Department of English

• Wednesday, April 9, 2014 - 4:30pm to 5:30pm

Fisher-Bennett Hall 401

Please join us for the final Departmental Lecture of the year. Jonathan Dollimore will be speaking on 4/8 and will be in conversation in a seminar co-hosted by the Med/Ren group along with the Gen/Sex group and Theorizing on 4/9.

"Literature Reading Philosophy: Nietzsche, Wilde, Freud and the Violence of Desire”
Departmental Lecture Series
Tuesday, April 8
4:30 pm
Fisher-Bennett Hall 401

The lecture will be followed by a reception in the Fisher-Bennett faculty lounge.
 

“In Conversation with Jonathan Dollimore”
Wednesday, April 9
5 pm
English Department Graduate Lounge
Fisher Bennett Hall 330

For a reading that will form the for the basis of the conversation, please see the forthcoming Jonathan Dollimore in Conversation. You can access this reading via a PennKey protected link on the Med/Ren website.

This event is hosted by the Med/Ren group, the Gen/Sex group, and Theorizing.

Professor Jonathan Dollimore co-founded (with Alan Sinfield) the Sexual Dissidence and Cultural Change MA in English at the University of Sussex, one of the few humanities-based graduate programs of its kind. This makes it a high profile and competitive program that attracts students from around the world.

Dollimore was Reader in the School of English and American Studies and is currently an associate member of the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence, University of Sussex. He is also a Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of York. Dollimore is credited with making major interventions in debates on sexuality and desire; Renaissance literary culture; art and censorship, and; cultural theory.

After leaving school at fifteen with no formal education to speak of, he worked in a car factory, in farming, and journalism before going to university as a mature student. His first degree was in English with Philosophy. Both subjects have remained central to his range of interests which include renaissance literature, especially drama; gender studies, especially homosexuality and bisexuality; the history of ideas, especially the philosophical preoccupation with decadence and death in western culture; the history of criticism, especially new historicism and cultural materialism.

Jonathan Dollimore's books include (with Alan Sinfield), Political Shakespeare:  Essays in Cultural Materialism, 1985, second edition 1994; Sexual Dissidence, 1991; Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture 1998; Sex, Literature and Censorship(2001). A fourth edition of his very first book, Radical Tragedy: Religion Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, which has been continuously in print since its first publication in 1984, appears in 2010.

He is currently Honorary Professor at the University of Sussex and Honorary Research Fellow at Royal Holloway College, University of London. Prior to this he was a Professor in the Humanities Research Centre at Sussex, and Professor English, University of York. He has also been visiting fellow at the Humanities Research Centre, Canberra, Australia, 1988; Mellon fellow at the National Humanities Center, North Carolina, USA 1988-89; scholar in Residence, Centre for Renaissance and Baroque Studies, Maryland University, USA, 1991-2; Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa Visiting Fellow, July 1996; Visiting Professor at the University of British Columbia, 1997;Cohen-Porter Visiting Professor, University of Tel Aviv, 2002; Selfridge Lecturer in Philosophy, LeHigh University, 2002.

He has a PhD from London University.