Current News

Susan Williams, English, will present " Autonomy and Collaboration: Or, Why I Study the History of Authorship," in the College's fifth Inaugural Lecture of the year at 4:30 pm, February 22, OSU Faculty Club. Readers of literature often find themselves wanting to know something about the author of the work they are reading: "No man can read a fine author, and relish him to his very bones, while he reads," as Herman Melville put it, "without subsequently fancying to himself some ideal image of the man and his mind." Yet that ideal image, as Melville also points out, is often at odds with the "real" person, and sometimes readers prefer to move away from biographical facts in order to focus on authors' texts and their meanings. Why, then, study authorship as its own subject? This lecture will explore that question, focusing in particular on the history of authorship in nineteenth-century America. During this time, the Romantic image of the author as hero vied with other conceptions of this role, including the author as social activist and as detailed observer of "real life." These various conceptions, in turn, hinged on a crucial debate about the relative values of autonomy and collaboration. Was the ideal author an autonomous prophetic genius or a collaborator with his or her publishers and readers? Could such collaboration itself provide an opportunityfor increased autonomy and authority? This last question was particularly vexed for women and minority authors, who eventually led the way toward a more fluid understanding of the relation between autonomy and collaboration.

Peter L. Hahn, History: Historical Dictionary of United States-Middle East Relations (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).

James Phelan, English:  Pedagogy 7, 1 (2007), guest editor, Special Issue: Wayne C. Booth: Perspectives on a Master Teacher; "Guest Editor's Introduction: Perspectives on a Master Teacher," Pedagogy 7, 1 (2007): 3-4; and "Wayne C. Booth: The Effect of His Being." Pedagogy 7, 1 (2007): 91-98.

Susan Williams, English: review of Inexpressible Privacy: The Interior Life of Antebellum American Literature, by Milette Shamir, The New England Quarterly 79 (September 2006): 507-10.

Joseph Lynch, History, has been selected to address the graduates at the Winter Commencement Ceremonies, March 18. A rebroadcast of the commencement address will be on WOSU-TV.

Michelle Herman, English, read from her work at Mills College, Oakland, California, February 8.

Job candidate Bruce Fudge (Southwestern University) will present "Tongues of Men and the Word of God: Language Interpretation and the Qur'an," 3:30 pm, February 20, 306 Hagerty Hall. Contact: Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, 292-9255.

Lisa Downing, Philosophy, will present "Rationalism, Empiricism, and Mechanism," 11:30 am, February 21, 104 East 15^th Avenue, in the Horizons Lecture Series. Contact: Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities, 688-0265.

Author Lynn Emanuel will give a public reading, 7:30 pm, February 21, Wexner Film/Video Theatre. Contact: Creative Writing Program, 292-2242.

Gregson Davis (Duke University) will present "'Afro-Greeks' in Search of Home: The Motif of the Underworld Journey in the Poetry of Aimé Césaire and Derek Walcott," 11:00 am, February 23, 347 University Hall. Contact: Department of African American and African Studies, 292-3700.

"A Literacy Studies Miscellany: Recent Work and Work in Progress," 11:30 am, February 23, 104 East 15^th Avenue, in the Graduate Student Interdisciplinary Seminar on Literacy Studies. Contact: Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities, 688-0265.

The Writing Programs of the Department of English will sponsor the Writing Pedagogy Forum with the Digital Media Project Staff speaking on "From One Screen to Another: Teaching Writing through Film," 1:30 pm, February 23, 131 Mendenhall Lab. Faculty, Lecturers, and Graduate Teaching Assistants are welcome and refreshments will be provided. Contact: Department of English, 292-6065.

Stephen Knight (Cardiff University) will present "Marvelous Merlin: Knowledge, Propphecy and Power," 2:30 pm, February 23, 90 Science and Engineering Library, in The Marvelous Lecture Series. Contact: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 292-7495.

Richard Gordon, Spanish and Portuguese, will present "The Performance of Late-Eighteenth-Century Portugal and Brazil in 'Novo entremez Os Malaquecos, ou Os costumes brazileiros' [ca. 1787]," 3:30 pm, February 23, 46 Hagerty Hall, for the Lusophone Globalicities Working Group. Contact: Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities, 688-0265.

Georgina Kleege (UC-Berkeley) will read from Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller (Gallaudet University Press, 2006, 4:30 pm, February 26, 311 Denney Hall, for the Disability Studies Program. Contact: smith.2447@osu.edu.

Trudier Harris (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill) will present "The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South," 4:30 pm, February 28, 311 Denney Hall, in the first Department of English Distinguished Alumni Lecture, sponsored by the Department of English and the Center for Folklore Studies. Contact: Department of English, 292-6065