Long 20th Century Colloquium
Welcome!
The English Department’s Long 20th Century Colloquium serves students at every stage of graduate work on post-1900 literature and culture. The Colloquium—formerly divided into the 19th Century/Modernism Colloquium and the Twentieth Century and Contemporary Colloquium—serves primarily as a venue for academic and professional development for graduate students. We meet as a seminar four to six times each semester, for a mixture of student workshops, presentations by guest speakers, professionalization events, and an informal book club. Through regular meetings, students will have a chance to present ongoing research. In addition to our graduate student workshops, we also facilitate conversations centered on current research in relevant fields and invite speakers from other institutions.
To be added our mailing list, to ask a question, or to make a suggestion, please contact Colloquium co-coordinators Jeffrey Careyva, Shalisa James, and Manan Kapoor. No matter your area of specialization, your department, or your university, we'd love to have you join us!
If you would like to attend an event and are not on our mailing list, please email Jeffrey, Shalisa, or Manan to let them know.
Faculty sponsors are Kelly Mee Rich and Sarah Dimick.
UPCOMING EVENTS
Spring 2024
Monday, April 29, 5:30 PM (Barker 114, Kresge Room)
Amit Chaudhuri in Conversation with James Wood
About the speakers:
Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, essayist, poet, and musician. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he lives in Calcutta and the United Kingdom. Sojourn is his eighth novel. Among his other works are three books of essays, the most recent of which is The Origins of Dislike; a study of D.H. Lawrence’s poetry; a book of short stories, Real Time; two works of nonfiction, the latest of which is Finding the Raga; and four volumes of poetry, including New and Selected Poems (New York Review Poets, 2023). Formerly a professor of contemporary literature at the University of East Anglia, Chaudhuri is now a professor of creative writing and the director of the Centre for the Creative and the Critical at Ashoka University, as well as the editor of www.literaryactivism.com. He has made several recordings of Indian classical and experimental music, and has been awarded the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, the Indian government’s Sahitya Akademi Award, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
James Wood is a literary critic, essayist, and novelist. He is Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. He is the author of How Fiction Works, and several collections of essays, most recently Serious Noticing: Selected Essays 1997-2019, and two novels, The Book Against God and Upstate.
PAST EVENTS
Spring 2024
Tuesday, Februrary 27th, 6:00 PM (Barker 114, Kresge Room)
Juno Jill Richards (Yale University), “Close Up at the Harlem Drag Ball: A Racial History of Transgender Touch.”
Fall 2023
Friday, November 10th, 4:00 PM (Barker 114, Kresge Room)
Vidyan Ravinthiran (Harvard University), "Louis MacNeice's mayfly, and Roddy Lumsden's autism poetics."