Please join us next week for the second annual Mandel Lectures in the Humanities, featuring James Wood of Harvard University andThe New Yorker. Hailed by the Financial Times as “the best literary critic of his generation,” Wood will be delivering a series of public lectures on the theme of “Letters to a Young Writer,” in which the critic and novelist will grapple with the great questions of literature: the “Why?” the “What?” and the “How?” The lectures will take place on Monday, April 8; Wednesday, April 10; and Thursday, April 11. All events will take place at 4:30 in the Mandel Humanities Center Auditorium (MCH G3). All are free and open to the public. There will be a public reception in the beautiful Mandel Atrium immediately following the final lecture. All are invited!
** Please also note: on Tuesday, April 9, at 12:30, Professor Wood will be leading a special conversation about Saul Bellow’s classic short novel, Seize the Day (1956). This symposium will take place in the Mandel Reading Room, on the third floor of the Mandel Center (Room 303). Free lunch will be served. And we will provide FREE COPIES of the novel, in advance, to participants. Supplies are limited! For your free copy, contact Mangok Bol, mbol@brandeis.edu, MCH 129.
poet
Fred Marchant
Tuesday, April 9 at 5:30 pm
Mandel Reading Room
Fred Marchant is the author of four poetry collections: Tipping Point (1993), which won the Washington Prize that year; Full Moon Boat (2000); House on Water, House in Air (2002); and his most recent, 2009’s The Looking House. In 2008, he edited the collectionWilliam Stafford: The Early Years, a volume of then-unseen work by the titular poet and essayist. Professor Marchant also co-translated into English an edition of the Vietnamese poet Tran Dang Khoa’s From a Corner of My Yard.
Currently, Professor Marchant works at Suffolk University as a professor and the director of their creative writing program. Additionally, as the founder of the university’s Poetry Center, he acts as its director. When away from Suffolk, he teaches in a variety of writing programs, from UMass Boston to California to the Colrain Poetry Workshops.
Books by Fred Marchant will be available for purchase and signing following the reading.
an Andrew Grossbardt event, sponsored by Creative Writing
Brandeis PhD Alumna Ivy Schweitzer Wins MLA Lifetime Acheivement Award
March 29th, 2013
Humanities News
Dartmouth Now reports that Ivy Schweitzer, a professor of English at Dartmouth since 1983, has won an MLA Lifetime Achievement award. Professor Schweitzer earned her PhD in English from Brandeis University, writing her dissertation about early American poetry. From the article:
Schweitzer has recently gained further recognition: The professor of English was awarded the Modern Language Association’s Division for American Literature Before 1800 Lifetime Achievement Award. For her mentorship, scholarship, and teaching, Schweitzer became the first recipient of the award since 2009 and the third female winner ever. The award was presented this month at a conference in Savannah, Ga.
“It’s something I never expected,” she says.
University of California, Berkeley Professor Kathleen Donegan spoke about Schweitzer at the award’s presentation: “This award is about lifetime achievement in research, teaching, and service, and Ivy’s career unites these three areas seamlessly.”
Faculty and students are warmly invited to a luncheon presentation, “Layers of Recognition: Haiti and the Atlantic World,” by Julia Gaffield, our third candidate for the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Caribbean Age of Revolution. The talk will take place on Friday, March 15, 12:30-1:30 p.m., in Olin-Sang Room 207. Lunch will be served.
Julia Gaffield received her PhD in History from Duke in 2012, and will soon begin an appointment as assistant professor of history at Georgia State University. Her dissertation research made international headlines in 2010, when she unearthed in the British National Archives what is believed to be the first printed copy of Haiti’s 1804 Declaration of Independence. She was the organizer of last week’s conference on “The Haitian Declaration of Independence in an Atlantic Context,” held at the International Center for Jefferson Studies in Virginia, and has published widely, including articles in the William and Mary Quarterly and the Journal of Social History.
This presentation is among the first of many events scheduled for 2013-2014 under the auspices of the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar on the “The Age of Revolution: Rights, Representation, and the Global Imaginary,” under the direction of Professors Jane Kamensky and Sue Lanser. Mark your calendars now for our inaugural symposium on Friday, September 27, 2013, featuring distinguished Revolution-age scholars Lynn Hunt (French), Doris Garraway (Haitian), and Eliga Gould (American).
You are invited to a Kraft-Hiatt Lecture
Dreaming in Time and Space: 1 Thessalonians and Paul’s Apocalyptic Imagination
By Professor Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre
Thursday, March 7, 2013, 1 to 1:50 pm, Lown 301 (Presented in NEJS 130a: The New Testament: A Historical Introduction with Professor Bernadette Brooten)
In an early first-century letter, the Apostle Paul describes the future return of Jesus Christ in fantastic images of a celestial King riding the clouds of Heaven and believers flying into the air to meet him. Historians place this imagery within Paul’s apocalyptic worldview, which drew on ancient Jewish ideas about God’s future return in judgment. This lecture introduces students to this apocalyptic worldview, and proposes thinking about such imagery in terms of space and material culture, not only in terms of time and texts. Using a critical and material understanding of space brings out the ways that Paul’s vision of the future orients ancient and contemporary readers to their own here and now.
Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre is the Associate Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Drew University Theological School in Madison, New Jersey.
Her teaching and scholarship centers on the beginnings and growth of the Jesus movement and the Christ communities in the context of the Roman Empire, as well as on the politics and ethics of the interpretation of scriptures. Her current research focuses on using critical space, material culture, and utopian studies to think about how ancient religious texts reflect and organize their worlds. She is the author of Jesus Among Her Children: Q, Eschatology, and the Construction of Christian Origins (2005) and Mary Magdalene Understood with Jane Schaberg (2006).
Jan Miernowski – The Bombard, the H-Bomb, and the Human Bomb: A Humanist Perspective on Anti-Humanism
February 26th, 2013
Humanities News
Jan Miernowski: How to Teach Critical Reading: An E-Learning Solution
February 26th, 2013
Humanities News
Faculty and students are warmly invited to a luncheon presentation, ““They Always Knew Her to be Free:” Emancipation and Re-Enslavement in French Santo Domingo, 1804-1809,” by Graham Nessler, candidate for a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Caribbean Age of Revolution, on Friday, March 1, 12:30-1:30 p.m. in the Mandel Humanities Center Reading Room (3rd floor).
Graham Nessler received his PhD in Latin American History from the University of Michigan and currently teaches at the Texas A&M University-Commerce. He has published in Slavery & Abolition and Estudios Sociales, and his book An Invisible Emancipation? The Struggle for Freedom in Hispaniola during the HaitianRevolution, 1789-1809 will be published by the University of North Carolina Press.
This presentation is the first of many events scheduled for 2013-2014 under the auspices by the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar on the “The Age of Revolution: Rights, Representation, and the Global Imaginary,” under the direction of Professors Jane Kamensky and Sue Lanser. Mark your calendars now for our inaugural symposium on Friday, September 27, 2013, featuring distinguished Revolution-age scholars Lynn Hunt (French), Doris Garraway (Haitian), and Eliga Gould (American).
