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This year the graduate program launched two exciting new lecture series: the Graduate Alumni Lecture Series, with Professor Peggy Phelan (PhD 1987) as its inaugural speaker, on December 7, 2006, and the Sexuality Speakers Series, which was kicked off by Professors Alice Echols, Heather K. Love, and
Patrick R. O’Malley.
Phelan, who is the Ann O’Day Maples Chair in the Arts and a professor of drama and English at Stanford University, spoke on “9/11, Photography, Performance, and the Real.” Phelan’s lecture examined the privileged place of film, as opposed to still photography, in our constructions of the “reality” of 9/11 and of traumatic experience in general.
Echols, an associate professor of English, gender studies, and American studies at the University of Southern California, and a visiting professor in the English department at Rutgers this past spring, lectured on the emergence of post-Stonewall gay hypermasculinity around disco music and club culture. Love, the M. Mark and Esther K. Watkins Asssistant Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, discussed what she calls “compulsory happiness” in contemporary liberal constructions of queer culture, using Brokeback Mountain as her central text. O’Malley, an associate professor of English at Georgetown University, discussed the construction of marginalized sexual identities and its relation to marginalized religious identities during the Victorian period. These lectures were co-sponsored by the Nineteenth Century Studies Group and the Twentieth Century Studies Group.
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Marianne DeKoven and Peggy Phelan during the Q & A following
the Graduate Alumni Lecture |
Cheryl Wall, Mary Ellen Phelan, Peggy Phelan,
Marianne DeKoven, Carolyn Williams, Kate Flint,
Barry Qualls, and William Galperin |
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| Alice Echols |
David Kurnick and Heather Love |
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