornell.edu/visit/parking/

Cosponsors include the Zalaznick Reading Series, Society for the Humanities, American Studies Program, College of Arts & Sciences, Helena María Viramontes, & Caroline Elizabeth Levine.

Reading by Desiree Cooper
Thursday, October 24, 4:30 p.m.
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall

The Fall 2019 Barbara & David Zalaznick Creative Writing Reading Series comes to a close with a reading by Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist & women's rights activist Desiree Cooper.

Desiree Cooper is a 2015 Kresge Artist Fellow, former attorney and Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist. Her debut collection of flash fiction, Know the Mother, has won numerous awards including 2017 Next Generation Indie Book Award. Cooper’s fiction, poetry and essays have appeared in The Best Small Fictions 2018, Callaloo, Michigan Quarterly Review, Hypertext Review, and Best African American Fiction 2010, among other publications. In 2018, she wrote, produced and co-directed “The Choice,” a short film about reproductive rights and recipient of the 2019 Berlin Flash Film Festival’s Outstanding Achievement Award, and an Award of Merit from the Los Angeles Best Short Film Festival. Cooper was a founding board member of Cave Canem, a national residency for black poets.

Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation will be provided for this reading.

The Philip Freund Prize for Creative Writing Alumni Reading by Dorothy Chan, Nicholas Friedman, Ruth Joffre, & Daniel Peña
Thursday, November 14, 4:30 p.m.
Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, 132 Goldwin Smith Hall

Recipients of the 2019 Philip Freund Prize for Creative Writing for excellence in publication will read from their works:

Dorothy Chan BA '12, Poet
Dorothy Chan is the author of Revenge of the Asian Woman, Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold, and the chapbook Chinatown Sonnets. She was a 2014 finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Chan is the Poetry Editor of Hobart and an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Visit her website at dorothypoetry.com.

Nicholas Friedman MFA '12, Poet
Nicholas Friedman is the author of Petty Theft, winner of The New Criterion Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in The New York Times, POETRY, Yale Review, and other venues. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, he is also the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. He lives with his wife and son in Syracuse.

Ruth Joffre BA '11, Author
Ruth Joffre is the author of the story collection Night Beast. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, Lightspeed, The Masters Review, Nashville Review, CutBank, and elsewhere. She lives in Seattle and teaches at the Hugo House.

Daniel Peña MFA '12, Novelist
Daniel Peña is a Pushcart Prize-winning writer and Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Houston-Downtown. A Fulbright-Garcia Robles Scholar and former Picador Guest Professor in Leipzig, Germany, his writing has appeared in Ploughshares, The Guardian, Kenyon Review, and NBC News among other outlets. His novel, Bang, is out now from Arte Publico Press.

Philip Freund ’29, MA ’32, was a novelist, short-story writer, poet, documentary film writer, playwright, television dramatist, essayist, and literary critic. The Philip Freund Prize for Creative Writing honors graduates upon their successful publication. 

Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation will be provided for this reading.

The Paul Gottschalk Memorial Lecture by Richard Rambuss
"Milton, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Carnival—New Orleans Style" 
Thursday, November 21, 4:30 p.m.
Guerlac Room, A.D. White House

Literature may be far from mind now when one thinks of what’s billed as the greatest bacchanal in the US: Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Yet a learned deployment of English literature—especially Renaissance literature—played a structuring role in a denotatively Anglo-American endeavor to appropriate and “elevate” Carnival traditions in multicultural New Orleans. This lecture focuses on the all-male, secret society Carnival organizations founded in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, beginning with the Mystick Krewe of Comus (named after Milton’s masque), which innovated the elaborate, expensive public parades and private tableaux balls for which New Orleans Carnival has come to be known. The themes for their fanciful, erudite Mardi Gras pageantry were often derived from poetry and drama. This lecture reflects upon the performative afterlife of English Renaissance literature in an American context. But it does so outside the usual Northeastern purview to consider Milton, Spenser, and Shakespeare in the Deep South—in New Orleans, which (as Robert D. Abrahams puts it) “has provided alternative ways of thinking about almost everything in American life.”

Richard Rambuss is chair of the English Department at Brown University, where he is Nicholas Brown Professor of Oratory and Belles Lettres. His teaching and writing travels back and forth between early modern literature and contemporary culture, especially film. Much of his interest in the old and the new turns on questions of gender and sexuality. He has published three books, most recently The English Poems of Richard Crashaw, the first new scholarly edition of this ecstatic seventeenth-century poet in fifty years. He has also just completed a manuscript on men and masculinity in extreme circumstances in the work of Stanley Kubrick, which is forthcoming from Fordham University Press. He is now working on a new book titled Mardi Gras Milton: The Golden Age of New Orleans Carnival and English Renaissance Literature.

The Gottschalk Memorial Lecture was established in memory of Paul Gottschalk, Professor of English at Cornell, scholar of British Renaissance literature and author of "The Meanings of Hamlet" (1972). He died in 1977 at the age of 38.

Free and open to the public

Reception to follow in the A.D. White House

This lecture will be followed by a graduate student seminar with Richard Rambuss on November 22

Seminar by Richard Rambuss
"Milton's Christ" 
Friday, November 22, 11:00 a.m.
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

A seminar on Milton's strange devotional poetry on the Son of God.

Richard Rambuss is chair of the English Department at Brown University, where he is Nicholas Brown Professor of Oratory and Belles Lettres. His teaching and writing travels back and forth between early modern literature and contemporary culture, especially film. Much of his interest in the old and the new turns on questions of gender and sexuality. He has published three books, most recently The English Poems of Richard Crashaw, the first new scholarly edition of this ecstatic seventeenth-century poet in fifty years. He has also just completed a manuscript on men and masculinity in extreme circumstances in the work of Stanley Kubrick, which is forthcoming from Fordham University Press. He is now working on a new book titled Mardi Gras Milton: The Golden Age of New Orleans Carnival and English Renaissance Literature.

RSVP BY FRIDAY NOVEMBER 15 to lbl3@cornell.edu to sign up for the seminar and receive the readings.

Refreshments will be served

Spring 2019 Schedule

For a calendar view, please visit the University's English Events Calendar.
To add English events to your online calendar, see the "Subscribe To These Results” field of the University's English Events Calendar (bottom right of page) and select your calendar type. Also see Exporting Events (Google, Outlook Calendar Notes).

The Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading by Robert Morgan & Ernesto Quiñónez
Thursday, February 7, 4:30 p.m.
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall

The Spring 2019 Barbara & David Zalaznick Creative Writing Reading Series kicks off with the Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading featuring Robert Morgan, poet & novelist, and Ernesto Quiñónez, writer.

Robert Morgan is the author of fifteen books of poems, most recently Terroir and Dark Energy. He has published eleven works of fiction, including Gap Creek and Chasing the North Star. Nonfiction works include Boone: A Biography and Lions of the West. Recipient of awards from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. A native of western North Carolina, he is currently Kappa Alpha Professor of English at Cornell University.

Ernesto Quiñónez is a product of public education, from kindergarten to his Masters at the City College of New York. He is the author of the novel Bodega Dreams and an associate professor of English at Cornell University.

The Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading was created in 2002 by family and friends of Richard Cleaveland, Cornell Class of ’74, to honor his memory.

Free and open to the public

Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

Coffee Break with the Profs featuring Ben Ortiz
February 13, 12:15-1:10 p.m.
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

Ben Ortiz is the Assistant Curator of the Cornell Hip Hop Collection, which is part of Cornell University Library's Rare and Manuscript Collections division. The CHHC is the world's most extensive research archive on Hip Hop music and culture (a very broad subject through which a wide diversity of topics can be explored). In addition to his position with Cornell Hip Hop Collection, Ben is also active in the local music scene, and can be found rocking dance floors as his alter ego, DJ ha-MEEN. 

Coffee Break with the Profs (formerly called Books Sandwiched In) is a monthly lunch series for Cornell undergraduates, designed to bring faculty and undergraduate students together in an informal and cozy setting to discuss literature. You need not be an English Major to attend. Join in this informal discussion with faculty, meet other students interested in literature, and get free coffee, too!

English Department Roundtable: CANCELLED
February 15, 2:30 p.m.
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

The 40^th Anniversary of the Paul Gottschalk Memorial Lecture by Suzanne Conklin Akbari
“Chaucer’s Periodization”
Thursday, February 28, 4:30 p.m.
Guerlac Room, A.D. White House

To talk about “Chaucer’s periodization” often means to ask how we ourselves think of Chaucer: as a quintessentially “medieval” poet, or as a harbinger of the “modern.” Instead, this lecture explores how Chaucer and his contemporaries saw their own place in time, focusing on The House of Fame, the Knight’s Tale, the Man of Law’s Tale, and Troilus and Criseyde, and asking questions such as the following: Does Chaucer present a linear or a cyclical view of history? To what extent does each national history stand on its own? And what’s the place of the individual subject within Chaucer’s periodization?

Suzanne Conklin Akbari is Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. She has written books on optics and allegory (Seeing Through the Veil) and European views of Islam and the Orient (Idols in the East), and edited collections on travel literature (Marco Polo), Mediterranean Studies (A Sea of Languages), and somatic histories (The Ends of the Body). She is finishing up a monograph titled Small Change: Metaphor and Metamorphosis in Chaucer and Christine de Pizan, and working on another project on premodern ideas of periodization as seen in universal histories, maps, and diagrams (The Shape of Time). She is also an editor of the Norton Anthology of World Literature. 

The Gottschalk Memorial Lecture was established in memory of Paul Gottschalk, Professor of English at Cornell, scholar of British Renaissance literature and author of "The Meanings of Hamlet" (1972). He died in 1977 at the age of 38.

Free and open to the public

Reception to follow in the A.D. White House

This lecture will be followed by a graduate student seminar with Suzanne Conklin Akbari on March 1

Seminar by Suzanne Conklin Akbari
"Mapping Ethiopia within Medieval Studies"
Friday, March 1, 11:30a.m.-1:00p.m. 
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

"Mapping Ethiopia within Medieval Studies": The place of medieval Ethiopia can be conceived within the overarching framework of a 'global' Medieval Studies, or in a way that draws upon Mediterranean Studies' focus on connectivity and regional identities. Either approach must reckon with the long history of western representations of Ethiopia, which drew upon religious and racial constructions to imagine a people who were at once remote and monstrous, deformed by the heat of the sun and yet situated at the very heart of an alluring fantasy of Judeo-Christian identity. Drawing especially on medieval maps, encyclopedias, and travel narratives, we will consider what Ethiopia represented for medieval Europe, and what 'medieval Ethiopia' might mean for us today.

RSVP to lbl3@cornell.edu to sign up for the seminar and receive the readings

African American Literature Series: Lecture by Nahum Dimitri Chandler
“W. E. B. Du Bois and the Sacred Music of The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (1903) --Across the Centuries.”
March 7, 4:30 p.m.
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

Nahum Dimitri Chandler, Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of California-Irvine, will give a lecture in the African American Studies Speakers Series,  “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Sacred Music of The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (1903)--Across the Centuries.”

Background texts are available for potential audience members at this link: https://goo.gl/t7Req

Nahum Dimitri Chandler serves on the faculty of the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. From August 2018 to July 2020 he will serve as faculty director of the University of California Education Abroad Program (UCEAP) programs in Japan, while also serving as a Visiting Professor of the Department of Humanities, College of Liberal Arts, at the International Christian University, Mitaka (Tokyo), Japan, the host institution of the UCEAP Tokyo Study Center. Known in the formal academic context as an historian of the human sciences and as a theorist within contemporary critical thought – especially as a scholar of the work of W. E. B. Du Bois and as a critical interpreter of the work of Jacques Derrida, along with a singular engagement with the work of late composer, poet, and pianist Cecil Taylor (who was the 2013 Kyoto Prize laureate in Arts and Philosophy) whom he hosted for six months as an artist in residence while director of the Program in Comparative American Studies at Johns Hopkins University – Professor Chandler has lectured in the majority of the states in the United States, in Canada, several parts of Europe (for example, Germany, England, the Netherlands, Scotland, Italy, Hungary, and the Czech Republic) and in Asia (Japan and China), and has undertaken scholarly visits to Africa (Zimbabwe and Nigeria) over the past twenty-five years.

This lecture is the first spring semester installment in a year-long series of talks focusing on current topics in African American literary studies: the 2018-19 African American Studies Speaker Series. The talks in the series are supported by the Department of English and College of Arts and Sciences. Next in the series, A Lecture by Hortense Spillers, M.H. Abrams Distinguished Visiting Professor, on March 21.

English Department Roundtable: TBD
March 8, 2:30 p.m.
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Moderator: TBD

Copies of the paper are available in the English Department Roundtable (EDR) mailbox in the English Department mailroom (GS 250, on the far right of the wall of English grad student boxes) and on the EDR Blackboard site

Refreshments will be served

The English Department Roundtable is a forum for graduate students in the English Department to share ideas across a wide variety of fields, time periods, and methodologies.  Open to students at all stages of the program, the EDR gives us an opportunity to discuss our work in an informal setting with a group of our peers, to give and receive feedback about current projects, and to learn about the work being done by our colleagues. At a time in which the tremendous diversity of literary study has made it increasingly difficult to grasp the discipline as a whole, the purpose of the EDR is to foster a greater sense of intellectual community and cohesion within Cornell’s English Department, and to strengthen our work through increased collaboration with our peers.

Sponsored by the Class of 1916 Chair

Coffee Break with the Profs
March 20, 12:15-1:10 p.m.
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

English Majors! Career Services comes to you!

Arts & Sciences Career Development will have an open discussion about:
-Opportunities for English majors
-What English majors have done in the past
-How to leverage your English degree for employment or graduate education
-Answer your questions!

Coffee Break with the Profs (formerly called Books Sandwiched In) is a monthly lunch series for Cornell undergraduates, designed to bring faculty and undergraduate students together in an informal and cozy setting to discuss literature. You need not be an English Major to attend. Join in this informal discussion with faculty, meet other students interested in literature, and get free coffee, too!

