Fall Faculty Colloquium on Media and Experience

The Department of English and Comparative Literature is pleased to announce its Fall Faculty Colloquium, which will take place on Monday, December 3, at 2 pm in Donovan Lounge. For this semester’s colloquium, we will have a discussion with three colleagues who work on experience and media: Florence Dore, Shayne Legassie, and Inga Pollmann. Martin L. Johnson, colloquium coordinator, will moderate the discussion. In lieu of formal presentations, we will have a discussion on researching and writing about experience and media, exploring its theoretical, analytic, and practical dimensions. How do you describe the sound of music? Can biologists help us think about moving images? How does one research the relationship between insects and Hollywood? I will start by asking the participants a series of questions that they will have received in advance of the discussion, and will then open the floor for your own questions. The colloquium will last an hour. Florence Dore will discuss her recently published book, Novel Sounds: Southern Fiction in the Age of Rock and Roll (Columbia, 2018), which traces the interconnections between rock and roll and Southern literature. Inga Pollmann will speak on her new book, Cinematic Vitalism: Film Theory and the Question of Life (Amsterdam, 2018), which explores film theorists who saw the cinema as a lifelike, rather than mechanistic, media. Shayne Legassie will discuss his current research project on the place of flies and other insects in cinema, as well as his earlier work on travel diaries in the medieval era. We look forward to seeing you there, and to joining what promises to be a rich and enlightening discussion. Please circulate this announcement to all who may be interested in attending.