Look Ahead to Spring 2013

GW English Graduate Courses for Spring 2013

Spring 2013 Graduate Seminar: Digital Humanities in Theory and Practice 

ENGLISH 6130 // Prof. A. Huang  

Monday 6:10-8:40 pm, Rome 771

Watch this space for updates: http://www.academia.edu/2044861/Digital_Humanities_in_Theory_and_Practice

Digital and communication technologies are transforming humanities research. This seminar explores the history of digital humanities, theoretical issues it raises, and major methodological debates. 

• Participate in the Digital Humanities Symposium at GW, Friday January 25, 2013 
• Develop the skills necessary for working at, and engaging with, the intersection of the humanities and technology
• Grasp major theoretical developments (orality / textuality / paratext / race / disability / canon formation / close and distant readings / data mining / history of the book / new media theories)
• Examine existing digital humanities projects in your field
• Situate your own research interests within the larger context of digital humanities theories and practice
• Interact with guest speakers in class 
• No computer skills beyond basic familiarity with word processing and Internet access are required

Sample Readings 

• David M. Berry, ed. Understanding Digital Humanities
• Matthew K. Gold, ed., Debates in the Digital Humanities
• Jacque Derrida, Archive Fever
• Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality
• Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
• Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media
• William McCarty, Humanities Computing
• Gerard Genette, Paratexts
• N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts
• Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture
• Alexander Huang, "Global Shakespeare 2.0 and the Task of the Performance Archive," Shakespeare Survey (http://cco.cambridge.org/extract?id=ccol9781107011229_CCOL9781107011229A005)
• Jonathan Hope and Michael Witmore, "The Very Large Textual Object: A Prosthetic Reading of Shakespeare"  (http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/09-3/hopewhit.htm)
• Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy
• Jerome McGann, Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web
• Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History
• Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman, eds. A Companion to Digital Humanities. 
• Ray and Schreibman, eds.  A Companion to Digital Literary Studies
• Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information 
• Lisa Nakamura, Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet 

Sample Digital Projects

• DH Commons, http://dhcommons.org/
• Melville Electronic Library, http://mel.hofstra.edu/
• In the Middle, http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/
• Folger LUNA, http://luna.folger.edu/
• NINES: Nineteenth-Century Scholarship Online, http://www.nines.org/
• http://www.poetessarchive.com/
• Mark Twain Project Online, http://www.marktwainproject.org/
• Internet Shakespeare Editions, http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/
• Archive of the OCCUPY movement, http://activist-archivists.org/wp/
• Global Shakespeares, http://globalshakespeares.org/
• Global Chaucers, http://globalchaucers.wordpress.com/

Journals and Guidelines

• MLA Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media, http://www.mla.org/guidelines_evaluation_digital
• Profession 2011 (MLA), special section on digital scholarship: http://www.mlajournals.org/toc/prof/2011/1
• Journal of Digital Humanities, http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/
• Digital Humanities Quarterly, http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/
• Romantic Circles, online journal, http://www.rc.umd.edu/
Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, http://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/

Partitioned Modernities: Intimacy, Secularism and National Culture in South Asia

ENG 6560: Postcolonialism

Kavita Daiya

Wednesdays 3.30-6 pm

1947 was a crucial year for world history, as the end of WWII and decolonization over 1947-48 ushered in many new nations and invented new national communities and identities. This course focuses on what happened in 1947 in India, in relation to these global transformations; it engages postcolonial theories of nationalism, gender studies and historiography with literature and cinema to illuminate the cultural representation of the 1947 Partition of India and its social and political legacies for contemporary South Asia.  Drawing upon a range of disciplines, the course examines the violent migrations that occurred during 1947, and its link to contemporary conflicts (war, ethnic conflict, refugee displacement, property rights) and ideas about citizenship, political belonging, intimacy, and secularism. We will look at different registers: literature, film, print media, visual and new media.  How gender, ethnicity and disability inflect these histories and texts will be integral to the story we will tell. No prior knowledge of South Asia required. Readings include works by Paul Scott, Salman Rushdie, Homi Bhabha, Judith Butler, Vikram Chandra, Amitav Ghosh, Saadat Hasan Manto, Shauna Singh Baldwin, Tim Brennan, Pheng Cheah, Talal Asad, Sunil Khilnani, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gayatri Spivak, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Deepa Ollapally, among others.  Films we will watch include Hindi cinema as well as third cinema, like "Delhi 6", "Parzania," and "My Son, the Fanatic." 

