FSS - Jean Howard

The final lecture in this year's EGO Fall Speaker Series will be delivered on Thursday, December 6 by Professor Jean Howard. Professor Howard began her career at Syracuse and we are thrilled to sponsor her return! Please plan to attend the final event of the semester.

"Beatrice's Monkey: Staging Exotica in Early Modern London
Comedy."

In this piece I consider the consequences for early modern
spectators of the staging of exotic objects in plays that deal with
contemporary London. My starting point will be the moment in Eastward Ho
when Beatrice, a maid, comes on stage with a monkey. What is both the
representational consequence of that action, given the considerable symbolic
freight attached to monkey and apes in the early modern imagination, and
what is the presentational consequence, that is, the effect of having a
non-human "actor" from an exotic clime have a role in a play set in 1604
London? Probably, the monkey would have been imported from Africa, brought
back on a ship engaged in trade along the West African coast. How, then, can
we think about this creature's appearance on the public stage, and what
larger implications does it have for understanding how the stage functioned
to domesticate the exotic and to mask the larger economic and political
forces that enabled monkeys to become figures in stories of London life.



Jean E. Howard is William B. Ransford Professor of English and Vice Provost for Diversity Initiatives at Columbia University. Professor Howard’s specializations are Renaissance literature, history of drama, feminism, new historicism and Marxism. Her publications include Shakespeare's Art of Orchestration: Stage Technique and Audience Response (1984), Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, edited with Marion O'Connor (1987), The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (1994), With Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories (1997), Co-editor of The Norton Shakespeare (1997), and Marxist Shakespeares, edited with Scott Shershow (2000).

FSS - Shirley Samuels

Professor Shirley Samuels will deliver the second lecture in this year's Fall Speaker Series on October 23rd at 5pm in the Killian Room. Samuels' presentation, "Women, Blood, and Contract", will focus on the issues of land contracts, womens' bodies, and fears of interracial sexuality in historical novels of the 19th century – Hobomok, Hope Leslie, and The Last of the Mohicans. This paper will not only consider the colonial American period to which the narratives refer, but the immediate context in which they were published, a period in which land claims, citizenship, suffrage and slavery were all contested issues in the formulation of the Early Republic's national identity.

FSS - Amy Villarejo

The first lecture in this year's EGO Fall Speaker Series will be delivered by Amy Villarejo from Cornell University. This event, held on Tuesday September 25 at 5pm in the Killian Room (500 HL) will inaugurate Professor Villarejo's lecture is entitled "Tales of the City: Television and Queer Urbanity" and explores the role of television in constructing social spaces for the queer denizens of contemporary cities. A small reception will immediately follow the lecture. Save the date and support your grad student colleagues who've made this series such a success in recent years!

The EGO Fall Speaker Series is designed to foster new connections between the Syracuse English Department and other esteemed programs in the region, to showcase our graduate program in English, and to provide an opportunity for members of the SU community to engage with accomplished scholars working outside our own university.

The series is sponsored, planned, organized and funded entirely by our graduate students, which makes it a very exciting and valuable learning experience for all involved. If you haven't already, please get in contact with us to lend a hand!

Meeting Minutes, etc

The minutes from our last meeting can be viewed here.

In the continuing efforts to keep better records and make our decision making processes more transparent, we've attached a Google Documents account to the EGO Blog, which will allow us to easily save documents, letters, correspondence, and interesting items of department history.

Our next meeting's agenda should include discussion on policies regarding this storage system (who should be able to access it, what sort of password protection and/or editing priveleges should be arranged, etc). In the short term, anyone wishing to access this account can email me for the password (mddwyer at syr dot edu).

All Expenses Paid trip to Rochester Conference

As part of the University's partnership with Cornell and the University of Rochester to create a
"humanities corridor" in Central New York, funded by the Mellon Foundation, the college has
access to funds to send graduate students to the upcoming interdisciplinary conference at
Rochester next weekend, paying for lodging, travel, and sponsoring a reception Friday night to
allow Syracuse and Rochester grads to begin building connections between departments. If you
are interested in attending, please let me know via email: mddwyer (at) syr.edu.

I'm attaching the conference announcement beneath.
m-

The English Department and the Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester present  
An Interdisciplinary Conference, held as part of The Humanities Project:

The Archive of the Future / The Future of the Archive

The conference will take place on Friday and Saturday, April 6 and 7, 2007 and will include a roundtable discussion
on the future of the archive (with an opening address by Johnathan Massey, Assistant Professor of Architecture at
Syracuse University, along with a roundtable made up of faculty, librarians and graduate students) and an
opening reception on Friday, which will showcase Marsha Kinder's digital and interactive *Labyrinth Project*.
Saturday's events include a keynote address by Marsha Kinder, Professor of Cinema, Comparative Literature
and Spanish, at the University of Southern California, as well as 12 presentations by an interdisciplinary and
international group of graduate students on topics as diverse as Popular Culture and New Media,
Politics and Society, Visual Culture, and History, Revision and Memory.  

