Calendar
Join the MUSE scholars program for daily public panels. Presenters on Saturday, 10/19 include:
- Naajidah Correll: “Double Negative Discourse: On Black Icons and Public Despair”
- Ariana Karina Costales Del Toro: “It Was Powerful Women All Along: Debunking Female Monsters in Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring ”
- Ke’Shunta Faye Drake: “When (will) They see Us: Black Womanism, Me, Myself, and the Life and Times of Assata Shakur”
- Jennifer Mojica Santana: “‘Soy Bandolero como el Míster Politiquero’: Tracing Sociopolitical Activism in Don Omar’s and Tego Calderón’s Reggaetón”
- Dr. Tamara Butler: “Worn: Sartorial Politics and Artifacts”
Please mark your calendars for the campus visit of Big10 Emerging Scholar Valerie O’Brien, visiting from the University of Illinois on November 7 and 8.
The Big 10 Emerging Scholars Program—now in its second year—seeks to provide a platform for the work of emerging graduate student scholars in Big10 Departments of English. Each year, we host a scholar from one of our peer institutions, and one MSU graduate student is selected as a visiting scholar in turn.
Valerie has research interests in disability studies and animal studies. She will be participating in the HIVES Research Workshop on Nov 7th, from 4-6pm in Wells C607. On Friday, November 8th, from 3-5pm, Valerie will give a talk to the Department in Wells B342. Please attend and support our efforts to mentor graduate students.
This talk examines J.M. Coetzee’s Foe, a retelling of Robinson Crusoe that I contend illuminates the linkages between autobiographical narration and Enlightenment conceptions of personhood. In Coetzee’s reimagining, the character Friday, Cruso(e)’s slave, is a disruptive, enigmatic figure, for although Defoe’s Friday masters English, Coetzee’s cannot speak at all because his tongue has been cut out; consequently, Friday’s untold life story—a “hole in the narrative”—becomes the central mystery on which the narrator and the novel itself become fixated. I investigate this preoccupation with Friday’s mutism in relation to the role of language—and autobiographical narration in particular—in historical distinctions of person from animal, distinctions particularly fraught for slaves and disabled subjects. My talk calls attention to what is troubling about historical uses of autobiography as a litmus test for social belonging, examining how slave narratives functioned as tests for personhood and how the practice of telling one’s life narrative may exclude disabled individuals. Reading the novel as part of a larger body of contemporary fiction that explores the limitations and possibilities of autobiographical narratives to convey experiences of disability and debility, I argue that Foe unsettles conceptions of personhood bound to a capacity for normative autobiographical narration.
The Creative Writing Program, the Womxn of Color Initiatives, and the College of Arts and Letters are pleased to welcome Amalia Ortiz, who will visit MSU campus from November 10th through November 12th. Amalia Ortiz’s second book, The Cancion Cannibal Cabaret and Other Songs, is now available from Aztlan Libre Press. Ortiz has been featured on three seasons of Def Poetry on HBO, and on the NAACP Image Awards. Her debut collection Rant. Chant. Chisme. was selected by NBC News as one of the “10 Great Latino Books of 2015.” On November 11th, Ortiz will hold a conversation at 10:30am in Wells Hall, room C640, and will present a public reading geared toward the CAL community at 7:oopm in the Art Lab.
TIME & POLICY: Time Uses, Time Preferences, and Policy Perceptions In Israel
Time is one of our most essential resources. While researchers from various disciplines have studied time, less attention has been paid to the connection between time and public policy. The current study explores four questions:
1) How does the Israeli public spend their time, vis-à-vis four kinds of time: sleep, work, care time and personal time?
2) What are their preferences regarding the use of time in these four categories?
3) What is the public support for different policy alternatives that affect different uses of time?
4) Is there a connection between the uses of time, preferences regarding the uses of time and policy alternatives?
We found a connection between the way people use their time, want to use their time and their policy preferences.
Speaker: Dr. Lihi Lahat is a senior lecturer in the Department of Administration & Public Policy at Sapir Academic College.