Reading by Elissa Washuta, Nonfiction Writer
Thursday, March 14, 4:30 p.m.
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall

The Spring 2019 Barbara & David Zalaznick Creative Writing Reading Series continues with a reading by nonfiction writer Elissa Washuta.

Elissa Washuta is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and a nonfiction writer. She is the author of Starvation Mode and My Body Is a Book of Rules, named a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. With Theresa Warburton, she is co-editor of the anthology Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers. She has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust, 4Culture, Potlatch Fund, and Hugo House. Washuta is an assistant professor of creative writing at The Ohio State University.

Free and open to the public

Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

A Lecture by Hortense Spillers, M.H. Abrams Distinguished Visiting Professor
"The Family: Our Beloved Crisis"
Thursday, March 21, 4:30 p.m.
Lewis Auditorium, G76 Goldwin Smith Hall

Hortense Spillers is a Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in English at Vanderbilt University; she lectures widely both at home and abroad, most recently at the University of British Columbia where she spent the fall semester of the current academic year as an international visiting fellow at the Peter Wall Institute of Advanced Study and the Institute of Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Social Justice; Hortense Spillers is the recipient of a number of prizes and awards, most recently the Jay Hubbell lifetime achievement award for contributions to the study of American Literature, an honor conferred by the American Literature Association and an Alumni achievement award from Brandeis University where she received the doctorate in 1974; her essays have been collected in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture;  Chicago, 2003. Currently at work on two large projects—the idea of Black culture and the status of women in the eighteenth century context of revolution and enslavement, she is addressing us today on a single aspect of the topic, the career of the family.

The M.H. Abrams Visiting Professorship was established in 2006 by Stephen H. Weiss ('57) in honor of Meyer H. “Mike" Abrams, late Class of 1916 Professor, Emeritus. Hortense Spillers is the Spring 2019 M.H. Abrams Distinguished Visiting Professor.

This lecture is the second spring semester installment in a year-long series of talks focusing on current topics in African American literary studies: the 2018-19 African American Studies Speaker Series. The talks in the series are supported by the Department of English and College of Arts and Sciences.

Free and open to the public

Reception to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

English Department Roundtable: TBD
March 22, 2:30 p.m.
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Moderator: TBD

Copies of the paper are available in the English Department Roundtable (EDR) mailbox in the English Department mailroom (GS 250, on the far right of the wall of English grad student boxes) and on the EDR Blackboard site

Refreshments will be served

The English Department Roundtable is a forum for graduate students in the English Department to share ideas across a wide variety of fields, time periods, and methodologies.  Open to students at all stages of the program, the EDR gives us an opportunity to discuss our work in an informal setting with a group of our peers, to give and receive feedback about current projects, and to learn about the work being done by our colleagues. At a time in which the tremendous diversity of literary study has made it increasingly difficult to grasp the discipline as a whole, the purpose of the EDR is to foster a greater sense of intellectual community and cohesion within Cornell’s English Department, and to strengthen our work through increased collaboration with our peers.

Sponsored by the Class of 1916 Chair

English Department Roundtable: "'Deliver us from misreadings': Lupine Scholarship and the Making of Virginia Woolf"
Presenter: Alec Pollak
April 12, 12:30 p.m.
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Moderator: Sam Lagasse

Copies of the paper are available in the English Department Roundtable (EDR) mailbox in the English Department mailroom (GS 250, on the far right of the wall of English grad student boxes) and on the EDR Blackboard site

Refreshments will be served

The English Department Roundtable is a forum for graduate students in the English Department to share ideas across a wide variety of fields, time periods, and methodologies.  Open to students at all stages of the program, the EDR gives us an opportunity to discuss our work in an informal setting with a group of our peers, to give and receive feedback about current projects, and to learn about the work being done by our colleagues. At a time in which the tremendous diversity of literary study has made it increasingly difficult to grasp the discipline as a whole, the purpose of the EDR is to foster a greater sense of intellectual community and cohesion within Cornell’s English Department, and to strengthen our work through increased collaboration with our peers.

Sponsored by the Class of 1916 Chair

The Robert Chasen Memorial Poetry Reading by Claudia Rankine, Poet & Writer
Thursday, April 18, 5:00 p.m.
Alice Statler Auditorium, Statler Hall

The Spring 2019 Barbara & David Zalaznick Creative Writing Reading Series comes to a close with a reading by poet & writer Claudia Rankine. 

Recipient of the 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry. Rankine is the recipient of the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts. Rankine’s bestselling book, Citizen: An American Lyric, was the winner of the 2015 Forward Prize for Best Collection, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (it was also a finalist in the criticism category, making it the first book in the award’s history to be a double nominee), the NAACP Image Award, the PEN Open Book Award, and the LA Times Book Award for poetry. Citizen also holds the distinction of being the only poetry book to be a New York Times bestseller in the nonfiction category. She teaches at Yale University as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry.

The Robert Chasen Memorial Poetry Reading is a biennial event, featuring a public reading by a distinguished poet. It was established in 1980 by Margaret Rosenzweig, '32, in memory of Robert Chasen.

Free admission - Ticket required. Tickets to this event are available at the Willard Straight Resource Center (4th/Main floor) from Friday, March 1 and while supplies last.

Statler Auditorium doors will open at 4:30 p.m. for seating at the reading on April 18.

Books signed by Claudia Rankine will be available for purchase at the reading on April 18.

Shop Talk featuring Robert Casper, Library of Congress
Thursday, April 25, 4:30 p.m.
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

Robert Casper is the head of the Poetry and Literature Center at the Library of Congress. Casper will talk about his own post-MFA degree experience and the career trajectory that built on that degree to reach his prestigious position, followed by a Q&A. This informal conversation may assist students in making their own career goals.

The founding publisher of the literary magazine jubilat, Robert Casper has worked for the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (where he served on the board) and the Poetry Society of America. He also served as the poetry chair of the Brooklyn Borough President’s Literary Council; as a member of the Poetry Coalition, LitNet, and the National Writer’s Museum National Advisory Council; and as a judge/panelist for the National Endowment for the Art’s “Poetry Out Loud” competition and “Great American Read” initiative, the PBS “Great American Read” Advisory Panel, the National Student Poets Program, and the National Youth Poet Laureate initiative, among others. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the poet Matthea Harvey.

Free and open to the public

Refreshments will be served

English Department Roundtable: TBD
April 26, 2:30 p.m.
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Moderator: TBD

Copies of the paper are available in the English Department Roundtable (EDR) mailbox in the English Department mailroom (GS 250, on the far right of the wall of English grad student boxes) and on the EDR Blackboard site

Refreshments will be served

The English Department Roundtable is a forum for graduate students in the English Department to share ideas across a wide variety of fields, time periods, and methodologies.  Open to students at all stages of the program, the EDR gives us an opportunity to discuss our work in an informal setting with a group of our peers, to give and receive feedback about current projects, and to learn about the work being done by our colleagues. At a time in which the tremendous diversity of literary study has made it increasingly difficult to grasp the discipline as a whole, the purpose of the EDR is to foster a greater sense of intellectual community and cohesion within Cornell’s English Department, and to strengthen our work through increased collaboration with our peers.

Sponsored by the Class of 1916 Chair

In A Word featuring Professor Carole Boyce Davies with Professor Ishion Hutchinson
"Caribbean Migrations and Imperial Projects"
Wednesday, May 1, 4:30 p.m.
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall

Professors Boyce Davies and Hutchinson engage in a wide-ranging conversation about their creative and scholarly work archiving the Caribbean experience during global conflicts.

Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of two poetry collections: Far District and House of Lords and Commons. He is the recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, among others. He is a contributing editor to the literary journals The Common and Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art. 

Carole Boyce Davies is a professor of English and Africana Studies at Cornell University. She has held distinguished professorships at a number of institutions, including the Herskovits Professor of African Studies and Professor of Comparative Literary Studies and African American Studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject and Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones. Her most recent monograph is Caribbean Spaces: Escape Routes from Twilight Zones and a children’s book, Walking.

In A Word is a series that showcases the Creative Writing Program’s influences and contributions to the literary world by its dedicated faculty of poets and fiction writers.

Free and open to the public

Reception to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

Creative Writing MFA Graduation Reading featuring
Saturday, May 11, 3:00 p.m.
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall

The Department of English Program in Creative Writing proudly presents the MFA Graduation Reading! Fiction writers Remy Barnes, Nneoma Ike-Njoku, Alice Mercier and Charlotte Pattison, and poets Christopher Hewitt, Frances Revel, Sasha Smith and Alice Turski will share work from their theses or other works-in-progress.

Free and open to the public

Reception to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

The Department of English Diploma Ceremony & Reception
May 24, 2019
3:00 p.m. Reception
4:00 p.m. Ceremony
Statler Auditorium

Light refreshments will be served

Photography by Grad Images

Fall 2018 Schedule

For a calendar view, please visit the University's English Events Calendar.
To add English events to your online calendar, see the "Subscribe To These Results” field of the University's English Events Calendar (bottom right of page) and select your calendar type. Also see Exporting Events (Google, Outlook Calendar Notes).
The Department of English is pleased to have purchased carbon offsets for our event guests' travel through the Finger Lakes Climate Fund, a program of Sustainable Tompkins.

Honoring Carol Edelman Warrior
August 30, 4:30-6:00 p.m.
Africana Studies & Research Center, 310 Triphammer Road

Please join the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program and the Department of English in the Africana Center Multi-Purpose Room to recognize and remember Carol Edelman Warrior’s important contributions to Cornell University life and learning. As a cherished teacher, student mentor, and valued colleague, Carol gave generously of her time, insights and compassion to all. Please bring your good thoughts and memories to share. There will be both scheduled speakers--family, colleagues and students--and space for others who wish to contribute.

Light refreshments available

Jane Gallop talk
"Sexuality, Disability, and Aging: Queer Temporalities of the Phallus”
September 17, 4:30 p.m.
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

Jane Gallop (Cornell PhD ’76 & BA ’72) is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the author of numerous books, including The Deaths of the Author: Reading and Writing in Time; Living with His Camera; and Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment. Her new book, Sexuality, Disability, and Aging: Queer Temporalities of the Phallus, will appear from Duke next year.

Free and open to the public

Seminar with Erica Edwards (Rutgers University)
“Literature, Race, and Terror”
September 21, noon-2:00 p.m.
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

This seminar will explore Edwards' essay on African American literature and the war on terror, a few selections from Evie Shockley’s recent volume of poetry, semiautomatic, and also: “A Most American Terrorist: The Making of Dylann Roof,” by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah. 

RSVP to lbl3@cornell.edu to sign up for the seminar and receive the readings

This seminar will be followed by The Wendy Rosenthal Gellman Lecture on Modern Literature by Erica Edwards at 4:30 p.m. in the English Lounge

The Wendy Rosenthal Gellman Lecture on Modern Literature by Erica Edwards (Rutgers University)
'How Very American': Black Women Writers and the Long War on Terror
September 21, 4:30 p.m.
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

This talk is drawn from Edwards' current book project, The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Grammars of State Violence, which analyzes how contemporary black expressive culture has refracted the culture of U.S. empire throughout the long war on terror, from 1968 to the present. Mapping the transformations of African American literature against global and local campaigns of counterinsurgency, this book argues that Black feminist poetry, fiction, television, and film have exposed the imperial grammars of blackness while also marking out minor grammars of subsistence, survival, and black radical undoing. 

Erica Edwards is Presidential Term Chair in African American Literature and Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University. She specializes in African American literature, gender and sexuality, and black political culture. Edwards is the author of Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), which won the Modern Language Association’s 12th annual William Sanders Scarborough prize. Her work, published in such journals as American Quarterly, Callaloo, American Literary History, and Black Camera, shows how contemporary African American literature challenges us to think in new ways about the relationships between African American narrative, American popular culture, and the contemporary history of black politics and black social movements.

The Gellman Lecture, featuring a distinguished scholar of modern literature, was established by a generous gift from Wendy Rosenthal Gellman ‘81, who majored in English at Cornell.

This year, the Gellman Lecture launches a year-long series of talks focusing on current topics in African American literary studies: the 2018-19 African American Studies Speaker Series. The other talks in the series are supported by the Department of English and College of Arts and Sciences. Next in the series, a Lecture by GerShun Avilez on October 16.

Free and open to the public

Refreshments to follow in the Pale Fire Lounge

Reading by Gregory Pardlo
September 27, 4:30 p.m.
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gregory Pardlo will deliver the first reading of the Fall 2018 Barbara & David Zalaznick Creative Writing Reading Series. Gregory Pardlo's ​collection​ Digest won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His other honors​ include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Pardlo's first collection, Totem, was selected by Brenda Hillman for the APR/Honickman Prize in 2007. He is Poetry Editor of Virginia Quarterly Review. Air Traffic, a memoir in essays, was released by Knopf in April.

Free and open to the public

Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

Books Sandwiched In
Topic: Why Literature Matters

October 10, 12:15-1:10 p.m.
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

Professor Chynthia Chase will lead discussion on the topic: "Wordsworth's Daffodils and Margaret Thatcher"

Books Sandwiched In is a monthly lunch series for Cornell undergraduates, designed to bring faculty and undergraduate students together in an informal and cozy setting to discuss literature. You need not be an English Major to attend. Join in this informal discussion with faculty, meet other students interested in literature, and get free lunch, too!

The Eamon McEneaney Memorial Reading by Alice McDermott
October 11, 4:30 p.m.
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall

Novelist Alice McDermott will read from her work as part of the Barbara & David Zalaznick Creative Writing Reading Series. Alice McDermott’s eighth novel, The Ninth Hour, was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2017 Kirkus Prize for Fiction. Her seventh novel, Someone, was a finalist for the Dublin IMPAC Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Patterson Prize for Fiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Three of her previous novels—After This, At Weddings and Wakes, and That Night—were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Charming Billy won the National Book Award for fiction in 1998. She is the Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. 