 Tony Lopez's graduate seminar, ENGL 6453:

English 6453: ¡Vámonos!  Latino Transit Cultures

This course considers the cultures of Latino transit: the literary and popular expressions of walking and riding in their embodied varieties across public and private U.S. transportation infrastructures.  Students will become acquainted with a range of 20^th and 21^st-century U.S. Latino works in conversation with theories of movement, space, and the body from Walter Benjamin to disability and diaspora studies.  Through such works, we will explore recent debates regarding the built environment, citizenship, and the state.

English 6220 (Topics/Medvl&EarlyMod Studies)

Environ, Body, Object, Veer

This cartographic seminar follows the lines of possibility that might be generated when the words environ, body, object and veer are simultaneously nouns (surroundings; corpus; impedimental thing [from the Latin “to throw in the way of”]; abrupt directional shift or change of vector) and verbs (to circuit inward; to materialize an abstraction; to protest or differ; to fly off course). Some of the problems we will unpack through these four keywords include: what does it mean to possess life? What worlds commence in medieval texts when the nonhuman exerts its sidelong agency? Is anthropocentricity an inevitable circumscription to thought? How does travel (in space, in time, in scale) open vistas that might otherwise remain unperceived? Are medieval and contemporary one or several temporalities?

We will create a confluence of contemporary theory (disability studies; queer theory; the new materialism; object oriented ontology; ecocriticism) and medieval English, Latin and French texts to map (environ, body, object and veer) possibilities for both. Among the medieval texts we will read: Beowulf, Chaucer (The House of Fame, General Prologue, The Pardoner’s Tale, The Franklin’s Tale, The Wife of Bath’s Tale, The Squire’s Tale); Geoffrey of Monmouth (History of the Kings of Britain), The Book of John Mandeville, Song of Roland, Saint Erkenwald, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl. Among the works of contemporary theory we may discuss (in entirety or selections): Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology; Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow, eds. Sex and Disability; Margrit Shildrick, Dangerous Discourses of Disability, Subjectivity and Sexuality; Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering and Queer Affect; Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now?: Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time; Tim Ingold, Being Alive; Will Stockton, Playing Dirty; Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures.

Robert McRuer and Holly Dugan's Queer Theory: Now and Then seminar (ENGL 6120):

This seminar examines the ways in which queer theory appears, now and then. From sixteenth century narratives of seduction and eroticism to postmodern, hyper-mediated sex play, we will engage in a transtemporal and interdisciplinary conversation about both shared and contested assumptions about queerness. Weaving seemingly disparate strands of this field through and around each other, we seek to pose the following questions: how queer is historicism? Is there a way to do queer historicism, or are the terms mutually exclusive (as some in the field might claim)? If queer theory “now” is arguably obsessed with global technologies that locate bodies within systems of commodification, consumption, and resistance, what about queer theory “then”? When we approach these questions from a transtemporal framework, what happens to practices and desires we think we recognize as “alternative”
or “normative”? How is the alternative constitutive of the norm, now and then? What bodily practices and desires remain resistant to categorizations, whether temporal or otherwise? Readings may include work by Lynne Huffer, Kevin Floyd, Madhavi Menon, James Bromley, Will Stockton, Valerie Traub, Margot Weiss, Darieck Scott, Jasbir Puar, José Esteban Muñoz, Elizabeth Povinelli, and others.

Upcoming Events

Join us in November for two exciting events at George Washington University Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute and Dean's Scholars in Shakespeare Program: 

On Monday, Nov. 12, from 1-2 pm, Dr. Dennis Kennedy will be presenting a lecture on “The Culture of the Spectator.” Currently Beckett Professor of Drama Emeritus in Trinity College Dublin, Dennis Kennedy will consider examples from sports, popular culture, and the theatre in order to open up a discussion about a ‘culture’ of the spectator in the present. 

