Enlarging Our Understanding Conferences, Symposia and Other Events

Two Shepherds Talking Poetry ca. 1579.

Jeff Dolven

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.

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 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).

Diana Fuss and Bill Gleason

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

The Historical Poetics Reading Group met virtually, enabling scholars and graduate students from around the country to attend.

spring about her forthcoming book “Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric in the Nineteenth Century” (Princeton University Press). Princeton graduate students and faculty from across the country discussed the highly anticipated book. Surprise guests included Marjorie Perloff (Stanford University), Craig Dworkin (University of Utah), Meredith McGill (Rutgers University), Jason Rudy (University of Maryland, College Park), Matt Sandler (Columbia University), Ben Friedlander (University of Maine), and Carolyn Williams (Rutgers University). Jackson will come to campus in person to give her postponed BainSwiggett lecture on March 29, 2022.

Rebecca E. Rainof

This year, I will be launching the new summer internship program for English concentrators with Princeton University Press and HomeWorks Trenton, an innovative afterschool residential program that provides academic and social-emotional enrichment activities for marginalized high school girls in the city of Trenton, New Jersey.

Sarah Rivett

As part of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Princeton (NAISIP), and with an exploratory grant from the Humanities Council, I’ve convened a working group and a seminar series in fall 2021. NAISIP seeks to increase awareness and understanding of the cultural traditions and experiences of Indigenous people in the Western Hemisphere and globally. It has formed a working group consisting of faculty, staff and students from across the disciplines and the University, and this fall it presents a seminar series that brings leading Native scholars, artists and activists to campus as a way of fostering cross-disciplinary dialogue in our community and beyond.

With Sarah Malone, Jessica Lambert, Keely Toledo, and Izzy Lockhart, we’ve built a website and developed a NAISIP logo.

Esther H. Schor

In April through May of 2021, I co-chaired an international virtual conference called “Language and Migration: Experience and Memory” for the Migration Lab, Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. The conference was originally scheduled for April 2020; we wisely decided to wait to reschedule until we’d learned a thing or two about holding an online conference. Held this spring over two weeks, the conference drew a large audience of over 550 unique viewers from 52 countries. It was a pleasure to host a conversation among panelists from, for example, Brazil, Jordan, Turkey and Poland, and a real delight to welcome a large complement of junior scholars who would not otherwise have been able to participate. We were fortunate that our original keynoters — novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen (University of Southern California) and scholar-activist Sarah DrydenPeterson (Harvard Graduate School of Education — both gave marvelous talks to open and close the proceedings. I’m grateful to the Department of English for support, and especially to my colleagues Anne Cheng, Sarah Chihaya and Paul Nadal, who introduced speakers and chaired sessions.

Nigel Smith

I enjoyed organizing two virtual meetings: “The Virtual Materiality of Texts: Book History During a Pandemic” colloquium was held in the Department of History with the aim of providing the basis for discussion among scholars of book, manuscript and media history about the status of the field during this moment of difficulty in accessing archival resources, and for sharing experiences and ideas for teaching and research with material texts in the time of COVID-19. “Critical Race Conversations: Race, Philosophy and Political Thought,” was held through the Folger Shakespeare Library, and brought together diverse perspectives to address the question of how thinking with the category of race can organize a conversation in the history of political thought. At the 2021 MLA Annual Convention, I organized the panel on “Transnational Early Modern Drama: Race, Rape, Migration, Translation, Revolt.”

Autumn M. Womack

This year, and in collaboration with my colleague Monica Huerta, we launched the multiyear project, Organizing Stories: Toward a Scholarly-Activist Praxis. Working with a team of graduate and undergraduate students, professor Huerta and I curated five remote workshops that brought veteran organizers and the Princeton community together to consider the role that all kinds of storytelling play in political activism.