| April 26, 2013 | ||
| 10:00 am | to | 6:00 pm |
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Gerlinger Hall Alumni Lounge
1468 University St.
UO campus
A group of innovative scholars who specialize in African American literature will gather at the University of Oregon to give talks about their research on April 26, 2013 from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. This free symposium is open to the public and will take place in the Alumni Lounge of Gerlinger Hall, 1468 University Street.
This symposium will include a morning panel moderated by Mark Whalan (U Oregon) and an afternoon panel moderated by Ernesto Martínez (U Oregon). The day will conclude with readings of poetry and creative nonfiction from accomplished authors Evie Shockley and David Bradley.
Guest Presenters:
- Anthony Reed (Yale), “The Science of Mourning in Contemporary African American Poetry”
- Matt Sandler (U Oregon), “The New Science of Will Alexander”
- Evie Shockley (Rutgers), “Colorblind(ed): Visuality, Discursivity, and Slavery in Rita Dove’s and George Elliott Clarke’s Verse Plays”
- Howard Rambsy (Southern Illinois U Edwardsville), “A Golden Age of Inspiration for Black Men Writers, 1977-1997”
- Erica Edwards (UC Riverside), “The Racial Commonsense of Counterterror: African American Literature after 9/11”
- Evie Shockley (Rutgers), poetry reading
- David Bradley (U Oregon), “Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blues”
The gathering of this group of scholars in Eugene is possible through the generous support of the Vice Provost of Academic Affairs, the Center for the Study of Women in Society (CSWS), and the English Department.
Schedule:
10 am: Welcome and Introductions
- Carol Stabile, Director of the Center for the Study of Women in Society
- Doug Blandy, Senior Vice Provost for Academic Affairs
- Courtney Thorsson, Assistant Professor of English
10:15 am-12:15 pm
Moderator: Mark Whalan (UO English)
- Anthony Reed—Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies, Yale University, “The Science of Mourning in Contemporary African American Poetry,”
- Matt Sandler – Instructor of Literature, Clark Honors College, University of Oregon, “The New Science of Will Alexander”
- Evie Shockley—Associate Professor of English, Rutgers University, “Colorblind(ed): Visuality, Discursivity, and Slavery in Rita Dove’s and George Elliott Clarke’s Verse Plays”
- Discussion/Q&A
12:30-2 pm Lunch Break
2-4 pm
Moderator: Ernesto Martínez (UO Women and Gender Studies, Ethnic Studies)
- Howard Rambsy – Director of Black Studies and Associate Professor of Literature, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville – “A Golden Age of Inspiration for Black Men Writers, 1977-1997”
- Erica Edwards – Associate Professor of English, UC Riverside, “The Racial Commonsense of Counterterror: African American Literature after 9/11”
- Discussion/Q&A
4-5 pm Reception
5-6 pm Author Readings:
Introductions: Courtney Thorsson, Assistant Professor of English, U Oregon
- Evie Shockley – Associate Professor of English, Rutgers University, poetry reading
- David Bradley – Associate Professor of Creative Writing, U Oregon, “Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blues”
Participant Bios:
David Bradley is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Oregon. He is the author of two novels: The Chaneysville Incident (Harper and Row 1981), and South Street (Grossman 1975). He has published essays on Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, Herman Melville, William Melvin Kelley, and Alice Walker, and has published articles in Esquire, Redbook, The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and The Village Voice and other periodicals. In addition to the PEN/Faulkner Award (1982) for The Chaneysville Incident, Professor Bradley has received numerous honors including and Academy Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1982), a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction (1989), and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for creative nonfiction (1991). He is currently at work on a nonfiction book, The Bondage Hypothesis: Meditations on Race and History, and a novel in stories, Raystown.
Erica Edwards is associate professor of English at the University of California, Riverside and the author of Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership (University of Minnesota Press, 2011). Her work on African American literature, politics, and gender critique has appeared in journals such as Callaloo, American Quarterly, American Literary History, and Women and Performance.
Ernesto Martínez (moderator) is associate professor of ethnic studies and women and gender studies at the University of Oregon. He is the author of On Making Sense: Queer Race Narratives of Intelligibility (Stanford University Press, 2012) and coeditor with Michael Hames-García of Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader (Duke University Press, 2011), which won the 2012 Lambda Literary Award. Professor Martínez is currently at work on Engaging Our Faculties: New Dialogues on Diversity in Higher Education, a volume that consists of 10 critical essays written by junior faculty of color from multiple disciplinary backgrounds and 10 responses to those essays written by university presidents, provosts, and deans from across the nation. His articles have appeared in the International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities, and Nations, Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader, Signs, and PMLA.
Howard Rambsy II is an associate professor of literature at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville where he teaches African American literature and directs the Black Studies Program. His writings and mixed media exhibits focus on poetry, literary history, and technology. His work has appeared in African American Review, The Southern Quarterly, Black Issues Book Review, The Crisis, and Mississippi Quarterly. Rambsy’s book The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry (Michigan 2011) focuses on a defining African American literary and cultural movement of the 1960s and 1970s that involved figures such as Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, and Nikki Giovanni.
Anthony Reed is an assistant professor of English and African American Studies at Yale University. He is currently finishing a book called Fugitive Time: The Politics and Poetics of Black Experimental Writing, and beginning research on a project tentatively titled Phonographic Poetry considering the interplay of poetry and documentation in African American literature in the 20th and 21st centuries. Professor Reed’s poetry has been published in Callaloo (2012) and his scholarship appears in The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature (June 2011) and African American Review (forthcoming).
Matt Sandler teaches literature in the Clark Honors College at University of Oregon. His work has appeared in Callaloo, African American Review, and Atlantic Studies, as well as anthologies of work on Walt Whitman and Paul Laurence Dunbar. He is currently completing a book on self-help and vernacular American literature.
Evie Shockley is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is the author of Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (Iowa 2011), a critical study, as well as two books of poetry: the new black (Wesleyan 2011), winner of the 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry, and a half-red sea (Carolina Wren Press 2006). Her poems and essays appear widely in journals and anthologies, and her work has been honored and supported by the 2012 Holmes National Poetry Prize, fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and residencies at Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and the Millay Colony for the Arts.
Courtney Thorsson (organizer) is an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Oregon, where she teaches African American literature. Her book, Women’s Work: Nationalism and Contemporary African American Women’s Novels (University of Virginia Press 2013) argues that Toni Cade Bambara, Paule Marshall, Gloria Naylor, Ntozake Shange, and Toni Morrison reclaim and revise cultural nationalism in their novels of the 1980s and 90s. Her writing has appeared in Callaloo and Atlantic Studies. Her article “James Baldwin and Black Women Writers” will appear in the Baldwin special issue of African American Review in 2013. Professor Thorsson’s current book project, Revolutionary Recipes, is a study of culinary discourse and the recipe form in African American cookbooks, poetry, and fiction.
Mark Whalan (moderator) joined the University of Oregon as the Robert D. and Eve E. Horn Professor of English in 2011, after beginning his career at the University of Exeter in the UK. He specializes in American modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, and has published four books: The Letters of Jean Toomer, 1919-1924 (University of Tennessee Press 2006); Race, Manhood and Modernism in America: The Short Story Cycles of Sherwood Anderson and Jean Toomer (University of Tennessee Press 2007); The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro (University Press of Florida, 2008); and American Culture in the 1910s (Edinburgh University Press, 2010). He has published in African American Review, Modernism/Modernity, American Art, Studies in American Fiction, Modern Fiction Studies, and the Journal of American Studies. His current work examines the relations between American modernism, World War One, and the development of the federal state.
