Department of English

September 21, 2022

5:30 - 6:30 pm
Pearlman Lounge - snacks served!

Boston Poet Laureate Porsha Olayiwola is the current Brandeis Jacob Ziskind Poet in Residence. Olayiwola is a writer, performer, educator and curator who uses afro-futurism and surrealism to examine historical and current issues in the Black, woman, and queer diasporas. She is an Individual World Poetry Slam Champion and the founder of the Roxbury Poetry Festival.

This event is made possible by the Grossbardt Memorial Fund.

September 28, 2022

The Mandel Center for the Humanities is excited to host What Could a Dissertation Be?: A Zoom panel discussion, September 28, 5:30-6:45pm, EST.
PhD dissertations in the humanities and social sciences have traditionally been scholarly proto-monographs. However, increasing numbers of PhD students are exploring alternative formats for communicating their research -- formats such as a series of articles, graphic novels, films, public-facing blogs, apps and podcasts. Graduate departments are increasingly supporting these new forms, as are the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the Mellon Foundation. In this seminar, current Brandeis PhD students Nai Kim (English) and Yi He (English) will join Anna Williams (Assistant Lecturer and Co-Director of the Writing Center, Birmingham-Southern College) and Iván González-Soto (PhD Candidate, UC Merced) to discuss the benefits and challenges of non-traditional dissertations. Register here.

October 14, 2022

11:00 am - 5:00 pm (with events continuing Saturday, 10/15)
Mandel Center for the Humanities and livestreamed
Register.

Reimagining Native America: D'Arcy McNickle's The Surrounded (1936)

The Brandeis Novel Symposium is a one-day conference with a dual focus: both on a particular novel and on theoretical and scholarly questions raised by the novel more generally.

View this year's schedule, speakers, and registration information. 

October 18, 2022

5:30 - 6:30 pm

Women's Studies Research Center (WSRC), Epstein Building

Elisa Albert '00 is the author of the novels Human Blues, After Birth, The Book of Dahlia, and the short story collection, How This Night is Different. Albert's writing is compared to that of Philip Roth or Grace Paley, and The New Yorker described her fiction as having "a pathos that is uniquely her own, all the more blistering for being slyly invoked."

Prof. Stephen McCauley, one of Albert's former teachers, will be in conversation with her. This is a cosponsored event with the WSRC and is funded in part by the Dafna Zamarripa-Gesundheit Endowment. 

October 20, 2022

4:00 - 5:30 pm
Mandel Center for the Humanities Reading Room (303)

Join us for this talk by Jordan B. Kinder, a settler-British and Métis scholar of environmental humanities and media studies from a resource town in what is now called northern British Columbia, Canada. He is an incoming 2022-23 Postdoctoral Fellow with the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University.

October 27, 2022

5:30 - 6:30 pm
Pearlman Lounge - snacks served!

Writer in Residence Christopher Castellani is the author of four novels, including All This Talk of Love — a New York Times Editors' Choice — and A Kiss from Maddalena — winner of the Massachusetts Book Award. His newest novel is Leading Men, for which he received Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, MacDowell, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Leading Men is currently being adapted for film.

This event is made possible by the Dafna Zamarripa-Gesundheit Endowment. 

October 27, 2022

Kareem Khubchandani is an associate professor of theater, dance, and performance studies at Tufts University whose research and creative work centers on queer, feminist, and trans aesthetics, namely in South Asia and its diasporas. Performing under the name LaWhore Vagistan, Kareem utilizes drag performance as a pedagogical tool. He is the author of Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife (University of Michigan Press, 2020), which won the 2021 Association for Theatre in Higher Education Outstanding Book award, 2021 Dance Studies Association de la Torre Bueno book award, and the 2019 CLAGS: Center for LGBTQ Studies Fellowship. He is also co-editor of Queer Nightlife (University of Michigan Press, 2021) and curator of criticalauntystudies.com.

Featuring: Jacob Bird (Dinah Lux), Ryan Persadie (Tifa Wine), Enzo Toral (Penelope Sumac), and Uzma Zafar (Sher)

4:00-5:30PM

Laurie Theater, Spingold Theater Center

October 28, 2022

Speaker: Kareem Khubchandani, associate professor of theater, dance, and performance studies at Tufts University.

5:00-6:30PM

Laurie Theater, Spingold Theater Center

November 1, 2022

Speaker: Kareem Khubchandani, associate professor of theater, dance, and performance studies at Tufts University.

4:00-5:30PM

MCH G03

November 14, 2022

5:30 pm
Pearlman Lounge

A. E. Stallings is a US-born poet who has lived in Greece since 1999. She studied Classics at the University of Georgia and at Oxford University. She has published four volumes of poetry, most recently Like, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A selection of poems, This Afterlife, is forthcoming in December from FSG. Her verse translations include Lucretius' The Nature of Things and Hesiod's Works and Days for Penguin Classics, and the pseudo-Homeric The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice in an illustrated edition for Paul Dry books. She has received a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

This is a cosponsored event with English, Comparative Literature, and Classical Studies and is funded in part by the Grossbardt Memorial Fund.

March 31, 2023

Tentative date; schedule coming soon.

With keynote speaker Kari Weil from Wesleyan University.