Department of English

Thursday, October 29th

10am

The English and Creative Writing UDRs would like to invite you to a Meet the Majors event on Thursday, October 29th at 5pm. 

Interested in studying English or Creative Writing at Brandeis? Have Questions about the majors?
Come hear brief presentations from the English and Creative Writing UDRs on their academic experiences, course selection advice, literary interests, and more!

After the presentations, you are welcome to spend a few minutes chatting with the UDRs and Undergraduate Advising heads and getting your specific questions answered. We hope to see you there!


Zoom Link

Wednesday, November 4th

5:30pm, Zoom Link

Javier Zamora was born in El Salvador and migrated to the US when he was nine. He was a 2018-2019 Radcliffe Institute Fellow at Harvard and has been granted fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, and Stanford University. Unaccompanied is his first poetry collection. He lives in Harlem where he’s working on a memoir. 

Sean Hill is the author of two poetry collections, Dangerous Goods and Blood Ties & Brown Liquor. His poems and essays have appeared in Callaloo, Harvard Review, New England Review, Orion, The Oxford American, Poetry, Terrain.org, and numerous other journals, and in several anthologies including Black Nature and Villanelles. He directs the Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference at Bemidji State University and lives in Montana. More information can be found at his website: www.seanhillpoetry.com.

Thursday, November 5th

5:30pm, Zoom Link

This is a follow-up to the Zamora/Hill reading of Nov. 4 (Wednesday)

Tess Taylor is the author of four books of poems, most recently Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange, a book published in conjunction with the Museum of Modern Art that explores Lange’s paths across California during the Great Depression and the current state of lands and peoples along that route. Taylor is on-air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered. 

Friday, November 6th

Stay tuned.

November 8, 2020

Sunday, November 8th

2pm, Livestream

Featuring Scott Barrow
Hosted by Assistant Professor Isaiah M. Wooden

The Theater Arts Department is thrilled to present this talk in conjunction with our virtual
production of The Laramie Project. We will be bringing together Moisés Kaufman, Tectonic
Theater member and Theater Arts MFA alum Scott Barrow, and Theater Arts Department’s
own Assistant Professor Isaiah M. Wooden to discuss this groundbreaking documentary
theater play about the murder of Matthew Shepard. Please join us for this digital panel
discussion.

This event is generously co-sponsored by the Department of English, the Department of Romance Studies, and Creativity, the Arts, and Social Transformation (CAST) Program.

Register

Wednesday, November 11th

5:00 p.m.–6:20 p.m., via Zoom 

Part performance, part lecture, part writing workshop—this event is unprocessed and gluten and guilt free.  

Please register in advance for this session. 

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with information about joining the meeting.

Listen to the attached audio segment before the event.

 Co-sponsored by the Department of Romance Studies, The Latin American and Latino Studies Program, and the Minor in Creativity, the Arts, and Social Transformation (CAST). 

FOLLOWED BY:

Open Session of ENG 170b: Contemporary Theatre with Virginia Grise

 Wednesday, November 11, 2020

8:00 p.m.–9:15 p.m., via Zoom

Please register in advance for this session.

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with information about joining the meeting.

 Sponsored by the Department of English and co-sponsored by the Minor in Creativity, the Arts, and Social Transformation (CAST).

Tuesday, February 9th

5:30pm, Zoom

Angie Cruz is a novelist and editor. The New York Times Book Review called her novel, Dominicana,"Lovely and Compelling" and NBC NEWS labeled it "one of the most evocative and empowering immigrant stories of our time." Cruz is founder and Editor-in-chief of Aster(ix).

Thursday, February 18th

4pm

Jonathan Flatley, English Department, Wayne State Univesity

"Black Leninism"

In the larger project from which this talk is drawn, Flatley examines "black group formation, those moments when black people come together as a group for whom collective action seems urgent, obvious, and vital, and when victory over the forces of white supremacy seems possible."

Sponsored by the Contemporaneity Group, Mandel Center for the Humanities

Thursday, March 4

4pm

Nasia Anam, English Department, University of Nevada, Reno

"Muslim Heterotopias"

Anam's current research "centers on the figure of the urban Muslim migrant from the postwar to the post-9/11 eras in global Anglophone and Francophone fiction."

Sponsored by the Contemporaneity Group, Mandel Center for the Humanities

March 9, 2021

Time: Tuesday, March 9th, 5:30-6:30 pm

Relations between African Americans and Jews in the United States are at a complicated and critical juncture, which brings some members of these groups closer together, while causing significant tensions in other quarters. The stories of many Jews of Color throughout the world also signal that Jewish identity and identity with communities of color are not mutually exclusive. This conversation will compare shared themes of diaspora and assimilation, as well as ideological perspectives on social and political empowerment, before asking: What are the best strategies for advancing freedom and equality in the United States?

Participants

• Amber Spry, Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and Politics, Departments of African and African American Studies and Politics

• Alexander Kaye, Karl, Harry, and Helen Stoll Assistant Professor of Israel Studies, Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies

Moderator

• David Sherman, Associate Professor of English, Department of English

Wednesday, March 10th

5:30pm, Zoom

“unfailing invention and virtuoso wordcraft... heady, bold, vivid, sexy, intensely envisioned, metaphorically brilliant" (Lenore Marshall Award citation for The Nerve Of It: Poems New and Selected). Lynn Emanuel is the author of five books of poetry. Her work has been featured in Best American Poetry numerous times and has been included in The Oxford Book of American Poetry and published in The New York Times.

Thursday, March 18th

4pm

Margaret Ronda, English Department, University of California, Davis.

TBA

Ronda's work to date "attends to the ways American poets and poems dramatize an ever-clearer sense of planetary environmental crisis by reimagining poetic genres such as pastoral and elegy."

Sponsored by the Contemporaneity Group, Mandel Center for the Humanities

Thursday, April 8th

4pm

Tao Leigh Goffe, English Department, Cornell University

"The Abolition of Time"

Goffe's current research moves in two directions: "a book on the ecological poetics and entanglements of the Caribbean plantation and a manifesto on digital technology, black feminist praxis and DJ culture called Pon De Replay."

Sponsored by the Contemporaneity Group, Mandel Center for the Humanities

Wednesday, May 5th

5:30pm

Please join us for the annual reading by writers graduating with honors who will be sharing work from their fiction, poetry, and screenwriting projects and theses.