A Celebration of the Work of James A Miller

Professor James A. Miller

The Departments of English and American Studies and the Program in Africana Studies invite you to join us for "A Celebration of the Work of James A. Miller," on Friday, September 11, from 2-6 PM.  This event will be held in the Jack Morton Auditorium (805 21st Street NW).

Professor James Miller (1944-2015) was a GW Professor of English, American Studies, and Africana Studies.  His work focused on a wide range of topics in African American literary and cultural studies across  the 20^th and 21^stcenturies.  Professor Miller was the author of Remembering Scottsboro: The Legacy of an Infamous Trial (Princeton University Press, 2009), as well as numerous articles and volumes focused on African American history, literature, music, film, and theory.

"A Celebration of the Work of James A. Miller" will begin with a panel of invited scholars.  The afternoon will continue with a reading by Professor Edward P. Jones, and conclude with a reception featuring the jazz ensemble Witney's Swing N Gin.  The event is free and open to the public; it is made possible by the Wang Endowment in the Department of English.

2-3:30 PM Panel: The Work of James A. Miller

Barbara Foley (English and American Studies, Rutgers-Newark), “Not a Cocktail Party: The New Negro Movement and the Left”

Farah Jasmine Griffin (English, Comparative Literature, and African American Studies, Columbia), “Reading, Justice, and the African American Novel”

Paul Gardullo (Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture), “From Slave Ships to the Mothership: Missions into Expanding ‘The Archive’ at the Smithsonian’s NMAAHC”

3:30-4 PM Break

4-4:45 PM A Reading by Edward P. Jones (Creative Writing and English, GWU)

5-6 Jazz Reception featuring Witney's Swing N Gin

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Professors Jennifer James and Jennifer C. Nash on Ferguson

GW Professors Jennifer James and Jennifer C. Nash are part of a forum accessible online this month in Feminist Studies.  The forum is on "Teaching about Ferguson," with six professors reflecting on the pedagogical challenges of teaching about state-sanctioned violence against people of color in the United States.  There is direct access to Feminist Studies online for the whole month of April.

Direct Access for the month of April to Feminist Studies forum Teaching about Ferguson   Access the forum now Access the forum through your university library  Six professors reflect on the pedagogical challenges of teaching about state-sanctioned violence against people of color in the United States: Jennifer C. Nash, Teaching about Ferguson: An Introduction  Jennifer James, Looking Sylvanna M. Falcón, The Globalization of Ferguson: Pedagogical Matters about Racial Violence  Sarah Jane Cervenak, On Not Teaching about Violence: Being in the Classroom After Ferguson  Rebecca Wanzo, The Deadly Fight Over Feelings  Treva B. Lindsey, Post-Ferguson: A "Herstorical" Approach to Black Violability To "speak about Ferguson is always to speak about more than Ferguson," as Jennifer C. Nashnotes. "Ferguson" has become shorthand for the legal murder and devaluation of racially marked bodies. Nash reflects on teaching about racial violence in the midst of racial violence. Jennifer James argues that we must "accept the unleashing of historical mourning as part of what we do." Sylvanna M. Falcón connects racialized police violence within the United States with state violence outside the United States. Sarah Jane Cervenak builds on Trinh T. Minh-ha's documentary concept of "speaking nearby" to teach "near" racial and sexual violence. Rebecca Wanzo analyzes anger over Mary Engelbreit's transgressive portrayal of a mother crying in the wake of Michael Brown's death. Treva B. Lindsey reminds us of the role of trans* and queer people in racial justice movements, and counters narratives about racial violence that center only on Black men.

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Emancipation Day Lecture April 15: Robert S. Levine

Eventbrite RSVP. Please circulate.

Please join the Africana Studies Program for

The George Washington University’s Annual DC Emancipation Day Lecture

“Frederick Douglass’s Tales of Abraham Lincoln”

Robert S. Levine

 Professor of English, The University of Maryland

General Editor, Norton Anthology of American Literature

 

Drawing from his forthcoming book, The Lives of Frederick Douglass (Harvard, 2016), Levine will discuss the image of Lincoln emerging from Douglass’s personal and public writing. Levine will revise the mythical ideas of a Lincoln-Douglass “bromance” and instead shed light on a complex relationship that altered the course of history

A force in American and African American literature, Levine is the author of books such as 1997's Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity and 2008's Dislocating Race and Nation. He has produced scholarly editions from a range of important writers, William Wells Brown and Harriet Beecher Stowe among them. He sits on the editorial boards of American Literary History, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, andJ19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. He has edited numerous critical volumes, including Hemispheric American Studies and The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville. Recent awards include a 2012-13 NEH Senior Fellowship and a 2013-14 Guggenheim Fellowship. Levine was awarded the MLA’s 2013 Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Achievement in American Literary Studies.

April 15, 6:00-7:30 PM

The City View Room

1957 E Street, NW

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

GWU’s Emancipation Day Lecture commemorates April 16^th, 1862, the day Lincoln signed the D.C.’s Compensated Emancipation Act, freeing the District’s enslaved. Co-sponsored with the District of Columbia Archives

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A Successful Residency: Simon Gikandi

This week marked the completion of another visiting residency for GW English, sponsored by the Wang Endowment.  Simon Gikandi, Professor of English at Princeton University and editor of PMLA, and author (most recently) of the critically-acclaimed Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton UP, 2011) was with us from October 26-October 31.

The residency included visits to our two Critical Methods courses (a course required for all majors), an extended seminar with graduate students and faculty (in which we discussed Slavery and the Culture of Taste and several PMLA essays), and our first-ever undergraduate seminar with a Wang Distinguished Professor-in-Residence (in which students discussed Nigerian writer Sefi Atta's story "Yahoo Yahoo" with Professor Gikandi).  Most importantly, on Tuesday, October 28, Professor Gikandi delivered the annual GW Distinguished Lecture in Literary and Cultural Studies to a packed house in the Mavin Center.  The lecture, which was also sponsored by GW's Africana Studies Program, was titled "Archives without Subjects, Subjects without Archives"; the talk used poetry from across three centuries, as well as a wide range of sources, including records of the deaths of enslaved Africans during the Middle Passage, to identify corporeal traces of subjectivity in what Professor Gikandi termed the "crypt" of slavery's objectifying record.

Archives without Subjects, Subjects without Archives
Photo: Professor David Mitchell

Simon Gikandi with GW English Faculty
Daniel DeWispelare, Jennifer James, Kavita Daiya,
and other audience members
Photo Provided By: Professor Kavita Daiya

This visiting residency was created through a gift by Albert Wang and his family that has, since 2009, supported professors such as Edward P. Jones (now a member of the GW English Department), José Esteban Muñoz, J. Jack Halberstam, and Michael Bérubé.  The gift from the Wang family is one of the largest philanthropic commitments to GW's Columbian College of Arts and Sciences' Department of English.

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