Lecture Series

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  Terrence Hayes

  Terrence Hayes

  Terrance Hayes is a 2014 MacArthur Fellow. His first book, Muscular Music, won a Whiting Writers Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. His second book, Hip Logic (Penguin 2002), was a National Poetry Series selection and a finalist for both the Los Angeles Time Book Award and the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Wind In a Box (Penguin 2006), a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award finalist, was named one of the best books of 2006 by Publishers Weekly. How to Be Drawn received the 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry. Lighthead, was winner of the 2010 National Book Award. His sixth poetry collection, American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin (Penguin, 2018), was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the TS Eliot Prize, the Brooklyn Public Library’s Literary Prize for Fiction & Poetry, the LA Times Book Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Award.

  The 2019 Baine Lecture is a free, public program, and begins at 6:00 p.m. in the Bondurant Auditorium.

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  Understanding Randall Kenan

  Randall Kenan and James A. Crank

  April 11, 2019 at 4:00 p.m. in Peabody 206 The event will begin with Kenan reading from his work and will be followed by an interview by James A. Crank, author of Understanding Randall Kenan. Signing to follow. Copies of the book will be available for purchase. Randall Kenan is best known for his novel A Visitation of Spirits (1989) and his collection of stories Let the Dead Bury Their Dead (1992), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, was a nominee for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction, and named a New York Times Notable Book. Kenan is also the recipient of a , as well as the Whiting Writers Award, Sherwood Anderson Award, John Dos Passos Award, Rome Prize, and North Carolina Award for Literature. James A. Crank is an associate professor of American literature and culture at the University of Alabama, a National Humanities Center Fellow, and cohost of the podcast The Sound and the Furious. Crank’s essays have appeared in Agee Agonistes: Essays on the Life, Legend, and Works of James Agee and Southerners on Film: Essays on Hollywood Portrayals since the 1970s. In addition to his book on Kenan, Crank has written Understanding Sam Shepard (2012), New Approaches to Gone with the Wind (2015), and Race and New Modernisms (2019).

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  Shakespeare and Un-Freedom

  Ayanna Thompson

  Ayanna Thompson is Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies (ACMRS) at Arizona State University. She is the author of Shakespeare in the Theatre: Peter Sellars (Arden Bloomsbury, 2018), Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student-Centered Approach (Arden Bloomsbury, 2016), Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (Oxford University Press, 2011), and Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage (Routledge, 2008). She wrote the new introduction for the revised Arden3 Othello (Arden, 2016), and is the editor of Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance (Palgrave, 2010) and Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance (Routledge, 2006). She is currently working on a collection of essays for Cambridge University Press on Shakespeare and race, and is collaborating with Curtis Perry on the Arden4 edition of Titus Andronicus. Professor Thompson is the 2018-19 President of the Shakespeare Association of America, and has served as a member of the Board of Directors for the Association of Marshall Scholars. She was one of Phi Beta Kappa’s Visiting Scholars for 2017-2018. The Forty-Seventh James Edwin Savage Lecture in the Renaissance will take place on April 4 at 6:30 p.m. in the Bondurant Auditorium.

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  Sounds of Earth: 40 Years of Voyager’s Golden LP and the Poetry That Spun From It

  Adrian Matejka

  Adrian Matejka was born in Nuremberg, Germany and grew up in California and Indiana. He is a graduate of Indiana University and the MFA program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He is the author of The Devil’s Garden (Alice James Books, 2003) which won the New York / New England Award and Mixology (Penguin, 2009), a winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series. Mixology was also a finalist for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature. His most recent collection of poems, The Big Smoke (Penguin, 2013), was awarded the 2014 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. The Big Smoke was also a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award, 2014 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and 2014 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. His new book, Map to the Stars, was released from Penguin in March 2017. Among Matejka’s other honors are the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Award, two grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the Julia Peterkin Award, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and a Simon Fellowship from United States Artists. He teaches in the MFA program at Indiana University in Bloomington and is currently working on a new collection of poems, Hearing Damage, and a graphic novel. The 2017 Edith T. Baine Lecture will take place on November 15th at 6 p.m. at The Depot. This event is free and open to the public.

