Long 20th Century Colloquium

2024-2025 Events

Coordinators: Manan Kapoor, Celine Shanosky

Faculty Sponsors: Beth Blum, Vidyan Ravinthiran

2023-2024

Coordinators: Jeffrey Careyva, Shalisa James, Manan Kapoor

Fall 2022 Schedule 

Guest Speaker, Thursday, September 29, 6 p.m., Plympton Room (Barker 133)

Jonathan Howard (Yale), "The Blueness of Blackness"

This event cosponsored by the Race and Ethnicity Colloquium.

Spring 2022 Schedule 

Wednesday, March 23, 6:00 PM (Barker 133)

Walter Benn Michaels (University of Illinois Chicago), "'Literary in the Bad Sense': Wharton's 'Racial Aesthetic'"

Thursday, April 14, 5:00 PM (Barker 133)

Andrew Delbanco (Columbia), "The University Crisis"

Fall 2021 Schedule

Tuesday, September 28, 6:00 PM (conducted via Zoom)

Welcome Back Drinks + Discussion—meet fellow members, and share your ideas for events this semester

Thursday, October 7, 6:00 PM (conducted via Zoom)

Michael Allen (Harvard), "'City I wanted most to see, and most did not see…': Virtual Cities in the Poetry of John Ashbery and Philip Larkin"

Thursday, October 14, 5:00 PM (conducted via Zoom)

Matthew Sussman (University of Sydney), "From Dissertation to Book: The Unvarnished Truth"

Spring 2021 Schedule

All events will be conducted via Zoom.

Thursday, February 11, 4:00 PM

Chris Jones (University of St. Andrews), "Fossil Poems and the Engrafted Speech: Old English in Tennyson and Whitman"

Thursday, March 11, 5:00 PM

Graduate Student Workshop: Sezen Unluonen  (Harvard), "Historical Status of the Copy in Hardy's The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved"

Thursday, March 18, 5:00 PM

Job Market and Careers Panel (feat. Kim Adams, Adam McGee, Tara Menon, and Adrienne Raphel) 

Wednesday, April 21, 5:00 PM

Lesley Goodman (Albright College), "Developing a Writing Program: An Unexpected Journey"

Fall 2020 Schedule

All events will be conducted via Zoom.

Tuesday, September 22, 5:00 PM

Welcome back virtual happy hour, with discussion session on "Undisciplining Victorian Studies" by Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong, and "Weak Theory, Weak Modernism" by Paul Saint-Amour (optional reading: Nathan K. Henseley's evaluation of The Norton Anthology: The Victorian Age)

Thursday, October 8, 6:15 PM

Simon Stern (University of Toronto), "Frame-Ups: Cross Examination and Narrative Surprise" Co-sponsored with 18th Century and Romanticism Colloquium 

Monday, October 12, 4:00 PM

Colloquium Book Club - Vanity Fair meeting #1 (up to ch. 6) 

Additional events TBA soon!

Spring 2020 Schedule

Thursday, February 20, 5:00 PM

Lawrence Buell (Harvard University), "Thoreau, Environmental Memory, and Anthropocene Revisionism"

Sever 304

Thursday, March 12, 5:00 PM

Simon Stern (University of Toronto), "Frame-Ups: Cross Examination and Narrative Surprise" POSTPONED

Co-sponsored with 18th Century and Romanticism Colloquium

Barker 114 (Kresge Room) 

Thursday, April 2, 5:00 PM

Chris Jones (University of St. Andrews), "Fossil Poems and Engrafted Speech: Old English in Tennyson and Whitman" POSTPONED

Co-sponsored with Medieval Colloquium

Barker 114 (Kresge Room) 

Thursday, April 23, 5:00 PM

Rita Felski (University of Virginia), "Hooked: Art and Attachment" POSTPONED

Co-sponsored with 20th Century and Contemporary Colloquium

Sever 103

Spring 2022

Guest Speaker, Thursday, March 3, 6 p.m. (virtual)

Namwali Serpell (Harvard), "Zola 2.0"

