In recent months, prestigious national and international organizations recognized Brown faculty for their research, scholarship, humanitarian efforts and leadership.
Interview with Nonfiction Program Senior Lecturer Kate Schapira about her recent book, Lessons from the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth: How to Live with Care and Purpose in an Endangered World.
First-year graduate student Katherine J. Chen, winner of the 2023 American Library in Paris Book Award, returns to the Library to discuss her fictionalized account of the life of Joan of Arc with Patricia Dailey (Columbia University).
Misrecognitions mounts a vigorous defense of the labyrinthine plotting of Victorian novels, notorious for their implausible concluding revelations and coincidences. Critics have long decried Victorian recognition scenes—the reunions and retroactive discoveries of identity that too conveniently bring the story to a close—as regrettable contrivances. Ben Parker counters this view by showing how these recognition scenes offer a critique of the social and economic misrecognitions at work in nineteenth-century capitalism.
The 2023 jury—consisting of Lauren Groff (chair), Doan Bui and Sudhir Hazareesingh—wrote of the book:
“Congratulations to Katherine J. Chen for Joan, winner of the eleventh annual American Library in Paris Book Award. The book is a fierce fictional retelling of the life of Joan of Arc. Deeply researched and fully imagined, Joan manages to subvert the old, dusty narratives about the ardent virgin warrior from Domremy in Eastern France, and creates a flawed, complicated, and compelling heroine for our age.”
The winner was announced by jury member Doan Bui before an audience of Library supporters on 9 November at the George C. Marshall Center in the Hôtel de Talleyrand on the Place de la Concorde.
What is the relation between the novel and ethical thought? Henry James and the Promise of Fiction argues that the answer to this question lies not in the content of a work of fiction but in its form. Stuart Burrows explores the relationship between James's ethical vision and his densely metaphorical style, his experiments with narrative time, and his radical reimagining of perspective.
First-Year PhD student Katherine Chen's Joan: A Novel (Random House USA / Hodder & Stoughton UK), has been shortlisted for the 2023 American Library in Paris Book Award. The winner will be announced on 9 November 2023. Joan is Chen's second published novel, and it is a thrilling, feminist reimagining of the life of Joan of Arc, from her childhood until her capture.
Professor Kevin McLaughlin's book, The Philology of Life: Walter Benjamin's Critical Program, was published by Fordham University Press in January 2023
Prof. Dixa Ramírez-D'Oleo's new book, This Will Not Be Generative, published by Cambridge University Press, "attends to the semiotics of ecological writings via Caribbean literary studies and black critical theory. Closely reading texts by Donna Haraway, Monique Allewaert, and Lisa Wells, and exposes how the language of tentacles and tendrils, an assumptive 'we,' and redemptive sympathy or 'care' disguises extraction from black people and blackness. This often speculative rhetoric, abetted by fantasies of white communion with indigenous groups, contrasts with the horror semiotics of the films Get Out (2017) and Midsommar (2019), which unmask the antagonistic relationship between white survival 'at the end of the world' and blackness as compost."
The best piece of advice I can think of is to be flexible and adaptable to the changing realities of the field/job market/this crazy and precarious world, and be creative and expansive in your conception of what a PhD in English can contribute (a lot!)
Remember that your own happiness is more important than proving to yourself or others that you can succeed in a job market that is fundamentally broken.
By dumb luck I got at tenure-track job my first year on the market. You must keep that in mind: Brown will get you in the mix, but from there it is 75% luck.
As writers, teachers, editors, and researchers, our skills are broadly applicable. It might feel difficult to communicate that to potential employers without a full-time job on your resume, but a little experience here and there during graduate school can help get your foot in the door.
Grace Talusan, Lecturer in the Nonfiction Writing Program, has been awarded The Massachusetts Fellowship, a fully funded, 4-week residency focused on building a close-knit cohort of Massachusetts artists of all disciplines from across the Commonwealth.
Grace Talusan, Lecturer in the Nonfiction Writing Program, interviews Monica Macansantos about her latest collection of stories, Love and Other Rituals (University of Melbourne’s Grattan Street Press, 2022).
Professor Kevin Quashie has won the James Russell Lowell Prize, awarded to "an outstanding literary or linguistic study or a critical biography," for his 2021 book Black Aliveness; or, a Poetics of Being (Duke University Press). In Black Aliveness, Quashie imagines a Black world in which one encounters Black being as it is, rather than only as it exists in the shadow of anti-Black violence. As such, he makes a case for Black aliveness even in the face of the persistence of death in Black life and Black study.
