April 10, 12 noon PAHB 428
“Poetry and the Root of Dreams"
A Colloquium by Michael Fallon

…We are such stuff

As dreams are made on; and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep. –The Tempest Act 4, scene 1, 148-158

Powerfully visionary and disturbing dreams have not gone away with the shaman, the dream visions of the Middle Ages, the Gothic novel, or Surrealism. The language of dreams will always fascinate artists, story tellers, and poets because it is the language of the imagination, the vocabulary of deepest meaning. This colloquium will examine the relation between poetry and dreams, as well as the process by which some of my own poems—rooted in and inspired by dreams—have metamorphosed into poems.

Monday, November 5, 12 noon Commons 329
“Faulkner and Hemingway: Overview of a Rivalry”

Joseph Fruscione
Department of English, UMBC and First-Year Writing Program, George Washington University

William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, both winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature, carried on a nuanced and complex literary rivalry. At times, each voiced a shared professional respect; at other times, each thought himself the superior craftsman and spoke disparagingly of the other. Through 
a sense of competition, though, came an equally strong sense of psychological influence. In this talk, Fruscione will give
 a kind of overview of their multi-decade relationship, with special emphasis on their correspondence and Faulkner’s late novel,
 A Fable.

7:30 p.m. Proscenium Theater
Short Story Reading 
and Discussion of
 This is How You Lose Her
Junot Díaz
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author

Nancy Allen Professor of Creative Writing, MIT

Co-sponsored by the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences,
 College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences, Department of Modern Languages, Linguistics and Intercultural Communication, Department of Psychology, Division of Student Affairs,
the Dresher Center for the Humanities,
 Office of Institutional Advancement,
the Provost’s Diversity Initiative, and UMBC’s Latino Hispanic Faculty Association

Junot Díaz was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic and is the author of Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao which won the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. Díaz will discuss his new collection of short stories.

Monday, Feb 27
4:00 p.m., Library 7th floor
The Korenman Lecture
Kathy E. Davis (Institute of History and Culture, Utrecht University, The
Netherlands)
"Feminism as Traveling Theory: The Case of Our Bodies, Ourselves"

co-sponsored with the Gender and Women’s Studies Program with additional
support from the Dresher Center for the Humanities.

Thursday, March 1
4:00 p.m., UC 310
Louis Bayard (novelist, George Washington University)
Reading and Booksigning.

Wednesday, April 18
4:00 p.m., Library 7th floor
Mrinalini Sinha (Department of History and Women's Studies, Pennsylvania
State University)
"Totaram Sanadhya's Mere Fiji Dwip me Ikkis Varsh (My 21 years in Fiji)
and the Second Abolition"

co-sponsored with the Asian Studies Program, the Gender and Women's
Studies Program, and the Departments of History and Political Science.

Guest Speaker: Jane Donawerth, March 10th, 2011

Title: "Technologies of Gender: Science in Science Fiction by Women in the Pulp Magazines"
Speaker: Jane Donawerth, UM College Park
Place & Time: March 10th, 4pm in the Kuhn Gallery

Sponsored by the English Department, Friends of the A.O. Kuhn Library and Gallery, and the Gender and Women's Studies Progra.
From 1926, when the science fiction magazines and fan clubs were invented by Hugo Gernsback, until 1960, when the paperback novel took over the sf market, the magazines printed on cheap, over-sized wood-pulp paper with garish covers were the primary venue for publishing science fiction. For quite a while, science fiction history ignored women writers in the pulps, but they were there. Even today, many historians assume that women writers wrote a kind of domestic science fiction--one 1950s editor called it "diaper sf"--and left the "hard" science to the men. In this lecture, Professor Donawerth contests this assumption and explores the science in women's short fiction. Drawing on the SF collections of UMBC, Penn State, and the Toronto Public Library Judith Merril Collection, Professor Donawerth considers the invention of prostheses and blood transfusion in stories by Clare Winger Harris and Kathleen Ludwick, the science of reproduction and contraception in fiction by Katherine Maclean and Eileen Gunn, and the development of television in works by C. L. Moore and James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon). Bound by constraints of gender but not always limited by them, women writers often deploy representations of science in their science fiction to explore anxieties about women's roles--about the body and its parts and the ways we use them to construct masculinity and femininity; about reproduction, reluctance to reproduce, and the science that might substitute for women's wombs; and about women as communicators and technologies of connection and alienation.

Jane Donawerth is a Professor of English and Affiliate in Women's Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. She has published articles on sf in Extrapolation, Science Fiction Studies, and PMLA, co-edited with Carol Kolmerten of Hood College Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference, and authored Frankenstein's Daughters: Women Writing Science Fiction. She won the International Association for Fantasy and the Arts Career Award for her work on gender and science fiction. She has also taught and published widely on Shakespeare, early modern women writers, and history of rhetorical theory by women. She is currently working on a book on the science in science fiction by women in the pulp magazines.

The 2010 release of Bartleby, UMBC's creative arts journal, will be held on April 22nd from 7-9pm on the 7th floor of the Library.

Guest Speaker: Helene Cooper, Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Location: April 21st at 7PM in the Library, 7th floor

Helene Cooper grew up as the privileged child of the Liberian political aristocracy, descendants of freed American blacks who founded Liberia in 1821. On the eve of the 1980 revolution in Liberia just about everyone in the government was either a relative or connected in some way to her family. Her uncle was foreign minister and she and her sisters, one biological and one adopted, watched on television the execution of her uncle and other relatives and family friends, before her own immediate family fled after getting visas to the U.S. Continuing her childhood, with her adoptive sister left behind in Liberia, Helene experienced racism for the first after moving to the American South. She returned to Liberia for the first time 23 years later, a return she wrote about last April as the cover story in the New York Times Magazine. In the meantime she has grown up to be one of this country's top journalists, going from the Wall Street Journal to the NY Times, where she was the assistant editorial page editor, then the diplomatic correspondent and now is the White House correspondent who often gets in the first question at President Obama's press conferences. She has won honors from the Merage Foundation for the American Dream and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

As part of the Humanities Forum and with support from the English department, she will be reading from her memoir, The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost Childhood and sharing stories about her past and how it has shaped her life and writing as a journalist.