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  Nineteenth-Century Facebook: John Ridge and the Archives of Cherokee Resistance

  Kelly Wisecup

  Kelly Wisecup is assistant professor of English at Northwestern University, where she researches and teaches Native American and early American literatures, focusing especially on Native American writers’ and activists’ engagement with colonial science, archives, and genres. Her first book, Medical Encounters: Knowledge and Identity in Early American Literatures (2013) explores how medical knowledge served as a form of communication among colonists, Native Americans, and African Americans, one in which people defined and defended their bodies as well as their relationship to the environment and to other than human beings. Her current book project, Assembled Relations: Compilation, Collection, and Native American Writing, investigates how Native American writers adapted forms of compilation and collection—herbals, vocabulary lists, museum inventories, catalogs, and commonplace books—to restore and remake environmental, epistemological, and interpersonal relations disrupted by colonialism. Her articles have appeared in Early American Literature, Early American Studies, Atlantic Studies, Studies in Travel Writing, Literature and Medicine, The Southern Literary Journal, and Literature Compass, and she has received fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the American Philosophical Society, the John Carter Brown Library, the Newberry Library, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Edith T. Baine Lecture will take place on October 24th at 4:30 p.m in the Barnard Observatory Tupelo Room. This event is free and open to the public.

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  Demonic Possession and the Theater in Early Modern England

  Brian Levack

  Brian Levack grew up in a family of teachers in the New York metropolitan area. From his father, a professor of French history, he acquired a love for studying the past, and he knew from an early age that he too would become a historian. He received his B.A. from Fordham University in 1965 and his Ph.D. from Yale in 1970. In graduate school he became fascinated by the history of the law and the interaction between law and politics, interests that he has maintained throughout his career. In 1969 he joined the History Department of the University of Texas at Austin, where he is now the John E. Green Regents Professor in History. The winner of several teaching awards, Levack offers a wide variety of courses on early modern British and European history, legal history, and the history of witchcraft. For eight years he served as the chair of his department. His books include The Civil Lawyers in England, 1603-1641:A Political Study (1973), The Formation of the British State: England, Scotland and the Union, 1603-1707 (1987); The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (4th edition, 2016), which has been translated into eight languages; Witch-Hunting in Scotland: Law, Politics, and Religion (2008); and The Devil Within: Possession and Exorcism in the Christian West (2013). He has also edited twenty books, including The Jacobean Union: Six Tracts of 1604 (1985); The Witchcraft Sourcebook (2004; 2nd edition 2015); and The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America (2013). The Forty-Fourth James Edwin Savage Lecture in the Renaissance will take place on April 12 at 6:00 p.m. in the Bondurant Auditorium.

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  Literary Death Match

  Beth Ann Fennelly, Derrick Harriell, Matt Bondurant, and Kiese Laymon

  Zany event to raise money for the department's Barry Hannah Fund

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  Hubert Creekmore State Historical Marker Dedication

  Annette Trefzer and Jennifer Ford

  Please join us for the unveiling of the State Historical Marker dedicated to the life and work of Mississippi author Hubert Creekmore (1907 – 1966) on Friday, October 9th at 4p.m. in Water Valley, Mississippi. 4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. Unveiling of the State Historical Marker at 114 Panola Street, the family home built by his father Hiram Hubert Creekmore around 1900. 5:00 – 6:30 p.m. Reminiscences of Hubert Creekmore and Reading from his Work at Bozarts Gallery at 403 N. Main St. Refreshments served. This program brings together family members, scholars, readers, archivists, students and all those who care about preserving and recovering Mississippi’s literary heritage. The program features recitations of poems from four published collections of his poetry, a reading from each of his three novels including The Welcome, a novel set in Water Valley, as well as readings, commentary, and overviews of his numerous translations of literature from Latin and his non-fictional work. Also on view will be paintings on loan by the family, photography, and various editions of his books as well as a facsimile exhibition of letters and material items pertaining to his life curated by Dr. Jennifer Ford, head of Special Collections at the J.D. Williams Library at the University of Mississippi.