This reading is made possible by Eamon McEneaney’s Cornell teammates, family, and friends. In addition to being one of Cornell’s most talented and best-loved athletes, Eamon McEneaney ’77 was a dedicated husband and father, loyal friend, prolific writer and poet, and an American hero. He died on September 11, 2001, in the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

Free and open to the public

Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

English Department Roundtable: Gary Slack
"The Crisis of Craft: Ralph Ellison as Negro Authority"
October 12, 2:30 p.m.
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Moderator: Marty Cain

Copies of the paper are available in the EDR mailbox in the English Department mailroom (GS 250, on the far right of the wall of English grad student boxes) and on the EDR Blackboard site

Refreshments will be served

The English Department Roundtable is a forum for graduate students in the English Department to share ideas across a wide variety of fields, time periods, and methodologies.  Open to students at all stages of the program, the EDR gives us an opportunity to discuss our work in an informal setting with a group of our peers, to give and receive feedback about current projects, and to learn about the work being done by our colleagues. At a time in which the tremendous diversity of literary study has made it increasingly difficult to grasp the discipline as a whole, the purpose of the EDR is to foster a greater sense of intellectual community and cohesion within Cornell’s English Department, and to strengthen our work through increased collaboration with our peers.

Sponsored by the Class of 1916 Chair

Seminar with GerShun Avilez (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
"Race, Sex, & Space"
October 16, noon-2:00 p.m.
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

This seminar explores how questions of space (geographic and conceptual) are key elements in contemporary African American critical culture. In the process, we consider how spatial vocabularies provide valuable ways to think about the social construction of racial and sexual identity. 

RSVP to lbl3@cornell.edu to sign up for the seminar and receive the readings

This seminar will be followed by a Lecture by GerShun Avilez at 4:30 p.m. in the English Lounge

Lecture by GerShun Avilez (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
“Fugitive Movement: Queer Vulnerability in the Black Diasporic Imaginary”
October 16, 4:30 p.m.
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

In this talk, Avilez considers how social and geographic restrictions often constrain racial and sexual minorities and create conditions of vulnerability. However, to what extent is vulnerability the dominant lens for articulating Black queer life? Avilez takes up this question by first exploring the contexts for queer vulnerability and then highlighting innovative methods for documenting queer life and desire. Using fiction and ethnographic works, he demonstrates how Black queer subjects creatively navigate assumed states of vulnerability to express agency within the context of restriction. 

GerShun Avilez is an Associate Professor in the Department of English & Comparative Literature and the Director of the Program in Sexuality Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is a cultural studies scholar who specializes in African American literature and visual culture, as well as the art of the Black Diaspora. He is the author of the book Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism (Illinois), which won the 2017 William Sanders Scarborough Prize, given by the Modern Language Association for an outstanding scholarly study of African American literature or culture. Currently, he is completing a new book on spatial concerns in Black literary culture and social history and co-editing a special issue of the journal Women's Studies. 

This talk is the second in the 2018-19 African American Studies Speaker Series, sponsored by the Department of English and College of Arts and Sciences.

Free and open to the public

Refreshments to follow in the Pale Fire Lounge

Political Resentment: a discussion with Pierre Fasula (Université Paris 1 - Panthéon-Sorbonne, Philosophy, Research fellow)
October 22, 5-6:30 p.m.
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

Join us for this discussion across people in philosophy, political science, cultural studies, and literature about the problem of political resentment.

Pierre Fasula defended a PhD at the Sorbonne, about “The Sense of Possibility in Musil and Wittgenstein’s Works" (2013). He works mainly in ethics, and social and political philosophy, as well as in philosophy of language and literature.

Email cel235@cornell.edu to receive the readings

"Translation Matters": a conversation with Valzhyna Mort, Edmundo Paz-Soldán, & Fernando Toda
October 23, 4:30 p.m.
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

Three admired scholars and translators will converse about their translation work and translation in general:

"When we try to formulate what it means to translate poetry, we come closest to defining poetry itself. A translation of a poem is simultaneously a poem and a text about understanding it – a poem about a poem." Valzhyna Mort is Professor of the Practice in the Department of English at Cornell, the author of two books of poetry, and a translator between English and several Slavic languages. She will discuss a text as a migrant and translating speechlessness.

Edmundo Paz-Soldán teaches Latin American Literature in the Romance Studies Department at Cornell. He has written eleven novels and has been translated to eleven languages. His last novel in translation is Norte (U Chicago P). He will talk about the challenges of translating the novel Bodega Dreams, by Ernesto Quiñonez, into Spanish, focusing on the different registers of Spanish needed to make it work.

Fernando Toda is Professor of Translation at the University of Salamanca and previously taught History of the English Language at the University of Seville, in Spain. He has translated some twenty books, mostly prose and some poetry. He will be addressing key issues in professional literary translation, with special reference to his rendering of particularly challenging parts of the novel Mailman, by J. Robert Lennon, into Castilian Spanish.

Free and open to the public

Light refreshments provided

Reading by Viet Thanh Nguyen
October 25, 4:30 p.m.
Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, 132 Goldwin Smith Hall

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist & cultural critic Viet Thanh Nguyen will read from his work as part of the Barbara & David Zalaznick Creative Writing Reading Series. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer is a New York Times best seller and won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His current book is the bestselling short story collection, The Refugees. Most recently he has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations. He is a University Professor, the Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and a Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He is a critic-at-large for the Los Angeles Times and a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times.

Free and open to the public

Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

"For the Love of Literature": a talk about alternative publishing by Lamar Herrin and Gail Holst-Warhaft
November 6, 5:00 p.m.
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

Ithaca/Cornell writers Lamar Herrin and Gail Holst-Warhaft have both published books with Fomite Press and will talk about the experience of working with a press that may not be well known but compensates with a willingness to consider unusual manuscripts and produce beautiful books. Writers who despair of finding a publisher for a manuscript would do well to consider Fomite and a growing number of small presses willing to take a risk on lesser-known authors or unusual books.

Fomite Press is one of a number of small, idealist presses that are not concerned with making a profit but publish manuscripts for the pleasure of producing interesting, off-beat, or simply good books. Unlike many publishers, they like to publish bi-lingual books and insist on bi-lingual texts for translations. Marc Estrin and Donna Bister’s press is based in Burlington, VT. Estrin, the principal editor, is a prolific novelist himself, and Bister, who survives on a day job, designs and helps edit the books. Originally, Fomite solicited manuscripts from writers they knew or admired, but as they became better known, they were flooded with manuscripts from everywhere. They now publish approximately 20 books a year. Their stated market is "People who value literature and who are interested in reading things that push beyond commercial genres. We even have a category called 'Odd Birds: Eluding the Net of Classification.'” It is Fomite's policy to involve the author in every stage of the book's production - design, typescript, cover art, promotion, etc. - so that the the author is given an education in what it takes to bring a book out into the world.

Free and open to the public

Light refreshments available

The Philip Freund Prize for Creative Writing Alumni Reading by Catherine Chung, Ezra Dan Feldman, Sara Eliza Johnson, & Sarah Scoles
November 8, 4:30 p.m.
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall

Recipients of the 2018 Philip Freund Prize for Creative Writing for excellence in publication will read from their works:

Catherine Chung MFA ’06 Writer
Ezra Dan Feldman MFA ’08, PhD ’17 Poet
Sara Eliza Johnson BA ’06 Poet
Sarah Scoles MFA ’10 Nonfiction Writer

Catherine Chung was born in Evanston, IL and studied mathematics at the University of Chicago before receiving her MFA from Cornell. She is the author of Forgotten Country, and the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, an Honorable Mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award, a Granta New Voice, and a fiction editor at Guernica Magazine. Her new novel, The Tenth Muse, is forthcoming from Ecco in 2019.

Ezra Dan Feldman is the author of Habitat of Stones, which won the Patricia Bibby First Book Award. He has published in RHINO, Crazyhorse, DIAGRAM, The Los Angeles Review, Gertrude, and other journals. He teaches English and Science and Technology Studies at Williams College.

Sara Eliza Johnson’s first book, Bone Map, won the 2013 National Poetry Series. She is a recipient of an NEA Fellowship in poetry, a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award, and two fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, among other honors. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Virginia Quarterly Review, Boston Review, Crazyhorse, Blackbird, and elsewhere.

Sarah Scoles is the author of the book Making Contact: Jill Tarter and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. She is a contributing reporter at WIRED and a contributing editor at Popular Science, and her nonfiction work has also appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Slate, Scientific American, and others. Her fiction has been published in the Alaska Quarterly Review, Catapult, LIT, and other journals.

Philip Freund ’29, MA ’32, was a novelist, short-story writer, poet, documentary film writer, playwright, television dramatist, essayist, and literary critic. The Philip Freund Prize for Creative Writing honors graduates upon their successful publication. 

Free and open to the public

Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

English Department Roundtable: Jen Rabedeau
"Poems by Walt Whitman & the Packaging of an American Poet for a British Audience"
November 9, 2:30 p.m.
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Moderator: Bojan Srbinovski

Copies of the paper are available in the EDR mailbox in the English Department mailroom (GS 250, on the far right of the wall of English grad student boxes) and on the EDR Blackboard site

Refreshments will be served

The English Department Roundtable is a forum for graduate students in the English Department to share ideas across a wide variety of fields, time periods, and methodologies.  Open to students at all stages of the program, the EDR gives us an opportunity to discuss our work in an informal setting with a group of our peers, to give and receive feedback about current projects, and to learn about the work being done by our colleagues. At a time in which the tremendous diversity of literary study has made it increasingly difficult to grasp the discipline as a whole, the purpose of the EDR is to foster a greater sense of intellectual community and cohesion within Cornell’s English Department, and to strengthen our work through increased collaboration with our peers.

Sponsored by the Class of 1916 Chair

Coffee Break with the Profs

November 14, 12:15-1:10 p.m.
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

Books Sandwiched In is a monthly lunch series for Cornell undergraduates, designed to bring faculty and undergraduate students together in an informal and cozy setting to discuss literature. You need not be an English Major to attend. Join in this informal discussion with faculty, meet other students interested in literature, and get free lunch, too!

Email Corrine at cb624@cornell.edu to reserve your seat, and please include your netID in your reply.

English Department Roundtable: speaker TBA
Title TBA
November 30, 2:30 p.m.
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Moderator:

Copies of the paper are available in the EDR mailbox in the English Department mailroom (GS 250, on the far right of the wall of English grad student boxes) and on the EDR Blackboard site

Refreshments will be served

The English Department Roundtable is a forum for graduate students in the English Department to share ideas across a wide variety of fields, time periods, and methodologies.  Open to students at all stages of the program, the EDR gives us an opportunity to discuss our work in an informal setting with a group of our peers, to give and receive feedback about current projects, and to learn about the work being done by our colleagues. At a time in which the tremendous diversity of literary study has made it increasingly difficult to grasp the discipline as a whole, the purpose of the EDR is to foster a greater sense of intellectual community and cohesion within Cornell’s English Department, and to strengthen our work through increased collaboration with our peers.

Sponsored by the Class of 1916 Chair

Spring 2018 Schedule

For a calendar view, please visit the University's English Events Calendar.
To add English events to your online calendar, see the "Subscribe To These Results” field of the University's English Events Calendar (bottom right of page) and select your calendar type.

Reading by Julie Sheehan
February 1, 4:30 p.m.
Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, 132 Goldwin Smith Hall

The Barbara & David Zalaznick Creative Writing Reading Series kicks off with a reading by poet Julie Sheehan, Distinguished Visiting Writer of the Cornell University Department of English for the Spring 2018 Semester.

Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

The Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading featuring J. Robert Lennon & Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon

February 8, 4:30 p.m.
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall

The Spring 2018 Barbara & David Zalaznick Creative Writing Reading Series continues with the Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading featuring J. Robert Lennon, fiction writer, and Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, poet.

The Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading was created in 2002 by family and friends of Richard Cleaveland, Cornell Class of ’74, to honor his memory

Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

English Department Roundtable: Becky Lu
Title: "'I thy soverayne prayses loud will sing': Tracing Elizabeth I from The Shepheardes Calender to Epithalamion"
February 9, 2:30 p.m.
236 Goldwin Smith Hall
Moderator: Laura Francis

Copies of the paper are available in the EDR mailbox in the English Department mailroom (GS 250, on the far right of the wall of English grad student boxes) and on the EDR Blackboard site

Refreshments will be served

The English Department Roundtable is a forum for graduate students in the English Department to share ideas across a wide variety of fields, time periods, and methodologies.  Open to students at all stages of the program, the EDR gives us an opportunity to discuss our work in an informal setting with a group of our peers, to give and receive feedback about current projects, and to learn about the work being done by our colleagues. At a time in which the tremendous diversity of literary study has made it increasingly difficult to grasp the discipline as a whole, the purpose of the EDR is to foster a greater sense of intellectual community and cohesion within Cornell’s English Department, and to strengthen our work through increased collaboration with our peers.

Sponsored by the Class of 1916 Chair

Books Sandwiched In
Topic: "Career Advice for English Majors - Employers Want YOU!"

Feburary 14, 12:15-1:10 p.m.
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

The Career Development Office will present and discuss opportunities for English majors and jobs. This program will be the first of several op­portunities over the next few years to hear about various career paths of English alumni and to learn about the resources available to you at the Career Development Center.

Books Sandwiched In is a monthly lunch series for Cornell undergraduates. You need not be an English Major to attend. Join in this informal discussion, meet other students interested in literature, and get free lunch, too!

Email Corrine at cb624@cornell.edu to reserve your seat, and please include your netID in your reply.

