Month: September 2017

Get to Know Our Fellows: Four Questions with Sarah Berry

 

-What is your academic background and what is your current position at UConn?

I am a PhD candidate in the English department at UConn. I began the program in 2012. Before that, I earned a bachelor’s degree in an interdisciplinary Great Texts program from Baylor University and a master’s degree in English literature from Boston College.

 

-What is the project you’re currently working on?

The title of my dissertation is “The Politics of Voice in Twentieth-Century Verse Drama.” It is a transatlantic study of plays that are written in verse (instead of prose) during the last hundred years. I argue that verse drama gets revived in the twentieth century not as a genre in its own right but as a hybrid of poetry and drama, which makes it a venue for experimentation with different literary and dramatic forms as well as literary and dramatic voices. All this experimentation with voice has political implications as well, since voice is as much a political concept as a literary one. Twentieth-century playwrights use the different vocal possibilities of verse drama to respond creatively to a variety of contemporary political crises, including fascism, colonialism, the struggle for civil rights, class conflict, and sectarian violence.

 

-How did you arrive at this topic?

I came to this topic from an interest in weird plays: radio plays, plays with stage directions written in verse, plays in which characters blur together or become someone else. I realized that what makes these plays so weird is that they are half drama, half poetry. They combine the rules and conventions of lyric poetry with those of modern drama, but sometimes these rules and conventions contradict one another. So I set out to investigate the tension between the dramatic elements and lyric elements of these plays.

 

 

-What impact might your work have on a larger public understanding of your topic?

My hope for this study is that it will make people rethink the relationship between poetry and drama. We often think of poetry, especially lyric poetry, as the opposite of drama, but there is a long history, right up to the present day, of the interaction between these two genres. In fact, I think our conceptions of these genres are interdependent—that is, our understanding of lyric poetry is based on shifting notions of what drama is, and our understanding of what drama is has been informed by the emergence of lyric poetry as its own genre during the nineteenth century. This study is timely in genre studies, where scholars are contesting the value of categories like the lyric. But verse drama also provides us with an opportunity to think more broadly about the way that genres are created and reinforced.

I also hope that my study will demonstrate the inextricable relationship between form and genre on the one hand and politics on the other. Genre theory can sometimes seem abstract—or only of interest to literature scholars—but I think these plays show that questions of genre are necessarily intertwined with questions of politics, specifically through voice, which is always both literary and political.

Publishing NOW!

Angie Hogan, University of Virginia Press
October 10, 2017, 4pm 

Angie Hogan is Associate Editor and Rights Manager at the University of Virginia Press, where she has worked in the acquisitions department since 2004. Prior to joining U.Va. Press, she spent several years as an editor at InteLex Corporation, a pioneer in humanities electronic publishing best known for the Past Masters series. At Virginia, Ms. Hogan maintains a broad, multidisciplinary list focused primarily on early-modern, eighteenth-century, and Enlightenment studies. She also manages the Walker Cowen Manuscript Prize competition as well as the Press’s contracts and subsidiary rights. Books for which Ms. Hogan served as acquiring editor have been chosen for the Baker-Burton Award, the NeMLA Book Award, and the Choice list of Outstanding Academic Titles.

Publishing NOW!

 

 

 

 

Adam McGee, Boston Review
October 2, 2017, 4pm 

Adam McGee is the Managing Editor of Boston Review. He previously was Acting Managing Editor for Transition. He also served as Associate Editor for the Harvard Art Museums. Adam earned his Ph.D. in African and African American Studies from Harvard University. He has taught religious and cultural studies and cultural anthropology at Harvard University, Tufts University, and Northeastern University, and has published a number of scholarly articles on Haitian Vodou. In addition, Adam is a Pushcart nominee whose poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Cimarron ReviewPainted Bride QuarterlyMemoriousAssaracusRHINOThe Doctor T.J. Eckleburg ReviewSAND JournalBayou Magazine, and other places. To learn more or to contact him, visit www.adammichaelmcgee.com.

 

 

 

Get to Know Our Fellows: Four Questions with Deirdre Bair

Deirdre Bair

-What is your academic background and what is your current position at UConn?

MA and PhD from Columbia University, comparative literature major.  Tenured professor at U. of Pennsylvania.  Visiting professor, writer in residence, or distinguished scholar at (among other titles) Ohio State University; Bennington College; Macquarie and Griffith Universities. Humanities Institute at Australian National University, Canberra, (all Australia),  Visiting lecturer at Paris VII, Kassel U. (Germany), Upsala U. (Sweden), James Joyce Summer School ( University College, Dublin).  These are selected.  Currently independent scholar and writer.

-What is the project you’re currently working on?

Bio/Memoir: the Accidental Biographer (working title, subject to change).  It is the history of the seven years for each biography I wrote, of Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir. During those years I knew and worked with each subject on the research and writing.  It will include new information that was not appropriate to publish during their lifetimes, and it will also detail my coming of age as a writer and feminist.  It will be both a history of my personal evolution throughout this historical moment and will also address the many professional decisions I made as I created a new form of contemporary biography. It will also elaborate on how the genre evolved over the last several decades.

-How did you arrive at this topic?

I decided to write this book because so many individuals and organizations have asked me about my experiences. Other biographers, historians, psychologists, and art historians want my testimony for their books and because they sometimes change what I tell them to fit it into their particular theories or world views, I’ve decided to write my own account first so that my version of “the truth” (in all the post-modern ramifications of that term) will be on the record. After that, they are free to interpret it as they wish.

-What impact might your work have on a larger public understanding of your topic?

I hesitate to make assumptions about the impact my work will have.  I simply offer it as part of a historical record so that future scholars and writers may use it as they will.  I think of Margaret Atwood here, who said how can we think we are providing permanent answers now when we don’t even know what questions future generations will be asking.