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  Toward a Sustainable Humanities

  Stephanie LeMenager

  The Edith Baine Lecture Series presents: “Toward a Sustainable Humanities” by Stephanie LeMenager. Sept. 17th at 7:00 p.m. The Depot. Stephanie LeMenager is the Barbara and Carlisle Moore Professor of English and Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon. Her publications include the books Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century, Manifest and Other Destinies, and (as co-editor) Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century. Her forthcoming books are Weathering: Toward a Sustainable Humanities and the collection Teaching Climate Change in the Humanities with co-editors Stephen Siperstein and Shane Hall. She is a founding editor of Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities.

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  Is the Early in Early Modern the same as Early in Early Colonial?

  Ania Loomba

  Ania Loomba is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her BA (Hons.), M. A., and M. Phil. degrees from the University of Delhi, India, and her Ph. D. from the University of Sussex, UK. She researches and teaches early modern literature, histories of race and colonialism, postcolonial studies, feminist theory, and contemporary Indian literature and culture. She currently holds the Catherine Bryson Chair in the English department. She is also faculty in Comparative Literature, South Asian Studies, and Women’s Studies, and her courses are regularly cross-listed with these programs. Her writings include Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (Manchester University Press; 1989; Oxford University Press, 1992), Colonialism/ Postcolonialism (Routledge, 1998; second edition, 2005; with Italian, Turkish, Japanese, Swedish and Indonesian editions) and Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford University Press, 2002). She has co-edited Post-colonial Shakespeares (Routledge, 1998); Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (Duke University Press, 2005), and Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion (Palgrave, 2007). She is series editor (with David Johnson of the Open University, UK) of Postcolonial Literary Studies (Edinburgh University Press). Her latest publications are a collection of essays South Asian Feminisms (co-edited with Ritty A. Lukose, Duke University Press, 2012) [http://southasianfeminisms.wordpress.com/] and a critical edition of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (Norton, 2011) [http://books.wwnorton.com/books/Antony-and-Cleopatra/] She is currently working on the lives of left-wing Indian women of the 1940s and 1950s, and co-editing (with Melissa Sanchez) Rethinking Feminism: Gender, Race and Sexuality in the Early Modern World. The Forty-Third James Edwin Savage Lecture in the Renaissance will take place on April 16 at 7:00 p.m. in the Bondurant Auditorium.

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  The Wild Not Less Than the Good: Thoreau, Sex, Biopower

  Peter Coviello

  Peter Coviello is Professor of English at the University of Illinois-Chicago. He received his BA from Northwestern University in 1993, and his MA and PhD from Cornell. From 1998 to 2014 he taught at Bowdoin College, where he served as Chair of the departments of English, Africana Studies, and Gay and Lesbian Studies. He is the editor of Walt Whitman’s Memoranda During the War (Oxford 2004) and the author of Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature (Minnesota 2005) and of Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America (NYU 2013), a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies. With Jared Hickman he co-edited a 2014 special issue of American Literature entitled “After the Postsecular.” He has written about Walt Whitman, the history of sexuality, queer children, 18th- and 19th-century American literature, Mormon polygamy, stepparenthood, pop music, and much besides. This work has appeared in PMLA, American Literature, ELH, GLQ, and Raritan, as well as in venues like the LA Review of Books, Avidly, Frieze, and The Believer. The Edith Baine Lecture will take place on March 26th at 7:00 p.m at The Depot. This event is free and open to the public.