English Department Roundtable: Nici Bragg
Title: "'Beside Myself': The Maternal Poetics of Judith Butler"
Februrary 23, 2:30 p.m.
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Moderator: Jane Glaubman

Copies of the paper are available in the EDR mailbox in the English Department mailroom (GS 250, on the far right of the wall of English grad student boxes) and on the EDR Blackboard site

Refreshments will be served

The English Department Roundtable is a forum for graduate students in the English Department to share ideas across a wide variety of fields, time periods, and methodologies.  Open to students at all stages of the program, the EDR gives us an opportunity to discuss our work in an informal setting with a group of our peers, to give and receive feedback about current projects, and to learn about the work being done by our colleagues. At a time in which the tremendous diversity of literary study has made it increasingly difficult to grasp the discipline as a whole, the purpose of the EDR is to foster a greater sense of intellectual community and cohesion within Cornell’s English Department, and to strengthen our work through increased collaboration with our peers.

Sponsored by the Class of 1916 Chair

Books Sandwiched In - Literature in Today's World
Topic: Lyric Poetry
Featuring faculty guests: a scholar of poetry (Prof. Roger Gilbert), a poet (Prof. Joanie Mackowski), and the poetry columnist for the New York Times Book Review (Prof. David Orr)

March 7, 12:15-1:10 p.m.
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

Books Sandwiched In is a monthly lunch series for Cornell undergraduates. You need not be an English Major to attend. Join in this informal discussion, meet other students interested in literature, and get free lunch, too!

Email Corrine at cb624@cornell.edu to reserve your seat, and please include your netID in your reply.

English Department Roundtable: Austin Lillywhite
Title: “Is Posthumanism Primitivism?”
March 9, 2:30 p.m.
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Moderator: Malcolm Bare

Copies of the paper are available in the EDR mailbox in the English Department mailroom (GS 250, on the far right of the wall of English grad student boxes) and on the EDR Blackboard site

Refreshments will be served

The English Department Roundtable is a forum for graduate students in the English Department to share ideas across a wide variety of fields, time periods, and methodologies.  Open to students at all stages of the program, the EDR gives us an opportunity to discuss our work in an informal setting with a group of our peers, to give and receive feedback about current projects, and to learn about the work being done by our colleagues. At a time in which the tremendous diversity of literary study has made it increasingly difficult to grasp the discipline as a whole, the purpose of the EDR is to foster a greater sense of intellectual community and cohesion within Cornell’s English Department, and to strengthen our work through increased collaboration with our peers.

Sponsored by the Class of 1916 Chair

Reading by Julie Schumacher
March 15, 4:30 p.m.
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall

Writer Julie Schumacher will read from her work as part of the Spring 2018 Barbara & David Zalaznick Creative Writing Reading Series.

Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

Celebrating Dan Schwarz: 50 Years of Transformative Teaching

March 23, 2:30-6:00 p.m.
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall

March 24, 9:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m.
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall

The Department of English is planning a major celebration to honor Dan Schwarz’s 50th year of teaching at Cornell. The event will include panels, lectures, toasts, and other tributes to one of Cornell’s most beloved professors.

Conference Schedule
The conference begins Friday afternoon and continues for a full day Saturday

Friday, March 23
Rhodes-Rawlings Audiorium, G70 Klarman Hall

2:30-2:45 p.m.
Introductory Remarks
Gretchen Ritter, Harold Tanner Dean of Arts & Sciences (Cornell)

2:45-3:45 p.m.
The Humanities as Gateway: Vocations and Avocations
Panel discussion with Cornell alumni:
Úlfar Erlingsson (Google Brain) PhD, Computer Science, ‘04
Ashley Featherstone (Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center) BA, English, ‘08
Devon Goodrich (New York City Law Department) BA, English, ‘07
Diana Lind (Fels Policy Research Initiative, UPenn) BA, English, ‘03
Morgan Sze (Azentus Capital Management) BA, English, Economics, ‘87
Moderated by Barbara A. Baird, Horace White Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology (Cornell) PhD, Chemistry, '79

4:00-5:00 p.m.
"Dan Schwarz, Humanistic Poetics, and the Ethics of Reading"
James Phelan (Ohio State University)
Introduction by Harry E. Shaw, Professor of English (Cornell)
Phelan invites guests to read a short story in advance of his lecture, Jhumpa Lahiri's "The Third and Final Continent"

5:15-6:00 p.m.
“My Life as Teacher and Scholar”
Dan Schwarz, Frederic J. Whiton Professor of English Literature and Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow (Cornell)
Introduction by Kenneth A. McClane, W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of Literature Emeritus (Cornell)

6:00-8:00 p.m.
Dinner in Groos Family Atrium, Klarman Hall
Champagne toast and tributes to Dan Schwarz beginning at 7:00 p.m.

Saturday, March 24
Rhodes-Rawlings Audiorium, G70 Klarman Hall

9:30-10:30 a.m.
“Transforming Humanism: Pluralism in a (Post-)Secular Age”
Beth Newman (Southern Methodist University)
Introduction by Laura Brown, John Wendell Anderson Professor of English (Cornell)

10:45-11:45 a.m.
Five Decades of Transformative Teaching
Panel discussion with Cornell alumni:
Josh Gerber BA, English, College Scholar, ‘08
Grace Jean BA, English, ’00
Leslie Storm BA, English, ’83
Beverly Tanenhaus BA, English, ’70
Zach Zahos BA, English, PMA, College Scholar, ‘15
Moderated by Brett de Bary, Professor of Asian Studies and Comparative Literature (Cornell)

11:45 a.m.-1:30 p.m.
Lunch on own

1:30-2:30 p.m.
“Modernist Funnies, or, Comics in the Age of Mass High Culture”
Lee Konstantinou (University of Maryland)
Introduction by Kevin Attell, Associate Professor of English (Cornell)

2:45-3:45 p.m.
"Reconfiguring Word and Image"
Janice Carlisle (Yale University)
Introduction by Caroline Levine, David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of Humanities (Cornell)

4:00-5:30 p.m.
Transformations in Literary Studies
Roundtable with Dan Schwarz and friends:
Steven Knapp (The George Washington University)
Helen Maxson (Southwestern Oklahoma State University)
Daniel Morris (Purdue University)
Edward O’Shea (State University of New York, Oswego)
Moderated by George Hutchinson, Newton C. Farr Professor of American Culture (Cornell)

Co-sponsored by the Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences; the Society for the Humanities; the departments of Comparative Literature, German Studies, Performing and Media Arts, and Romance Studies; and the Jewish Studies Program

*Visit the Celebrating Dan Schwarz event webpage for ongoing updates and more information

Seminar by Lawrence Buell (Harvard University)
“What Is Environmental Memory, Anyhow?”
April 12, 12:30-2:00 p.m.
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

This seminar will double as a reconnaissance of the full scope of the still-emergent master concept to be deployed more selectively in the afternoon lecture and as an opportunity to contribute through free-swinging dialogue and unsparing critique toward a more sophisticated formation. The optional reading, “Uses and Abuses of Environmental Memory,” aims to serve both purposes: as partial distillation of Dr. Buell's present thinking but also as a stage beyond which the project has since evolved. The seminar will not, however, presuppose more than cursory inspection of this text, nor will the afternoon lecture presuppose attendance at the seminar.

RSVP to lbl3@cornell.edu to sign up for the seminar

This seminar will be followed by The Wendy Rosenthal Gellman Lecture on Modern Literature by Lawrence Buell at 4:30 p.m. in Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium

The Wendy Rosenthal Gellman Lecture on Modern Literature by Lawrence Buell (Harvard University)
“Remembering the Future to Keep It from Happening: Environmental Imagination in the Anthropocene”
April 12, 4:30 p.m.
Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, 132 Goldwin Smith Hall

The well-attested interdependences between the processes of memory and anticipation go a long way toward explaining both the power of environmental memory as a driver of bodies, minds, and peoples as well as its resistance to executive control. Nowhere are these complexities more revealingly on display than in works of creative imagination, which, so regarded, underscore the importance of the environmental humanities in confronting the challenges of the Anthropocene era.

The Gellman Lecture, featuring a distinguished scholar of modern literature, was established by a generous gift from Wendy Rosenthal Gellman ‘81, who majored in English at Cornell

Reception to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

Lawrence Buell is Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature Emeritus at Harvard. He has written extensively and lectured worldwide on the environmental humanities. His books include The Environmental Imagination (1995), Writing for an Endangered World (2001), and The Future of Environmental Criticism (2005). In 2007 he received the Modern Language Association’s Jay Hubbell Award for lifetime contributions to American Literature scholarship. In 2008 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His current book project is on “Environmental Memory in Art and Real Life.”

This lecture is also part of the 2017-18 Environmental Humanities Lecture Series organized by Anindita Banerjee of Comparative Literature and George Hutchinson of English and the Knight Institute. The series is sponsored by the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Society for the Humanities, the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, the departments of English, Comparative Literature, and Science and Technology Studies, and the American Studies Program.

English Department Roundtable: Brianna Thompson
Title: “’just feeling my way’: World Building through Religion, Queer Intimacy, and Trauma in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents”
April 13, 2:30 p.m.
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Moderator: Ju Hyun Lee

Copies of the paper are available in the EDR mailbox in the English Department mailroom (GS 250, on the far right of the wall of English grad student boxes) and on the EDR Blackboard site

Refreshments will be served

The English Department Roundtable is a forum for graduate students in the English Department to share ideas across a wide variety of fields, time periods, and methodologies.  Open to students at all stages of the program, the EDR gives us an opportunity to discuss our work in an informal setting with a group of our peers, to give and receive feedback about current projects, and to learn about the work being done by our colleagues. At a time in which the tremendous diversity of literary study has made it increasingly difficult to grasp the discipline as a whole, the purpose of the EDR is to foster a greater sense of intellectual community and cohesion within Cornell’s English Department, and to strengthen our work through increased collaboration with our peers.

Sponsored by the Class of 1916 Chair

TRANS*forming Literature: a reading & conversation with Ryka Aoki, Helen Boyd, & Ely Shipley
April 26, 4:30 p.m.
Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, 132 Goldwin Smith Hall

The Spring 2018 Barbara & David Zalaznick Creative Writing Reading Series wraps up with a reading and conversation with:
Ryka Aoki Poet, Novelist, & Composer
Helen Boyd Writer & Educator
Ely Shipley Poet

Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

English Department Roundtable: Gabriella Friedman
Title: "The tunnel that no one had made': Colson Whitehead's Infrastructural Speculation"
April 27, 2:30 p.m.
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Moderator: Jesse Goldberg

Copies of the paper are available in the EDR mailbox in the English Department mailroom (GS 250, on the far right of the wall of English grad student boxes) and on the EDR Blackboard site

Refreshments will be served

The English Department Roundtable is a forum for graduate students in the English Department to share ideas across a wide variety of fields, time periods, and methodologies.  Open to students at all stages of the program, the EDR gives us an opportunity to discuss our work in an informal setting with a group of our peers, to give and receive feedback about current projects, and to learn about the work being done by our colleagues. At a time in which the tremendous diversity of literary study has made it increasingly difficult to grasp the discipline as a whole, the purpose of the EDR is to foster a greater sense of intellectual community and cohesion within Cornell’s English Department, and to strengthen our work through increased collaboration with our peers.

Sponsored by the Class of 1916 Chair

In A Word: featuring Joanie Mackowski and Elisha Cohn, In Conversation
May 2, 4:30 p.m.
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall

How can we write beyond the human? Though lyric poems are often assumed to express the perspective of a single human voice, or novels to focus on the story of an individual protagonist, what resources might writers have to imagine alternative perspectives? How can we speak from the vantage of animals, vapors, cells, corporate or collective persons? In this conversation, Joanie Mackowski and Elisha Cohn (Associate Professors of English) bring together creative and critical perspectives on ecological, scientific, social, and above all, aesthetic efforts to rethink the boundaries between selves as connections among bodies.
In A Word is a new series that showcases the Creative Writing Program’s influences and contributions to the literary world by its dedicated faculty of poets and fiction writers.

Reception to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

MFA Graduation Reading
May 12, 3:00 p.m.
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall

The Department of English Program in Creative Writing proudly presents the MFA Graduation Reading! Poets Cristina Correa, Emily Mercurio, Carl Moon, & Lindsey Warren, and fiction writers Neal Giannone, Peter Gilbert, Shakarean Hutchinson, Weena Pun, & Hema Surendranathan will share work from their theses or other works-in-progress.

Reception to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

The Department of English Diploma Ceremony & Reception

May 25, 2018
3:00 p.m. Reception
4:00 p.m. Ceremony
Statler Auditorium

Light refreshments will be served


Photography by Grad Images

Novel Studies Conference

May 31-June 2, 2018

The biennial conference of the Society for Novel Studies at Cornell University

Please visit the conference website for the full schedule, registration information, and more!

Fall 2017 Schedule

For a calendar view, please visit the University's English Events Calendar.
To add English events to your online calendar, see the "Subscribe To These Results” field of the University's English Events Calendar (bottom right of page) and select your calendar type.

Lecture by Priyamvada Gopal (University of Cambridge, U.K.)
"Insurgent Empire: How Anticolonial Resistance Shaped Dissent in Britain"
September 5th, 4:30pm
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

Priyamvada Gopal (Ph.D., Cornell 2000) is a Reader in Anglophone and Related Literatures at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Churchill College. She is the author of Literary Radicalism in India (Routledge, 2005) and The Indian Novel in English: Nation, History and Narration (Oxford, 2009). She has written for The Guardian, The Nation, Al-Jazeera, Open: the Magazine and The Hindu, among others. Her forthcoming book, Insurgent Empire, is due out with Verso in 2018.

Refreshments provided

Reading by Ron Rash
September 7th, 4:30pm
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall

The Fall 2017 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series kicks off with a reading by poet & fiction writer Ron Rash.

Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

Reading by Quan Barry
September 14th, 4:30pm
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall

Quan Barry, poet & novelist, reads from her work as part of the Fall 2017 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series.

Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

English Department Roundtable: Presenter Mint Damrongpiwat
Title: "Birth and the Posthuman: Cats, Rabbits, and Frankenstein's Monster"
September 22, 2:30pm
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Moderator: Maddie Reynolds

Copies of the paper are available in the EDR mailbox in the English Department mailroom (GS 250, on the far right of the wall of English grad student boxes) and on the EDR Blackboard site.