For more information: http://www.gwmemsi.com/2012/09/the-culture-of-spectator-lecture-by.html

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Erika Lin will be with us on Tuesday, Nov. 27, from 11:10 am-12:20 pm, to explore early modern theatre. Lin, an Assistant Professor of English at George Mason University, takes a close look at Thomas Dekker’s play “The Shoemaker’s Holiday” as she explores the process by which festivity was transformed into commercial theatre through the act of performance in “Playing with Time: Pancakes and Bells in ‘The Shoemaker’s Holiday.’”

For more information: http://www.gwmemsi.com/2012/10/playing-with-time-pancakes-and-bells-in.html

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GW MEMSI: http://www.gwmemsi.com/

GW Dean's Scholars in Shakespeare: http://columbian.gwu.edu/undergraduate/programs/specialacademicopportunities/shakespeare

Both of these events are open to the public and will be held on the George Washington University campus in Rome Hall, room 771 (801 22nd St. NW, Washington, D.C., one block from the GW/Foggy Bottom metro station). 

For Flyers on each of these events visit: 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/esu4js1n2atkjml/DennisKennedy_GW-poster.jpg

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ze3o4ch45r1evc8/LinPoster.jpg

M.A.T.C.H. Reading Group

This is a reminder and a plug for tomorrow's M.A.T.C.H. meeting @ 6:15 in the Rome Hall vestibule where it will move to an available meeting space. The meeting will last an hour and then you are welcome to join in for dinner. This month's reading is from The Queer Art of Failure by Judith "Jack" Halberstam who will be visiting GWU at the end of this month. You can contact M. Bychowski (mbychows@gwmail.gwu.edu) for the reading or if you have any questions about the event. You are encouraged to come even if you are anxious about discussing Theory. Let me assure you, these opportunities to discuss theory outside of the classroom are invaluable! So take your mentee or your mentor, your study buddy or friend - this is a great opportunity to connect with your fellow grad students. 

For more information about M.A.T.C.H. or this event, check out the Facebook page!

Upcoming Department Events - September

Borrowed from PhD Comics

Welcome to a new year! We hope your first week of classes was not too stressful. As you know, we are currently working on developing the Mentor Program, so stay tuned for more information about that. In the meantime, we have drawn up a long list of upcoming events for our department. Many of these events are great opportunities to network with members of our program and others from outside the department. As these events approach, we will showcase them on this blog. If you have one you would like to add to this list, please leave a comment below or contact us at gwegsa@gmail.com. You can also Like us on Facebook and/or follow this blog via email using the box to the right.

September 7 Inaugural Dean Lecture 3:30pm Mt. Vernon Campus 

September 13 M.A.T.C.H. Theory Reading Group 5-6pm Rome Hall (Dinner to follow)

September 14 EGSA September Happy Hour 4-7 Location TBA

September 17 EGSA Board Meeting 5:30 Rome 771 (EGSA meetings are open to GWU English Grads)

September 20 American Literature and Culture Organization Event (Details TBA)

September 22-23 EGSA National Book Festival Outing (Details TBA)

September 24 Professional Development: Attending Conferences and Writing Abstracts

More information about our first event - the Dean's Lecture:

Please join us for the Inaugural Dean's Lecture on Friday, Sept. 7, at 3:30 p.m. on the Mt. Vernon Campus.

Dr. Gail Kern Paster will be delivering her talk entitled:  "Shylock, Othello and the Theatrical Coding of Difference: Picturing Shakespeare at the Folger" Images of Shylock and Othello from the Folger Shakespeare Library image database show how these figures of the Jew and the Moor as Other have been represented since the eighteenth century. These images also show how they have been presented for consumption and display. Setting images side by side has great potential for understanding the theatrical coding of difference in an historical trajectory. The talk is designed for a broad audience.
This event is open to the public and will be followed by a reception. Please see the attached flier for more information.