Please see
http://www.rochester.edu/College/humanities/projects/?archive
http://www.rochester.edu/College/humanities/projects/?archive&conference 
for more information (including specific times and paper topics) and to REGISTER. 
 
This conference, including Friday's reception and Saturday's lunch, is FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. We do
ask, however, that you register using the form on the website so we have a sense of how many people to expect.


Please free to contact the organizers at futureofthearchive@gmail.com with any questions or comments.

Negotiations February

The February Negotiations panel is scheduled for Friday, February 23 at 2pm in 421 HL.

Negotiations is designed as both a showcase for ongoing work produced by graduate students, and a workshop for papers that go on to be presented and published in the academic community. For this reason, it's important for everyone to attend, to make sure that the papers that have "Syracuse University English Department" attached to them are the very best that they can be. Mark your calendars!

Meghan Boyle will be presenting from her paper "From Nanook of the North to Survivor: The Entertainment of Imperialism."

Rachel Collins will contribute a presentation entitled "'Living was an ache': Authorial Distance and Indentification in Experiments of Class Transvestism".

Finally Soumitree Gupta will read from her "Resignifying Female Desire: Regulation and Resistance in Post-War Psychiatric Melodramas on the Mad Woman".

See you all there!

Negotiations: Spring Schedule

The Spring schedule for the Negotiations Graduate paper series is set, so make sure you mark your calendars and come to support your colleagues, and help to improve the work coming out of the department.

Presenters for this semester will be:
Meghan Boyle, Jared Champion, Rinku Chatterjee, Rachel Collins, Tanushree Ghosh, Soumitree Gupta, Mike O'Connor, Matt Rigilano, and Jon Singleton

Matt Hotham's Early Art, back in print!

Early Art, a chapbook of 11 poems from 3rd year MFA Matt Hotham, is now in its second printing from Turtle Creek Press.

Jane Cassady, author of An Awkward Kind of Faith and host of Monday Night Poetry, says that Matt "humanizes political life while letting NO ONE off the hook. He is both fierce and playful. It's not all politics, of course. There are some sweet love poems with just the right ratio of emo and remove. I'm not pulling any lines to show you because the book is a treasure map of images, and you should get the privelege of making these discoveries on your own."

Copies are $5, ($7.50 with shipping).

Order by mail:
Matt Hotham
131 Dell St, Apt #2
Syracuse, NY 13210

Syracuse English @ the MLA

Syracuse made an excellent impression at the 2006 annual conference of the Modern Language Association in Philadelphia. Graduate students, faculty, and some recently departed department alumni delivered presentations, interviewed, and crashed an Ivy League party.

• Gina Liotta, MA '06, on the Early Twentieth Century African-American Children's Literature panel, delivered her presentation, "A New Narrative: Reading Langston Hughes Literature for Children as Imagetext". This paper was originally composed for Susan Edmunds' Harlem Renaissance course and was initially delivered in a 2005 Negotiations panel. Gina is currently enrolled in graduate studies at the University of Oregon Education program.

• Professor Susan Edmunds was busy at the MLA--sitting on the "Posthuman, All Too Posthuman" roundtable, as well as giving a paper entitled "A New Beauty: Anzia Yezierska's Immigrant Women and the Making of Modern America".

• Cindy Linden, fresh off her dissertation defense, appeared on the Pain and Disability panel. Cindy presented her paper, "In the Interests of Normativity: A reconsideration of Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain".
  

• Appearing on the Names, Language, and Theory panel, Amy Leal presented ""The Cockney School of Naming: Keats' Political Allegory in 'Caps and Bells'". Amy has also had an article published in The Chronicle of Higher Ed entitled "Who Killed John Keats?".
  

• Former Emerson Fellow Sarah Brouillette, who is now an Assistant Professor of Literature at MIT, appeared on the Spectacles of Violence panel with her paper, "The Culture Industries of Northern Ireland: Specularity, Violence, and the Conviction Plays".
  

• Professor Monika Wadman chaired a panel on the Native American artist Jimmie Durham. Monika's paper was entitled "Indian Playing Indian? Jimmie Durham's Columbus Day".

• Finally, former EGO facilitator, MA 2006, and current Cornell PhD Jon Senchyne not only delivered a paper entitled "Class, Sexuality, Hypervisibility: Complicating 'Diversity' with Everything I have is Blue", a paper that emerged from his experiences teaching at Syracuse, but also extended the invite to many Syracuseans to Cornell's Friday night party. Thanks, Jon!