Refreshments will be served.

The English Department Roundtable is a forum for graduate students in the English Department to share ideas across a wide variety of fields, time periods, and methodologies.  Open to students at all stages of the program, the EDR gives us an opportunity to discuss our work in an informal setting with a group of our peers, to give and receive feedback about current projects, and to learn about the work being done by our colleagues. At a time in which the tremendous diversity of literary study has made it increasingly difficult to grasp the discipline as a whole, the purpose of the EDR is to foster a greater sense of intellectual community and cohesion within Cornell’s English Department, and to strengthen our work through increased collaboration with our peers.

Sponsored by the Class of 1916 Chair.

The Robert Chasen Memorial Poetry Reading featuring Marilyn Hacker
September 28th, 4:30pm
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall

Marilyn Hacker, poet & translator, reads from her work as part of the Fall 2017 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series.

The Robert Chasen Memorial Poetry Reading is a biennial event, featuring a public reading by a distinguished poet. It was established in 1980 by Margaret Rosenzweig, 32, in memory of Robert Chasen.

Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

Books Sandwiched In - Literature in Today's World
Topic: Literature and Politics
Faculty guests: Prof. Kate McCullough, Prof. Helena Maria Viramontes, Prof. Shelley Wong

October 4, 12:15-1:10pm
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

How can literature help us understand and interpret the complexities of contemporary life? What can literary art contribute to bigger cultural, political, social debates? How does literature comment on the issues of its own time, and how might it offer insight into today’s issues as well? Join us for a new year of Books Sandwiched In, a year focusing on the ongoing relevance of literature in our daily lives. Have a free lunch and an informal discussion with faculty, and meet other students interested in literature!

Books Sandwiched In is a monthly lunch series for Cornell undergraduates. You need not be an English Major to attend. Join in this informal discussion with faculty of literature's relevance to politics, meet other students interested in literature, and get free lunch, too!

Email Corrine at cb624@cornell.edu to reserve your seat, and please include your netID in your reply.

Reading by Marlon James
October 12th, 4:30pm
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall

Marlon James, novelist, reads from his work as the final installment of the Fall 2017 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series.

Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

English Department Roundtable: Presenter Jesse Goldberg
Title: "What lay beneath their names: Social Death, The Afterlife of Property, and Pilate's Insistence of Black Being in Song of Solomon"
October 13, 2:30pm
Room 283, Goldwin Smith Hall
Moderator: Marquis Bey

Copies of the paper are available in the EDR mailbox in the English Department mailroom (GS 250, on the far right of the wall of English grad student boxes) and on the EDR Blackboard site.

Refreshments will be served.

The English Department Roundtable is a forum for graduate students in the English Department to share ideas across a wide variety of fields, time periods, and methodologies.  Open to students at all stages of the program, the EDR gives us an opportunity to discuss our work in an informal setting with a group of our peers, to give and receive feedback about current projects, and to learn about the work being done by our colleagues. At a time in which the tremendous diversity of literary study has made it increasingly difficult to grasp the discipline as a whole, the purpose of the EDR is to foster a greater sense of intellectual community and cohesion within Cornell’s English Department, and to strengthen our work through increased collaboration with our peers.

Sponsored by the Class of 1916 Chair.

The Critical Race Series Lecture by Nelson Maldonado-Torres (Rutgers University)
“The World that Coloniality Built: Fanonian Meditations on Language and Love”
October 18th, 4:30pm
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

The world that modernity/coloniality built is a world of Manichean hierarchies and forms of segregation and separation that serve those hierarchies. Language and love are fundamental forms of connection, which means that they find themselves in precarious conditions in the modern/colonial world. This presentation explores the meaning of language and love, as well as the idea of their respective decolonizations (e.g., decolonial language and decolonial love), with particular attention to Frantz Fanon’s classic text, Black Skin, White Masks.

Nelson Maldonado-Torres is Associate Professor in the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies, member of the core faculty of the Comparative Literature Program, and faculty affiliate in the Doctoral Program in Women and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He has been President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association (2008-2013), Director of the Center for Latino Policy Research at the University of California, Berkeley (2009-2010), and Chair of the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies at Rutgers (2012-2015). He is a board member of the Frantz Fanon Foundation in Paris, France, and honorary member of the Fausto Reinaga Foundation in La Paz, Bolivia. His publications include Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity (Duke UP, 2008), and the collection of essays La descolonización y el giro decolonial (Decolonization and the decolonial turn), compiled by the Universidad de la Tierra (Chiapas, Mexico) in 2011. He has guest edited two issues on “mapping the decolonial turn” for the journal Transmodernity, and is currently working two book projects: Theorizing the Decolonial Turn and Fanonian Meditations.

Light refreshments provided

This event is cosponsored by Latina/o Studies

Reading by Steven McCall
October 23rd, 4:30pm
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

Come join Steven McCall for a reading from Dan McCall’s posthumous memoir, Boy on a Unicycle: Confessions of a Young Man Trained to be a Winner.

Dan McCall (1940-2012) was a beloved professor of American Studies and English at Cornell for forty years. He was the critically acclaimed author of ten books of fiction and non-fiction, including Triphammer, The Example of Richard Wright, and Beecher. His novel Jack the Bear was translated into a dozen languages and made into a 20th Century Fox feature film.
Despite being passionate about his memoir, and producing dozens of drafts over the course of his lifetime, Dan was never able to settle on a final version. After his passing in 2012, his son Steven decided to take up the project and see it through to completion. Now, at long last, Boy on a Unicycle has just been published, in September 2017.
Boy on a Unicycle tells of a 1950s teen prodigy with a particular gift for enthralling audiences with speeches about American optimism. Steven will read excerpts from the book and talk about “the story behind the story”—of a novelist’s obsessive quest to examine the lies and truths of his youth, and a son’s determination to bring his father’s memoir into the world.  

Light refreshments provided

The Philip Freund Prize for Creative Writing Alumni Reading: Lauren K. Alleyne, Tacey M. Atsitty, Jennine Capó Crucet & Stephen Gutierrez
November 2, 4:30pm
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall

Recipients of the 2017 Philip Freund Prize for Creative Writing for excellence in publication read from their works:
Lauren K. Alleyne ‘06 Poet
Tacey M. Atsitty ‘11 Poet
Jennine Capó Crucet ‘03 Fiction Writer
Stephen Gutierrez ‘87 Fiction & Nonfiction Writer

Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

Books Sandwiched In - Literature in Today's World
Topic: Literary and Visual Representation
Faculty guests: Prof. Ella Diaz, Prof. Greg Londe, and Prof. Shirley Samuels. Prof. Kate McCullough, moderator

November 8, 12:15-1:10pm
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

How are visual representation and literary representation in conversation with one another? What can images do that words can’t, and vice versa? How do various media engage their audiences’ hearts and minds? Conversation will also draw on our faculty’s guests’ scholarly work on study of murals, comics, and photography.

Books Sandwiched In is a monthly lunch series for Cornell undergraduates. You need not be an English Major to attend. Join in this informal discussion with faculty of literature's relevance to politics, meet other students interested in literature, and get free lunch, too!

Email Corrine at cb624@cornell.edu to reserve your seat, and please include your netID in your reply.

English Department Roundtable: Presenter Katherine Lonsdale Waller
Title: Stars and Angels: The Working Universes of Charlie’s Angels and The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills”
November 10, 2:30pm
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Moderator: Zach Price

Copies of the paper are available in the EDR mailbox in the English Department mailroom (GS 250, on the far right of the wall of English grad student boxes) and on the EDR Blackboard site.

Refreshments will be served.

The English Department Roundtable is a forum for graduate students in the English Department to share ideas across a wide variety of fields, time periods, and methodologies.  Open to students at all stages of the program, the EDR gives us an opportunity to discuss our work in an informal setting with a group of our peers, to give and receive feedback about current projects, and to learn about the work being done by our colleagues. At a time in which the tremendous diversity of literary study has made it increasingly difficult to grasp the discipline as a whole, the purpose of the EDR is to foster a greater sense of intellectual community and cohesion within Cornell’s English Department, and to strengthen our work through increased collaboration with our peers.

Sponsored by the Class of 1916 Chair.

In A Word with J. Robert Lennon
"Some Important Third People"
November 15th, 4:30pm
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

In our age of memoir, social media, and young adult fiction, first person rules the roost. This talk will argue that first person is often misused in American fiction, and that a good writer should always consider third, in all its complex, ungainly glory. Professor Lennon will give examples from literature of third person's flexibility, and show writers how to use it.

In A Word is a new series that showcases the Creative Writing Program’s influences and contributions to the literary world by its dedicated faculty of poets and fiction writers like J. Robert Lennon. The author of eight novels, including Mailman, Familiar, and Broken River, and the story collections Pieces for the Left Hand and See You in Paradise, you can find out more about him at jrobertlennon.com.

Light refreshments provided

The Paul Gottschalk Memorial Lecture by Kim F. Hall (Barnard College)
"Intelligently organized resistance": Shakespeare in the diasporic politics of John E. Bruce
November 30th, 4:30 pm
Guerlac Room, A.D. White House

While scholars gathered at Harvard University to hear noted Shakespearean George Lyman Kittredge outline a program for Shakespeare study and tens of thousands took special trains to attend performances of Caliban in the Yellow Sands at the City University of New York, in 1916 a "Ye Friends of Shakespeare” group convened at a Settlement House on the Lower East Side for its presidential address. Delivered by journalist John E. Bruce, the speech gave this group of black activists and intellectuals (including noted bibliophile Arturo Schomburg) a program for self-directed Shakespeare study within a framework of black advancement and resistance. This lecture situates Bruce’s speech in the cross-hatchings of Shakespeare celebration and anti-racist activism of the early twentieth century. Part of a larger project that explores black archives for links between Shakespeare study and black freedom struggle, this lecture asks: “can we find in these archival fragments a Shakespeare more suitable for twenty-first century America?”

Kim F. Hall will deliver the Gottschalk Memorial Lecture, established in memory of Paul Gottschalk, Professor of English at Cornell, scholar of British Renaissance literature. Hall is the Lucyle Hook Chair of English and Professor of Africana Studies at Barnard College where she teaches courses in Early Modern/ Renaissance Literature, Black Feminist Studies, Critical Race Theory and Food Studies. She is the author of Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, Othello: Texts and Contexts and The Sweet Taste of Empire: Sugar, Gender and Material Culture forthcoming with UPenn Press. Professor Hall was the Barnard Library’s inaugural “Faculty Partner of the Year" (2014) and 2015 winner of the College’s Tow Award for Innovative Pedagogy for the Digital Shange project. Diverse Issues in Higher Education named her one of “25 Women Making a Difference in Higher Education and Beyond” in 2016. She is currently working on 'Othello Was My Grandfather': Shakespeare and Race in the African Diaspora for which she has received grants from the NEH, the National Humanities Center and the Schomburg Center for Research in African-American Culture.   

Reception to follow

~ Note the graduate student seminar with Kim F. Hall, offered on December 1, from 12:30-2:00pm ~

Gottschalk Seminar with Kim F. Hall (Barnard College)
"'I didn’t think I would feel like this': Early Modern Race Studies and its Discontents"
December 1st, 12:30-2:00pm
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

For this seminar Professor Hall will circulate the conclusion to her book, Sweet Taste of Empire: Sugar, Race and Gender in Early Modern England (under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press) and an excerpt from Robert Appelbaum's Aguecheek's Beef, Belch's Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections: Literature, Culture, and Food Among the Early Moderns.

The tripartite conclusion first discusses the response by people of color to artist Kara Walker's 2014 blockbuster installation, A Subtlety: The Marvelous Sugar Baby. Professor Hall sees in the black anger at the 2014 installation and in the oblivious responses by (mostly white) spectators a dynamic similar to the ongoing discussion of the presence and meanings of race in early modern literary studies, which helps make visible a racial politics of innocence in both the seventeenth century source materials and contemporary early modern scholarship. Inherent in conflicts over the installation and the Ferguson protests that emerged at the same time is anger at the refusal to hear what blacks have to say about their experience of being raced subjects and to consider that black epistemologies have a salience for historical understanding. The second section briefly juxtaposes Susan Amussen’s reading of English laws regarding slavery in Caribbean Exchanges with Colin Dayan's discussion of English law in The Law is a White Dog to demonstrate the gap between scholarship emerging from the African diaspora and early modern scholarship that refuses dialogue over race. The final section offers a reading of Walker's 2015 follow up exhibit, Afterword, and argues for the need to put race, anger, and healing in the story of early modern studies.

Please RSVP for the seminar by email to: LBL3@cornell.edu. Relevant materials will be emailed to those who RSVP.

~ This graduate student seminar is being offered in conjunction with the Paul Gottschalk Memorial Lecture by Kim F. Hall on November 30th ~

The Gottschalk Memorial Lecture was established in memory of Paul Gottschalk, Professor of English at Cornell, scholar of British Renaissance literature and author of The Meanings of Hamlet (1972). He died in 1977 at the age of 38.

English Department Roundtable: Presenter Sam Lagasse
Title: "The Improbable Indian: Primitivism and Orientalism in Andrew Salkey’s Escape to an Autumn Pavement (1960)"
December 1, 2:30pm
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Moderator: TBA

Copies of the paper are available in the EDR mailbox in the English Department mailroom (GS 250, on the far right of the wall of English grad student boxes) and on the EDR Blackboard site.

Refreshments will be served.

The English Department Roundtable is a forum for graduate students in the English Department to share ideas across a wide variety of fields, time periods, and methodologies.  Open to students at all stages of the program, the EDR gives us an opportunity to discuss our work in an informal setting with a group of our peers, to give and receive feedback about current projects, and to learn about the work being done by our colleagues. At a time in which the tremendous diversity of literary study has made it increasingly difficult to grasp the discipline as a whole, the purpose of the EDR is to foster a greater sense of intellectual community and cohesion within Cornell’s English Department, and to strengthen our work through increased collaboration with our peers.

