Department Events

September 2012

September 12 (Wednesday)
2:30 p.m - 4:00 p.m, HU 354, Professionalization Committee Meeting:  The first meeting of the year is general nterest meeting, intended most specifically for students who plan to look for academic jobs this year, but open to all students who are interested in the job market process.   Advice about when to begin an academic job search will be offered and the typical deadlines and necessary documents for such a search will be outlined.

September 19 (Wednesday)
3:00 p.m - 5:00 p.m, HU 354, Professionalization Committee Meeting: This meeting will be devoted to a careful review of academic job letters.  If you are on the academic job market this year, please do your best to attend this meeting.  Interested students who are not themselves seeking positions this year are also welcome to attend.

September 27 (Thursday)
2:00 p.m - 4:00 p.m, HU 290, Professionalization Committee Meeting: Ancillary Job Materials (CV, Teaching Statement, Dissertation Abstract, etc.) will be the topic of discussion.  More information to come.

October 2012          

October 3rd (Wednesday)

11:00 a.m., HU-290 – The Eighteenth-Century Reading Group and the English Department will sponsor a lecture by Professor Anthony Jarrells titled “After Novels,” which examines some of the myriad forms of writing—journalistic texts, didactic essays, rhetorics of advice, romance, perspective narratives, private histories, and personal diaries—that early novels imitated and engaged. By tracking how these discourses developed and thrived after novels took their place in the busy market of eighteenth-century print, Jarrells argues that the novel itself inspired experimentation and mixing among non-novelistic forms even as these forms pushed the novel to refine and consolidate its own formal boundaries. There will be a Q & A session and refreshments after the talk.

5:00 p.m., HU 354,  Professor Jarrells will also be hosting an open seminar.  You can contact Michael Amrozowicz at mamrozowicz@albany.edu reading materials  and he will send them to you. All graduate students and faculty are encouraged to attend.

 

 

October 11 (Thursday)
4:15 p.m., Standish Room, Science Library, Uptown Campus, Dorothy Driver, "The Work of Dreaming: Race, Feminism, and New South African Nationhood" Lecture
This lecture will examine literary texts as sites of dreaming in which unrealized visions of social harmony and individual autonomy—primarily in women’s writing—serve as antidotes to the historical forces that have produced South Africa’s nexus of race-class-gender oppressions.  In considering the work of Olive Schreiner, Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head, and Zoë Wicomb, Prof. Driver will examine how South African feminist thinking sometimes reproduces a Western feminism but sometimes also inscribes into the South African imaginary new forms of social interaction, thereby opening a route into Julia Kristeva’s revolutionary ‘women’s time’. Dreaming and writing thus become a powerful basis for change.  An eminent scholar of South African literature before and after Apartheid, Dorothy Driver holds a professorship at the University of Adelaide, Australia, and has taught at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and Stanford University. Her new book is Bessie Head (2011), a ground-breaking critical study of Botswana’s leading literary figure who was born illegally to a wealthy white South African woman and her black servant. The editor of books on Nadine Gordimer and Pauline Smith, Driver also served as a co-editor of the historical anthology Women Writing Africa: The Southern Region (2003), and co-editor for many years of the Southern African Review of Books.

 

October 12 (Friday)
4:15 p.m., Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center, Uptown Campus, J.M. Coetzee and Paul Auster Seminar
8:00 p.m., Main Theatre, Performing Arts Center, Uptown Campus, J.M. Coetzee and Paul Auster Conversation
In the afternoon seminar, J. M. Coetzee and Paul Auster will discuss Herman Melville’s classic tale of a 19th century office worker who refuses to conform to the demands of corporate culture in the financial district of lower Manhattan. To read “Bartleby, the Scrivener” in advance of the seminar. At the evening event, Nobel Prize-winning South African novelist J. M. Coetzee, and major American novelist Paul Auster will talk about their friendship and their soon-to-be-published body of letters to each other. The correspondence began in 2008 when Auster proposed an ongoing dialogue on any subject — “Let’s strike sparks off each other.” A collaborative meditation on a myriad of topics, the letters will be published as Here and Now in 2013. Coetzee, the first to win the Booker Prize twice, is the author of a number of novels regarded as classics of contemporary world literature, including Summertime (2009), Slow Man (2005), Elizabeth Costello (2003), Disgrace (1999), The Master of Petersburg (1994), Life & Times of Michael K (1983), and Waiting for the Barbarians (1980).  Paul Auster is known for his dark, intellectual, bestselling novels, including Sunset Park (2010), Oracle Nights (2003), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Music of Chance (1990), and The New York Trilogy (1987). His most recent book is Winter Journal (2012), a reflection on life and death and the events that shook and shaped him. Cosponsored by the NYS Writer's Institute, UAlbany Departments of Africana Studies; English; History; Languages, Literatures, and Cultures; Philosophy; Political Science; Women’s Studies; Institute for Research on Women; College of Arts & Sciences; Honors College; Rockefeller College; Offices of the Provost, and Vice President for Research; Alumni Association; and Student Association

 

November 2012

November 29 (Thursday)
2:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m., HU 290, Professionalization Committee Meeting: Interviewing Strategies will be the topic of discussion.  More information to come.