Annual Report / 2020-21
Enlarging Our Understanding: Conferences, Symposia and Other Events
Two Shepherds Talking Poetry ca. 1579.
people in partnership with Labyrinth Books and Princeton Public Library, and with support from the Lewis Center for the Arts, the English department, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. This series will include authors and works ranging from “The Ferrante Letters” (Sarah Chihaya and Merve Emre), to “Undocumented” (Dan-El Padilla Peralta) and “Decolonizing Diasporas” (Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vázquez).
Jeff Dolven
Diana Fuss and Bill Gleason
Among the greatest pleasures for me of this young year has been the resurrection of the Spenser Reading Group. The group has met for a dozen years or so to consider, each week, a canto of Edmund Spenser’s magisterial, perverse epic poem, “The Faerie Queene.” Somewhere between six and 12 graduate students, and the occasional intrepid undergraduate, sit together for an hour, read passages aloud, and talk about them. Some of the students are writing dissertations about Spenser; some have just fallen for his lurid, wayward pseudo-didacticism. In the past we have met in my office, often with a bottle of wine to share. Now we’re out in the McCosh courtyard for as long as the weather holds. The pandemic stopped us last year and so this fall we are beginning over again at the beginning, Book I, Canto i, aiming to work our way to the end of Book VI by spring 2024. One particular delight this time: among our newest members is a first-year graduate student who comes to us from Williams, where she participated in the Spenser Reading Group founded by our alum-turned-professor Emily Vasiliauskas. Spenser loves symmetries — well, he loves them and hates them, but this one, I suspect, would please him.
We offered an innovative graduate seminar on “Storytelling,” an experimental course that blends traditional course coverage with pedagogical training. We have long puzzled over how to offer graduate students an opportunity to do some trial teaching before they enter the undergraduate classroom. This course on storytelling (itself a pedagogical and mnemonic practice based on oral tradition) gave participants an opportunity to craft lesson plans, test out class exercises, engage in team teaching, and create original syllabi. In its second year as a pilot course, “Storytelling” seeks to complement the department’s existing pedagogy seminar and expand its course offerings on the practicalities and strategies of teaching.
Christina León Through generous funding from the 250th Anniversary Fund for Innovation in Undergraduate Education, recent Ph.D. graduate student RL Goldberg and I co-organized “t4t: A Trans Studies Symposium.” The symposium brought together artists, scholars and community organizers to be in dialogue about the current state of transgender studies and movement building. Over four conversations, the symposium unfurled the legacies of trans organizing, scholarship, art practices and histories, and how we might consider this history as we move forward into a precarious future. With Rebecca Rainof, we co-organized Justin Torres’ visit to Princeton’s campus for a reading from “We the Animals” to kick off the common works project.
Meredith Martin Though the Historical Poetics Reading Group at Princeton was on hiatus during the 2020-21 academic year, Virginia Jackson, a founding member of the group at large, was “virtually” on campus as the Bain-Swiggett Visiting Professor of Poetry (a post held by Evie Shockely this academic year). As part of her visit, she gave a lively and well-attended works-in-progress talk on Zoom during the
Monica Huerta I’ve curated and am hosting a virtual conversation series over this academic year, Personal Limits, about contemporary experiments in personal-critical writing with some amazing
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