Professor Ada Smailbegović received honorable mention in the Matei Calinescu Prize, awarded for "a distinguished work of scholarship in twentieth- or twenty-first-century literature and thought in any geographical context," for her book Poetics of Liveliness: Molecules, Fibers, Tissues, Clouds (Columbia University Press, 2021). Twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers, Smailbegović argues, have intermingled scientific methodologies with poetic form to reveal unfolding processes of change. Their works can be envisioned as laboratories within which the methodologies of experimentation, natural historical description, and taxonomic classification allow poetic language to register the rhythms and durations of material transformation.
As part of the annual Nonfiction@Brown lecture series, Maggie Nelson — New York Times bestselling author of 10 books of poetry and prose — read from her latest book, “On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint.” She discussed how we “think, experience and talk about freedom” for an audience at the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts
The Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism annually honors one book-length work of criticism published in the prior calendar year, and includes a prize of $7,500. Kevin Quashie is the 2022 recipient for his book Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being, which draws on Black feminist literary texts, including work by poets Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, and June Jordan.
What is the purpose of a novel? How satisfactory are the meanings that literary critics assign to novels? How has the novel changed? What does the novel share with cinema, and what does that mean for thought and literary criticism in the contemporary period? Iqra S. Cheema talks with Timothy Bewes about these and other questions as addressed in his book Free Indirect.
Interview with Paul Armstrong in June 2022 about his work on literature and neuroscience in Seisma, a London-based magazine that focuses on the relations between art and science. The discussion focuses on Paul's books How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art (2013) and Stories and the Brain: The Neuroscience of Narrative (2020), and examines the differences between taxonomic and phenomenological literary theories as well as types of cognition such as perception and selfhood as they relate to reading and literature. How might a neuro-phenomenological approach to literary studies facilitate our understanding of the interrelation between humans and literature?
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton spoke with Derek Shearer about current political issues, his own personal interests and gave career advice to future generations.
Elizabeth Rush, author of Rising: Dispatches From the New American Shore, wrote a guest essay for the New York Times in April 2022 about people living in frontline flood communities, who may know something the rest of us do not about the looming threat of climate change.
Ada Smailbegović’s new book Poetics of Liveliness investigates the ways twentieth- and twenty-first-century poets have intermingled scientific methodologies with poetic form to reveal unfolding processes of change. The book shifts across scales to describe the subtly changing realms of molecules, fibers, tissues, and clouds. It explores works such as Christian Bök’s insertion of a poetic text into the DNA code of living bacteria in order to generate a new poem in the shape of a protein molecule, Jen Bervin’s considerations of silk fibers and their use in biomedicine, Gertrude Stein’s examination of brain tissues in medical school and its subsequent influence on her literary taxonomies of character, and Lisa Robertson’s studies of nineteenth-century meteorology and the soft architecture of clouds.
In this two-part conversation, Smailbegović talks with our own Caitlin Hurst about how her work thinks through the relationship between poetry and science, guided by its interest in questions of “liveliness,” soft matter, and nonhuman perception. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
A wide-ranging and revelatory conversation with scholar and writer Kevin Quashie about his new book Black Aliveness, which emphasizes the experience of Black life through readings of poetry and first-person essays.
I met Elizabeth Rush on Twitter, through friends I also met on Twitter, who all resided, generally, in Providence, Rhode Island, and who didn’t necessarily know each other in real life. In the summer of 2019, we all broke bread and drank beer in a Providence backyard where the conversation centered around toxics, built and natural environments, sociology, chemistry, writing, and the publishing industry—all except Elizabeth who had been invited but had run off to other climes: Columbia and then on to Antarctica to work on a new book. Before our group met again online in April 2020, this time including Elizabeth, I re-read her book Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, which was a Pulitzer finalist for 2018. In it, she took complex topics (rising seas, climate change, the human condition) and showed the vulnerability of all three in a way that made me feel at home. In her voice, I recognized a sibling to my own. As girls, we played a little too rough, swore a little too much, considered our stubbornness a positive thing, but we always kept our hearts in the game. And in our books, I also saw parallels in the way we told stories, by allowing humans their humanity and nature its course, all the while recording the former’s intrusion upon the latter.