Come out, learn about Sigma Tau Delta--the Honors Society for students in English, and help us plan our Spring events.
The James S. Brown Award is given to honor the memory of Professor James S. Brown, a sociologist on the faculty of the University of Kentucky from 1946 to 1982, whose pioneering studies of society, demography, and migration in Appalachia (including his ethnography of “Beech Creek”) helped to establish the field of Appalachian Studies at U.K. and beyond.
In May 2013, ten students will go to Costa Rica to do ethnographic writing for English 205: Advanced Composition. Steve Alvarez of WRD is taking the group to the town of Heredia for four weeks. The course meets the graduation requirement for writing, and will include service learning opportunities and plenty of cultural experiences. For more information about taking this class, please contact the instructor.
Michael Trask will pre-circulate a paper for this Seminar.
Nazera Wright will pre-circulate a paper for this Seminar, co-sponsored by English and African American & Africana Studies.
Mary Jean Corbett, John W. Steube Professor of English and Affiliate of Women, Gender, and Sexual Studies at Miami U. of Ohio, will pre-circulate her paper on "Queering Closure in The Woman in White and Lady Audley's Secret" for this event.
Andrea Holliger will be speaking on "The Death of a Trope: Authority, Bodies, and the American Culture of Servitude" and Seth Lee will present "Whithersoever Thou Goest: The Discourses of Exile in Early Modern Literature."
Derek Gregory, University of British Columbia: “Gabriel's War: Cartography and the Changing Art of War"
January 25, 2pm
Lexmark Room, Main Building
Dr. Derek Gregory is a member of the Department of Geography and one of two Peter Wall Distinguished Professors at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Dr. Gregory trained as an historical geographer at the University of Cambridge. His research focused on the historical geography of industrialization and on the relations between social theory and human geography and explored a range of critical theories that showed how place, space, and landscape have been involved in the operation and outcome of social processes. His 1982 book, Regional Transformation and Industrial Revolution, was staged on the classic ground of E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class. Following a move to Vancouver in 1989, Gregory’s work was reinforced by postcolonial critique, outlined in his 1989 book Geographical Imaginations. This new phase of work owed much to Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism, but it was much more concerned with the corporeality and physicality of travel – with embodied subjects moving through material landscapes – and with the constantly changing (often mislaid) cultural baggage of the travelers. And it paid attention what travelers mapped, sketched, and photographed – and to the consequences these representations had for their encounters.
This work on travel and travel writing was interrupted by the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, and the focus of his research shifted to the present. Drawing on his training as an historical geographer and his sense of the renewed power of Orientalism, Dr. Gregory traced the long history of British and American involvements in the “Middle East,” and showed how these affected the cultural, political, and military responses to 9/11. The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (2004) showed how war quite literally takes place, and described in detail the violent ‘taking of places’ not only in Afghanistan and Iraq but in occupied Palestine. The study showed how the conduct of war connects the abstractions of geopolitics – the pronouncements of politicians, the strategies of generals – to the lives and deaths of countless ordinary men and women.
His forthcoming book, The Everywhere War, shows how the conduct of war is shaped by the spaces through which it is conducted; ranging from the global war prison at Guantanamo Bay through counterinsurgency in Baghdad and the drone wars in Afghanistan/Pakistan. His new research project, Killing space, is a critical study of the techno-cultural and political dimensions of air war. It focuses on three major campaigns: the combined bombing offensive against Germany in the Second World War, America’s air wars over Indochina, and the present use of UAVs in Afghanistan/Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and elsewhere. It pays particular attention to the changing ways in which cities (and eventually people) have been visualized as targets within what is now called the ‘kill-chain,’ and to the different ways in which the media have represented and reported bombing to different publics.
Please join us at the UK English Department's 2013 Creative Writing Reception!
The event is free and open to the public.
The Commonwealth House/Gaines Center is located at 226 East Maxwell Street, Lexington, KY.