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  From There to Here: 3 Recent MFAs Share their Routes to Publication

  M. O. Walsh, Alex Taylor, and Jacob Rubin

  Panel with Former MFAs: M.O. Walsh, Alex Taylor, and Jacob Rubin “From There to Here: 3 Recent MFAs Share their Routes to Publication.”

  It is open to current MFAs/other interested parties, Friday, March 20 from 3-4pm in the Hannah-Ford Room for Writers (Bondurant C208). After the panel, these three authors will be reading and signing their books at 5pm at Square Books – March 20th.

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  Man Up, Man Down: The Past and Present of American Toughness

  Leonard Cassuto

  Leonard Cassuto is Professor of English at Fordham University, where he has taught since 1989. He is the author or editor of numerous volumes including The Inhuman Race: The Racial Grotesque in American Literature and Culture, Hard Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories, The Cambridge History of the American Novel, and The Cambridge Companion to Baseball. His latest manuscript, “The Graduate School Mess,” is under contract at Harvard University Press, and he writes a monthly column, “The Graduate Adviser,” for the Chronicle of Higher Education.

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  Minor Sound: Toward a Philosophy of Circumambience in Faulkner

  Julie Beth Napolin

  Julie Beth Napolin, assistant professor of Digital Humanities at Eugene Lang College, the New School, will give a talk entitled “Minor Sound: Toward a Philosophy of Circumambience in Faulkner.” Wednesday, March 4, at 6:00 p.m. in Bishop Hall 209

  Professor Napolin, who received her Ph.D. in Rhetoric from the University of California in 2010, works at the interface of modernist studies, new media studies, sound studies, critical theory, and American literature and music. Her work is included in the essay collections Vibratory Modernism and the forthcoming Fifty Years after Faulkner, and she is currently at work on two book-length studies, The Fact of Resonance: Toward a Literary Sound Studies and Dialectical Sound: Archiving Sonic Memory. Recent conference presentations and articles have focused on the work of Conrad, Faulkner, Du Bois, Eisenstein, and Benjamin. She has also served as associate director of the Digital Yoknapatawpha digital humanities project at the University of Virginia. Many thanks in advance for helping Professor Napolin feel welcome on our campus next month.

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  Monsters of Whiteness: White Zombie and Plantation Horror

  Amy Clukey

  Dr. Amy Clukey of University of Louisville will give a talk entitled “Monsters of Whiteness: White Zombie and Plantation Horror.” Monday, March 2 at 4:00 in Bishop 103

  Amy Clukey, a former Ole Miss undergraduate and now an assistant professor at the University of Louisville, will give a talk entitled “Monsters of Whiteness: White Zombie and Plantation Horror” Monday, March 2 at 4:00 in Bishop 103. Amy was a double major in English and Southern Studies with a minor in Gender Studies and she was in the honors college.

  Amy Clukey is assistant professor of English at the University of Louisville. Prior to this appointment, she was an ACLS New Faculty Fellow at Columbia University and a dissertation fellow with the Center for American Literary Studies at the Pennsylvania State University, where she received her Ph.D. in 2009. She teaches courses on transnational literature, global modernism, and southern studies. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Hibernia Review, Modern Fiction Studies, American Literature, and Twentieth-Century Literature, among other venues. Her article “Plantation Modernity: Gone with the Wind and Irish-Southern Culture” was awarded the Louis D. Rubin, Jr. Prize for the best article on southern literature published in 2013 by the Society for the Study of Southern Literature. She is currently completing a monograph entitled Plantation Modernism: Transatlantic Anglophone Fiction 1890-1950.

  At Ole Miss, Clukey was double major in English and Southern Studies with a gender studies minor, and an honors scholar. She was president of the Lafayette-Oxford-University chapter of the National Organization for Women, a member of the Isom Undergraduate Committee that organized Sarahfest concerts for rape crisis, served as a student representative on the Sarah Isom Center steering committee, and had a feminist column in the Daily Mississippian. She was also a work-study study at the Isom center for a year and before that at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. She received the Gray award for outstanding undergraduate work in southern studies in 2002 and the Georgia Nix undergraduate activism award from the Isom center in 2003.

