Current News & Events
Boundaries of English Symposium Schedule
Schedule for March 17 (all events will be held in Hyde Hall)
10:00—Student Roundtable discussion with Prof. Bérubé
12:00—Lunch and talk with Prof. Bérubé
(lunch will be provided.)
Click here for the article under discussion.
3:30—Panel discussion: What intellectual models can help us to describe today’s political world?
Featuring Michael Bérubé, Larry Grossberg (UNC Dept. of Comm. Studies), Tanya Shields (UNC Dept. of Women's Studies), and Michael Hardt (Duke Dept. of Literature).
Join us March 18 at 2:30 for a departmental town hall meeting in Toy Lounge.
Professor Gura Interviewed
Newman Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture Philip Gura discusses his new book American Transcendentalism: A History with radio host Christopher Lydon. Click here to listen in.
Herschel Award Winners Announced
Congratulations to the 2006-2007 C.S. Herschel Course Development Award winners! Department graduate teaching fellows Margaret Swezey and Anne Bruder took first place while Erin Ashworth-King and Nora Corrigan won second.
UNC-CH Sends Nine Participants to CCCC
Nine members of the Department of English and Comparative Literature attended the 2007 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) convention in New York City. Six of these delegates were presenting graduate students. Heather Branstetter and Kelly Bezio both presented on the value of kairos; Heather considered kairos and ephiphany in composition pedagogy, and Kelly discussed the rhetoric of the militant environmentalist group, Earth First. Meredith Malburne, Risa Applegarth, and Sarah Hallenbeck each examined identity and rhetorical agency in a historical context, including a Langston Hughes visit to UNC-CH, the education of Native Americans in the U.S. Southwest, and the community of women doctors in Victorian England. Faculty members Jane Danielewicz and Jordynn Jack also presented. Copies of Todd Taylor's new film, Twenty Questions, were available for viewing by the international convention.
Latina/o Culture(s) Speakers' Series
Dr. María DeGuzmán is the conceiver and organizer of the UNC-CH Latina/o Culture(s) Speakers' Series sponsored by the UNC-Chapel Hill English Department and the College of Arts and Sciences. The Series is the first of its kind at UNC-CH. It is dedicated to exploring Latina/o Studies as an interdisciplinary endeavor that draws on, among other areas of inquiry, literary and cultural studies, visual culture studies, creative writing and performance studies, philosophy and aesthetics, history, sociology, comparative ethnic studies and postcolonial studies, Americas studies, and gender and sexuality studies. It has served to create dialogue between ethnic studies areas on campus. The Series has hosted creative writers and scholars addressing the intersections between Latina/o and African-American cultural production, between specifically Chicana/o and Native American Studies, and common ground (LatinAsia or AsiaLat Studies) between Latina/o Studies and Asian Diaspora Studies. We have had over 22 speakers to campus and it is the only speakers series of its kind on the eastern seaboard.
First serialized novel by an African American woman:
Dr. William L. Andrews has co-edited for the first time in book form The Curse of Caste; or the Slave Bride (1865), a serialized novel authored by an almost totally forgotten African American woman, Julia C. Collins. "This is the first serialized novel by an African American woman yet to be uncovered," said Andrews, the E. Maynard Adams Professor of English and Senior Associate Dean for Fine Arts and Humanities. "Unlike Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859) and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), each of which recounts the story of its author’s life, The Curse of Caste is a fully-fledged novel, unprecedented in African American women’s writing for its author’s reliance on her own imagination for plot, character, and technique." Oxford University Press has just published the novel. To read more about The Curse of Caste, click here.