Congratulations to third-year Ph.D. students Philip Derbesy and Daniel Luttrull and fourth-year Ph.D. student Melissa Pompili, who have been selected for Arthur Adrian and Roger B. Salomon fellowships for the 2018-2019 academic year! The awards will enable each to have a service-free period next year to devote to the writing of dissertations.
Derbesy, Luttrull, and Pompili will be celebrated at 2018 Adrian-Salomon event on Friday, April 27 at 3:15 p.m. This event will feature lectures by the 2017-2018 fellows, Michael Chiappini, Megan Weber, and Megan Griffin.
Derbesy’s research investigates the influence of film on the post-45 American novel
Luttrull’s work concerns didacticism and moral philosophy within American Romanticism.
Pompili presented elements of her dissertation in her 2017 Neil MacIntyre Essay Prize lecture, titled “Strange Encounters with Dead Selves: Medical Memoir, Apostrophe, and (Re)animating Subjectivity.” Her research focuses on the sometimes contradictory subjectivities that are required by the biopolitical state from the early twentieth century to the present moment. Her dissertation, “Internal Medicine: Bioaffect, Medical Discourse, and the Making of a Physician,” attends to the paradoxical subject position that physicians come to occupy through medical training, and the aesthetic products that they produce during their education in order to affectively (as in emotionally and psychologically) accommodate that subjectivity.
The Adrian-Salomon Event
Date: Friday, April 27, 2018
Time: refreshments at 3:00 p.m.; lectures begin at 3:15 p.m.
Location: Clark Hall Room 206
“Discipline and Anarchy: Towards a Practice of Queer Rigor” by Michael Chiappini
What are literary archives good for? As humanistic fields such as rhetorical studies, queer studies, and performance studies celebrate what is termed “The Archival Turn,” the value of archival work to literary studies seems troubled by our recent turn away from historicisms. Through an examination of archival materials from the papers of William S. Burroughs and Kathy Acker, this talk briefly asks how we might rigorously bring archival materials to bear on literary texts without, on the one hand, subordinating these texts to their historical periods or authorial biographies or, on the other hand, turning archival materials into trivia or footnotes.
“Once and/or Future King: Shakespeare’s Henry V” by Megan Griffin
As the last-written in Shakespeare’s most famous sequence of history plays, Henry V‘s relationship to the politics of its day, and to sovereign power in general, is inextricably bound up with considerations of history and historiography. In this talk, Griffin will analyze Henry V in light of both its complicated chronological relationship to Shakespeare’s other history plays, and its engagement with contemporary debates about Elizabeth I’s possible successors. In doing so, she will argue that Henry V reaches for a kind of historical myth-making that consciously defies notions of linear history.
“The Minutia of Everyday Life: Language and Social Decorum in the private writings of Aphra Behn, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan” by Megan Weber
Through access to the British Library Archives, provided by the Dean’s Fellowship, Weber noticed a connection between how authors write to their peers and the lessons concerning social decorum that appears in their fictional work. Her talk examines how the seemingly small details contained in the three authors’s personal letters and diaries become the same language used in their outward facing publications.
Ph.D. student Melissa Pompili has been elected to the 2018-2019 Executive Board of the Graduate Council of Arts and Sciences (GCAS) as Vice President. In this role, Pompili will oversee graduate student representation on university committees and oversee development and management of task forces.
Ph.D. Dean’s Fellow Megan Weber has been elected to the 2018 WISHED Executive Board as the chair of the Professional Development Committee. This is the first elected board of the organization.
The EGSA 