UPDATED: Jewish Literature Live is Back: Spring 2015 Schedule

Sandra Bernhard returns to Jewish Literature Live
to begin the semester
on Thursday, January 22

UPDATE: Sandra Bernhard's schedule now requires her to stay in Los Angeles for rehearsals of four episodes of Two Broke Girls.  It will be great to see her on the show, but it unfortunately means that her appearance is cancelled for January 22.

Hailed by Time magazine as one of “the hottest seats in class”, Jewish Lit Live is back for another season. Past guests to the seminar-style class have included Tony Kushner, E.L. Doctorow, Art Spielgelman and Erica Jong.

Led by Professor Faye Moskowitz, the class provides students with the unique opportunity to meet the authors of each book read in class. On the day of the visit, the author will meet with the class in the afternoon so that students can ask questions in an intimate setting. That same night, the author will give a reading open to the entire community. All night time readings are free and are held in GW’s Marvin Center from 7:00-8:30.  The GW English calendar (to the right on this blog) will always have full details on these events.

Jewish Literature Live is made possible by the generous support of David Bruce Smith, BA '79, a former member of GW's Board of Trustees and an alum of the English Department. Any questions about the course can be directed to jewishlitlivegwu@gmail.com

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The roster for the upcoming semester will include:

Sandra Bernhard: Thursday, January 22 Love Love and Love, Marvin Center Ampitheater 7:00 – 8:30 PM

Sandra Bernhard is s compelling performer who loves to engage her audience with personal provocative and deeply emotional content. Bernhard just concluded her popular annual performances at Joe’s Pub in New York City.  

           

Bernhard’s film credits include Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, for which she was awarded Best Supporting Actress by the National Society of Film Critics, Nicholas Roeg’s Track 29, Hudson Hawk, Dinner Rush, and Dare.

Nick Kotz: Thursday, February 5 The Harness Makers Dream, Marvin Center Ampitheater 7:00 – 8:30 PM

As a reporter for the Washington Post and the Des Moines Register, and in six pathbreaking books, Nick Kotz won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, the National Magazine Award, two Robert F. Kennedy Awards, and eight other renowned prizes.

Daniel Handler/Lemony Snicket: Thursday, February 19 Why We Broke Up Marvin Center Room 307 7:00 – 8:30 PM

As Lemony Snicket, he has written the best-selling series All The Wrong Questions as well as A Series of Unfortunate Events, which has sold more than 60 million copies and was the basis of a feature film starring Jim Carrey and Meryl Streep, with Jude Law as Lemony Snicket.

Jean Korelitz: Tuesday, March 3 Admission Marvin Center Room 301 7:00 – 8:30 PM

Born and raised in New York City and educated at Dartmouth College and Clare College, Cambridge, she lives in New York City with her husband, Irish poet Paul Muldoon, and their children. In 2013, her novel Admission was turned into a romantic comedy-drama film directed by Paul Weitz and starring Tina Fey and Paul Rudd.

Tom Beller: Thursday, March 26 JD Salinger: The Escape Artist. Students will read Nine Stories (author J.D. Salinger). Marvin Center Ampitheater 7:00 – 8:30 PM

Thomas Beller is the author of J.D. Salinger: The Escape Artist. He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker's Culture Desk, has edited numerous anthologies including two drawn from his website, Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, and was a cofounder of the literary journal Open City.

Michelle Brafman: Thursday, April 9 Washing the Dead Marvin Center Ampitheater 7:00 – 8:30 PM

As the author or her debut novel, Washing the Dead, Michelle Brafman’s short fiction has also received special mention in the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and she has written essays and stories appearing in Slate, The Washington Post, Tablet, Lilith Magazine, the minnesota review, and numerous other publications.

Gary Shteyngart: Thursday, April 23 Little Failure Jack Morton Auditorium 7:00 – 8:30 PM

Gary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972 and came to the United States seven years later.  His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Travel + Leisure, Esquire, GQ, The New York Times Magazine, and many other publications and has been translated into twenty-six languages. 

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Creative Writing Reception: This Thursday!