There is a free shuttle service available from Foggy Bottom:

http://parking.gwu.edu/tve/

End of Semester Tips and Summer Productivity

The semester is finally over and, for many of us graduate students, the summer stretches out in front of us, promising mental recovery and long-forgotten normality. We probably all begin the summer with worthy goals in mind. We are going to do all our lesson prep in the summer, submit abstracts to 10 amazing conferences, finish that chapter, etc. However if you are at all like me, summer slowly sucks me into a state of euphoria and stupor. I find myself putting off important work because the summer seems like it will go on forever. Rather, we should be looking at it as a golden opportunity. Wrapped up in end-of-term grading, paper writing, and looming deadlines, we often take for granted what this moment has to offer. The end of the semester is a crazy time, but it is also the time to get organized, reflect, and plan. The summer is a much needed time of rest and regrouping, but it can also be the most productive period in your year. Below we have a bunch of links we pulled from the net about how to maximize your summer, starting right now with an End of Semester Checklist and Scheduling the Endless Summer.
    As these links suggest, this is the prime moment to gather any notes you took on your teaching, to go back through old files and make sure you aren't hanging on to what you no longer need, and update your own professional materials (CV, Linkedin profile, teaching statement). I also take this moment to go through the stacks of PMLA books, magazines, and articles I have collected over the semester to evaluate what I really want to keep. Find a system that works for you, but consider organizing your course work, articles, and student papers so that they are easily retrievable (and for heaven's sake - back up your files now!).
  Now many of us use the first month of summer to catch up on things we put off during the semester - the haircut, the oil change, the personal emails - this is just fine. One of the tips in Lessons for Summer Productivity is to go ahead and check items off your to-do list. However instead of getting bogged down in repainting your living room because it has been on the to-do list since you moved in, we suggest refocusing your energy to maintain momentum in May and to get the most out of the remaining summer months.
   Use this time to begin/update your CV, check out CFP sites for promising conferences (see our conference/abstract posts for some tips), catch up on important journals in your field, begin that theory reading / dissertation writing group (it may be easier to meet regularly in the summer months), prep for your Fall classes (go over your notes from the semester), catch up on some teaching tips (composition, pedagogy, and technology), create your dream-class syllabus (this will come in handy!), carefully consider your funding options for the coming academic year, and finally - take the time to peruse our blog! We have tried to collect helpful information throughout the year, and link to tried-and-tested resources for graduate students.
    Finally, we realize that some of our readers are facing a tough job market this summer, so we pulled together a few posts on how to Use Your Summer Wisely while on the market, and Making the Most of Your Off-Season Part1 and Making the Most of Your Off-Season Part 2. Some of these links are general Summer Advice for Job Seekers and some focus on How to Spend Your Summer Vacation if you already have a job lined up for fall.
   We will be reducing the number of blog posts over the summer, but please check back from time to time as we plan to post items periodically. Also, check out our new blog tabs at the top of this page (Documents and EGSA Board). We encourage you to follow our blog via email with the widget to the right, or "like" us on Facebook to receive updates. Your new EGSA board is gearing up for Fall, so stay tuned for an exciting new year.

Upcoming Campus and Department Events

Check out these exciting events coming up in April and May. Many of these events offer unique opportunities for academic enrichment and professional development. EGSA would like to personally invite you to two of our end-of-the-year events: "Plan Your PhD" and Elections Party. Meet your new EGSA board and get together with your fellow colleagues. We hope to see you there!

April 19 “Plan Your PhD” 3:30-4:30pm Rome 771 Come discuss the PhD program, new requirements, and helpful tips/resources for success. Light refreshments provided. Hosted by EGSA.

April 19 Elections Party 5:00-7:00pm Rome 771: Come welcome your new EGSA board and celebrate the end of another year. EGSA will provide libations, but please bring an appetizer to share.

April 20 Symposium at Maryland, Friday, April 20.  This event honors the work of Samuel R. Delany but also features a number of other invited speakers, including Robert Reid-Pharr, Tavia Nyong'o, Jordana Rosenberg, and Kevin Floyd.Note that our own Peyton Joyce is presenting in the afternoon (you can see the full program by clicking through to "program" using the link below).  Register online and you'll even get a free lunch.  Hope to see you all there.

