Category: Announcements

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Rob Doggett to speak on editing Yeats at upcoming conference in Rochester

rob_doggettProf. Rob Doggett will lecture on “Editing Yeats’s Early Poetry, Drama, and Fairy Tales” Friday, November 20 at 10:00 a.m. in the Galisano Midlevel Gateway Building of St. John Fisher College in Rochester, NY.

The lecture is part of St. John Fisher’s two-day conference, W.B. Yeats at 150: A Celebration, marking the 150th anniversary of the poet’s birth.

Prof. Doggett is the author of Deep-Rooted Things: Empire and Nation in the Poetry and Drama of William Butler Yeats (University of Notre Dame Press, 2006) and editor of When You Are Old: Early Poems, Plays and Fairy Tales of William Butler Yeats (Penguin Classics, 2015).

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Pier Gabrielle Foreman to deliver 2015 Walter Harding Lecture November 16

This year’s Walter Harding Lecture will be delivered by Pier Gabrielle Foreman, Ned B. Allen Professor of English and Professor of Black American Studies, University of Delaware.

Professor Foreman’s lecture, titled “To Speculate Darkly: Slavery, Black Visual Culture, and the Promises and Problems of Print,” will take place at 7:30 p.m. on November 16 in Doty Recital Hall on the SUNY Geneseo campus.

Pier Gabrielle Foreman Press ShotAs a scholar of African American studies and nineteenth-century literary history and culture, Prof. Foreman has examined the relationship between literary and activist practices. Her book Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women In The Nineteenth Century (Univ. of Illinois Press, 2009), examines this relationship in the work of authors Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson, Frances E.W. Harper, Victoria Earle Matthews, and Amelia Johnson.

Professor Foreman is co-editor, with Reginald Pitts, of the Penguin Classics edition of Harriet Wilson’s 1859 autobiographical novel Our Nig, Or, Sketches From The Life Of A Free Black, In A Two-Story White House, North. Showing That Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There.

Active in digital as well as print scholarship, and committed to collaborative work that advances public understanding and engages the community, Professor Foreman serves as faculty director of the Colored Conventions Project, a digital humanities project that documents the 19th-century African-American conventions movement through crowdsourced transcriptions of convention minutes.

The Harding Lecture is free and open to the public. A reception will follow in the Doty Hall lobby.

Download the poster (11×17).

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John Gallaher on campus September 21

Poet, editor, and musician John Gallaher will read from his work  on Monday, September 21 at 8 p.m. in Welles 111, the Harding Room, on the SUNY Geneseo campus.

According to Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips (Yes! Gallaher gets praise from rock stars!) “Gallaher is not a writer or a poet, he is a psychic using words to trick us.” He’s written collaborative books and produced film poems.

A previous winner of the prestigious Boston Review Poetry Contest (judged by Rae Armantrout) and the author of five books of poetry, Gallaher is a writer no less a person than John Ashbery has called “[a] poet I once influenced who ha[s] moved beyond me.” Gallaher builds on Ashbery’s chatty multidirectionality and associative logic by adding his own philosophical edge, a pondering that’s at once homespun and existential.

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2015 English department scholarships and graduating senior awards

Our previous post listed winners of the 2015 writing awards in English and Africana/Black Studies.

We’re also pleased to announce this year’s winners of the English department’s scholarships and graduating senior awards:

Scholarships

  • Natalie Selser Freed Memorial Scholarship: Meghan Barrett
  • Rita K. Gollin Senior Year Scholarship for Excellence in American Literature: Jeremy Jackson
  • Rita K. Gollin Junior Year Scholarship for Excellence in American Literature: Thomas McCarthy
  • Hans Gottschalk Award: KiayaRose Dilsner-Lopez
  • Joseph M. O’Brien Transfer Scholarship: Sarah Smith
  • Don Watt Memorial Scholarship: Kristen Druse

Graduating Senior Awards

  • William T. Beauchamp Literature Award: Christina Mortellaro
  • Patricia Conrad Lindsay Memorial Award: Sean Neill
  • Calvin Israel Award in the Humanities: Rebecca Miller and Liam Cody
  • Joseph M. O’Brien Memorial Award: Harrison Dole

We’ll be celebrating winners of scholarships, graduating senior awards, and writing awards today at 2:30 p.m. today in the Walter Harding Room, Welles 111.