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  Seven, Eight, or Nine Upbuilding Lessons that I Have Taken from Søren Kierkegaard

  Gordon Marino

  Dr. Gordon Marino, Professor of Philosophy at St. Olaf College (Northfield, MN), will give a talk entitled “Seven, Eight, or Nine Upbuilding Lessons that I Have Taken from Søren Kierkegaard” Today, February 27 at 2:00 PM in Bondurant 208C. In addition to courses on the Danish philosopher, he also teaches the history of philosophy and philosophy of religion, and serves as Curator of the Howard V. and Edna H. Hong Kierkegaard Library. He received his PhD from University of Chicago, an MA from University of Pennsylvania, and his BA from Columbia University.

  An insightful public intellectual, he has published articles in American Poetry Review, Atlantic Monthly, and New York Times Magazine. He is author of Kierkegaard in the Present Age and editor of The Quotable Kierkegaard, one of The Wall Street Journal Bookshelf Best Books of 2013.

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  All Standing: Escape from Famine

  Kathryn Miles

  Kathryn Miles is the author of All Standing (Simon and Schuster), which details the miraculous journeys of the famine ship Jeanie Johnston, and Adventures With Ari, a memoir recounting her year as a canine naturalist. Miles has also written about subjects that include Puerto Rican street food, eel poachers, homing pigeons, and lifesavers. Her writing has appeared in publications like Alimentum, Between Song and Story, Ecotone, History Outside, Meatpaper, and Terrain, where she is also an editorial board member and regular columnist. Her recent article on the sinking of the Bounty, “Sunk: The Incredible Truth About a Ship That Never Should Have Sailed,” was named a “must read” by The New Yorker, Longform, and The Daily Beast. Her book on the same subject will be published by Penguin in 2015. Kathryn serves on the faculty of Chatham University’s low-residency MFA program. She is the founding editor of Hawk & Handsaw: The Journal of Creative Sustainability and is a scholar-in-residence for the Maine Humanities Council. She was a professor at Unity College for 12 years, and has been a guest speaker at dozens of college and universities. The 2013 Edith T. Baine Lecture will take place on November 20th at 7p.m at The Depot.

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  What Was Native American Literature? Tribalism, Regionalism, and Comparativism, in the Age of Globalization

  Melanie Benson Taylor

  Melanie Benson Taylor (Herring Pond Wampanoag) is a literary critic who specializes in U.S. Southern studies. She explored the intersections of Native, African American, white, and immigrant southern cultures in her first two books: Disturbing Calculations: The Economics of Identity in Postcolonial Southern Literature, 1912-2002 (2008) and Reconstructing the Native South: American Indian Literature and the Lost Cause (2012). She continues to examine the effects of economic anxiety on the construction of cultural identity and borders in two new books projects: Faulkner’s Doom interrogates the use of Indian tropes in William Faulkner’s modern South, and Indian Killers uncovers the phenomenon of violence and murder in texts by and about contemporary Native Americans. The inaugural Edith T. Baine Lecture Series on November 28 at 6:00 p.m. in the Depot is free and open to the public.

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  Eco vs. Ego in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream

  Robert N. Watson

  Robert N. Watson received his B.A. summa cum laude from Yale in 1975 and his Ph.D. with Highest Honors from Stanford in 1979, then spent six years as a professor at Harvard before coming to UCLA in 1986, where he has served as Chair of the Department of English and Chair of the Faculty of the UCLA College of Letters and Science, and is now Associate Vice-Provost for Educational Innovation. The Fortieth James Edwin Savage Lecture in the Renaissance will be held on April 3, 2012 at 7:00 p.m. in the Bondurant Auditorium.