Newsworthy: Walter Benn Michaels to Visit

Walter Benn Michaels' Itinerary

• Thursday, March 1 - Meeting with Penny Ingram's and Jame Goldstein's classes
• Thursday, March 1 - Lecture, " Model Minorities and Silent Majorities:  The Meaning of Ethnic Identity in Modern American Literature,” HC 1203, 4 p.m.
• Friday, March 2 - Informal gathering with English majors and faculty and a discussion about his recent book on issues relating to diversity, Thach 317, 10 a.m.

Walter Benn Michaels is professor of English at University of Illinois at Chicago and chairman of the department.  Before going to Illinois in 2001, he taught at the University of California-Berkeley and at Johns Hopkins University, where he was founding director of the Program in Comparative American Cultures.  He is the author of The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism; Our America:  Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism; The Shape of the Signifier:  1967 to the End of History; Promises of American Life:  1880-1920; and, forthcoming, The Trouble with Diversity or, How the Left Learned to Love Inequality.  Recent essays have appeared in Critical Inquiry, New Literary History, and American Literary History.

He has directed two NEH summer seminars and was a Whitney J. Oates Fellow in the Humanities at Princeton, a visiting professor in the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, and Distinguished Professor of American Literature at Tel Aviv University.  He has delivered the Lahey Lecture, Concordia University (Montreal); the Inaugural American Studies Lecture, University of Wisconsin; and the Ian Watt Lecture in the History and Theory of the Novel, Stanford University.

Professor Michaels' public lecture on March 1 will be about the social and intellectual work performed by the idea of a minority literature. Its central example will be the development of a distinctively Asian-American Literature (the central literary texts will be John Okada's No No Boy and Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker) but, it will include some discussion of African-American and Jewish identity. The point of the lecture will be to examine and criticize the role played in American society today by the idea of identity itself.

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James Goldstein's Article Appears in Journal

James Goldstein's essay, "Discipline and Relaxation in the Poetry of Robert Henryson" has just appeared in A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture, c. 1350-c.1500, edited by Peter Brown (Blackwell, 2007).

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Joyce Rothschild to Give Editing Workshop

Joyce Rothschild is giving an editing workshop February 14 at the monthly meeting of the Society for Technical Communication, Birmingham Chapter.

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Alicia Carroll Announces News from the Quilts of Gee's Bend in Context Research Group

"The Bends of Life," an original dance piece researched by the group and choreographed by Alabama native Thaddeus Davis, debuted in New York recently. Please visit Wideman/Davis Dance to read the New York Times review and see images and clips from the performance.

The group also announces that it will be speaking at the International Symposium on the Arts in Society at New York University in February and at the symposium "Traditions and Trajectories: Education and the Quiltmaker" at the International Quilt Study Center, University of Nebraska, Lincoln in March.

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Auburn Chamber Music Society to Present Concert

The Auburn Chamber Music Society will present its second concert of the 2006-07 season on Thursday 15 February at 7:30 pm in the Goodwin Recital Hall. The featured group for this evening's concert will be the Mozart Piano Quartet. They will perform Mozart's Piano Quartet in E flat, K. 493, Melanie Bonis's Piano Quartet #2 in D Major, and Brahms' Piano Quartet in G minor, Opus 25. Tickets will be available at the door for $20 per person and $5 for students with ID. For more information, please contact Craig Bertolet (bertocr@auburn.edu ), Co-President of the Auburn Chamber Music Society.

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Angela Farmer to Present at Conference

Angela Farmer will present "American Masculinity and the Machine: Discipline and Abjection in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" at the conference Men and Madness: Representing Male Psychopathology and Mental Disorder in Modern and Contemporary Culture at Manchester Metropolitan University this June.  

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Toni Bowers to Present "What's the Difference?: Women's Studies, Feminist Studies, Gender Studies"

Toni Bowers, Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, will give a talk titled, “What's the Difference?: Women's Studies, Feminist Studies, Gender Studies,” Wednesday, March 21, 3:00 p. m. in the auditorium of the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art. Her talk will discuss the politics, implications, and different effects of three terms used on university campuses: “Feminist Studies,” “Women's Studies,” and “Gender Studies.”  There will be 3 respondents, Ruth Crocker, Director of the Women's Studies Program at Auburn University, Penelope Ingram, Associate Professor in the Department of English, and Joanne Tong, Assistant Professor in the Department of English. 

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English Channel Message

We would like to know about your current news! Please send information about awards, lectures, publications, etc. to be included in The English Channel. The deadline for submitting information is Tuesdays at 10 a. m. Check the bottom of the page for more information about submitting your news.

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Calendar for 2006-07 Academic Year

Here is information about Departmental events for academic year 2006-07.

• March 1-2 - Walter Benn Michael's visit sponsored by Phi Beta Kappa
• March 10 - Graduate Student Colloquium
• March 15 - Trudier Harris (English Symposium Series)
• March 21 - Toni Bowers, "What's the Difference?: Women's Studies, Feminist Studies, Gender Studies," Auditorium of Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, 3 p.m.
• April 20 - Department Awards Ceremony (3:00 p.m.)

Here are dates for departmental faculty meetings.

Faculty Meetings

• February 14
• April 4
• April 18

Here are the important dates for the spring 2007 semester.

• March 26-31 - Spring Break
• April 30 - Last Class Day
• May 10 - Commencement

For more information on these events and more, visit the Department's Calendar page.

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To include an item in The English Channel, submit text items by Tuesday at 10 AM for publication Wednesday. Submit items by email to Heather Finch or Margaret Kouidis or put the information in their mailboxes. Please check your submission for accuracy and completion—all calendar items and meeting announcements must include the date, time, and location of the event.

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Last updated February 14, 2007

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Department of English
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Auburn University, AL 36849-5203
Phone (334) 844-4620
FAX (334) 844-9027
© 2006 Department of English at Auburn University. All rights reserved.

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