English seminar: Reconsidering Transnational Literary Studies: US Literature in the Diplomatic Frame
5 April | Zoom only
Harilaos Stecopolous, ‘Reconsidering Transnational Literary Studies: US Literature in the Diplomatic Frame’
This presentation draws on Professor Harilaos Stecopoulos’ recent book Telling America’s Story to the World: Literature, Internationalism, Cultural Diplomacy (Oxford, 2022), which reconsiders transnational literary studies in light of the struggle between US cultural diplomacy and the global activism of US writers. The presentation will feature two case studies: Langston Hughes’s involvement with the US government’s Africa Propaganda Campaign, and Maxine Hong Kingston’s work with the US-China Writers Conferences.
Harilaos Stecopoulos is Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa. The former editor of The Iowa Review, he has published four books: Race and the Subject of Masculinities (Duke, 1997); Reconstructing the World: Southern Fictions and US Imperialisms (Cornell, 2008); A History of the Literature of the US South (Cambridge, 2020); and Telling America’s Story to the World: Literature, Internationalism, Cultural Diplomacy (Oxford, 2022). He is currently at work on a new book, “Entangled Words: Diplomacy and the Making of American Literature.”
Contact: Liam Semler (liam.semler@sydney.edu.au)
Seminar overview for S1 2023
| 22 March
Woolley S226 Room and Zoom |
Gretchen Minton (Montana State University, and Fulbright Scholar, James Cook University), ‘Big Skies and Specific Sites: Shakespeare’s Environments in the North American West’
|
| 5 April
Zoom only |
Harilaos Stecopolous (University of Iowa), ‘Reconsidering Transnational Literary Studies: US Literature in the Diplomatic Frame’
|
| 19 April
Woolley S226 Room and Zoom |
Doug Battersby (Marie Curie Global Fellow, Stanford and Bristol), ‘Cardiac Realism: The Affective Life of the Modern Novel’
|
| 3 May
Woolley S226 Room and Zoom |
Nienke Boer (University of Sydney), ‘The Briny South: Displacement and Sentiment in the Indian Ocean World’
|
| 17 May
Woolley S226 Room and Zoom |
Frances Di Lauro (University of Sydney). Title to be advised. |
