Category: Speakers

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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.

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Bernardine Evaristo to read from her work April 11

Bernardine Evaristo
Photo credit: Hayley Madden

Bernardine Evaristo returns to SUNY Geneseo on Friday, April 11 at 4 p.m. (Newton 204) to read from her work as part of the English department’s Literary Forum series. Evaristo is the author of seven books including her new novel, Mr Loverman, about a 74 year-old Caribbean London man who finally comes out of the closet (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin, 2013 & Akashic Books, US, 2014). Evaristo’s writing, characterized by daring experimentation and subversion, playfully and humorously challenges the myths of various Afro-diasporic histories and identities. Mr Loverman dares to explore almost forbidden topics, such as the seeming prevalence of homophobia in the black community and slavery as its justification.

Since 1997 Evaristo has accepted invitations to take part in over 80 international tours as a writer. She gives readings and delivers talks, keynotes, workshops, and courses. She has held visiting fellowships and professorships. Her books are translated into several languages, including Mandarin. Her awards include the EMMA Best Book Award, Big Red Read, Orange Youth Panel Award, a NESTA Fellowship Award and an Arts Council Writer’s Award. She has won “Book of the Year” 13 times in British newspapers and magazines; The Emperor’s Babe was a Times “Book of the Decade.” Hello Mum has been chosen as one of 20 titles for World Book Night in 2014. She was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2004, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2006, and she received an MBE in 2009.

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Author Steve Almond to read here October 9

17_almond_lgl Steve Almond, author of ten books — including the nonfiction Candy Freak and Rock and Roll Can Will Save Your Life, and the story collections My Life in Heavy Metal and the recent God Bless America — will read at SUNY Geneseo as part of the all-college hour Distinguished Speakers Series this Wednesday, October 9, in the College Union Ballroom.

The event begins at 2:30. There will be a reception and book signing afterwards, and the bookstore will have God Bless America for sale.

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Laura Dassow Walls to deliver 2013 Harding Lecture

Laura Dassow Walls HeadshotThis year’s annual Walter Harding Lecture will be delivered by Laura Dassow Walls, William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.

The lecture, to be held on Thursday, September 12 at 4 p.m. in the SUNY Geneseo College Union Ballroom, is free and open to the public.

The title: “Of Compass, Chains, and Sounding Lines: Taking Thoreau’s Measure.”

Professor Walls specializes in American Transcendentalism, transatlantic romanticism, literature and science, and environmental literature and ecocriticism, with a particular emphasis on the work of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Her most recent book, The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (University of Chicago Press, 2009), won the Modern Language Association’s James Russell Lowell Prize, the Organization of American Historians’ Merle Curti Award for the best book in American intellectual history, and the Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize from the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts.

Professor Walls is currently at work on a new biography of Thoreau.

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Our March visit from Kadija Sesay

Kadija SesayContinuing our look back at Spring 2013, one memorable event was a reading on March 28 by poet Kadija (George) Sesay. A graduate of Birmingham University, where she majored in West African Studies, Kadija is the founder/publisher of SABLE LitMag and SABLE LitFest. She’s also the editor of several anthologies of work by writers of African and Asian descent: Dreams Miracles and Jazz: New Adventures in African Fiction (Picador Africa 2008); Red: Contemporary Black British Poetry (2010); Dance the Guns to Silence: 100 Poems for Ken Saro-Wiwa (with Nii Ayikwei Parkes) and IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain (with Courttia Newland) and Write Black, and Write British: From Post Colonial to Black British Literature.  Kadija has published her own poetry, short stories, essays and articles in magazines, journals, and anthologies in the UK, USA and Africa; her work has been featured on the BBC.

Kadija has coordinated various literary events, such as “Word from Africa” at the British Museum (2008), and organized international writer’s residencies: the SABLE Writer’s HotSpot to The Gambia, Cuba and New York. She’s a fellow of the George Bell Institute, a Fellow of the Kennedy Arts Centre of Performance Arts Management and an associate of Vision Quest International. She’s received several awards for her work in the creative arts.

Her poetry collection, Irki (which means “Homeland” in the Nubian language) was published by Peepal Tree Press this March.

The event was sponsored by the English Department, the Office of the Provost, and International Programs.

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Erika Dreifus to read here November 12

Erika Dreifus, author of the short story collection Quiet Americans, which won the 2012 ALA Sophie Brody Medal Honor Title for outstanding Jewish literatureErika Dreifus, will read from her work at 4 p.m. on November 12 in the Walter Harding Lounge, Welles 111.

As Dreifus’ website explains, the stories in Quiet Americans “reframe familiar questions about what is right and wrong, remembered and repressed, resolved and unending. Portions of the proceeds from sales of Quiet Americans are being donated to The Blue Card, which supports survivors of Nazi persecution and their families in the United States.”

You can read a full bio of Erika Dreifus here.

Correction: Earlier versions of this post incorrectly gave the date of this event as November 4 and November 14. The actual date is November 12.

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Dennis Looney, Professor of Italian, to speak on “Freedom Readers”

Dennis O. Looney, Professor of Italian at the University of Pittsburgh, will deliver a lecture titled “”The Poetics of Lynching: Dante, Allen Tate, and other Freedom Readers” on Monday, October 15, at 4:00 p.m. in Welles 121.

Examining “The Swimmers,” a poem written amid American poet and literary critic Allen Tate’s “literal conversion to Catholicism and his move away from segregationist ideology,” Looney argues that the poet turned—as did many African American writers—to Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy in order to grapple with the legacy of white supremacy.

Professor Looney is the author of Freedom Readers: The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy, published by the University of Notre Dame Press in its Devers Series in Dante Studies, 2011, and of Compromising the Classics: Romance Epic Narrative in the Italian (1996).