Zoom link: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/93197684767?pwd=TUtXY0Y3ajJHZm4xLy8rVlBPR1BaZz09

Guest Speaker, Thursday, March 24, 6 p.m. (in-person, Barker 133)

Günter Leypoldt (Dartmouth), "Gatekeeping the Laureate Position in the Literary Field: The Debates About Jeanine Cummins's American Dirt and Peter Handke's Nobel" 

Graduate Student Workshop, Thursday, April 7, 6 p.m. (hybrid)

Phoebe Braithwaite, Title TBA (Zoom)

Samuel Foster, Title TBA

Book Club, Thursday, April 28, 6 p.m. (in-person, location TBA)

Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke

Fall 2021

Graduate Student Workshop, Thursday, October 21, 6 p.m. (in-person)

Elinor Hitt (English, G2), "The Loss of Small Detail: Choreographic Thought in Beckett and Forsythe"

Wyatt Sarafin (English, G3), "Situating Antipolitics: Kara Walker's Black Dimensionality"

Guest Speaker, Thursday, December 2, 6 p.m. (virtual)

Greg Chase (Holy Cross), "World War, Woolf, and Wittgenstein"

Zoom link: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/96393586087?pwd=bjVIeXVpMjNma0NoRUlDd3RqcTkxQT09

Book Club, Thursday, December 9, 6 p.m. (Barker 024)

Winter Recipes from the Collective, by Louise Glück

Summer 2021

We are reading Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall for our summer book club. We will be meeting three times—about once a month—and discussing two parts of the novel during each session. If you'd like to join us and are not on our mailing list, please send one of the coordinators an email!

Book Club Meeting, Thursday, June 24:

Parts 1 and 2 of Wolf Hall

6 pm (EDT)

Book Club Meeting, Thursday, July 29:

Parts 3 and 4 of Wolf Hall

6 pm (EDT)

Book Club Meeting, Thursday, August 26:

Parts 5 and 6 of Wolf Hall

6 pm (EDT)

Spring 2021

Book Club Meeting, Thursday, April 1:

Join us for a discussion of Jericho Brown's The Tradition (2019).

6 pm (EDT)

Graduate Student Workshop, Thursday, April 15:

Charlie Tyson (English, G5),  "Twilight of the Aesthetes: Aesthetic Passivity and Self-Transformation in Hollinghurst"

Jocelyn Sears (English, G3), "Modeling Historical Time in The Handmaid's Tale"

6 pm (EDT)

Faculty Presenter, Thursday, April 29:

Sarah Dimick (Harvard), "Occasional Poetry and the Craft of Environmental Urgency"

6 pm (EDT)

Fall 2020

Book Club Meeting, Thursday, Oct. 15:

Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation (2014)

5 pm (EDT)

Information Session with Ben Platt and Kelley Deane McKinney from Public Books, Thursday, Oct. 22:

Senior editor Ben Platt and publisher Kelley Deane McKinney joined us from Public Books to discuss the magazine and offer information about how graduate students can begin publishing public-facing writing.

6:00 pm (EDT)

Invited Speaker, Thursday, Oct. 29:

Matthew Hart (Columbia), "No Go Zones and Other True Fictions" and a discussion of the scholarly publishing landscape

Continuing with ideas presented in his recent book, Extraterritorial: A Political Geography of Contemporary Fiction (Columbia UP, 2020), Hart's paper considered what Ali Smith's seasonal tetralogy has to do with the racist myth of the Sharia law enclave. He also discussed the current state of publishing for scholars who work on 20th- and 21st-century literature.

6:30 pm (EDT)

Invited Speaker, Thursday, Nov. 5:

Grace Lavery (Berkeley), "The Cannibal's Diagnosis: The Silence of the Lambs as a History of Medicine"

Lavery considered sexology, psychoanalysis, medical gatekeeping, the filmic gaze, and more in her analysis of the depictions of trans identity in the iconic film The Silence of the Lambs.