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Poet M. NourbeSe Philip to perform here April 28 at 7 p.m.

Afro-Canadian poet, writer, and activist M. NourbeSe Philip will perform from her recent book, Zong!, a radical collection of poetry that tries to come to terms with the 1781 tragedy of the slave-ship Zong, from which ship over 150 African men, women, and children were thrown overboard as part of an insurance claim. Zong colorNo one was ever tried for their murder, and all that survives recording the incident is a two-page legal decision, Gregson v. Gilbert, named for and concerned with the ship’s owners and insurers, not the Africans onboard. It has been described by Juliana Spahr as “exceptional and uniquely moving.”

Philip’s performance will be accompanied by an original musical composition by SUNY Geneseo’s Glenn McClure.

The event, which will be held at Doty Hall on the SUNY Geneseo campus, is free and open to the public; books will be available for purchase.map

M. NourbeSe Philip is the acclaimed author of four books of poetry, two collections of essays, a play, a novel, several short stories, and other writings; her work features in the Norton Anthology of English Literature. The recipient of many illustrious international awards, including the Casa de las Americas prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a McDowell Fellowship, a Chalmers Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation residency, Philip has read and performed her work internationally, including as writer-in-residence at the University of the West Indies and as part of The Scream Literary Festival. She lives and writes in Toronto, where she has previously been the writer-in-residence at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore.

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Lytton Smith and Jón Gnarr at UR bookstore April 23

Update (April 20, 2015 at 7:17 a.m.): Dr. Smith’s translation of The Indian has been praised as “beautifully translated” and “hypnotic and heartbreaking” in a pre-publication review by Michael Schaub of NPR Books. You can read an excerpt of The Indian here.

07_27_2014_525x825_indian4Professor Lytton Smith will appear at the University of Rochester bookstore this Thursday, April 23, at 6 p.m. with Jón Gnarr, former punk rocker, mayor of Reykjavík, sitcom star, and author of The Indian, which Smith has translated into English for publisher Deep Vellum.

There will be a conversation between Smith and Gnarr, a reading from the book, and a chance to ask questions. The event is free and open to the public.

192px-Jon-gnarr-2011-ffm-098The Indian is a novel/memoir of Gnarr’s uncomfortable childhood, telling in black humor his isolation and his misdiagnosis as backwards because of his severe dyslexia and ADHD. Subjected to constant bullying, young Gnarr sets his bedroom on fire (accidentally), tries to fit in by self-piercing his ears at a Grease-themed school dance, and attempts to sail across the Reykjavík bay, almost washed out into the ocean.

The Indian is the first novel in a trilogy on Gnarr’s youth, and resonates with young readers as much as with parents of children with emotional and learning issues; The Indian is taught in schools throughout Iceland, resonating with readers of all ages. The Indian is out May 5th and Deep Vellum will publish the full trilogy throughout 2015-2016.

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Melanie Blood to direct reading of Civil War letters at Riviera Theater

Professor of English and Music Melanie Blood is the director of “Civil War Letters: Love and War,” which will be performed Friday, February 13, 8 p.m. at the newly renovated Riviera Theater in Geneseo.

From the Riviera’s Facebook page:

On FRIDAY FEBRUARY 13th, the Livingston County Historical Society will present a staged reading of a collection of Civil War love letters penned in 1862 by Colonel John Rorbach & his wife Elizabeth Vance Rorbach, from Geneseo, NY. Directed by Dr. Melanie Blood and performed by Noah Pfeiffer and Christina O’Shea, this program will be sure to make the Civil War, and a beautiful love story, come to life.

