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

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/

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.

Queer Chronocities and Structures of Unfeeling: A Short Review of Elizabeth Freeman's and Lauren Berlant's Recent Talks in DC

It's been an exciting few weeks on campus, as we had Elizabeth Freeman give a talk called “Queer Chronicities” at Georgetown and Lauren Berlant give the keynote for the GW American Studies “Collected Stories and Twice-Told Tales” conference, titled “Structures of Unfeeling in Mysterious Skin” (or something like this).

Freeman’s talk was heady, elegantly self-contained, and generated a lively Q and A.

Bringing Queer Theory and Bioethics together, with an eye to the conjunction of chronic diseases and modernization-industrialization, Freeman treated the audience to a facile reading of Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha” as a story of depression and addiction written in a chronic Steinian style, placed alongside Freeman’s compelling reading of the “chronic” as an etymological and conceptual site where Biomedicine meets sexology in a possible ontology of queer subjecthood.

Mark Your Calendars! April Campus and EGSA Events

We know this time of year is crunch time, but we have a long list of exciting events coming up this month. EGSA would also like to add that elections are coming up, so stay tuned for Election information concerning your 2012-2013 EGSA Board members (and we will be having a party!). We hope to see you at some of these events - remember that taking a break is necessary, and networking is helpful! 

April 5 Alternate Career Session 5:30-6:30pm Rome 771 Meet our panel of professionals who took their English Graduate degrees and turned them into awesome, interesting careers. Learn about transferable skills and how to make that CV work for you in the professional world. Hosted by EGSA. Light refreshments provided.

April 7 9pm-12am Please join us for night-caps and scamels as we launch the Luminary Tempest at the Shakespeare Association of America in Boston.
The Charlesmark Hotel lounge, 655 Boylston Street,  Boston, MA

April 9 Thomas Bisson “Crisis in Early Ducal Normandy: Some Conjectural History” 2110 Taliaferro Hall; Refreshments 4:00, Seminar 4:30pm.

April 13 Please join us for our last event of the spring semester: a breakfast seminar with Danna Agmon (History, Virginia Tech). We begin at 9 AM in Rome 771 (801 22nd St. NW). Breakfast will be served. Her paper is pre-circulated; please RSVP to me [lduckert@gwu.edu] and I will send you a copy. 

April 14 Hear great poetry from exciting DC writers and help women in your community--come to Will Read for Women, the first poetry reading/pantry drive of its kind! 

So to Speak, a feminist literary journal, will host our first reading drive to benefit a local domestic violence shelter. The reading will feature poetry by Sarah Browning, Joe Hall, Kateema Lee, and Meg Ronan, with an open mic to follow. Audience members are asked to bring toiletry items and other pantry necessities to donate to the shelter, Bethany House. The list of suggested items follows.

The reading is scheduled for Saturday, April 14th at 8:30 p.m. in the Johnson Center Bistro, a cafe on the first floor of the student center at George Mason's Fairfax campus. Parking is available nearby in the Mason Pond, Shenandoah, and Rappahannock parking decks. We'd appreciate your support in reaching out into the community and getting this event off the ground! Contact us at sotospeakjournal@gmail.com with any questions. 

April 19 “Plan Your PhD” 3:30-4:30pm Rome 771 Hosted by EGSA for current PhD students. Come learn about new department policies, check out DegreeMap, and get a chance to ask advanced PhD students all the questions you might have about your program. 

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!

Don't get stuck with an empty plate. Please RSVP to the upcoming symposium

Your RSVP is not just helping the EGSA.  It's helping you too.  The EGSA will be providing lunch, and we will order food based on the number of RSVPs.  So if you are planning on coming (and planning on eating) please let us know through either our Facebook Group or by emailing me directly.

Bodies in Space - Schedule

EGSA Symposium Keynote Address

The EGSA Symposium, "Bodies in Space," is this Friday.  Put it in your calendars!  We have a full day of panels planned, with a keynote by Georgetown University's Dana Luciano.

Dana Luciano is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program at Georgetown University. She is the author of Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America (NYU, 2007), which won the Modern Language Association’s First Book Prize in 2008. She is currently at work on a monograph exploring the erotics of the non-human in 19th century American literature, entitled Romancing the Inhuman: Animacy and Eros in America, 1840-1910, as well as a collection of essays on contemporary LGBT film and video entitled Once More, With Feeling: The Texture of the Past in Queer Period Films.

Dr. Luciano will be giving a talk titled "Touching Spirits" which explores the innovative intimate and social forms proposed by 19th century spirit photography, focusing primarily on the work of William Mumler (active c. 1862-1870s) and Edward Wyllie (active c. 1890s-1910).

