Past Speakers (ERC)

April 2018

Ana Schwartz – Our Children’s Children: The Genealogy of Subjection in Early America

Wednesday, April 18th, 4-5:30 p.m.
Center for Environmental and Life Sciences, 120

Image from Wikipedia: XIR3675 Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c.1555 (oil on canvas) by Bruegel, Pieter the Elder (c.1525-69); 73.5x112 cm; Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, Belgium; (add.info.: Icarus seen with his legs thrashing in the sea;); Giraudon; Flemish, out of copyright

Dr. Schwartz earned her PhD from the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania in August 2017, and joins the Department of English at Montclair State after completing a pre-doctoral fellowship in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Schwartz studies the literature of English colonial settlement in America, and through these texts reveals evidence of emotion’s instrumental function as a technique of efficient governance by Anglo-American settlers. Her teaching draws this research into lively conversation with broader European writings on discovery and conquest, as well as recent popular discourse on the exploration of space, the final frontier. Dr. Schwartz has shared her research in a variety of intellectual settings, from the Mahindra Center for the Humanities at Harvard University to the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and has taught equally as widely.

November 2017

Jeffrey Gonzalez – “Walking, Driving, Cricket: Circulating Post-9/11 New York in Teju Cole’s Open City and Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland“

Wednesday, November 29th, 4-5:30 p.m.
Center for Environmental and Life Sciences, 110

Jeffrey Gonzalez teaches English at Montclair State University. He teaches classes on 20th century American literature. His writing explores how massive changes in cultural hierarchies and arrangements of power over the past several decades have led to alterations in the form and function of literary narratives. He is currently revising an essay about the ambivalence several fiction writers exhibit toward Walt Whitman and is at work on a project about the various ways of periodizing post-1990 literature. He has published articles in Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature and Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction and was lead editor of the Corporations and Culture issue of New American Notes Online.

April 2017

Jonathan Greenberg – “Satire and the Novel: The Comedy of Manners”‌‌

Monday, April 3rd, 4-5:30 p.m.
Schmitt 104

Jon Greenberg specializes in modernism — British, Irish, Anglophone, and American — and more generally, 20th century literature. His first book, a study of modernist satire, has recently (fall 2011) been published by Cambridge University Press, and he is working on a second book for the same press, to be titled “The Cambridge Introduction to Satire.” His edited collection of essays on Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was published by Palgrave in 2016. He is developing a book on the role of Darwin’s writing and thought in modernism.

December 2016

Jeffrey Alan Miller – “Inside the King James Bible’s Earliest Known Draft”

‌‌‌‌‌December 13th, 4:30-6 p.m.
Schmitt Hall 104

Jeffrey Alan Miller is Assistant Professor of English at Montclair State University, where he researches and teaches early modern literature, with a particular focus on the works of John Milton and his contemporaries. In 2015, Miller announced his discovery what is now the earliest known draft of the King James Bible (1611), the most enduring English translation of the Bible of all time and the most widely read work of English writing in the history of the language. The draft discovered by Miller also represents the only draft of the translation yet to be found in a hand definitively identified as belonging to one of the King James translators themselves. In his talk, Miller will provide a detailed, illustrated overview of the draft, which is unlike any other draft of the King James Bible previously uncovered, and he will ultimately discuss some of the more notable (and surprising) things about the translation that the draft serves to reveal. Come have an up-close look at one of the greatest achievements in English literary, religious, and cultural history in the making!

October 2016

Patricia Matthew – Reading Percy through Mary: Intersectional Politics in Prometheus Unbound and Valperga

Wednesday, October 14th, 3:30-5 p.m.
Schmitt Hall 104

Patricia Matthew is Associate Professor of English and this presentation will be part of a lecture she delivers for the University of Pennsylvania’s Unbinding Prometheus project (http://repository.upenn.edu/unbindingprometheus/)

April 2015

Caroline Dadas – Hashtag Activism: The Promise and Risk of “Attention.”

Wednesday, April 8th, 3:30-5 p.m.
Dickson Hall 179

Professor Dadas’s recent publications include articles and reviews in College Composition and Communication, New Media and Society, Computers and Composition, Kairos, and Computers and Composition Online. Her current project proposes methodological frameworks for conducting empirical research online.

February 2015

Photo of David Galef Poster

October 2014

Photo of Laura Jones Poster