April 25 Reorienting Global Shakespeare: Touring Productions to England, 1955-2011
Presentation by Alex Huang 12:00-1:00 pm, Wednesday April 25 2012 Board Room, Folger Shakespeare Library 201 E. Capitol St SE, Washington DC 20003

April 27-28 The UMD Graduate Field Committee in Medieval and Renaissance Studies and the Department of English present an interdisciplinary conference, GEOGRAPHIES OF DESIRE, to be held at the University of Maryland, College Park on April 27th and 28th. The event is free and open to the public. However, we please ask that you RSVP to rob.wakeman@gmail.com by Sunday, April 22. All events will be held in Tawes Hall. Please see attached program or visit our website.

May 14  Inaugural job market 2012-2013 meeting on Monday, May 14, from 10 am to noon in Rome 663.You should attend if you're going on the market in the fall or just thinking about it.  We'll plan for the summer, look ahead to fall meetings, and, in general, explain the process of the job season, which will run through spring 2013.  The Graduate Committee and I are preparing a GWU English Guide to the Job Market.  We expect to have it ready by the meeting.
Please RSVP by April 16 (amlopez@gwu.edu), indicating your dissertation title, the names of your committee members, and whether you've been on the market before.

Upcoming Events - GW Campus and EGSA

We are pleased to present a list of the upcoming department and campus events for GW EGSA students. These are great opportunities for academic enrichment, for catching up with your fellow English Grads, and for connecting with other scholars from different schools. We hope to see you there! Coming up we will be posting information on how you can participate in EGSA next year, what EGSA events are still ahead, and useful ways to wrap up your semester. You can always follow our blog using the via email box to the right or  "like" us on Facebook to receive updates.  

March 25 MEMSI is holding an interdisciplinary, transhistorical symposium on "Cultural Translations: Medieval / Early Modern / Postmodern" to be held at George Washington University in D.C., 9:30 am - 4:00 pm, Sunday, March 25, 2012. 

Free and open to the public. Please stay tuned for updates on the venue and lunch. 

Website: http://www.gwu.edu/~acyhuang/culturaltranslations.html

PRESENTATIONS

Medieval
Suzanne Conklin Akbari (Toronto, English and Medieval Studies): Translating the Past: World Literature in the Medieval Mediterranean
Marcia Norton (GW, History): topic to be announced

Early Modern
Barbara Fuchs (UCLA, English and Spanish & Portuguese): Return to Sender: "Hispanicizing" Cardenio
Christina Lee (Princeton, Spanish & Portuguese): Imagining China in a Golden Age Spanish Epic

Postmodern
Peter Donaldson (MIT, Literature): The King's Speech: Shakespeare, Empire and Global Media
Margaret Litvin (Boston, Arabic and Comparative Literature): topic to be announced

March 25 5:30 PM, the GW EGSA and DC Queer Studies will collaborate on a reading group/discussion/seminar.  It will be held in Rome Hall 771 and will be a discussion of readings from Freeman's book. And there will be pizza.  This should be a great collaboration between Georgetown, GW, and other area schools and between faculty and graduate students.

March 27 9:30 am the American Religion Working Group will meet for a discussion of "Sex and Secularism." We will come together to discuss two articles from the journal Social Research (Winter 2009): "American Protestant Moralism and the Secular Imagination: From Temperance to the Moral Majority" by Susan Harding and "Obama's Neo-New Deal: Religion, Secularism, and Sex in Political Debates Now" by Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini. We will meet in the American Studies building, in room P201, at 9:30 AM, and will provide coffee and snacks. This new working group aims to bring together scholars who find (or suspect) that religion occupies a space within their work. We approach the study of religion from a variety of vantage points, integrating it into our histories, analyses of literature, theories of sexuality, and accounts of politics; the hope of the working group is that it is this interdisciplinary position that can produce the most interesting conversations about how religion has shaped American history and culture. At this first meeting, we can discuss the possibilities  and goals for this working group, including future meetings. If this time doesn't work for you but you are interested in joining us, please send an email to Kim Bolles (kpend@gwmail.gwu.edu). 

March 28 4pm Elizabeth Freeman, author of Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories will be speaking at Georgetown.

March 29 7:30pm Elizabeth Goldsmith (French, Boston U) specializes in seventeenth-century France. Light refreshments provided, books available for purchase. RSVP by March 27 jawood@bu.edu

BOSTON UNIVERSITY WASHINGTON ACADEMIC CENTER

1776 Massachusetts Ave NW, Suite 650

Close to Dupont Circle metro

April 3 7:30pm New York actor and playwright Gabrielle Maisels will bring her
one-woman performance "Bongani" to George Washington University's
Black Box Theater. The play is the second of her trilogy based on her
experiences growing up in a Jewish activist family in South Africa.

