Emerging Scholars Lecture Series

Several of the Big Ten Departments of English launched the Emerging Scholars Lecture Series in the 2018-2019 academic year; additional departments joined for the 2019-2020 academic year. This series enables departments to host an advanced graduate student or newly minted PhD from another Big Ten English Department for a two-day visit during which the visiting speaker will deliver a lecture and engage in other campus visit-related activities. We see this joint initiative as a proactive way of providing our graduate students with a job talk-like experience, while also promoting networking across universities.

Selection process: Each department nominates three candidates, and the chairs of the participating departments collectively decide which of the nominees will be invited to give a lecture.

The 2020/21 invited lecturers are:  

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have decided to postpone the selection process until fall 2020.

 

The 2019/20 invited lecturers were:

• Katie Greulich (Michigan State), “Garden Work: Prosaic Alightments Among Ecology and ‘Kew Gardens’,”at Penn State.
• Margaret Sheble (Purdue), “‘Slew hirself with hys swerde for dole and sorrow’: Gender-Bending Suicide in the Arthurian Tradition,” at Ohio State.
• Bethany Christensen (Ohio State), “Women’s Medicine in England, 1000-1130 CE: Evidence of Medical Manuscripts with a Focus on the Herbarium Tradition,” at Indiana.
• Emer Vaughn (Indiana), “‘My Friends’–Trans-Species Empathy in the Natural History Essay of Mary treat,” at Wisconsin.
• Bethany Doane (Penn State), “Engines of Desire: Erotic Horror and Queer Excess,” at UIUC.
• Yuan Ding (UMN), “The City and Its Refugees: The Geo-Politics of Non-Places in Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia and Exit West,”at U Iowa.
• Stephanie Tsank (U Iowa), “Inside Mary Johnson’s Mouth: Crane’s Realism and Sensing the Slums in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets,” at UNL.
• Anne Nagel (UNL), “Deleuzean Virtuality in the Victorian Bedroom: Transgressive Reverie in Dickens’s Dombey and Son,” at UMN.
• Valerie O’Brien (UIUC), “’A hole in the narrative’: Disability, Voice, and Autobiographical Exclusion in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe,” at MSU.
• Oladipupo Oyeleye (UW), “Postcolonial Futures: Rethinking Afropolitanism as a theory of Reading Global Africa,” at Purdue.

The 2018/19 invited lecturers were:

• Michael Gadaleto (Penn State), “The Island Nation and Its Discontents: Transnational Identities and Participatory Nationhood in English Renaissance Literature from Shakespeare to Milton,” at UMN.
• Derek Lee (Penn State), “Parascience and Revolution: The Paranormal Mind in Twentieth-Century Literature,” at UIUC.
• Katelin Krieg (UMN), “The Victorian Mind’s Eye: Perception as Form in Literature and Science,” at UW.
• Matthew Guzman (UNL), “Non/human: Praxis and Flux in Nineteenth-Century American Literature,” at MSU.
• Laura B. McGrath (MSU), “Comp Titles, Computation, and Contemporary Literature,” at UNL.
• Emily L. Loney (UW),  “Preposterous Revisions: Reordering Space and Time in the Sidney Circle,” at Penn State.
• Kate Norcross (UIUC),  “Beowulf and Trauma,” at Penn State.