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Department of English

News

Medievalist Warren Ginsberg becomes the English Department's first Knight Professor.

Professor Steven Shankman is named UNESCO Chair in Transcultural Studies, Interreligious Dialogue and Peace. Read more.

English Professor and environmental activist Louise Westling receives the University of Oregon's Charles E. Johnson Memorial Award for "exceptional service." Read more.

Professor Chadwick Allen of Ohio State University, a specialist in comparative indigenous studies, joins the English Department faculty as the 2007-08 Moore Distinguished Visiting Professor.

Professor Karen Ford receives a 2007 Research Innovation Award to support her work on a new book on race and form in American poetry. Read more.

Professor Suzanne Clark wins the Wayne T. Westling Award, established by the University Senate in 2001 to honor faculty or staff who have provided long-term leadership and service to the university community. Read more

Upcoming Events

Poet and Fiction Writer N. Scott Momaday

The Promise of Reason: The New Rhetoric after Fifty Years

To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the appearance of Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's La Nouvelle Rhétorique: Traité de l'Argumentation, the University of Oregon will host an international conference from May 17-20, 2008. Deadline for submission of paper proposals is September 21, 2007. To read more about The New Rhetoric and The Promise of Reason conference, go to http://www.uoregon.edu/~promreas/

For further information, contact: promreas@uoregon.edu

Indigenous Literatures and Other Arts: A Symposium and Workshop

May 2 – 3, 2008

In what ways are Indigenous literatures related to other Indigenous arts?  Scholars have long argued that Indigenous oral traditions are significant contexts for written works.  Few literary critics, however, have considered the potential relevance of the wide array of other Indigenous arts practices, including dance, music, and performance; architecture; painting, carving, and photography; basket making, weaving, and beadwork; and film and video production.  Similarly, few critics have incorporated ideas from Indigenous arts and media scholarship into their interpretations of written texts.

This two-day Symposium will bring together a diverse group of scholars, artists, and community members to investigate the potential relationships among Indigenous literatures, other Indigenous arts practices, and Indigenous arts and media scholarship.  Through staged conversations and hands-on workshops, participants will investigate a range of complex questions about how we understand the tensions between politics and aesthetics, audience and innovation, situated improvisation and the continuity of custom.

For more information and to sign up to attend, please go to Indigenous.

Recent Events 

Fiction Writer Antonya Nelson

Poet Dorianne Laux & Fiction Writer Ehud Havazelet

Northwest Review 50th Anniversary

A reading by science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin honoring Northwest Review, followed by a wine and jazz reception.

Fiction Writer David Bradley

The 2007-2008 Cressman Lecture: Bill McKibben, “Building the Climate Movement”

Bill McKibben is an environmentalist and author who frequently writes about global warming, alternative energy, and the risks associated with human genetic engineering. Beginning in the summer of 2006, he led the organization of the largest demonstrations against global warming in American history.  His most recent book, Deep Economy: the Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, (March 2007) addresses what he sees as shortcomings of the growth economy and envisions a transition to more local-scale enterprise.

McKibben is a frequent contributor to various magazines, including The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Orion Magazine, Mother Jones, The New York Review of Books, Granta, Rolling Stone, and Outside. He is also a board member and contributor to Grist Magazine.  He has been awarded Guggenheim and Lyndhurst Fellowships, and won the Lannan Prize for nonfiction writing in 2000. He has honorary degrees from Green Mountain College, Unity College, Lebanon Valley College and Sterling College.

Sponsored by the Oregon Humanities Center

Linda Mizejewski, "Queen Latifah, Unruly Women, and the Bodies of Romantic Comedy"

Linda Mizejewski is Professor of Women’s Studies at Ohio State University and author of three books on film and cultural studies. Her first two books, Divine Decadence:  Fascism, Female Spectacle, and the Makings of Sally Bowles (Princeton, 1992) and Ziegfeld Girl: Image and Icon in Culture and Cinema (Duke, 1999), are about the historical, sexual, and racial meanings of high-profile showgirls in American culture. Her most recent book is Hardboiled and High Heeled: The Woman Detective in Popular Culture (Routledge, 2004). Her current research project is on women and comedy, specifically the impact of the unruly and minority female body on traditional comedy film narratives.

Poet Joseph Harrison

Joseph Harrison’s 2003 collection, Someone Else’s Name, was chosen as one of five poetry books of the year by The Washington Post and was a finalist for the Poets’ Prize.  His forthcoming book, Identity Theft, will be released this year in the U.K. and in early 2008 in America.

Poets Lillias Bever & Susan Rich

Trans-American Critical Perspectives: A Symposium

May 3, 2007 

Over the past two decades, hemispheric approaches to the literatures of the Americas have redrawn the nation-centered cartographies of traditional literary studies and have explored the disciplinary limits of scholarship in American studies and Latin American studies, fields in which questions about the social significance of culture, literature, racial formation, imperialism, and nationalism provide overlapping critical interests. The purpose of this event is to bring together scholars whose work traces the changing landscape of the study of the cultures and literatures of the hemisphere to discuss the disciplinary changes as well as the political challenges posed by these theoretical remappings.  Speakers: 

Things! A Series of Lectures, a Seminar, and a Symposium 

April 13, 2007:  3pm-125 McKenzie Hall

Bill Brown, University of Chicago: "Commodity Nationalism and the Lost Object" 

April 18, 2007:  3pm-Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art

The Not-So-Secret Lives of Things: A Faculty Symposium 

April 23, 2007:  3pm-Knight Library Browsing Room

Elaine Freedgood, New York University: "The Social Lives of People as Told by Things" 

April 24, 2007:  3pm-Humanities Center Conference Room

Faculty seminar with Elaine Freedgood
Based on the introductory chapter of her recent book, The Ideas in Things 

Read more about Things: http://uoregon.edu/~engl/Things.pdf.

Faisal Devji, "Dying on Principle: The Claims and Renunciations of Suicide Bombing"

Friday, April 13
4 pm, Lillis 211 

Faisal Devji is a historian who specializes in studies of Islam, globalization, violence and ethics.  He teaches at The New School for Social Research in New York City.  He received his PhD from the University of Chicago and was chosen to be a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. He has taught at Yale University and also served as Head of Graduate Studies at The Institute of Ismaili Studies in London. 

The 2006-07 Moore Guest Lecture Series: "Black Masculinity"

October 23, 2006

3:30 pm.
Browsing Room, Knight Library

Shelly Eversley, Baruch College, CUNY: "Richard Wright's Postcards from Africa: Black Women's Bodies and the Emergence of the Cosmopolitan Male" 

March 5, 2007

3:30 pm.
Browsing Room, Knight Library

Alexandra Juhasz, Pizer College: "I'm Still Here: Gay Men of Color and the Revisioning of AIDS" 

April 16, 2007

3:30 pm.
Browsing Room, Knight Library

Robin Kelly, University of Southern California: "Black and Tan Fantasies: Visualizing Race and Masculinity through the Dark Shades of Jazz"

The Future of Minority Studies

National Conference: New Directions and Intersections
University of Oregon
November 9-11, 2006 

The Future of Minority Studies Research Project (FMS) is a consortium of scholars and academic institutions with a primary interest in minority identity, education, and social transformation. Although originally conceived in 2000 as a year-long interdisciplinary bicoastal research initiative, the FMS project has evolved to become a mobile 'think tank' facilitating focused and productive discussions across disciplines about the democratizing role of minority identity and participation in a multicultural society.  For more information, see  http://fmsproject.cornell.edu.