Sponsored by the Class of 1916 Chair.

Spring 2017 Schedule

For a calendar view, please visit the English Events Calendar.

The Department of English is pleased to have purchased carbon offsets for our event guests' travel through the Finger Lakes Climate Fund.

Theorizing the Lyric: The World Novel

February 3, 2:00-5:00pm
Guerlac Room, A.D. White House

February 4, 11:00am-5:00pm
Guerlac Room, A.D. White House

Jonathan Culler's Theory of the Lyric is a serious intervention into how the lyric is conceived, thought, and taught. This conference, organized by professors Elizabeth S. Anker (English) and Grant Farred (Africana Studies), brings together scholars from the U.S., Canada, and Europe to address a series of debates about the theoretical impact and importance of Culler's groundbreaking work, exploring its relevance both to novel studies and to larger conversations about method unfolding within literary criticism and theory.
The conference opens on Friday afternoon and continues on Saturday.

Friday, February 3rd
2:00-2:30
Elizabeth S. Anker (Cornell University), Welcome
Jonathan Culler (Cornell University), Opening remarks

2:30-3:30
David James (Queen Mary-University of London), “In Defense of Lyrical Realism"
3:45-4:45
Ellen Rooney (Brown University), “Change of Address”
Moderator: Tim Murray (Cornell University)

~ Reception to follow ~
 
Saturday, February 4th
11:00-12:00
Robert Caserio (Penn State University), “Wireless: The Novel's Transmissions of Lyric Form”
12:00-1:00
Grant Farred (Cornell University), “This is Not a Fiction: Rankine's Citizen as Mimetic Event”
Moderator: Leslie Adelson (Cornell University)
 
2:00-3:00
Christopher Nealon (Johns Hopkins University), “Some Limits to Antihumanism, or, Problems with the Critique of Meaning”
3:00-4:00
Elizabeth S. Anker (Cornell University), “Beyond Interpretation: Dualism, Postcritical Reading, and Ali Smith’s How To Be Both”
Moderator: Elisha Cohn (Cornell University)
 
4:00-4:30
Ian Balfour (York University), Response
Grant Farred (Cornell University), Closing remarks

~ Light breakfast and lunch provided; reception to follow ~

The Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading featuring Alice Fulton and Helena María Viramontes 

February 9, 4:30 p.m.
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall

The Spring 2017 Barbara & David Zalaznick Creative Writing Reading Series kicks off with the Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading featuring Alice Fulton, poet and writer, and Helena María Viramontes, writer.

The Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading was created in 2002 by family and friends of Richard Cleaveland, Cornell Class of ’74, to honor his memory.

Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

English Department Roundtable: Marquis Bey
 "The Etc. of Negroes: Transfigurative Blacknesses"
February 10, 2:30pm
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Moderator: Gabriella Friedman

Copies of the paper are available in the EDR mailbox in the English Department mailroom (GS 250, on the far right of the wall of English grad student boxes) and on the EDR Blackboard site.

Refreshments will be served.

The English Department Roundtable is a forum for graduate students in the English Department to share ideas across a wide variety of fields, time periods, and methodologies.  Open to students at all stages of the program, the EDR gives us an opportunity to discuss our work in an informal setting with a group of our peers, to give and receive feedback about current projects, and to learn about the work being done by our colleagues. At a time in which the tremendous diversity of literary study has made it increasingly difficult to grasp the discipline as a whole, the purpose of the EDR is to foster a greater sense of intellectual community and cohesion within Cornell’s English Department, and to strengthen our work through increased collaboration with our peers.

Sponsored by the Class of 1916 Chair.

Shop Talk with Manjula Martin, Writer and Editor of Scratch

February 13, 5:00pm
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

Manjula Martin is editor of the anthology Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living. She created the blog Who Pays Writers? and was the founder and editor of Scratch magazine, an online periodical about the business of being a writer.

Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living will be available for purchase.

Complementary light refreshments will also be available.

English Department Roundtable: Emily Rials
"Revising Realism in Zadie Smith's NW"
February 24, 2:30pm
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Moderator: Hema Surendranathan

Copies of the paper are available in the EDR mailbox in the English Department mailroom (GS 250, on the far right of the wall of English grad student boxes) and on the EDR Blackboard site.

Refreshments will be served.

The English Department Roundtable is a forum for graduate students in the English Department to share ideas across a wide variety of fields, time periods, and methodologies. Open to students at all stages of the program, the EDR gives us an opportunity to discuss our work in an informal setting with a group of our peers, to give and receive feedback about current projects, and to learn about the work being done by our colleagues. At a time in which the tremendous diversity of literary study has made it increasingly difficult to grasp the discipline as a whole, the purpose of the EDR is to foster a greater sense of intellectual community and cohesion within Cornell’s English Department, and to strengthen our work through increased collaboration with our peers.

Sponsored by the Class of 1916 Chair.

Graduate student seminar with Jodi A. Byrd (U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

“Gaming Indigeneity”
10:00am-12:00pm, Thursday, March 2nd
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

RSVP for the seminar by February 23 to LBL3@cornell.edu
Seminar materials will be made available to those who RSVP

~ This seminar is offered in conjunction with the Critical Race Series Lecture with Jodi A. Byrd, also on March 2, at 4:30pm ~

The Critical Race Series Lecture with Jodi A. Byrd (U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
“Playing Stories: Never Alone, Indigeneity, and the Structures of Settler Colonialism"
March 2, 4:30pm
Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, 132 Goldwin Smith Hall

Reception to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

~ Note the graduate student seminar with Jodi A. Byrd, offered earlier in the day on March 2, from 10am-noon ~

Books Sandwiched In with Cornell Career Services

March 8, 12:15pm
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

Books Sandwiched In is a monthly lunch series for Cornell undergraduates. You need not be an English Major to attend.

Email Corrine at cb624@cornell.edu to reserve your seat, and please include your netID in your reply.

The Wendy Rosenthal Gellman Lecture on Modern Literature with Douglas Mao (Johns Hopkins)
"Utopia at Fifty"
March 9, 5:00pm -- TIME CHANGED to accommodate college curriculum town hall meeting
Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, 132 Goldwin Smith Hall

The Gellman Lecture, featuring a distinguished scholar of modern literature, was established by a generous gift from Wendy Rosenthal Gellman ‘81, who majored in English at Cornell

Reception to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

~ Note the graduate student seminar with Douglas Mao, offered on March 10, from 10am-noon ~

Graduate student seminar with Douglas Mao (Johns Hopkins)
"Utopia in Motion and Not in Motion (Utopia at One Hundred)"
March 10, 10am-noon
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

RSVP for the seminar to LBL3@cornell.edu
Seminar materials will be made available to those who RSVP

~ This seminar is offered in conjunction with Wendy Rosenthal Gellman Lecture on Modern Literature with Douglas Mao on March 9, 4:30pm ~

English Department Roundtable: Maddie Reynolds
"The Ironmaster's Alternative Narrative in Bleak House"
March 10, 2:30pm
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Moderator: Mint Damrongpiwat

Copies of the paper will be available in the EDR mailbox in the English Department mailroom (GS 250, on the far right of the wall of English grad student boxes) and on the EDR Blackboard site.

Refreshments will be served.

The English Department Roundtable is a forum for graduate students in the English Department to share ideas across a wide variety of fields, time periods, and methodologies. Open to students at all stages of the program, the EDR gives us an opportunity to discuss our work in an informal setting with a group of our peers, to give and receive feedback about current projects, and to learn about the work being done by our colleagues. At a time in which the tremendous diversity of literary study has made it increasingly difficult to grasp the discipline as a whole, the purpose of the EDR is to foster a greater sense of intellectual community and cohesion within Cornell’s English Department, and to strengthen our work through increased collaboration with our peers.

Sponsored by the Class of 1916 Chair.

Lecture with Anna Kornbluh (U. of Illinois, Chicago)
"Snapshots of Political Formalism: William Henry Fox Talbot, Karl Marx, and the Cameras of Collective Life"
March 10, 4:30pm
Guerlac Room, A.D. White House

Reading by Jeff VanderMeer
March 16th, 4:30pm
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall

Jeff VanderMeer, fiction writer, reads from his work as part of the Spring 2017 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series.

Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

English Department Roundtable: Abram Coetsee
"Was Graffiti Ephemeral? Three episodes from the (an)archive of style-writing in the late demos of New York City, 1965-2013."
March 24, 2:30pm
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Moderator: TBA

Copies of the paper will be available in the EDR mailbox in the English Department mailroom (GS 250, on the far right of the wall of English grad student boxes) and on the EDR Blackboard site.

Refreshments will be served.

The English Department Roundtable is a forum for graduate students in the English Department to share ideas across a wide variety of fields, time periods, and methodologies. Open to students at all stages of the program, the EDR gives us an opportunity to discuss our work in an informal setting with a group of our peers, to give and receive feedback about current projects, and to learn about the work being done by our colleagues. At a time in which the tremendous diversity of literary study has made it increasingly difficult to grasp the discipline as a whole, the purpose of the EDR is to foster a greater sense of intellectual community and cohesion within Cornell’s English Department, and to strengthen our work through increased collaboration with our peers.

Sponsored by the Class of 1916 Chair.

The Eamon McEneaney Memorial Reading featuring Eamon Grennan

April 13, 4:30 p.m.
Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, 132 Goldwin Smith Hall

Poet Eamon Grennan reads from his work as part of the Spring 2017 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series.

This reading is made possible by Eamon McEneaney’s Cornell teammates, family, and friends. In addition to being one of Cornell’s most talented and best-loved athletes, Eamon McEneaney ’77 was a dedicated husband and father, loyal friend, prolific writer and poet, and an American hero. He died on September 11, 2001, in the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

English Department Roundtable: Mint Damrongpiwat
Title: "Fictions of Interiority in Richardson's Clarissa"
April 14, 2:30pm
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Moderator: Noah Lloyd

Copies of the paper are available in the EDR mailbox in the English Department mailroom (GS 250, on the far right of the wall of English grad student boxes) and on the EDR Blackboard site.

Refreshments will be served.

The English Department Roundtable is a forum for graduate students in the English Department to share ideas across a wide variety of fields, time periods, and methodologies.  Open to students at all stages of the program, the EDR gives us an opportunity to discuss our work in an informal setting with a group of our peers, to give and receive feedback about current projects, and to learn about the work being done by our colleagues. At a time in which the tremendous diversity of literary study has made it increasingly difficult to grasp the discipline as a whole, the purpose of the EDR is to foster a greater sense of intellectual community and cohesion within Cornell’s English Department, and to strengthen our work through increased collaboration with our peers.

Sponsored by the Class of 1916 Chair.

Reading by Lisa Russ Spaar

April 27, 4:30pm
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall

Lisa Russ Spaar, poet and essayist, reads from her work as the final installment of the Spring 2017 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series.

Reception and book signing to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

In A Word: featuring Lyrae VanClief-Stefanon and Dagmawi Woubshet, In Conversation
May 3, 4:30pm
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall

In A Word is a new series that showcases the Creative Writing Program’s influences and contributions to the literary world by its dedicated faculty of poets and fiction writers. Poet Lyrae VanClief-Stefanon and scholar Dagmawi Woubshet converse about their work.

MFA Graduation Reading
May 13, 3:00pm
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall

The Department of English Program in Creative Writing proudly presents the MFA Graduation Reading, featuring:

Rocio Anica, Fiction Writer

Christopher Berardino, Fiction Writer

Mario Giannone, Fiction Writer

Annie (Elizabeth) Goold, Poet

Jasmine Jay, Poet

Shane Kowalski, Fiction Writer

Cary Marcous, Poet

Michael Prior, Poet

Leo Rios, Fiction Writer

Reception to follow in the English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

The Department of English Diploma Ceremony & Reception

May 28, 12noon
Statler Auditorium

Immediately following the Cornell University Commencement Program

Light refreshments will be served
Photography by Grad Images

Fall 2016 Schedule

For a calendar view, please visit the English Events Calendar.

James McConkey: Courting Memory, A 95th Birthday Celebration
September 1st, 4:30pm
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall

The Fall 2016 Zalaznick Reading Series kicks off with a celebration of Prof. Emeritus James McConkey on the occasion of his 95th birthday. Three of McConkey's award-winning former students will also read from their own works in his honor.

Featuring:
James McConkey, Fiction and Nonfiction Writer
Diane Ackerman ‘78, Poet and Essayist
Gilbert Allen ‘77, Poet and Fiction Writer
A. Manette Ansay ’91, Fiction Writer & Memoirist

Reading by Joy Harjo
September 15th, 4:30pm
Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, 132 Goldwin Smith Hall

Joy Harjo, poet and memoirist, reads from her works as part of the Fall 2016 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series.

English Department Roundtable: Jesse Goldberg
"The Excessive Present: Historicity, Periodization, and the Anti-Grammar of Ghosts"
September 23rd, 2:30pm
236 Goldwin Smith Hall
Moderator: Verdie Culbreath

The Philip Freund Prize for Creative Writing Alumni Reading: H.G. Carrillo, Sally Wen Mao, Adam O’Fallon Price, & Emily Rosko
September 29th, 4:30pm
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall

Dept. of English MFA alumni H.G. Carrillo (fiction), Sally Wen Mao (poetry), Adam O’Fallon Price (fiction), & Emily Rosko (poetry) read from their works as part of the Fall 2016 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series.

Featuring:
H.G. Carrillo ‘07, Fiction Writer
Sally Wen Mao ‘12, Poet
Adam O’Fallon Price ‘14, Fiction Writer
Emily Rosko ‘03, Poet

Reading by David Madden
October 13th, 4:30pm
Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, 132 Goldwin Smith Hall

David Madden, fiction and nonfiction writer, reads from his works as part of the Fall 2016 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series.

