Humanities News, Features, and Other Updates

Category: English Faculty

Van Kooy’s paper for London conference examines ‘the plantationoscene’

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Associate Professor Dana Van Kooy presented her essay, “Assemblages of the Plantationoscene” recently at The London Stage and the Nineteenth-Century World III conference, sponsored by the New College at Oxford University.

Dana Van Kooy

Invoking the neologism “plantationoscene,” the paper from Van Kooy, who directs Tech’s English program, examines John Fawcett’s pantomime, “Obi; or Three-Finger’d Jack,” which opened at London’s Haymarket Theatre in 1800. Linking the era (cene) to the performance and visual reproduction of specific theatrical scenes, this neologism offers an alternative framework for interpreting Fawcett’s pantomime, which assembled scenes of plantation life and its corresponding devastation into a formulaic plot.

Focusing on stage descriptions and those scenes advertised on its playbills, “Assemblages of the Plantationoscene” draws attention to the production of a visual ecology that reconfigured the colonial landscape.

In her abstract, Van Kooy established the relevance of the topic: “Throughout The Atlantic World, the plantation system marked a period of human and ecological disaster, one that theaters in Britain and the United States readily transformed into captivating spectacles throughout 18th and 19th centuries. The scale of this devastation continues to impact society in myriad ways, including racialized violence and policies that associate people and labor practices with ‘natural’ and/or geographical spaces.”

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Stephanie Carpenter Publishes Book Review

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Stephanie CarpenterStephanie Carpenter has published an omnibus book review in the Fall 2018 issue of The Missouri Review. Her piece, “The End of the World as We Know It: Four Novels of Climate Change,” considers new novels by Louise Erdrich, Jenni Fagan, Paul Kingsnorth and James Bradley. Carpenter will again teach Literature and the Environment (HU 3508) in Fall 2020.

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RTC Colloquium: Islands of Resistance

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RTC colloquium event posterPlease join the Department of Humanities for a Rhetoric, Theory and Culture Colloquium on Wednesday, November 14 titled “Islands of Resistance.” Dana Van Kooy, associate professor of english in transnational literature and literacy theory and culture, will present “Islands of Resistance: Geography as a Configuration of Political Resistance and Atlantic History” (see abstract below). This essay draws attention to Haiti, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic as differently scaled geopolitical literary spaces that represent multiple cultures and histories of resistance.

Please join us 12 p.m. (noon) Wednesday, November 14 in Rozsa Center room 120 (choral room).

Abstract:

Islands of resistance. The phrase commonly refers to isolated pockets of organized and oppositional force. Significantly, when interpreting the phrase, the emphasis falls more on the geographical features of an island than on the refusal to comply. The geographical imagery encircles and confines resistance: limiting its effectiveness to a series of singular actions or to a small, containable  collective movement. In the cultural imaginary, the island represents a point of stasis in the midst of an immensely larger—very fluid and indomitable—natural force. However, the island’s characteristics—its isolation, its remoteness from everywhere else, and its unique ecology—also produce a synecdoche: the world is an island. What I find relevant here is how geographical markers reconfigure the politics of the phrase, both positively and negatively. 

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Stephanie Carpenter Gives Talk and Reading at Flint Literary Festival

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Stephanie CarpenterStephanie Carpenter, senior lecturer in creative writing and literature, was a featured reader at the second annual Flint Literary Festival held on October 27.

Carpenter gave a talk called “Re-creating History,” reading from her own fiction and discussing how creative writers use objects and documents to imagine or uncover stories at the margins of the historical record.

Mona Hanna-Attisha and Journalist Anna Clark headlined the festival, reading from their works about the ongoing Flint water crisis.

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RTC Colloquium: A Sixth Great Lake Beneath Our Feet

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Poster for the Fall 2018 RTC ColloquiumThe Department of Humanities is pleased to announce the first Rhetoric, Theory and Culture Colloquium of the semester titled A Sixth Great Lake Beneath Our Feet. Professor M. Bartley Seigel will read poetry from his current project and will be joined by students from his graduate seminar in poetics: Edzordzi Agbozo & Xena Cortez. Seigel is the author of the poetry collection, This Is What They Say, (Typecast Publishing, 2013).

Please join us on Wednesday, October 10 at 12 p.m. (noon) in the Rozsa Center Choral Room 120.

 

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Cumbria Faculty-Led Study Abroad Information Session

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Street scene in EdinburghHumanities professor Dana Van Kooy, along with Carl Blair (SS), and Libby Meyer (VPA) will host an information session for Cumbria 2019, a faculty-led study abroad program in northern England and southern Scotland: summer, Track B. The session will take place from 6 to 7 p.m. Wednesday (Oct. 10) in Fisher 130.

We welcome students from across campus. This program offers students an opportunity for foreign travel and for fulfilling HASS (humanities, arts and social sciences) and other General Education requirements in the fields of history, literature, music and archaeology. This session will provide students with information about course offerings, field trips, the application process, costs and scholarships.

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Dana Van Kooy Edits Essay Collection

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Dana Van KooyDana Van Kooy has edited a special edition of essays about Teaching Romantic-period drama for Romantic Textualities, a peer-reviewed, online journal. These eight essays contribute new insights about a variety of topics, including William Blake, visual spectacle and theatrical form, the intersections between biography and tragedy in Mary Mitford’s work, gender and Goethe’s “Faust,” politics and Sheridan’s “Pizarro,” and the changing cultural landscape of the Atlantic world in George Colman the Younger’s “Inkle & Yarico.”

Each highlights the relevance of Romantic-period drama and theatre as a textual, performative, and a visual art form. Contributors include scholars from University of Pittsburgh, UCLA, Aldo Moro University (Italy), Mount Saint Vincent University (Canada), Montclair State University, and the University of Colorado at Boulder.

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Laura Kasson Fiss Presents Paper at The Body and the Page Conference

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Laura Kasson-FissLaura Kasson Fiss presented a paper entitled “The Bodies of the Idler’s Club: A Quantitative Analysis of Column Contributors” at The Body and the Page, an international conference jointly hosted by the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals and the Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada in Victoria, British Columbia.

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