This Week with EGSA

First, thank you for joining us at the October Happy Hour last Friday! As part of our continuing Abstract/Conference online content, we have provided some information below on upcoming Conferences. These are recommended by your fellow grads and faculty. We also have many exciting campus events approaching, including some special seminars and professional development opportunities. We hope to see you at some or all of these events. Stay tuned for more online content from our Abstract/Conference Workshop

Upcoming Conferences:

November 3-4, 2011 University of Maryland “Rethinking World Literatures/ Other World Literatures”

February 17-18, 2012 British Commonwealth Planning Committee, Savannah Georgia. “21^st Annual British Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies Conference.”

March 21-25, 2012 The 33^rd International Conference on the Fantastic in Arts “The Monstrous Fantastic” in Orlando, FL. 

Upcoming GW English Events:

October 27 Thursday 4pm (1957 E St NW Rm 213) Please join MEMSI members for a panel on "What Monsters Mean" with Asa Simon Mittman and Jeffrey Weinstock 

October 28 Friday 12:15pm (slight change in time!) Please join us for a seminar on "Monster Theory" co-sponsored by GW MEMSI and EGSA. Lunch will be served, so you should r.s.v.p. for this event by October 25 (today!): lduckert@gwu.edu. Many of your EGSA Board members will be in attendance, so we hope to see you there!

November 1 Tuesday 5pm Marvin Center 307 The GW Career Center is hosting: Graduate Students: Resume vs. CV. What are the differences between résumés and CVs? Develop a better understanding of these two primary career and job search documents, including appropriate content, format and length. Learn more about how to utilize these two important self marketing materials to advance your career. Co-sponsored by the Office of Graduate Student Enrollment Management. RSVP through the GWork Workshop calendar.

November 3-4 Composing Disability: Writing, Communication, Culture George Washington University, Washington DC. Organized by one of our favorite faculty, Robert McRuer, this event promises to be a unique opportunity to discover how Disability Studies and Disability Culture are transforming higher education. “Composing Disability” brings together Disability and Deaf Studies, Writing Studies, Education, and Global Cultural Studies for spirited, collegial dialogue, about the production of disability culture, disability writing, and disability representation in and beyond academia today. Please click on the link for the program schedule, information about the keynote speakers, and to register for the event. Even if you are only able to attend part of the seminar, please take time to register. 

November 4 4pm Join GW MEMSI for Master Oh Tae Suk's screening of the film of his production, The Tempest. The audience will have an opportunity to interact with the director at a presentation on November 5. Both events at the Harry Harding Auditorium, 1957 E Street. The events are part of this year's Hahn Moo-Sook Colloquium in the Korean Humanities. This event is co-sponsored by MEMSI and co-organized by Professor Alex Huang.

November 11 2:00-3:30pm Rome 771 Carla Peterson will be discussing her acclaimed new book, Black Gotham, a cultural history of free black elites living in antebellum New York. Hosted by the English Dept.

November 18 2:30-4:30 Rome 771 EGSA Teaching and Pedagogy Seminar. Mark your calendars for this final 2011 Professional Development event. Chances are you will be spending some part of your career as an English graduate student teaching in the classroom. We want to provide you with all the tools you need, including information on teaching composition (and how to convince a future employer that you can), information on the latest issues in English pedagogy, and how to use technology in the classroom. This seminar is designed for all English grads, even those that have been teaching for a while. Stay tuned to this blog for more information, and please direct any questions to Tawnya Ravy (tcravy@gwu.edu).

Fall Literary Events

Welcome to the George Washington University EGSA blog. Your EGSA board hopes to use this tool to keep in touch with you and to keep you posted on upcoming events, professional development opportunities, and social gatherings.

To start us off, I would like to announce a couple literary events coming up this Fall. The D.C. Metro area offers us unique and exciting opportunities to experience the literary world.

First, Toni Morrison, celebrated Nobel Prize and Pulitzer-prize winning American author, editor, and professor, is coming to our very campus on Wednesday September 21 to do a reading and speak about her life and work. For details on the event and to rsvp (for a free ticket) click here. Second, George Mason University, located in NOVA, is hosting a "Fall for the Book" Festival from September 18th-23rd. Check out the schedule here to see the large variety of authors at this event as well as unique panels on a wide range of topics. Finally the National Book Festival, hosted this year by the Obamas and the Library of Congress on the National Mall in Washington D.C. takes place on September 24-25. Check out the schedule here. This Festival will provide you with another opportunity to see Toni Morrison as well as a number of other famous authors including Sarah Vowell (one of my favorite authors). The theme for this year is celebrating Reading Out Loud and they have several special events planned to encourage children, parents, and educators to consider the pleasures and advantages of reading out loud. At least one or two of us are already committed to coming on Saturday, September 24 to see Sarah Vowell - if you would like to join us or suggest other authors to see, look for our event details on facebook (and don't forget to "like" GWEGSA to receive updates via facebook).

Welcome to the new blog

Let me know how you like it.