English Department Roundtable: Gabriella Friedman
"Cultivating America: Colonial History in the Morrisonian Wilderness"
October 14th, 2:30pm
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Moderator: Jesse Goldberg

First-Year MFA Reading Series
October 14th, 5:00pm
Buffalo Street Books

MFA program features new writers Cristina Correa (poetry) and Neal Giannone (fiction), as they read fiction and poetry selections!

M.H. Abrams Lecture with Seth Lerer
“The English Lyric: Medieval to Early Modern”
October 20th, 4:30 pm
Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, 132 Goldwin Smith Hall
Reception to follow in the English Lounge (GS 258)

The M.H. Abrams Visiting Professorship was established in 2006 by Stephen H. Weiss ('57) in honor of Meyer H. “Mike" Abrams, late Class of 1916 Professor, Emeritus. Seth Lerer is the Fall 2016 M.H. Abrams Distinguished Visiting Professor.

First-Year MFA Reading Series
October 21st, 5:00pm
Buffalo Street Books

MFA program features new writers Weena Pun (fiction), Christopher Berardino (fiction), & Lyndsey Warren (poetry), as they read fiction and poetry selections!

The Paul Gottschalk Memorial Lecture with Jeffrey Masten
“Christopher Marlowe’s Queer Reformations: Heresy, Theory, Book History”
October 27th, 4:30 pm
Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, 132 Goldwin Smith Hall
Reception to follow in the English Lounge (GS 258)

Jeffrey Masten (Northwestern University) delivers the Gottschalk Memorial Lecture, established in memory of Paul Gottschalk, Professor of English at Cornell, scholar of British Renaissance literature.

Gottschalk Seminar with Jeffrey Masten
“On Queer Philologies”
October 27th, 12:00 pm
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

Graduate Student seminar with Jeffrey Masten (Northwestern University). This seminar is being offered in conjunction with the Paul Gottschalk Memorial Lecture by Jeffrey Masten at 4:30pm in HEC Auditorium (GSH 132).

English Department Roundtable: Laura Francis
"The Rules of the Game: Allegory and Space in A Game at Chess"
October 28th, 2:30pm
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Moderator: Stephen Kim

Reading by Chris Abani
November 3rd, 4:30pm
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall

Chris Abani, poet and writer, reads from his works as part of the Fall 2016 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series.

Forms, Figures, and Difference: A Conference in Honor of Fredric Bogel
November 4th, 4:30 pm
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Reception to follow in the Pale Fire Lounge

Exploring the texts, forms, genres, and critical approaches that Rick Bogel has brought to literary theory and to eighteenth-century studies and beyond, this conference includes presentations of new work as well as panels that reflect and develop Rick’s contribution. The conference opens on Friday afternoon and continues for a full day on Saturday.

Featuring:
Neil Saccamano (Cornell University), Welcome
Suvir Kaul (University of Pennsylvania), “Apostrophe As a Theory of History”
David Alvarez (DePauw University), “Enlightenment Theologies of Satire”
Moderator: Laura Brown (Cornell University)

Forms, Figures, and Difference: A Conference in Honor of Fredric Bogel
November 5th, 9:30am
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Light breakfast and lunch provided

Exploring the texts, forms, genres, and critical approaches that Rick Bogel has brought to literary theory and to eighteenth-century studies and beyond, this conference includes presentations of new work as well as panels that reflect and develop Rick’s contribution. The conference opens on Friday afternoon and continues for a full day on Saturday.

Featuring:
9:30-11:00
Mark Blackwell (University of Hartford), “‘Less’ning as he soars’: Epic and Mock-Epic, 1660-1714"
Jess Keiser (Tufts University), “Materialism in the Dunciad”
Moderator: Laura Brown (Cornell University)
 
11:00-12:30
Sarah Eron (University of Rhode Island), “Wistful Thinking”
Sarah Ensor (Portland State University), “Willa Cather and the Grammar of the Unrealized”
Moderator: Harry Shaw (Cornell University)
 
1:30-3:00
Meghan Freeman (Manhattanville College), “'All This Vast Wreck': Strategies of Aesthetic Recuperation in Middlemarch”
Shilo McGiff (Independent Scholar), “Little Greens: Joni Mitchell, Virginia Woolf, and the Poetics of Pastoral”
Moderator: Harry Shaw (Cornell University)
 
3:00-4:30
Dwight Codr (University of Connecticut), “Reading and Allusion: Pope and Mackenzie”
Stephanie DeGooyer (Willamette University), “The Politics of Form”
Moderator: Neil Saccamano (Cornell University)
 
5:00-6:00
Roundtable with Meghan Freeman, Suvir Kaul, Jess Keiser,and Shilo McGiff

First-Year MFA Reading Series
November 10th, 5:00pm
Buffalo Street Books

MFA program features new writers Hema Surendranathan (fiction) & Emily Rosello Mercurio (poetry), as they read fiction and poetry selections!

English Department Roundtable: Katherine Thorsteinson
"National Roots and Diasporic Routes: Tracing the Flying African Myth in Canada"
November 11th, 2:30pm
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Moderator: Brianna Thompson

In A Word with Ernesto Quiñonez
“The Fingerprints of Influence”
November 16th, 4:30pm
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

In A Word is a new series that showcases the Creative Writing Program’s influences and contributions to the literary world by its dedicated faculty of poets and fiction writers like Ernesto Quiñonez. 

First-Year MFA Reading Series
November 17th, 5:00pm
Buffalo Street Books

MFA program features new writers Shakarean Hutchinson (fiction), Carl Moon (poetry), & Peter Gilbert (fiction), as they read fiction and poetry selections!

English Department Roundtable: Amber Harding
"'But so it is': Contradictions of Optimism & Doubt in James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”
December 2nd, 2:30pm
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Moderator: TBA

Spring 2022 Schedule

For a calendar view, please visit the University's English Events Calendar.

In-person attendance is open to the Cornell community: Cornell ID required.

Most events are hybrid, with livestream open to all via Zoom (details in event listings below).

Adherence to university public health guidelines is required. Visit covid.cornell.edu for the latest information.

We strive to host inclusive, accessible events that enable all individuals, including individuals with disabilities, to engage fully. To be respectful of those with allergies and environmental sensitivities, we ask that you please refrain from wearing strong fragrances. Lecture and reading venues are wheelchair accessible and equipped with assistive listening technology. If you need additional accommodations to participate in an event, please contact us as soon as possible.

The Paul Gottschalk Memorial Lecture by James Simpson (Harvard University) — HYBRID event (details below)

“Unwriting Virtue, Selves and Texts: Early Modern Self-Erasure”  
Thursday, February 17, 5:00 p.m.
Guerlac Room, A.D. White House

The tradition that became Liberalism, which claims to have promoted meritocracy and individual agency, was, in both evangelical origin and in 150-year tradition thereafter, unremittingly hostile to the claims of human merit and agency upon God. In early modern elegiac poetry, Simpson observes the attempted dissolution of evangelical selfhood and the inevitable twin of that desired dissolution: the unravelling of discursive confidence that must accompany, and perhaps produces, the desire for self-dissolution. Elegiac writing unwrites itself.

In-person attendance is open to the Cornell community: Cornell ID & mask required
Livestream is open to all via Zoom: https://cornell.zoom.us/j/93037071395?pwd=TENETVJMbEpTMlBOSVQzRFJzeE1oZz09
Passcode: 1654

James Simpson is Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University (2004-). Educated at the universities of Melbourne and Oxford, he was formerly Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge. His most recent books are: Reform and Cultural Revolution, being volume 2 in the Oxford English Literary History; Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents; Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition; and Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism.

The Gottschalk Memorial Lecture was established in memory of Paul Gottschalk, Professor of English at Cornell, scholar of British Renaissance literature and author of The Meanings of Hamlet (1972). He died in 1977 at the age of 38.

This lecture will be followed by a graduate student quodlibet-seminar with James Simpson on February 18 - RSVP required

Quodlibet-seminar for graduate students with James Simpson (Harvard University)

Friday, February 18, 10:00 a.m.
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

Simpson will host a mixture of the quodlibet and seminar models. Participants will receive an essay that will be of interest both for medievalists and early modernists, yet Simpson will prioritize hearing what students are working on. The group will refer back to the essay if that is productive, but students are encouraged to gain more from Simpson, and the group, hearing about, and responding to, their projects. Students should come with a three-minute max oral presentation of their project, or proposed project, mentally prepared.

James Simpson is Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University (2004-). Educated at the universities of Melbourne and Oxford, he was formerly Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge. His most recent books are: Reform and Cultural Revolution, being volume 2 in the Oxford English Literary History; Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents; Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition; and Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism.

RSVP BY FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 11 to lbl3@cornell.edu to sign up for the quodlibet-seminar and receive the essay.

The Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading by J. Robert Lennon & Mukoma Wa Ngugi — HYBRID event (details below)

Thursday, February 24, 5:00 p.m.
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall

The Spring 2022 Barbara & David Zalaznick Creative Writing Reading Series begins with the Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading featuring literatures in English faculty: novelist J. Robert Lennon and poet, writer, and scholar Mukoma Wa Ngugi.

In-person attendance is open to the Cornell community: Cornell ID & mask required
Livestream is open to all via Zoom: https://cornell.zoom.us/j/93391601147?pwd=TVJWcEFXSGwxRE1yb0tJbERFZm1SUT09
Passcode: 349124

J. Robert Lennon is the author of three story collections and nine novels, including Familiar, Broken River, and Subdivision. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, and Harper’s, and his criticism in The London Review of Books, The Guardian, and The New York Times Book Review. Lennon is a professor in the Department of Literatures in English.

Mukoma Wa Ngugi is an associate professor in the Department of Literatures in English and the author of recently released Unbury Our Dead with Song; as well as The Rise of the African Novel: Politics of Language, Identity and Ownership; the novels Black Star Nairobi and Nairobi Heat; and two books of poetry, Logotherapy and Hurling Words at Consciousness. His novel Mrs. Shaw was released in Eastern Africa as We, the Scarred in 2020. Nairobi Heat has just been optioned by a major Hollywood studio. 

The Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading was created in 2002 by family and friends of Richard Cleaveland, Cornell Class of ’74, to honor his memory.

Books by the authors will be available for purchase at the reading courtesy of Ithaca's local cooperative, Buffalo Street Books.

Book signing to follow.

This is the first event in the Spring 2022 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series.

"Frog in the Mouth": A Virtual Reading by Zahid Rafiq

Thursday, March 3, 10:00 a.m. ET
View the event recording here

Writer, journalist, and alumnus Zahid Rafiq (MFA ’21) will read from his short story collection. The reading will be followed by conversation and a brief question and answer session.

Zahid Rafiq is a writer and journalist based in Kashmir. He is a recent alumnus of the Cornell MFA Program in Creative Writing and is working on a collection of short stories set in Kashmir.

Tune in to this special event! Livestream powered by our friends at eCornell.

Reading by Ling Ma — HYBRID event (details below)

Thursday, March 10, 5:00 p.m.
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall

The Spring 2022 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series continues with a reading by fiction writer, Kirkus Prize winner, & alumna Ling Ma (MFA '15).

In-person attendance is open to the Cornell community: Cornell ID & mask required
Livestream is open to all via Zoom: https://cornell.zoom.us/j/96305762726?pwd=UXZvUS9oeHdEYnRMM2lqd0ZrbUtSQT09
Passcode: 039102

Ling Ma is the author of the critically acclaimed debut novel Severance, which won the Kirkus Prize for Fiction, the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Named a New York Times Notable Book and an NPR Best Book of 2018, it has been translated into seven languages. Ma's fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Granta, Playboy, Vice, Chicago Reader, Ninth Letter, Buzzfeed, and more. Her fellowships include a Whiting Award and an NEA creative writing fellowship. Ma was born in Sanming, China, and grew up in Utah and Kansas. She received her MFA from Cornell University. Prior to graduate school she worked as a journalist and editor. She has taught creative writing and English at Cornell University and the University of Chicago. She lives in Chicago.

Books by Ling Ma will be available for purchase at the reading courtesy of Ithaca's local cooperative, Buffalo Street Books.

Book signing to follow.

This is the second event in the Spring 2022 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series.

The Wendy Rosenthal Gellman Lecture on Modern Literature by Brent Hayes Edwards (Columbia University) — HYBRID event (details below)

"Clipping in and out of the Trenches: Black Radicalism and the Archive"
Thursday, March 17, 5:00 p.m.
Kaufmann Auditorium, G64 Goldwin Smith Hall

A early as 1911, the brilliant Black editor, street orator, and activist Hubert Harrison complained that "the Negro is being ‘done’ by headlines and other newspaper devices.” Part of a broader project on archival practice as a form of political radicalism, this lecture considers the innovative newspaper clipping and scrapbooking practices of interwar Black intellectuals including Harrison and Claude McKay as an important mode of critique aimed at the pervasive racial prejudice of the mainstream Western press -- a high-stakes attempt to "plead in the courts of the oppressor against oppression," as Harrison put it.

In-person attendance is open to the Cornell community: Cornell ID & mask required
Livestream is open to all via Zoom: https://cornell.zoom.us/j/94246852749?pwd=Tk9tbmVQaXFLMHBCblZkb2pCUUxrdz09
Passcode: 067118

Brent Hayes Edwards is the Peng Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the editor of the journal PMLA, and the author of books including The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism and Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination. His translations include Michel Leiris’s 1934 monumental classic, Phantom Africa. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, Edwards was elected in 2020 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The Gellman Lecture, featuring a distinguished scholar of modern literature, was established by a generous gift from Wendy Rosenthal Gellman '81, who majored in English at Cornell.

The Language of Poetry in a Time of Crisis: A Poetry Reading and Conversation with Ilya Kaminsky –– HYBRID event (details below)

Thursday, March 24, 5:00 p.m.
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall

Poet, translator, and essayist Ilya Kaminsky will read poems, discuss his collections Dancing in Odessa and Deaf Republic, and speak about his new work.

