Spring Semester Updates

It's already turning out to be a very busy spring semester, and we still have quite a bit of winter ahead of us. Here are some upcoming events to keep an eye out for:

• First, congratulations to Cristina Stasia, whose lecture "Mrs. Croft: Angelina Jolie & the Straightening of the Female Action Genre" was, by all accounts, a successful start for the spring colloquium lineup.

• Hearts of Westcott, the English Dept soccer team, has its first match of the indoor season on Monday night.

• PhD admit Eve Eisenberg is headed our way this Wednesday to have lunch with graduate students and sit in on a graduate seminar. Please make her feel welcome. More PhD & MA admits will be visiting this term, and will be announced soon.

• Thursday the department will be hosting prospective senior hire Sarah Projansky, who is currently in the Gender & Women's Studies program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. If you would like to attend the lunch with Professor Projansky, or the teaching talk, please contact Mike Dwyer.

• Ben Jonson's Head, the Department's Trivia team, is firmly entrenched in the peleton, but needs help to make the push to the top of the rankings. Trivia starts at 9pm at the Inn Complete.

• This month's Negotiations panel will be held on February 29th.

• Finally, we're trying to get a ego website together that is a little more comprehensive & appealing. Feel free to check out the new Syracuse English Graduate Organization homepage and tell us what you think.
  
  As a part of this, we'd like to put together a backlog of abstracts of Negotiations panels, so if you have abstracts for papers you've given, you can send those along as well.
  
  But the thing we need the MOST help with is the "Guide to Syracuse" section. We just want to give people a sense of what kind of resources might be available to them as a grad student in Syracuse. If you want to see a model, you can check out the Univ of Florida's EGO site here.
  
  So, I'll ask two things, respond to me at mddwyer (at) syr.edu.
  
  1) List up to three favorites in any categories you have opinions on.
  2) Write up (at least) one very brief description for any one of your choices. 100-200 words, tops.

Thanks!
Mike

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!