Thanks to the generous funding of the Rochester Area Community Foundation, Leicester Town Historian Tom Roffe, along with assistance from intern Rob Terreri, recently scanned and transcribed a collection of Civil War letters and photos owned by descendants of the Rorbach/ Vance family. A sampled reading of these letters, from the home front and from the battlefield, reveal a love story between a colonel and his beloved wife amidst a war of national significance.

The performance will take place at the recently renovated Riviera Theater, 4 Main Street, Geneseo, at 8:00pm. Those with patron tickets will be invited at 6:45pm prior to the performance to enjoy a wine and cheese tasting. Museum Administrator, Anna Kowalchuk promotes this event as the premier performance at the Riviera Theater. “Those who pay a patron ticket price will have preferred seating and a first glimpse at the amazing work completed by proprietor Don Livingston-all while enjoying a wine and cheese tasting in brand new community venue.”

General admission is $15.00 ($18 after 2/7/15) and patron tickets are $25 and are available on line at www.livingstoncountyhistoricalsociety.com or at local Geneseo Main Street Merchants, David Mann’s Jewelers or the Not Dot Shop. Public parking available and the theater is handicapped accessible.

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Next Up: Joan Anim-Addo

Writer and Professor of Caribbean Literatures and Cultures Joan Anim-Addo will lecture on “Lesssons from Imoinda: Black British Writing at the (21st C) Margins” in Doty 300 on Wednesday, October 22 at 2:30 p.m.  At Goldsmiths, University of London,  Professor Anim-Addo has been the Director of the Centre for Caribbean Studies since 1998. Her publications include the libretto Imoinda (2008); the poetry collections Haunted by History (1998) and  Janie Cricketing Lady (2006); and the literary history Touching the Body: History, Language and African-Caribbean Women’s Writing (2007). Her co-edited books include Interculturality and Gender (2009), Caribbean-Scottish Relations: Colonial and Contemporary Inscriptions in History, Language and Literature (2007), and I am Black, White, Yellow: An Introduction to the Black Body in Europe (2007). She is co-editor of two Feminist Review Special Issues, ‘Affect and Creolisation’ (2013) and ‘Black British Feminisms’ (2014).

For more information:
www.gold.ac.uk/caribbean
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William Cronon to deliver 2014 Walter Harding Lecture

This year’s Walter Harding Lecture will be delivered by William Cronon, Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas Research Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

william_cronon_hiresThe lecture, titled “Wildness and the Preservation of the World: From Walden Pond to the 1964 Wilderness Act and Beyond,” will take place in SUNY Geneseo’s new Doty Recital Hall on Monday, September 15 at 7:30 p.m. As always, the Harding Lecture is free and open to the public.

The recipient of a 1985 MacArthur Fellowship, Professor Cronon is the author or editor of numerous publications, including Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (Hill & Wang, 1983), Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (W. W. Norton, 1995), Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past (W. W. Norton, 1992), and Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (W. W. Norton, 1991). Changes in the Land won the 1984 Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians. Nature’s Metropolis won the 1992 Bancroft Prize, the George Perkins Marsh Prize of the American Society for Environmental History, and the Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Award of the Forest History Society. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History.

Professor Cronon’s area of study is American environmental history and the history of the American West. According to his website, his research “seeks to understand the history of human interactions with the natural world: how we depend on the ecosystems around us to sustain our material lives, how we modify the landscapes in which we live and work, and how our ideas of nature shape our relationships with the world around us.”

In 2012-13, Professor Cronon served as president of the American Historical Association. He has published essays on the practice of history and on the goals of a liberal education.

With Professor Paul Robbins, director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dr. Cronon was interviewed on National Public Radio’s Science Friday for a September 2013 story on “Saving Wild Places in the ‘Anthropocene.'”.

An active citizen as well as scholar, Dr. Cronon serves on the governing council of the Wilderness Society and holds leadership positions in numerous other organizations dedicated to land conservation and to the history and protection of the environment.

Dr. Cronon’s lecture will be followed by a reception in Doty Hall.