6 pm (EST)

Graduate Student Workshop, Wednesday, Nov. 11:

Andy Koenig (English, G3), "Novels of Literary Obsession"

Jeff Careyva (English, G3), "William Carlos Williams and the Poetry of Aphasia"

5 pm (EST)

Graduate Student Workshop, Thursday, Dec. 3:

Maria Marchinkoski (English, G3), "On Refusing to Specify: Politics, Period, & Value in Post-1945 Literary Studies"

Mary Galli (English, G2), "The Elliptical Edwardians and the Role of the Reader: A Case Study for Literary Periodization"

6 pm (EST)

Spring 2020 

Graduate Student and Invited Speaker Workshop, Wednesday, March 4:

Wyatt Sarafin (English, G1), "Anne Carson's Ethics of Residue, Avital Ronell's Aesthetics of Kitsch: Or, Why Not to Have Sex with Your Books, and Other Cautionary Professional Practices"

Christian Howard-Sukhil (Bucknell University), "Cultural Appropriation and the Literary Imagination"

6-8 pm, Sever Hall 105

Additional events from the spring term were cancelled due to the pandemic.

Fall 2019 

Invited Speaker Workshop, Cosponsored with Race and Ethnicity Colloquium, Thursday, Sept. 26:

Palmer Rampell (Academy of Arts & Sciences), "Chester Himes's Flat Cops" 

5:00 pm, Barker 218

Information Session on Academic-Monograph Publishing with Harvard University Press, Friday, Oct. 25:

10:00 am, Harvard University Press, 79 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA

Book Club Meeting, Thursday, Oct. 31:

Ilya Kaminsky's Deaf Republic (Graywolf, 2019)

6:00 pm, Barker 218

Invited Speaker, Wednesday, Nov. 6:

Caren Irr (Brandeis), "An Anatomy of Contemporary Species Fiction"

6:00 pm, Sever 215

Invited Speaker, Cosponsored with Theater and Performance Colloquium, Wednesday, Nov. 13:

Aniko Szucs (Yale), "Performances of Resistance in the Illiberal Democracies of the 21st Century—The Case of Hungary, Macedonia, and Brazil"

5:00 pm, Barker 218

Graduate Student Workshop, Thursday, Nov. 21:

Tess McNulty (English, G5), "Claudia Rankine and the iWitness Account"

Ceci Mancuso (English, G5), "Estranged Worldbuilding in Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire"

6:00 pm, Barker 218 [Time Change]

Spring 2019

Invited Speaker, Cosponsored with 19th c Colloquium, Thursday, Feb. 21:

Paul K. Saint-Amour (UPenn), "Does a Cliff Have a Face? On Anthropocentric Structures of Perception"

5:00 pm, Room TBA

Graduate Student Workshop, Thursday, Feb. 28:

Chris Spaide (English, G6), "Multiple Choice: Terrance Hayes's Response-Poems and the African American Lyric 'We'"

Michael Allen (English, G5), "The Sprouting Corpse of Tradition"

5:00 pm, Kresge Room (Barker 114)

Invited Speaker, Cosponsored with 18th and 19th c Colloquia, Thursday, March 7:

Ted Underwood (UIllinois), Title TBD

5:00 pm, Room TBA

Invited Speaker, Thursday, April 18:

Leela Gandhi (Brown), Discussion of Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction

5:00 pm, Barker 316

Fall 2018 

Graduate/Invited Speaker Workshop, Thursday Oct. 25:

Phillip Schweighauser, "Of Literary and Social Innovation: Margaret Mead's Lyrical Work"

Ceci Mancuso (G4), "Mapping 21st-Century Science Fiction: From Oryx and Crake to X-Men"

5-7pm, Barker 024

New Literary History (NLH) Publishing Workshop With Bruce Holsinger (UVA)

Cosponsored as part of the Fall Graduate Symposium

9:00-10:00 am, Emerson 310 (tentative)

Graduate/Invited Speaker Workshop, Thursday Nov. 29:

Ben Alexander, "ADD: Arts Matronage, 'Affirm America,' and the Politics of American Artistry"

Nick Rinehart (G5), "Nabokov's Interracial Imagination"

5-7pm, Barker, Emerson 106