Maisels is the granddaughter of Israel Aaron Maisels, the lead defense
attorney for Nelson Mandela during the Treason Trials (1958-61)

The Program is sponsored by Africana Studies, Theater and Dance,
Judaic Studies, English and Women's Studies

RSVP preferred Africana@gwu.edu

March 30 9am-5:00pm The sixth annual Collected Stories and & Twice Told Tales conference will take place in MPA Building, Room 310 located at 805 21st St. NW, Washington, DC 20052. This day-long conference will include a collective of American Studies scholarly papers. A full schedule of events will be available online in early March 

This event will feature Lauren Berlant, George M. Pullman Professor of English, The University of Chicago who will present a keynote address from 4:00-5:30 titled “Structures of Unfeeling: Mysterious Skin.” Information about the keynote address is attached. 

You are welcome to join us for some or all of the talks. This event is free and open to the public and no RSVP is required. We hope to see you there!

Newberry Research Workshop

Check out this unique opportunity for Academic Enrichment and Research. It comes highly recommended by our own Dr. Huang. Let us know if you will be participating! 

Friday, September 28, 2012

9:00 am to 5:00 pm

The Poetics and Politics of Cultural Translation

Directed by Jyotsna Singh, Michigan State University
This workshop will be relevant to early-career graduate students in a range of fields and disciplines, including, but not limited to: Anthropology, Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, History, Literature in English or other relevant languages, Middle Eastern Studies, and Religious Studies. The workshop will help graduate students to develop and fine-tune skills in research methods and theoretical approaches, through the lens of the growing subfield of early modern Anglo-Muslim encounters.
Eligibility: Enrollment is limited to 20. Graduate students in a terminal master’s program and those who have not yet completed comprehensive exams in a PhD program may apply. No language prerequisites. Students from Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies consortium member institutions have priority.
About  |  Schedule  |  Pre-workshop Preparation  |  Travel Funding |  Register Online


The aims of this workshop are twofold:

·  to guide a close micro-reading of selected archival materials, primarily from the Newberry special collections, that illuminate the interactions and “translations” between early modern English and Muslim empires and travelers, as evident in both texts and images

·  to explore two related thematic strands: the emergence and divergence of Muslim empires from both English and Muslim perspectives; and the figure of the ambassador or emissary—both official and unofficial—as mediator and translator between different cultures and empires.

Drawing on the growing scholarly engagement with Anglo-Muslim relations from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries, this workshop will focus on figurations of Islam and Muslim cultures, within both intercultural and intra-cultural contexts. While European Renaissance cultures cast both a skeptical and a fascinated eye on the Muslim world on their peripheries, we hope to illuminate those Muslim societies from both local and globalizing contexts.


Schedule
8:30 – 9:00: Coffee and continental breakfast
9:00 – 9:45: Presentation by Jyotsna Singh
9:45 – 11:00: Discussion: participants share precirculated responses to the required readings
11:00 – 11:40: Obtain reader cards/library tour and orientation
11:40 – 12:30: Catered lunch
12:30 – 1:15: Presentation by Matthew Dimmock, University of Sussex
2:15 – 3:30: Rare books “show-and-tell” session
3:30 – 5:00: Concluding discussion


