This semester, the ECL was delighted to welcome the distinguished speakers of Critical Speaker Series, Pardis Dabashi and Lauren Michele Jackson! This semester, the ECL was delighted to welcome the distinguished speakers of Critical Speaker Series, Pardis Dabashi and Lauren Michele Jackson!
In October, Professor Dabashi presented a lecture and seminar on “Criticism and Revelation: On Evidence and the Limits of Argument.” Prof. Dabashi is an assistant professor of Literatures in English and Film Studies at Bryn Mawr College. She teaches courses on twentieth-century literature, film, and theory and her research examines the intersection of form, politics, and affect in narrative film and literary modernism. This November, she published her book, Losing the Plot: Film and Feeling in the Modern Novel through the University of Chicago Press.
Professor Jackson’s lecture titled “TWDG: On Parodying Gone with the Wind” this November. This talk concentrated on “the copyright dust-up over the publication of The Wind Done Gone, published in 2001 as a parody of Gone with the Wind, to consider the mythos shared between them and reopen the question of parody as the proper term for a melancholic literary inheritance.” Prof. Jacksonc also read from her forthcoming book project, Back.
Prof. Jackson is an assistant professor of English at Northwestern UNiversity and a fellow at New America. Her first book, an essay collection titled White Negroes, was published in 2019. She is a contributing writer for The New Yorker and her work has also appeared in The Atlantic, The Awl, Chicago Magazine, The New Inquiry, The Point, Rolling Stone, Slate, and The Washington Post.
Each year, the Critical Speaker Series is led by a group of four graduate coordinators and who invite five outstanding and innovative scholars in the literary humanities to campus to present their research to the larger University community and the public. Junior coordinator Joshua Cody Ward described the selection process as largely “democratic.” It involves polling “professors for cutting edge literary theorists of interest, as well as the ECL student body, and [investigating] that list to see what names pop up multiple times and finally, what work is likewise most interesting and engaging to us.” This years team is led by senior coordinators Ryan Carroll and Ellie Rambo and junior coordinators Dana Maller and Ward.
Next semester will feature three speakers that Ward notes “are thinkers all my peers in the ECL department should really keep on their radars, so we’re hoping to see lots of familiar faces at these upcoming events!”
The ECL would like to express its appreciation for the CSS team’s outstanding effort this semester, and a congratulations for another successful semester of the CSS events!
To stay up-to-date on the incredible work the CSS team is accomplishing, follow them on Instagram @criticalspeakerseries and Twitter @SeriesCritical!
