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!

FSS - Ernesto Laclau

An afternoon lecture with Ernesto Laclau:
"The Signifier, the Role of Naming, and the Logic of Antagonism"





Ernesto Laclau, Chair of Political Theory at the University of Essex, will deliver the final lecture in the inaugural EGO Fall Speakers Series. His lecture will be held in the Killian Room, 500 Hall of Languages, at 3:15 PM on Thursday, November 30.

Professor Laclau is Director of the doctoral program in Ideology and Discourse Analysis at the Centre for Theoretical Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences. He also is currently University Professor of the Humanities and Rhetorical Studies at Northwestern University. He is coauthor, with Chantal Mouffe, of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical Democratic Politics (Verso, 1985). His numerous other works include New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (Verso, 1990) and Emancipation(s) (Verso, 1996), and he is the editor of The Making of Political Identities (Verso, 1994). His latest book, On Populist Reason, seeks to understand how the construction of a people relates to other forms of political subjectivity—classes, corporations and other forms of association.

FSS - Tim Dean

English Graduate Organization presents lecture by Tim Dean Oct. 16
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Professor Tim Dean, from the English Department at the University of Buffalo, will deliver a lecture entitled "Breeding Culture: Barebacking, Bugchasing, Gift-Giving" at 1:00PM in the Killian Room, 500 Hall of Languages.

Professor Dean will present research from his forthcoming book, Unlimited Intimacy, which addresses the emergence of bareback subculture. By suspending the impulse to pathologize this behavior, Unlimited Intimacy explores the kinship structures that the subculture produces as an alternative to normative heterosexuality.

**This lecture is a part of the English Graduate Organizations's Fall Speaker Series, jointly sponsored by the English Department, the LGBT Senate, and the Graduate Student Organization**

FSS - Susan Buck-Morss