Her papers have been published in journals such as Policy Sciences, Social Policy & Administration, International Review of Administrative
Sciences and Poverty & Public Policy. Her areas of research are policymakers’ perceptions of poverty, the regulation of personal social services, the trust and well-being of public officials, uses of time and policy, and collaborative governance.
Dr. Lahat is sponsered by the Israel Institute
Presented by:
The Michael and Elaine Serling Institute for Jewish Studies and Modern Israel
Co-sponsored by:
James Madison College
College of Arts & Letters
Department of Political Science
Residential College in the Arts & Humanities
Asian Studies Center
The Department of English and Creative Writing Program Presents: WALTON MUYUMBA
Author of The Show and the Act: Black Intellectual Practice, Jazz Improvisation, and Philosophical Pragmatism(University of Chicago Press), Dr. Walton Muyumba is an Associate Professor of American and African Diasporic Literature and Director of Creative Writing at Indiana University-Bloomington. Currently, he is finishing a book about contemporary American literary art and popular music, while also building projects on John Edgar Wideman’s literary works and ethnic American art in the age of terrorism. He serves on the Board of Directors for the National Book Critics Circle Award and regularly writes book reviews for The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times, The Dallas Morning News, The Chicago Tribune and other outlets.
PROFESSIONALIZATION IN CREATIVE WRITING & APPLYING TO THE MFA
Thursday, November 21, 1 pm.
Natural Sciences Building Room 145
PRESENTATION ON JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN
Friday, November 22, 3 pm.
Wells Hall B243
The Department of English and Creative Writing Program Presents: WALTON MUYUMBA
Author of The Show and the Act: Black Intellectual Practice, Jazz Improvisation, and Philosophical Pragmatism(University of Chicago Press), Dr. Walton Muyumba is an Associate Professor of American and African Diasporic Literature and Director of Creative Writing at Indiana University-Bloomington. Currently, he is finishing a book about contemporary American literary art and popular music, while also building projects on John Edgar Wideman’s literary works and ethnic American art in the age of terrorism. He serves on the Board of Directors for the National Book Critics Circle Award and regularly writes book reviews for The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times, The Dallas Morning News, The Chicago Tribune and other outlets.
PROFESSIONALIZATION IN CREATIVE WRITING & APPLYING TO THE MFA
Thursday, November 21, 1 pm.
Natural Sciences Building Room 145
PRESENTATION ON JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN
Friday, November 22, 3 pm.
Wells Hall B243
Film and Discussion
Senior Moments
Tamar Kay will introduce her film Senior Moments and lead a discussion after the screening. Funny, witty, bold and revealing, the creators of “Senior Moments” document intimate meetings with 10 resilient active elderly folks surviving old age with a vengeance. It cohesively samples a cultural variety of personalities in modern-day Israel and provides an inspiring outlook on what it means to be old this day and age.
Directed By: Tamar Kay & Yair Agmon, 2018
Tamar Kay graduated from the Sam Spiegel Film & Television School in Jerusalem in 2015. “Unchained,” an Israeli TV drama (12 episodes, 40 mins each) Tamar created with Yossi Madmoni & David Ofek, will have its premiere in November 2019, at the Israeli KAAN channel. She is a two-time Israeli Academy Award nominee.
The Mute’s House, which she directed and co-produced was shortlisted for the 2017 Best Short Documentary Academy Award (Oscars) and screened internationally and at MSU, winning numerous awards in prestigious festivals. Tamar edited the TV series, “Arik Einstein: A Standard Love Song”, which won the Israeli Emmy for Best Documentary TV Series (2018).
Please join us and invite your students:
Presentation/Reading with Petra Kuppers
Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist, a community artist, and a Professor of English, Women’s Studies, Theatre and Dance, and Art and Design
Date: Thursday, December 5, 2019
Time: 4-5:30 pm
Location: 300 Bessey Hall (The Writing Center)
Presented by HIVES, The Writing Center, and Legacies of the Enlightenment