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Professor Frederick Pollack Publishes New Poetry Collection

GW Creative Writing and English
Professor Frederick Pollack

Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems, The Adventure and Happiness, both published by Story Line Press.   GW English is happy to announce that his collection of shorter poems, A Poverty of Words (Prolific Press), will appear in a few weeks. Many other poems of his have appeared in print and online journals.  He is an adjunct professor of Creative Writing at GW.

A Poverty of Words contains 92 poems written between 2010 and 2013. Its themes combine politics and metaphysics. Stylistically it is neither mainstream nor postmodernist. At various times Pollack has described himself as a “Beat classicist” and as “redoing Stevens along Marxist lines.”

A poem from A Poverty of Words, "In the Hallway," is included below.  You can also read a few more poems by Pollack, published in the Modern Poetry Quarterly Review, here.

In the Hallway

A girl pressing her cheek against a door,

doorjamb, or wall beside a door.

Crying probably, possibly

mumbling. That’s it.

Her face is turned away,

you can’t see if she’s pretty.

Which would make a difference

in your quotient of empathy

divided by reluctance

to get involved plus eventual impatience.

And if and how quickly

you escaped the sense

of not being a plausible

savior (someone she’d find

attractive when this is over), or –

long-cherished, firmly-held –

of helplessness. A novelist

cases the hallway, the smells and light,

social class as revealed

by her dress. Or should.

For my part, I (not making this

about me) check

the decaying file, the yellowed partial volume

of memory. Not finding her.

But she exists now, therefore always did

and will, and is both punishment and forgiveness.

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GW English Alums on the Move: Nirmala Menon (PhD '08)

Nirmala Menon
GW PhD, 2008

"YOU NEVER QUITE GROW UP FROM WANTING TO CHANGE THE WORLD" - Nirmala Menon talks about her career, and about GW

After she earned her PhD from GW's English department, Nirmala Menon took an Assistant Professor position at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire.  Four years later, she decided to return to India, where she now teaches in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) department of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Indore. To mark the publication of her co-edited collection of essays titled Migrant Identities of “Creole Cosmopolitans”: Transcultural Narratives of Contemporary Postcoloniality, we spoke to her about her work and her life after GW.

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Tell us something about your graduate school experience at GW.

The English department was a very exciting place to be and I was fortunate to be part of the cutting edge British-Postcolonial area of expertise.  I was lucky of course in securing a tenure-track position, but I also credit the training I received from Profs. Judith Plotz, Kavita Daiya, and Jonathan Gil Harris. Judith’s erudite influence on my scholarship, research and pedagogy is so deep that I cannot even begin to enumerate it here.  Kavita’s focused and inspiring feedback on my work ensured its readiness for publication after my defense. Gil pushed my boundaries of thinking theory-wise which shows in my simultaneous respect and irreverence for theoretical narratives. 

Kavita’s postcolonial literature seminar was a blast - I confess that I completely plagiarize from my memory of her lectures to teach Gayatri Spivak’s subaltern essay even today. I have digitized, and saved on Google drive, Marshall Alcorn’s generous comments on my seminar paper. I still look at some of my notes from the advanced literary theory class I took with Robert McRuer that covered such extensive intellectual ground and I use them for my own literary theory class today. 

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Tell us about your book.

Migrant Identities of
"Creole Cosmopolitans"

A defining question that ties together the essays in the collection is: How do aesthetic and stylistic choices actually accentuate the condition of dislocation of the migrant, and by doing so also “trouble” the seemingly global promise of cosmopolitanism?

    The essays suggest that there are ways in which the migrant aesthetics, language, and imaginations in art forms may offer insights into the state of postcolonial studies, specifically about the interactions between hybridity  and cosmopolitanism.

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What about your current research?

My doctoral students and I are developing a digital database of scholarship in Indian language literatures, beginning with a pilot of four languages. The project is exciting and I am learning a lot as we progress. I also serve on the Editorial Board of the Open Library for the Humanities (OLH) which is an innovative digital humanities publishing project reimagining publishing and dissemination of humanities scholarship. 

My monograph titled The Indian Postcolonial: Re-Map, Re-Imagine and Re-Translate is under contract for publication in Fall 2015.  

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After a decade of living in the US, you decided to move to India. Was that a difficult decision?

I often get asked this question: Why did I move? I am not sure I have a good answer yet. It was part personal, part academic, part wanting to contribute to and grow with a new institute. And of course - you never quite grow up from wanting to change the world - do you?

