The Department of English at Michigan State University is thrilled to present, Literary Studies Now, its signature lecture series for the 2024-2025 academic year, which is funded through the generosity of the Russel B. Nye endowment.
The first speaker in the series was Merve Emre, the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism, who is the author of Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America, The Ferrante Letters, and The Personality Brokers, which was selected as one of the best books of 2018 by The New York Times, The Economist, NPR, CBC, and the Spectator. She is the editor of Once and Future Feminist, The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway, and The Norton Modern Library Mrs. Dalloway and is a contributing writer at The New Yorker. She spoke on Sept. 10 in a talk titled “Too Close Reading: On American Miniaturism.”
The following are the other speakers who will visit MSU’s campus during the 2024-2025 academic year as part of the Literary Studies Now signature lecture series:
Pardis Dabashi
“Losing the Plot: Form and Feeling in the Modern Novel”
Sept. 19, 2 p.m., Wells Hall B342
Pardis Dabashi, Assistant Professor of Literatures in English and Film Studies at Bryn Mawr College, teaches classes on twentieth-century literature, film, and theory. Her research examines the intersection of form, politics, and affect in narrative film and literary modernism. She is interested in how aesthetic and rhetorical form index or trouble stances of political, normative, and epistemic certainty, which she explores by examining structures of feeling such as ambivalence and doubt.
Dabashi is the author of Losing the Plot: Film and Feeling in the Modern Novel; co-editor of The New William Faulkner Studies; and co-editor of the “Visualities” forum on Modernism/modernity. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in PMLA, Modernism/modernity, Textual Practice, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, Film Quarterly, Early Popular Visual Culture, Arizona Quarterly, Public Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education and elsewhere.
Alix Beeston
“Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film”
Sept. 20, 2 p.m., Wells Hall B122
Alix Beeston is Reader in Literature and Visual Culture (Associate Professor) at Cardiff University. She is a writer and academic whose work advances interdisciplinary approaches to literature, film, and photography in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, while also experimenting with new modes of scholarly writing and dissemination. Her work performs a feminist revaluation of negative phenomena such as absence or silence as well as literary and visual objects that are seen as marginal, riven with gaps and flaws, or confounding in their effects.
Baeston is the founder of the digital project Object Women and author of In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen. Recently, her coedited book by Stefan Solomon, Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of Unfinished Film, was published as part of the Feminist Media Histories series at the University of California Press in June 2023.
She is the founder and co-editor, with Pardis Dabashi, of the “Visualities” forum on Modernism/modernity; the co-organizer, with Hayley O’Malley and John Hoffman, of the Film Studies special Interest group at the Modernist Studies Association; and a founding member and co-convenor of Image Works: Research and Practice in Visual Culture at Cardiff University.
Ramzi Fawaz
“Webbed Attachments: Psychedelic Lessons from the Multiverse”
Oct. 18, 4 p.m., Wells Hall B342
Ramzi Fawaz is a Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he currently holds a Romnes Faculty Fellowship for advanced research in the humanities. He is the author of two monographs, including The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics, which won the ASAP book prize, and Queer Forms.
With Darieck Scott he coedited a special issue of American Literature, titled “Queer About Comics,” which won the 2019 best special issue of the year award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. Alongside Deborah E. Whaley and Shelley Streeby, he coedited Keywords for Comics Studies, which was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2022.
Fawaz is currently at work on a new book project, titled Literary Theory on Acid: Reading for Diversity in the Psychedelic Era, in which he argues for the necessity of literary and cultural studies approaches to the contemporary psychedelic renaissance. As part of this project, he is editing a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly on “Psychedelic Imaginaries.”
Adrienne Brown
“The Residential is Racial: A Perceptual History of Mass Homeownership”
Nov. 19, 4 p.m., Wells Hall B342
Adrienne Brown is an Associate Professor in the Departments of English and Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago and Faculty Director of Arts + Public Life. Her newest book, The Residential Is Racial: A Perceptual History of Mass Homeownership, was published by Stanford University Press in 2024.
Her 2017 book, The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race, winner of the Modernist Studies Association’s 2018 First Book Prize, recovers the skyscraper’s drastic effects not only on the shape of the city but the racial sensorium of its residents.
With Valerie Smith, she co-edited the 2015 volume Race and Real Estate, an interdisciplinary collection rethinking narratives of property and citizenship.
Dan Sinykin
“The Sociology of Literature: Big Fiction and the Conglomerate Era”
Feb. 19, 4 p.m., Wells Hall B342
Dan Sinykin is an Associate Professor of English at Emory University. His first book, American Literature and the Long Downturn: Neoliberal Apocalypse, was published in 2020 by Oxford University Press. His second book, Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed Book Publishing and American Literature, was published by Columbia University Press in 2023.
He is the co-founder and co-editor of the Post45 Data Collective, a peer-reviewed, open-access repository for post-1945 literary and cultural data. It addresses three problems: the lack of shared best practices for the creation of humanities data, the lack of institutional recognition for scholarly data work in the humanities, and the atomization of data that could be powerful when made public and put in conversation with related datasets. In 2024, he was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Digital Humanities Advancement grant of $149,000 to continue work on the digital infrastructure for the Post45 Data Collective.
Sinykin has written for Dissent, n+1, The Nation, The New York Times, Slate, The Washington Post, and other publications.
Stephanie Burt
“Taylor Swift’s Literary Nature” (talk)
“Why Are We Mermaids”? (reading)
March 27, 4 p.m., Wells Hall B342
Stephanie Burt is a poet, literary critic, and the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University. She has published nine books, including two critical books on poetry and three poetry collections. Her essay collection Close Calls with Nonsense was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Burt’s other works include We Are Mermaids; Advice from the Lights; The Poem is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them; The Art of the Sonnet; Something Understood: Essays and Poetry for Helen Vendler; The Forms of Youth: Adolescence and 20th Century Poetry; Parallel Play: Poems; Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden; and Randall Jarrell and His Age.
Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The Believer, and the Boston Review.
Zainab Cheena
“Transnational Stagecraft: Excavating Early Modern Race and Globalization in English and Spanish Renaissance Theatres”
April 8, 4 p.m., Wells Hall B342
Zainab Cheema is an Assistant Professor of Early World Literature at Florida Gulf Coast University. Her teaching and research focus on contact zones in early globalizations, early modern race studies, translation movements, Anglo-Iberian cultural exchanges in early modern theatre, and contemporary film and television adaptations of medieval and early modern literatures.
Zainab is a member of the #ShakeRace and #RaceB4Race scholarly communities, as well as the Borderlands Shakespeare Colectiva. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Fulbright Scholarship Program, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Newberry Library, and the Huntington Library. She is currently working on her first book monograph supported by a Folger Long Term Fellowship for 2024–2025.
In her recent work, she has explored racial queenship and Anglo-Spanish embassies in Shakespeare’s romances; the translation of immigration and exile from the novels of Cervantes onto the early modern English stage; intersections of Morisco and Black slaveries in the plays of Lope de Vega; the intersections of early modern race with #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo in Starz’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s history plays for popular television; and representations of disability and caste in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Shakespeare trilogy.
