Near future occupations...

My fall courses, as described on the GWU English website:

Romantic Childhood and Victorian Children's Literature --- Judith Plotz

"Not only is childhood one of the leading preoccupations of 19th-century British culture, but both juvenilia and children’s literature are two brilliantly opening fields for 21st-century researchers. This seminar will trace the connections between romantic constructions of childhood (there are several, interestingly classed and gendered) and the brilliant body of children’s literature that emerges in the latter part of the 19th century.

Some key figures: Rousseau, Wordsworth, Maria Edgeworth, the Coleridge family (STC, Hartley, Sara), Lewis Carroll, Ewing, Dickens, Kipling, Nesbit. We’ll also examine the juvenilia of Hartley Coleridge,Marjorie Fleming, Jane Austen, the Brontes. We’ll frame our study with the help of critics and theorists including Alexander & McMaster, Kincaid, Myers, Richardson. Rose. The course will culminate in a mini-conference. Students will be expected to produce papers suitable for major conference presentation."

Constructions of Ethnicity and Identity: RENAISSANCE ORIENTATIONS --- Gil Harris

"This graduate seminar takes as its point of departure Sara Ahmed's recent book, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, in order to think through a cluster of related preoccupations with the "orient" (spanning North Africa, Turkey, and Persia to India, China and Indonesia) in English Renaissance writing. The orient was a shifting compass point in relation to which England in particular, and Europe in general, repeatedly (dis)oriented itself in space and time. How may these processes of (dis)orientation shed light on long-standing conceptions of the orient and its objects? We will pay particular attention to medieval and Renaissance travel writing about the orient (from Mandeville to Coryate, Herbert, and Heylyn) and Renaissance "oriental" drama (from Preston's Cambyses and Marlowe's Tamburlaine to The Adventures of the Three English Gentlemen and Fletcher's The Island Princess). We will also consider other theoretical texts on the orient and its objects, including Said's Orientalism, Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe, and Gunder Frank's Re-Orient"

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I will also be taking advantage of the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute (MEMSI). The first seminar is:

"Messianic Time and the Untimely"

Three papers will be pre-circulated. On September 17, we will have short presentations followed by open discussion. The presenters are:

1. Kathleen Biddick, "Dead Neighbor Archives and Messianic Time"
2. Julia Lupton, "Paul Shakespeare: Exegetical Exercises"
3. Jonathan Gil Harris, ""The Untimely Mammet of Verona"


And am not abandoning my JD Robb article either, so I will be a busy girl in the next month or so. I don't imagine that it will taper off after that, but for now this is the plan.