Pre-workshop preparation
The participants of this workshop will prepare short responses on one or two of the works below to be precirculated prior to the workshop (details of the assignment and copies of the readings will be made available to those who register):
1. Thomas Newton [Celio Curione], A Notable Historie of the Saracens (1575) [Case F 622.62]
2. Richard Eden, The history of Travayle in the West and East Indies (1577) [VAULT Ayer 110.E2 1577]
3. Sir Paul Rycaut [and Richard Knolles], The Turkish history, from the original of that nation, to the growth of the Ottoman empire (1687) [Wing folio F 59.4661]
4. Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes (1625) - especially books 4 (pp. 535-92) and 9 (pp. 1383-1406 and pp. 1464-83) [2 copies: Case folio G 12.71 and VAULT Ayer 110.P9 1625][1] 
5. Thomas Preston, Lamentable Tragedie, mixed full of plesant mirth, containing the life of Cambises, king of Percia(1584) [VAULT Case 3A 650]
6. Elkanah Settle, Cambyses, king of Persia: a tragedy (1670) [Case V 135.S48755]
7. William Bedwell, Mahommedis Imposturae (1615)
8. Tarih-i Hind-i garbi [A history of the India of the West] manuscript in Turkish c. 1600. [VAULT Ayer MS 612].[2]. English Translation - E101.G66 1990.
9. Baburnama: Memoirs of Babur, Prince and Emperor (1504-1529).  Ed. and Trans. W.M. Thackston. Modern Library Paperback Edition, New York: Random House, 2002.
10. Humayun Nama: The History of Humayun. Princess Gulbadan. (c.1580). Trans. Ed. Annette Beveridge. London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1902. [Y 301.641 v.13]
11. Tuzk-i-Jahangiri or Memoirs of Jahangir (1569-1609) Eds. Alexander Rogers and Henry Beveridge, London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1909-1914. [Y 301.641 v.19, 22]
Download a bibliography of secondary works.
We encourage participants to plan to return to the Newberry on the following Saturday morning to explore Newberry materials on their own in the Readings Rooms (open 9:00 am-1:00 pm on Saturdays).

Upcoming EGSA and Campus Events

Thank you to all who were able to attend our Second Annual EGSA Symposium last Friday. It was a great opportunity to catch up and see current work in our department. There are more professional and academic events to come this semester, and below is a short list of opportunities. We would like to highlight our upcoming Professional Development Event: Summer Jobs which will be held this Thursday, Feb. 16 from 3:00pm to 4:00pm. This session is to discuss potential summer jobs which are suited to English Graduate students. It can be tough finding a good job for only four months out of the year, and one that helps you financially as well as professionally, but we have polled our peers for a wide variety of summer job options. Come for an informal chat (and delicious cookies!) this Thursday in Rome 771. 

Februrary 16 EGSA Professional Development Event: Summer Jobs. Come join us for a conversation about how to fund your summer months with a wide variety of job options that will help you both financially and professionally. Delicious cookies will be provided.

February 16 Laura Lunger Knoppers (Penn State): "Reconsidering Luxury in Seventeenth-Century England: The Case of John Evelyn" Thursday, February 16th, 5:30pm Georgetown University Lannan Center New North 408

 March 2 The Washington Center for Psychoanalysis And The Columbia Academy of Psychodynamics present the 2012 Frieda Fromm-Reichmann Lecture “A Refugee from Chestnut Lodge Receives Asylum at the Folger Shakespeare Library: New Discoveries about the Authorship of Shakespeare’s Works”

Speaker:  Richard Waugaman, MD* 

Friday, March 2, 2012 7 pm – 9 pm

Chevy Chase Women’s Club

7931 Connecticut Avenue, Chevy Chase, Maryland Free to Students Register at www.wcpweb.org

March 8 David Loewenstein (University of Wisconsin-Madison): “John Milton, William Walwyn, and the 'Terrors' of Heresy in Seventeenth-Century England” Thursday, March 8th, 5:30pm Georgetown University Lannan Center New North 408

 March 25 MEMSI is holding an interdisciplinary, transhistorical symposium on "Cultural Translations: Medieval / Early Modern / Postmodern" to be held at George Washington University in D.C., 9:30 am - 4:00 pm, Sunday, March 25, 2012. 

