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Upcoming Events

  • Jul
    21
    1:00 PM to 3:00 PM

    FBH Faculty Lounge (room 135) and Zoom  

    On Monday, July 21, Estevan Alemán will defend his dissertation "Arresting Scenes: The Cultural Vocabulary of Police in Early Modern English Drama." Estevan writes:

    This dissertation examines sixteenth and seventeenth-century English drama to reveal the early modern English theatre’s role in making police a coherent concept before the advent of the modern uniformed police force. It investigates the early modern theatre’s comic and romantic conventions that shaped police officers into literary types, whose proximity to the rogues they surveil in plays reveals the close exchange between police knowledge and criminality since the early foundations of the police in the English cultural imaginary. To this end, this study develops a genealogy that explores and analyzes the cultural language for representing the police avant la lettre. It argues that in the wake of Tudor England’s intensification of statute laws that targeted vagrancy as a pressing problem that needed to be surveilled and regulated by the constableship, playwrights made sense of growing anxieties about poverty and disorder, on the one hand, and the logics of police procedures, on the other. They did so by situating police in genres like romantic comedy and city comedy, forms which imagine a return to order: what we might call comedies of policing envision officers as a part of the solution to social ills even as they deflate the seriousness of the power they wield. Through readings of canonical and minor plays by Shakespeare, Middleton, Dekker, Fletcher, Massinger, and other Tudor-Stuart playwrights, these chapters show how the police emerge as a recognizable literary type comprised of stock phrases, conventional practices, and claims to immanent authority vested in the office. In this sense, early modern English drama helped mediate the police as a cultural concept while rendering it palatable for audiences who were routinely subject to police surveillance.

    The defense will be a hybrid event, held both in the FBH Faculty Lounge (room 135) and on Zoom (please contact Estevan for the link). The private portion of the defense will take place from 12 to 1 pm, and the public portion of the defense will take place from 1 to 2 pm, to be followed by a celebratory reception.

    We hope to see you there as we congraulate Estevan on this wonderful achievement!

     

  • Jul
    22
    3:00 PM to 4:00 PM

    Zoom (online only)  

    On Tuesday, July 22, Bethany Swann will defend her dissertation, “The Spatial Logics of Lyric Torsion.” Bethany writes:

    In taking stock of the status of contemporary poetry a few decades into the twenty-first century, literary critic Timothy Yu writes that we have seen, “if not precisely a ‘return’ to lyric, then a renewed interest in exploring the potential of the category of lyric to be turned to new and often more politically engaged, ends.” So, what can be said of these new and more politically engaged ends? At the convergence of the fields of Asian American and Asian diasporic studies and contemporary poetry and poetics, "Lyric Torsion" draws from a rich set of interdisciplinary conversations in psychoanalysis, the natural sciences, and visual and material culture. Torsion, from the Latin torquere, is defined by the Cambridge English Dictionary as an action, a force, and a state of being. Each of torsion’s multipronged modes contributes to my intervention into a process through which poets revise the self and subject at the center of the contemporary poem. Through the construct of the “lyric I,” I track an alternative logic to the modern subject formation underwritten by Western empire. To elaborate, I turn to Don Mee Choi’s geopolitics of diasporic space in DMZ Colony (2020), Tan Lin’s playful theory of sampling in 7 Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary (2010), Arthur Sze’s expansive vision of synchronicity in The Redshifting Web (1998), and the viscous lifeworlds that emerge in the aftermath of militarized violence in Hoa Nguyen’s A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure (2021).

    The defense will be held exclusively on Zoom (please contact Bethany for the link). The private portion of the defense will take place from 2 to 3 pm, and the public portion of the defense will take place from 3 to 4 pm.

    We hope to see you there as we congraulate Estevan on this wonderful achievement!

     

     

  • Aug
    25
    4:30 PM to 6:30 PM

    FBH Faculty Lounge (room 135)

    Please join us to celebrate the start of the new academic year, and to celebrate our second-year Ph.D. students who will have just completed their 50-Book Exams!

    All faculty (standing and non-standing), graduate students, and staff are welcome to attend, and snacks and refreshments will be served. We hope to see you there!

  • Aug
    26
    (All day)
  • Sep
    1
    (All day)
  • Sep
    18
    5:30 PM to 8:00 PM

    Location TBA  

     

     

  • Oct
    9
    (All day)

    Penn Campus

  • Oct
    21
    (All day)
  • Nov
    27
    (All day)

    Penn Campus

  • Dec
    8
    (All day)
  • Jan
    14
    (All day)
  • Jan
    19
    (All day)