In-person attendance is open to the Cornell community: Cornell ID required
Livestream is open to all via Zoom: https://cornell.zoom.us/j/95557154108?pwd=UmJvSGZ3elhPTENtYlhJOTlMN1lXdz09
Passcode: 467216

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, Ukraine in 1977, and arrived in the United States in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the American government. He currently lives in Atlanta, where he holds the Margaret T. and Henry C. Bourne, Jr. Chair in Poetry at Georgia Institute of Technology.

Kaminsky is the author of Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press in US and Faber in UK), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the National Jewish Book Award, as well as finalist for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, the Forward Prize for Poetry (UK) and T.S. Eliot Prize (UK). Deaf Republic was a New York Times Notable Book for 2019, and was also named Best Book of 2019 by dozens of other publications, including Washington Post, Times Literary Supplement, The Telegraph, Publishers Weekly, The Guardian, Irish Times, Vanity Fair, Lithub, Library Journal, and New Statesman.

His first book, Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press in US and Faber in UK) won the Whiting Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Metcalf Award, a Lannan Fellowship, an Academy of American Poets’ Fellowship, the NEA Fellowship, Poetry magazine's Levinson Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

He has published articles and essays dealing with the subjects of immigration, disability, human rights, translation and cultural memory in publications such as The Guardian, The New York Times, The Boston Review, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, and The Yale Review.

Kaminsky is co-editor and co-translator of many other books, including Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (Harper Collins) and Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva (Alice James Books). His poetry had also received awards internationally, most recently in Lithuania and China and was shortlisted for the Neustsdt International Literature Prize. He was selected by BBC as “one of the twelve artists that changed the world.”  

Literatures in English Department Roundtable: Ariel Estrella
A Moment of Pause: Determining the Queer Immaterial of Richard Bruce Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies and Jade.”

March 25, 12:00 p.m.
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Zoom (contact ocm8@cornell.edu for Zoom link)
Moderator: Richard Thomson

Copies of the paper can be found on Canvas here. If you aren't able to access the link, please email ocm8@cornell.edu for a copy.

The Literatures in English Department Roundtable (LEDR) is a forum for graduate students in the Department of Literatures in English to share ideas across a wide variety of fields, time periods, and methodologies. Open to students at all stages of the program, the LEDR gives graduate students an opportunity to present work in an informal setting to a group of peers, to get feedback about a current project, and to learn about the work being done by colleagues. Projects might include excerpts of dissertation chapters, article drafts, conference papers, FWS writing assignment sequences, or course syllabi. At a time in which the tremendous diversity of literary study has made it increasingly difficult to grasp the discipline as a whole on one’s own, the purpose of the LEDR is to foster a greater sense of intellectual community and cohesion within Cornell’s Department of Literatures in English, and to strengthen graduate work through increased collaboration. The LEDR meets 5 times a semester in the department lounge. In order to facilitate discussion by members of the audience (including a large number of graduate students as well as faculty), papers being presented at the LEDR are made available one week prior to each meeting; meetings themselves will focus primarily on discussion between the audience and the presenter.

Sponsored by the Class of 1916 Chair

The Abrams Lecture by Fred Moten (M.H. Abrams Distinguished Visiting Professor) — HYBRID event (details below)

"Nothing in the Way of Things"
Thursday, March 31, 5:00 p.m.
Kaufmann Auditorium, G64 Goldwin Smith Hall

Amiri Baraka’s poetry was committed to the problem and the practice of what he called “social development.” This is evident in a late poem of his called “Something in the Way of Things (In Town).” The evidence is rhythmic, which is manifest in Baraka’s oral performances of it and in what Du Bois might have called the poem’s sociological hesitancy. The lecture attempts to read Baraka's reading, in deviant adherence to his rhythm, and then to investigate poetry’s dissident sojourn in the way of things.

In-person attendance is open to the Cornell community: Cornell ID required
Livestream is open to all via Zoom: https://cornell.zoom.us/j/94475503478?pwd=ekUyaWNvZytHUlNJTXNqRUVpZElTdz09
Passcode: 740326

Fred Moten is Professor of Performance Studies and Comparative Literature at New York University. He is interested in social movement, aesthetic experiment and black study. Moten has written a number of books of poetry and criticism, including In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition; Hughson's Tavern; B. Jenkins; The Feel Trio; The Little Edges; The Service Porch; consent not to be a single being; and All That Beauty.

The M.H. Abrams Visiting Professorship was established in 2006 by Stephen H. Weiss (’57) in honor of Meyer H. Abrams, Class of 1916 Professor, Emeritus.

Reading by M. NourbeSe Philip — HYBRID event (details below)

Thursday, April 14, 5:00 p.m.
Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, G70 Klarman Hall

The Spring 2022 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series continues with a reading by poet & PEN/Nabokov Award winner M. NourbeSe Philip.

In-person attendance is open to the Cornell community: Cornell ID required
Livestream is open to all via Zoom: https://cornell.zoom.us/j/92766493646?pwd=OVI3enJwM3J5SG5UOGZENWQzczB0QT09
Passcode: 555562

Born in Tobago, M. NourbeSe Philip is an unembedded poet, essayist, novelist, playwright, and independent scholar who lives in the space-time of the City of Toronto where she practiced law for seven years before becoming a poet and writer. Among her published works are the seminal She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks; the speculative prose poem, Looking for Livingston: An Odyssey of Silence; the young adult novel, Harriet’s Daughter; the play, Coups and Calypsos; and four collections of essays including her most recent collection, BlanK. Her book-length poem, Zong!, is a conceptually innovative, genre-breaking epic, which explodes the legal archive as it relates to slavery. Zong! was named the 2021 winner of World Literature Today’s (WLT) 21 Books for the 21st Century. Among her awards are numerous Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council grants, including the prestigious Chalmers Award (Ontario Arts Council) and the Canada Council’s Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award (Outstanding mid-career artist), as well as the Pushcart Prize (USA), the Casa de las Americas Prize (Cuba), the Lawrence Foundation Prize (USA), the Arts Foundation of Toronto Writing and Publishing Award (Toronto), and Dora Award finalist (Drama). Her fellowships include Guggenheim, McDowell, and Rockefeller (Bellagio). She is an awardee of both the YWCA Woman of Distinction (Arts) and the Elizabeth Fry Rebels for a Cause awards. She has been Writer-in-Residence at several universities and a guest at writers' retreats. M. NourbeSe Philip is the 2020 recipient of PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. She is also the 2021 recipient of the Canada Council for the Arts’ lifetime achievement award, the Molson Prize, for her “invaluable contributions to literature.”

Books by M. NourbeSe Philip will be available for purchase at the reading courtesy of Ithaca's local cooperative, Buffalo Street Books.

Book signing to follow.

This is the third event in the Spring 2022 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series.

Literatures in English Department Roundtable:Sara Stamatiades

The Entremés: In-Between Spaces in the Spanish Golden Age

April 22, 2:00 p.m.
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Zoom (contact ocm8@cornell.edu for Zoom link)
Moderator: Richard Thomson

Copies of the paper can be found on Canvas here. If you aren't able to access the link, please email ocm8@cornell.edu for a copy.

Bio: Sara is a 4th year PhD candidate in the Literatures in English Department, where she studies 16th and 17th century Spanish and English theater. Her dissertation project examines the ways in which early modern English and Spanish writers created and translated the world through the literary imagination. From investigating 'discovery' as a theatrical device to the grammar of expulsion, Sara's dissertation contends with early modern problems and their contemporary legacies. She would be incredibly grateful for any feedback on her first dissertation chapter-in-progress!

 

Abstract: In 1574, Fernán González de Eslava was imprisoned in Mexico City for writing a play — and a short one at that. Soon after, another young writer, Cristóbal de Llerena, was deported from Santo Domingo and sentenced to a year-long exile for the same crime. The works in question were both entreméses, interludes that were performed between the acts of comedias in Golden Age Spain and that typically spotlighted marginalized, working-class figures. While the genre has remained relatively unexamined in scholarship, these short plays made up around 20 to 30 percent of staged drama during the period. And as these brief, biographical anecdotes demonstrate, entreméses could be deeply controversial and even subversive, contradicting the oft-circulated portrayal of Spanish Golden Age drama as monolithic and conservatively propagandistic. This dissertation chapter in progress will analyze multiple entreméses written in Spain and across the Atlantic during the 16th and 17th centuries. As I will argue, the genre of the entremés becomes an in-between space, a liminal stage where Spanish narratives of honor, infallibility of the law, and imperial superiority become spectacularly interrupted.

The Literatures in English Department Roundtable (LEDR) is a forum for graduate students in the Department of Literatures in English to share ideas across a wide variety of fields, time periods, and methodologies. Open to students at all stages of the program, the LEDR gives graduate students an opportunity to present work in an informal setting to a group of peers, to get feedback about a current project, and to learn about the work being done by colleagues. Projects might include excerpts of dissertation chapters, article drafts, conference papers, FWS writing assignment sequences, or course syllabi. At a time in which the tremendous diversity of literary study has made it increasingly difficult to grasp the discipline as a whole on one’s own, the purpose of the LEDR is to foster a greater sense of intellectual community and cohesion within Cornell’s Department of Literatures in English, and to strengthen graduate work through increased collaboration. The LEDR meets 5 times a semester in the department lounge. In order to facilitate discussion by members of the audience (including a large number of graduate students as well as faculty), papers being presented at the LEDR are made available one week prior to each meeting; meetings themselves will focus primarily on discussion between the audience and the presenter.

Sponsored by the Class of 1916 Chair

Reading by Bao Phi — HYBRID event (details below)

Thursday, April 28, 5:00 p.m.
Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, 132 Goldwin Smith Hall

The Spring 2022 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series concludes with a reading by Vietnamese American multigenre writer Bao Phi.

In-person attendance is open to the Cornell community: Cornell ID required
Livestream is open to all via Zoom: https://cornell.zoom.us/j/92092286517?pwd=d0RJdndPV3FOK3FraDZJZVAyODRMUT09
Passcode: 386941

Bao Phi is a two-time Minnesota Grand Slam champion and a National Poetry Slam finalist, whose poetry is included in the 2006 Best American Poetry anthology and published widely elsewhere, including two collections published by Coffee House Press as well as other collections and magazines such as Spoken Word Revolution Redux, Poetry Magazine, Asian-American Literary Review, and many others. His fiction and essays have appeared in Octavia's Brood: Stories from Social Justice Movements, A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota, and others. He is also known for his three children’s books: his A Different Pond received six starred reviews and multiple awards, including the Caldecott Honor, an Ezra Jack Keats Honor, the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association award for best picture book, the Minnesota Book Award for picture books, and other recognitions. Phi is a visiting critic in the Department of Literatures in English during the 2021-2022 academic year.

Books by Bao Phi will be available for purchase at the reading courtesy of Ithaca's local cooperative, Buffalo Street Books.

Book signing to follow.

This is the fourth & final event in the Spring 2022 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series.

Literatures in English Department Roundtable:Taylor Pryor

‘Time is the Last Sacred Territory:’ Tenuous Temporalities, Japanese Colonialism, and Ainu Erasure in Naoko Takeuchi's Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon

April 29, 12:00 p.m.
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Zoom
Moderator: Laura Caicedo

Copies of the paper can be found on Canvas here. If you aren't able to access the link, please email ocm8@cornell.edu for a copy.

Bio: Taylor Pryor's work critically examines the ways that race, time, sexuality, and disability are implicated and rendered in various forms of media. She is particularly interested in representations of identity and the manner in which they inform--and are informed by--socio-political realities. Her current project explores indigeneity and racialization in Naoko Takeuchi's Sailor Moon franchise. She presented at the 2021 Northeastern Modern Language Association conference, and her writing has been published in Prose Studies. 

 

Abstract: The Sailor Moon franchise, and anime studies at large, has become a site of burgeoning interest. While scholarly work that critically examines the cultural impact of Takeuchi’s animated tour-de-force exists, little to no scholarship addresses the various historical underpinnings that appear to undergird Sailor Moon’s many narrative arcs. Responding to this theoretical gap, this paper explores Naoko Takeuchi's Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon through the lens of Japan’s settler-colonial past and present. I contend that the narrative trajectories of the characters in Naoko Takeuchi’s Sailor Moon franchise—specifically, the narrative of Sailor Pluto, the solitary guardian of the entrance to space-time–serve as a textual example of the displacement, erasure, and eradication of the Indigenous Ainu peoples of Japan, and suggest that Pluto’s racialized appearance, relationship with and to time, and narrative arc gesture towards a historical linkage to Japan’s colonialist past. I plan to address the following lines of inquiry: what can Sailor Pluto’s narrative trajectory reveal to us about the colonialist project in Japan? In what way does her relationship with space and time reflect the dispossession of the Ainu peoples through what Juliana Hu Pegues terms “space-time colonialism” (13)? Finally, how might the events that culminate in Pluto’s death provide a lens through which to further explore Japanese imperialism? In doing so, it is my hope to elucidate the ways in which Takeuchi’s manga contains the potential to unearth the histories of Indigenous erasure—namely, Ainu erasure—that contemporary Japan wishes to conceal.

The Literatures in English Department Roundtable (LEDR) is a forum for graduate students in the Department of Literatures in English to share ideas across a wide variety of fields, time periods, and methodologies. Open to students at all stages of the program, the LEDR gives graduate students an opportunity to present work in an informal setting to a group of peers, to get feedback about a current project, and to learn about the work being done by colleagues. Projects might include excerpts of dissertation chapters, article drafts, conference papers, FWS writing assignment sequences, or course syllabi. At a time in which the tremendous diversity of literary study has made it increasingly difficult to grasp the discipline as a whole on one’s own, the purpose of the LEDR is to foster a greater sense of intellectual community and cohesion within Cornell’s Department of Literatures in English, and to strengthen graduate work through increased collaboration. The LEDR meets 5 times a semester in the department lounge. In order to facilitate discussion by members of the audience (including a large number of graduate students as well as faculty), papers being presented at the LEDR are made available one week prior to each meeting; meetings themselves will focus primarily on discussion between the audience and the presenter.

Sponsored by the Class of 1916 Chair