Past Events - 2020-2021
January 27, 2022
12:00-1:00PM
Zoom
Speaker: Émilie Diouf (African and African American Studies, English, and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies)
Open to the public.
Monday, November 22nd, 2 PM
Join us for a reading and discussion with Lysley Tenorio, author of the novel The Son of Good Fortune (HarperCollins, 2020), winner of the New American Voices Award, and the story collection Monstress (HarperCollins, 2012), named a book of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle. Currently, he is a Radcliffe Fellow researching and writing a novel, “The Children Go,” which explores the Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW) phenomenon through a mother whose seven children work as OFWs across the globe, one on each continent. Born in the Philippines, Tenorio lives in San Francisco, and is a professor at Saint Mary’s College of California.
“In this perceptive and sensitive novel, Lysley Tenorio views the troubled American dream through the eyes of Excel, an undocumented immigrant literally born in the air between the Philippines and the United States. The result, in The Son of Good Fortune, is a nuanced and subtle account of that most basic American dynamic: the melancholic and sometimes devastating fluctuation between promise and failure, happiness and its opposite.” – Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer
Sponsored by the Creative Writing Program.
November 19, 2021
In this exciting event sponsored by Mandel Center for the Humanities, FTIM, and the English/ Creative Writing Departments, please join us for a screening of the brand new, highly anticipated 2021 film Candyman. The screening will be followed by a critical conversation led by Brandeis English professor, Dr. Brandon Callender. The discussion will center on the ongoing reimagination of how Blackness is represented within the horror genre. Join the UDRs and faculty from the English, AAAS, and Film departments for the screening at 6pm, followed by a critical discussion at 7:30pm on November 19, 2021.October 22, 2021
This year’s focal text is Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. As in previous years, papers will explore these larger questions from diverse theoretical, historical, and formal angles, taking Greene’s novel either as focus or simply as a point of departure.
October 6, 2021
Wednesday, October 6th, 2021
5:30 pm
Torrey Peters is author of the groundbreaking, bestselling novel Detransition, Baby. The book has garnered widespread international praise and was nominated for the Women's Prize for Fiction. Torrey has an MFA from the University of Iowa and a Masters in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth. She rides a pink motorcycle and splits her time between Brooklyn and an off-grid cabin in Vermont.
Please join us on Thursday, September 23th at 3:30 pm for this lecture from Dr. Len Cassuto, Professor of English at Fordham University and co-author of The New PhD: How to Build a Better Graduate Education. Location is MCH 303, Mandel Reading Room. This event is co-sponsored by GSAS and the Mandel Center for the Humanities.
After the lecture, please stay for the Opening Reception for the Mandel Center for the Humanities from 5:00 - 6:30 pm in the Mandel Atrium.
Wednesday, September 22nd, 2021
5:30 pm
Donika Kelly is the author of THE RENUNCIATIONS (Graywolf 2021) and BESTIARY (Graywolf). BESTIARY is the winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry, and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. The collection was also long listed for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for a Publishing Triangle Award for Lesbian Poetry and a Lambda Literary Award. A Cave Canem graduate fellow and member of the collective Poets at the End of the World, Donika has also received a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a summer workshop fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic online, The Paris Review, and Foglifter. She currently lives in Iowa City and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches creative writing.