Visiting Scholar/Writers Series

Each academic year, usually in the fall semester, the English Department invites a well-known scholar or writer to come to campus and give a public lecture. The scholar or writer also interacts with English faculty and students, especially English graduate students, in a seminar. The following scholars and writers have visited the campus as part of this series:

Spring 2007

Bill McKibben is best known as the author of The End of Nature (1989), which was the first book published in the U.S. on the subject of global warming, and addressed to general readers. He has also published many other books, on consumerism, media culture, and nature, as well as a wide range of articles in magazines such as The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Mother Jones, Harper's, and Outside Magazine
In his lecture, he will discuss two main topics. One is the forthcoming day of action named Stepitup2007 that he is helping to organize for April 14, 2007. (The link below to grist.org provides further information on this event.)
He will also discuss his new book, Deep Economy, in which he offers challenging, but hopeful plans for a reorganization of many components of our economy along local lines. McKibben wants us "to think in new ways about the things we buy, the food we eat, the energy we use, and the money that pays for it all." He argues that economic and social structures more rooted to localities will help combat global climate change and help us to get in touch with our essential humanity. The link to his website provides a fuller description.
www.grist.org
www.billmckibben.com

Fall 2005

Sidonie Smith is Martha Guernsey Colby Collegiate Professor of English and Women's Studies and Chair of the English Deartment at the University of Michigan. her fiels of interest include human rights and personal narrative, women's autobiography, women's theory, and postcolonial literatures. Prof. Smith's publications include: a Poetics of Women's Autobiography: Marginality and the fictions of Self-Representation(Indiana University Press, 1987); Subjectivity, identity, and the body: Women's Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century (Indiana University Press, 1993); Getting a Life: Everyday uses of Autobiography (co-edited with Julia Watson, University of minnesota Press, 1996); Writing New Identities: Genger, Nation, and Immigration in Contemporary Europe (co-edited with Gisela Brinker-Gabler, University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader (co-edited with Julia Watson, University of Wisconsin Press, 1998); Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (co-edited with Julia Watson, University of Minnesota, 2001); Moving Lives: Women's Twentieth Century Travel narratives (University of minnesota, 2001); Interfaces: Women's Visual and performance Autobiography (co-edited with Julia Watson, University of Michgan press, 2002); Human Rights and Narrated lives: the Ethics of Recognition (co-edited with kay Schaffer, Palgrave macmillan, 2004).

Fall 2004

Distinguished poet Carolyn Forche has won almost every major U.S. poetry prize, beginning with the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, The Country Between Us. Her most recent book of poems is the blue Hour. She is also well-known as an activist, and has edited several volumes of politically engaged poetry, Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, and The Angel of History.

Fall 2003
Dr. Susan Gubar, "A Feminism of One's Own"
Susan Gubar, Distinguished Professor of English and Women's Studies at Indiana University, has been a major influence in literary criticism and feminist theory ever since her ground-breaking work Madwoman in the Attic, co-authored with Sandra Gilbert in 1979. As she describes in her recent collection of essays CriticalCondition: Feminism at theTurn of the Century (2000), these have been exciting and turbulent years in feminist theory and criticism. Shel shared some of her insights from that journey in "From A Feminism of One's Own," a lecture based on an excerpt from her autobiographical work-in-progress which parallels her experiences to Virginia Woolf's depictions in A Room of One's Own.

Gubar's impressive publications reflect her wide range of research interests. She and Gilbert also wrote No Man's Land (Vol. 1: 1988; Vol. 2: 1989) and compiled The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (1985). More recently, Gubar and Gilbert have jointly edited a collection of poetry for and about mothers, MotherSongs (1995), and a satire entitled Masterpiece Theatre: An Academic Melodrama (1995). In 1997, Gubar published Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture. Her attention turned to the holocaust in Poetry after Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew (2002).

Fall 2002
Kevin Oderman and Michael Martone, Reading from their Creative Nonfiction
Michael Martone is currently a Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Alabama where he has been teaching since 1996. Before that, he taught at Syracuse University, Iowa State University, and Harvard University. Martone's newest book, The Flatness and Other Landscapes (University of Georgia Press, 2000), a collection of his own essays about the Midwest, won the AWP Prize for Creative Nonfiction in 1998. Louise Erdrich admires how Martone "writes with deep affection for the ordinary. In his hands, the quotidian dreams of the American Heartland are transformed and quietly exalted."

Spring 2002
Dr. Susan Bordo, "BEAUTY 2002: An Illustrated Journey Through the Innovations, Oddities and Obsessions of Contemporary Culture"
Susan Bordo is a professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Kentucky, where she holds the Otis A. Singletary Chair in the Humanities. She lectures nationally On contemporary culture and the body, focusing on topics such as eating disorders, cosmetic surgery, beauty and evolutionary theory, racism and the body, masculinity and the male body, sexual harassment and the impact of contemporary media. Bordo is the author of five books, including Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body (University of California Press, 1993), Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J. (University of California Press, 1997) and The Male Body (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999).

Graduate students from the Saint Rose English program and the University at Albany Women's Studies program met with Bordo for a seminar discussion of her works on the afternoon of March 7 at the UA campus.

Martone is also the author of five books of short fiction including Seeing Eye (Zoland Books, 1995), Pensées: The Thoughts of Dan Quayle (Broad Ripple Press, 1994), Fort Wayne Is Seventh on Hitler's List (Indiana University Press, 1990), Safety Patrol (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), and Alive and Dead in Indiana (Alfred A. Knopf, 1984). He has edited two collections of essays about the Midwest: A Place of Sense: Essays in Search of the Midwest and Townships: Pieces of the Midwest (University of Iowa Press, 1988 and 1992).

Kevin Oderman is a Professor of English at West Virginia University. His essays have appeared in Northwest Review, Southwest Review, North American Review, and Shenandoah. He is the author of How Things Fit Together, winner of the Katharine Bakeless Nason Literary Publication Prize in Nonfiction from Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Scott Russell Sanders, Judge for the Bakeless prize, comments: "Although the universe holds together faithfully, our own precious lives seem to scatter like blown leaves. How to bind up one's memories, yearnings, travels, scraps of knowledge, loves and lamentations into a coherent whole? That is KevinOderman's great theme in these compelling essays. He joins piece to piece with a poet's feel for elegant language and a carpenter's feel for sturdy joints. He's at ease outdoors as well as indoors-fishing in rivers as well as books, hunting in the wilds as well as museums. While Oderman writes of his private journeys in search of coherence, he also invites his readers to think about the fissures and patterns in their own lives."

Fall 2000
Dr. Vincent DiMarco, "Cool Chaucer: After 600 Years!"
Dr. Vincent J. DiMarco, Professor of Medieval Literature at the University of Massachusetts, has written on various medieval authors and topics: Chaucer, Langland, medieval Alexander literature, magic and science, the medieval Amazon myth, and textual matters. He was a Contributing Editor to the Riverside Chaucer and served for ten years as Associate Editor for the Yearbook of Langland Studies. His latest project takes him away from the fourteenth century into the eighteenth as the editor of three British manuscript cookbooks.