I think any big move is a very difficult decision - so, yes, it was difficult. I miss DC, I miss my department at Saint Anselm where I was fortunate to know and develop friendships with wonderful colleagues and students. Of course, the world is a much smaller place now and I travel back and forth as much as possible, and academic engagements/ collaborations can cross borders, so I feel that I still have deep connections stateside. 

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How do you compare academic work experience in New Hampshire and India?

From a liberal arts college where the humanities are the center of the college, I now find myself in an elite institution that is a technology powerhouse and hence, inevitably, carries some techno-determinism as a cultural legacy. But the Humanities And Social Sciences (HSS) department is a vibrant place with exciting research and pedagogy; I have colleagues doing exciting research work in areas as diverse as water resources management, literature of the North East, the newly emerging Indian English popular fiction, Cognitive Human factors and much more. The department is by definition interdisciplinary as it encompasses at least five different disciplines.

I also deeply value the stellar and brilliant student body of the institute both at the undergraduate and graduate level. My classes are therefore always challenging and often straddle vastly diverse student experiences. It is, in a nutshell, a microcosm of India and hence like everything else in India both cause for hope and despair. Hope - that these students compare with the best anywhere and can be creative, engaging, frustrating, foolish and enterprising.  Despair that I wonder if we stymie all of those qualities within rigorous but rigid academic boundaries ensuring success but depriving them of the discoveries of failure, even colossal failure!

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Do you have any advice for our current English graduates or for those who are reading this and are thinking of graduate school in Literature?

I think that GW’s English graduate school is just a wonderful place to be. I especially think that the British-postcolonial area of expertise really gives the department its international and global identity with its student and faculty body as also its research agendas. I cherish that from my GW experience and I hope they continue to expand and build on it.

    I think graduate school is a wonderful experience, and trust me; you will never meet so many extraordinary people (faculty and students) in one place anywhere else! So, make the most of it. I truly believe that your research should engage your passion because it is a long commitment; however, it is also pragmatic to consider career paths and options and be judicious in your selections. I would emphasize that academics and teaching should not be the sole career option and students should start early looking for areas where they can put their research to good use. Digital Humanities kind of opens up possibilities for literary research combined with translatable skills that can carry over to different industries, and I think graduate students should arm themselves with some of those too.

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Margaret Soltan Featured in Times Higher Education on Internet Privacy

In a cautionary piece about teaching university-sponsored online courses, Times Higher Education (THE) quotes extensively from Professor Margaret Soltan's remarks about the subject on her blog, University Diaries:

“All sorts of eyes are peering into your online course. . . . Your students, naturally; but also university administrators, on-campus tech people, the for-profit firm your school has probably hired to manage various course functions.”

Read the entire piece here.

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Crip/Queer Studies in the GW English Graduate Program

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GW English Alums on the Move: Laura Greenfield at Hampshire College

Dr. Laura Greenfield
GW English PhD '07

Laura Greenfield (GW English PhD 2007) is founder and executive director of Women's Voices Worldwide, Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting social justice around the globe by educating women and girls to be powerful speakers in all areas of personal, academic, professional, and civic life.  Since 2013, she has been a visiting associate professor of Education and Communication at Hampshire College.  She was recently featured on Hampshire College's "Faculty Friday" spotlight.  Read the entire post here.  Here are some highlights:

"Currently, Dr. Greenfield is the Director of the Transformative Speaking Program, a new initiative launched in 2013 which provides resources to students to develop as powerful speakers (public speaking, group discussion, interpersonal communication) and resources to faculty for support in bringing speaking instruction into their courses. The program is in the second year of its pilot phase, and Dr. Greenfield’s primary work thus far has been to hire, educate, and oversee a group of Hampshire students who are providing peer speaking mentoring to students.

Dr. Greenfield first came to Hampshire when representatives of the college contacted her with requests to provide speaking workshops and classes. 'Over the years I had the opportunity to learn from students, faculty, and staff about their interests in greater speaking resources. I fell in love with the school and the people here—the support for individuality, creativity, and innovation coupled with a commitment to justice in action resonates deeply with my philosophy of education. In response, I created a proposal for a pilot speaking program, and the rest is history!'"

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