Free and open to the public. Please stay tuned for updates on the venue and lunch. 
 Website: http://www.gwu.edu/~acyhuang/culturaltranslations.html
 PRESENTATIONS
 Medieval
Suzanne Conklin Akbari (Toronto, English and Medieval Studies): Translating the Past: World Literature in the Medieval Mediterranean
Marcia Norton (GW, History): topic to be announced
 Early Modern
Barbara Fuchs (UCLA, English and Spanish & Portuguese): Return to Sender: "Hispanicizing" Cardenio
Christina Lee (Princeton, Spanish & Portuguese): Imagining China in a Golden Age Spanish Epic
 Postmodern
Peter Donaldson (MIT, Literature): The King's Speech: Shakespeare, Empire and Global Media
Margaret Litvin (Boston, Arabic and Comparative Literature): topic to be announced

 April 12 Tobias Gregory (Catholic University of America): “Paradise Regained and Late Miltonic Values” Thursday, April 12th, 5:30pm Georgetown University Lannan Center New North 408

Upcoming EGSA Events

EGSA would like to kick the week off with a reminder that the EGSA Symposium on Bodies in Space is coming up in just two weeks. In the next few days we will be posting the flyer for the event with all the event details, but please be sure to r.s.v.p. on Facebook so that we can order enough breakfast, lunch, and wine (yes, there will be wine). This is an annual event showcasing our colleagues' work and interesting scholarship, so please make plans to attend and support our department and your EGSA board.

Also coming up:
February 16 - "Summer Jobs for English Grads": a presentation on options available for the summer months for money and for the resume.
February 24 - Join the EGSA board for a trek to the Library of Congress where we will get library cards (an immensely helpful resource in graduate school), and possibly tour the main hall.
March (dates to be announced) - we will organize a "Plan your PhD" event, and cover skills such as Resume/CV writing and Publishing in Academia. Additionally, we are considering another M.A. portfolio presentation, and round-table sessions for the Qualifying and Fields exams.
April (dates to be announced) - we will wrap up the year with a blog series on Alternative Career Options, and we will host another book sale. We will also host elections for next year's board, so start thinking about if you would like to be on the ballot.

We will of course continue to publish CFPs and campus events. Please take a minute and subscribe via email to our blog (note: you may have to use a different browser if you experience difficulty with subscribing).

EGSA CFP Extension

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Please read the following message from the EGSA VP for Academic Enrichment:

Hi everyone.  

I hope you had a relaxing break.  I'm writing to let you know that the deadline for the call for papers to the EGSA conference "Bodies in Space" has been extended until Monday, January 23 at midnight. This is a great opportunity to test conference papers out [for instance, in a happy accident, the UMD graduate conference is also focused on bodies this year] in a relaxed environment and a chance to share your work with your classmates, (plus a nice line on your cv for those of us who think about such things).  I highly encourage you to submit an abstract to support our second annual conference.

Thanks

Peyton

Here's the CFP again:

Call for Papers: Bodies in Space: Emerging Scholarship in Literary and Cultural Studies

[The Panopticon] is a type of location of bodies in space, of distribution of individuals in relation to one another, of hierarchal organization, of disposition of centres and channels of power, of definition of the instruments and modes of power ... – Michel Foucault

The English Graduate Student Association is pleased to announce the call for papers for oursecond annual graduate student symposium Bodies in Space: Emerging Scholarship in Literary andCultural Studies to be held Friday, February 10, 2012.

Foucault’s reading of the production of docile bodies notwithstanding, the aim of this conferenceis not to consider the ways that the multiplicity of concentrations in the fields of Literature andCultural Studies stand in relation to each other, but instead consider how they stand in relationwith each other (and the ways that these relationships are always promiscuous and overlapping).Thus, rather than an image of a body pinned to a specific space, the title alludes to the many waysthat bodies and spatiality might be productively considered in literary criticism. More generally, wemean to provide a frame large enough to encompass all of the interesting work going on in the GWEnglish department. In this symposium, we hope to foster conversation between presenters andparticipants across concentrations and even disciplines through the intersections of currentgraduate student work. We welcome any and all submissions and encourage submissions frompreviously written course work or works in progress, including dissertation chapters andconference papers.

Submission Guidelines

Abstracts should be submitted, along with your contact information, to gwegsa@gmail.com by 11:59pm on Monday, January 23, 2012. Submissions must be 250 words or less and must be submitted as a Microsoft Word document or PDF. Please include 2-3 keywords at the bottom of your submission and include the words “Conference Submission” in the subject line of your email. Conference presentations will be approximately 15 minutes, and panels will be organized after submissions have been accepted.

We also welcome any volunteers who would like to be involved in the organizational / logisticalside of the symposium, be it chairing a panel or assisting with lunch.