Eric G. Lorentzen, professor of English, recently gave a talk entitled "Interdisciplinary English as Social Justice: Dickens, Disney, and Popular Culture," at the Virginia Humanities Conference. The talk was based on a new class Lorentzen taught in fall semester of 2022, in which the goal was to mark, as an intellectual community, the tremendous on-going, and often not readily perceived, influence that Dickens’ work has on a multiplicity of genres in the 21st century. The course included materials as diverse as: 20th- and 21st-century literary texts, such as Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith, John Irving’s The Cider House Rules, and the Harry Potter books. films/shows like Ridley Road, It’s a Wonderful Life, About Time, The Game, The Time Traveller’s Wife, The Last Tree, and Disney’s Christopher Robin. literary societies, reading groups, social clubs, and online serial novel projects. Dickens festivals, holiday fairs, walking tours, and other elements of literary tourism that … [Read more...]

Maya Mathur presented the paper, "Strange Fish: Laughter and Race-Making in The Tempest" at the academic symposium, "Shakespeare and Race: Spoken Word(s)," which was held at Shakespeare's Globe, London, on November 4-5, 2022. The conference was organized by the Shakespeare Center, a collaboration between Shakespeare's Globe theater and King's College, London. … [Read more...]

Professor of English Chris Foss recently presented a paper, "‘We are the zanies of sorrow’: Oscar Wilde's Post-Prison Relationship to Mental Disability,” on Sat. Oct. 15th at the Anniversaries and Auguries: The Victorians Institute’s Golden Jubilee Conference in Spartanburg, SC. … [Read more...]

Antonio Barrenechea, Professor of English, recently presented "Alucard and Alucarda: From Universal to Hemispheric Horrors” at the Literature/Film Association Conference in New Orleans, October 20-22, 2022. … [Read more...]

Assistant Professor of English Brenta Blevins recently presented at the Conference on College Composition and Communication 2022 Virtual Conference. Blevins presented as part of the cross-institutional panel “Informal Reading Groups as Inclusionary Practice for Facilitating Graduate Students’ Disciplinary Access and Professionalization.” Analyzing an informal, multi-year reading group, the panel identified how professional reading groups produce multiple disciplinary preparation benefits and provided suggestions for implementing reading groups. … [Read more...]

Maya Mathur, Professor of English, recently presented the paper “Intersectionality, Inclusion and the Shakespeare Survey Course” at the 53rd annual convention of the Northeast Modern Language Association, which was held in Baltimore, Maryland March 10-13, 2022. Her paper was part of the seminar “After the Plague Year: Caring for/with Shakespeare in Text and Performance.”     … [Read more...]

On October 22, Chris Foss, Professor of English, presented a paper entitled “Reflection and Refraction in Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Selfish Giant’ and Clio Barnard’s The Selfish Giant” at the annual conference of the Victorians Institute in Charlotte, NC. Foss first examined Wilde’s literary endorsement of fantasy over realism as a valuable entry point for considering Victorian reflections on disability and freakery, in particular where the nexus of poverty and disability-aligned difference is concerned. Seeing the Giant’s peculiar body as aligned with other nonnormative ones, especially freakish bodies, opens a new appreciation for how the story stands out relative to many other Victorian literary representations of disability. Wilde’s prison literature testifies to the extent to which Wilde’s own enfreakment and enfoolment in jail provided profound personal experiences of physical and psychological illness/disability that led him to refract but ultimately retain the tenor of his fairy … [Read more...]

Professor Maya Mathur presented her research on global adaptations of Shakespeare at two virtual conferences this summer. The first paper, “Cross-Cultural Casting and Queer Desire in Global Adaptations of Twelfth Night,” was presented at a conference organized by the European Shakespeare Research Association June 3-6, 2021. The second paper, “Eat the Rich: Race, Class, and Caste in Bornila Chatterjee’s The Hungry,” was presented at the World Shakespeare Congress, held July 19-24, 2021. … [Read more...]