The Department is thrilled to announce our signature lecture series for academic year 2024-25, Literary Studies Now, funded through the generosity of the Russel B. Nye endowment. Our full schedule of guest speakers is listed below.
Merve Emre
"Too Close Reading: On American Miniaturism"
September 10, 4 p.m., Wells Hall B342
Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and the Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. She earned a BA from Harvard and a PhD from Yale. She is the author of Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (Chicago, 2017), The Ferrante Letters (Columbia, 2019), and The Personality Brokers (Doubleday, 2018), which was selected as one of the best books of 2018 by the New York Times, the Economist, NPR, CBC, and the Spectator, and informs the CNN/HBO Max documentary feature film Persona. She is the editor of Once and Future Feminist (MIT, 2018), The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway (Liveright, 2021), and The Norton Modern Library Mrs. Dalloway (Norton, 2021). She is finishing a book titled Post-Discipline: Two Futures for Literary Study (Chicago) and writing a book called Love and Other Useless Pursuits (Norton US/HarperCollins UK).
She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker. Her essays and criticism have appeared in publications ranging from The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, and the London Review of Books to New Literary History, PMLA, American Literature, American Literary History, and Modernism/modernity. In 2019, she was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize. In 2021, she was awarded the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle. Her work has been supported by the Whiting Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Leverhulme Trust, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Quebec, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin. She has judged the International Booker Prize, the Story Prize, the Whiting Foundation Grant, and other major prizes and awards. She currently serves on the boards of Words Without Borders, the Hawthornden Foundation, and Connecticut Humanities.
Pardis Dabashi
"Losing the Plot: Form and Feeling in the Modern Novel"
September 19, 2 p.m., Wells Hall B342
Pardis Dabashi is Assistant Professor of Literatures in English and Film Studies at Bryn Mawr College. She teaches classes on twentieth-century literature, film, and theory, and her research examines the intersection of form, politics, and affect in narrative film and literary modernism. She is interested in how aesthetic and rhetorical form index or trouble stances of political, normative, and epistemic certainty, which she explores by examining structures of feeling such as ambivalence and doubt. She is author of Losing the Plot: Film and Feeling in the Modern Novel (Chicago, 2023); coeditor of The New William Faulkner Studies (Cambridge, 2022); and coeditor of the Visualities forum on Modernism/modernity Print Plus. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in PLMA, Modernism/modernity, Textual Practice, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, Film Quarterly, Early Popular Visual Culture, Arizona Quarterly, Public Books, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere.
Alix Beeston
"Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film"
September 20, 2 p.m., Wells Hall B122
Alix Beeston is Reader in Literature and Visual Culture (Associate Professor) at Cardiff University. She is a writer and academic whose work advances interdisciplinary approaches to literature, film, and photography in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, while also experimenting with new modes of scholarly writing and dissemination. Her work performs a feminist revaluation of negative phenomena such as absence or silence as well as literary and visual objects that are seen as marginal, riven with gaps and flaws, or confounding in their effects. She is the founder of the digital project Object Women and author of In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen (Oxford, 2018). Her coedited book by Stefan Solomon, Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of Unfinished Film, was published as part of the Feminist Media Histories series at the University of California Press in 2023. Alix is the founder and coeditor, with Pardis Dabashi, of the Visualities forum at the online platform of Modernism/modernity; the coorganizer, with Hayley O’Malley and John Hoffman, of the Film Studies Special Interest Group at the Modernist Studies Association; and a founding member and coconvenor of Image Works: Research and Practice in Visual Culture at Cardiff University.
Ramzi Fawaz
"Webbed Attachments: Psychedelic Lessons from the Multiverse"
October 18, 4 p.m., Wells Hall B342
Ramzi Fawaz is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he currently holds a Romnes Faculty Fellowship for advanced research in the humanities. He is the author of two monographs, including The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (NYU, 2016), which won the ASAP Book Prize, and Queer Forms (NYU, 2022). With Darieck Scott he coedited a special issue of American Literature titled “Queer About Comics,” which won the 2019 Best Special Issue Award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. Alongside Deborah E. Whaley and Shelley Streeby, he coedited Keywords for Comics Studies, which was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2022. Fawaz is currently at work on a new book project titled “Literary Theory on Acid: Reading for Diversity in the Psychedelic Era,” in which he argues for the necessity of literary and cultural studies approaches to the contemporary psychedelic renaissance. As part of this project, he is editing a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly on “Psychedelic Imaginaries.”
Adrienne Brown
"The Residential is Racial: A Perceptual History of Mass Homeownership"
November 19, 4 p.m., Wells Hall B342
Adrienne Brown is Associate Professor in the Departments of English and Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago and Faculty Director of Arts + Public Life. With Valerie Smith, she coedited the 2015 volume Race and Real Estate, an interdisciplinary collection rethinking narratives of property and citizenship. Her 2017 book The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race, winner of the Modernist Studies Association’s 2018 First Book Prize, recovers the skyscraper’s drastic effects not only on the shape of the city but the racial sensorium of its residents. Her newest book, The Residential Is Racial: A Perceptual History of Mass Homeownership, was published by Stanford University Press in 2024.
Dan Sinykin
"The Sociology of Literature: Big Fiction and the Conglomerate Era"
February 19, 4 p.m., Wells Hall B342
Dan Sinykin is Associate Professor of English at Emory University and the author of Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature (Columbia, 2023) and American Literature and the Long Downturn: Neoliberal Apocalypse (Oxford, 2020). He has written for Dissent, n+1, The Nation, the New York Times, Slate, Washington Post, and other venues.
Stephanie Burt
"Taylor Swift's Literary Nature" (talk)
March 27, 4 p.m., Wells Hall B342
"Why Are We Mermaids"? (reading)
March 28, 3 p.m., Wells Hall B342
Stephanie Burt is a poet, literary critic, and professor with nine published books, including two critical books on poetry and three poetry collections. Her essay collection Close Calls with Nonsense was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other works include We Are Mermaids; Advice from the Lights; The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them; The Art of the Sonnet; Something Understood: Essays and Poetry for Helen Vendler; The Forms of Youth: Adolescence and 20th Century Poetry; Parallel Play: Poems; Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden; and Randall Jarrell and His Age. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the Believer, and the Boston Review.
Zainab Cheena
"Transnational Stagecraft: Excavating Early Modern Race and Globalization in English and Spanish Renaissance Theatres"
April 8, 4 p.m., Well Hall B342
Zainab Cheema is Assistant Professor of Early World Literature at Florida Gulf Coast University. Her teaching and research focus on contact zones in early globalizations, early modern race studies, translation movements, Anglo-Iberian cultural exchanges in early modern theatre, and contemporary film and television adaptations of medieval and early modern literatures. Zainab is a member of the #ShakeRace and #RaceB4Race scholarly communities, as well as the Borderlands Shakespeare Colectiva. Zainab’s work has been supported by fellowships from the Fulbright Scholarship Program, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Newberry Library, and the Huntington Library. She is currently working on her first book monograph supported by a Folger Long Term Fellowship for 2024–2025. In her recent work, she has explored racial queenship and Anglo-Spanish embassies in Shakespeare’s romances; the translation of immigration and exile from the novels of Cervantes onto the early modern English stage; intersections of Morisco and Black slaveries in the plays of Lope de Vega; the intersections of early modern race with #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo in Starz’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s history plays for popular television; and representations of disability and caste in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Shakespeare trilogy. Zainab have been published with English Language Notes, Shakespeare Survey, Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, Feminist Studies, The Bulletin of the Comediantes, The Shakespeare International Yearbook, and other publications.
