Tuesday, April 13, 2010 at 4:00 P.M. in Humanities 193

The UCLA Department of English and the Friends of English invite you to a lecture

McCarthy's Road to Hell
presented by Professor Kenneth Lincoln

Professor Lincoln published a book last year with Palgrave/Macmillan, "Cormac McCarthy: American Canticles," and will discuss this book and the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel "The Road."

Professor Ken Lincoln was raised south of Wounded Knee in northwest Nebraska and adopted into a Sioux family ceremonially in 1969, helping with off-reservation Indian programs for the past four decades.  He came to UCLA in 1969 from Stanford and Indiana University and has specialized in Modernist and Native American literacies and helped to build the American Indian Studies Center, its graduate program, and publications.

Tuesday, May 4, 2010 at 4:00 P.M. in Humanities 193

The UCLA Department of English and the Friends of English invite you to an afternoon conversation
between Professor Richard Yarborough and award-winning Los Angeles journalist, Erin Aubry Kaplan

THE CONTROVERSY OVER PRECIOUS: STEREOTYPE OR REALITY?

Join Professor Yarborough and journalist Erin Aubry Kaplan as they discuss the controversial film Precious. They will screen and discuss clips from the film and open the discussion up to questions and comments from the audience.

Richard Yarborough received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1980 and is currently Associate Professor of English and Faculty Research Associate with the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA.  He has lectured and published on race and American literature, with essays on authors such as Frederick Douglass, Charles Chesnutt, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Attaway, and Richard Wright.  He is the associate general editor of the Heath Anthology of American Literature as well as the director of the University Press of New England’s Library of Black Literature reprint series.  In addition, he has served as a consultant on a number of film and theatre projects; most notably, he was a dramaturg for Anna Deavere Smith’s play House Arrest in 1998.  He has received UCLA's Distinguished Teaching Award, commendations from the City of Los Angeles and the County of Los Angeles, and fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.  He has served as Director of UCLA’s Bunche Center for African American Studies and as a member of the California Council for the Humanities.

Erin Aubry Kaplan is a Los Angeles journalist and columnist who has written about African-American political, economic and cultural issues since 1992.  She is currently a contributing editor to the opinion section of the Los Angeles Times, and from 2005 to 2007 was a weekly op-ed columnist “the first black columnist in the Times” history. She has been a staff writer and columnist for the LA Weekly and New Times Los Angeles. She is a regular contributor for many publications, including the Los Angeles Times, Salon.com, Essence, Oxford-American, Black Enterprise, BlackAmericaWeb,  Ms. and the Independent. She is also a regular columnist for make/shift, a quarterly, cutting-edge feminist magazine that launched in 2007.  As a journalist, Erin’s passion has always been injecting the personal in features, commentary, criticism and essays. One of her most-remembered pieces is “The Butt,” an essay for the LA Weekly that pondered the many social and psychological ramifications of having the pronounced backside typical of black women (Erin was the body model for the photos that ran with the story. She thought she would go unrecognized; she did not). Another Weekly piece, “Blue Like Me,” explored the modern connections between her own long battle with depression, family history and the still-distressing state of the race.  That piece won the PEN USA 2001 award for journalism.
Erin’s essays have been anthologized is several books, including  Mothers Who Think:  Tales of Real-Life Parenthood(Villard, Washington Square Press), Step Into A World (Wiley & Sons) and Rise Up Singing: Black Women Writers on Motherhood(Doubleday). The last book’s contributors include Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks and Alice Walker, and won an American Book Award in 2004.
Erin was born and raised in Los Angeles and lives in Inglewood. She is married and has three rescue dogs, Toby, Maude and Honey.

Tuesday, May 4, 2010 at 7:00 P.M. at the Hammer Museum

SOME FAVORITE WRITERS: PETER CAREY

in conversation with UCLA faculty member and novelist Mona Simpson

One of the wonders of Carey’s work is that his great, urgent narratives, so turbulent, so dark, so grand, are at the same time animated by such conscious and playful craft, as well as by a profound comic awareness. –New York Review of Books

Australian writer Peter Carey is the author of ten novels, most recently, Parrot and Olivier in America and His Illegal Self. He received the Booker Prize twice, first in 1988 for Oscar and Lucinda, and again in 2001 for True History of the Kelly Gang. His other honors include the Commonwealth Writer's Prize, the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and the Age Book of the Year Award. He collaborated on the screenplay for the film Until the End of the World with Wim Wenders. Carey is currently the executive director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at Hunter College, part of the City University of New York. 
This series of readings is organized by Mona Simpson, author of Anywhere But Here and Off Keck Road. Readings are followed by discussions with Simpson.

Thursday, May 6, 2010 at 7:00 PM at the Hammer Museum

HAMMER POETRY SERIES: DAVID GEWANTER

Gewanter's poetry offers a sense of obstacles, and of obstacles not overcome but ridden and thus dealt with, and is nowhere better illustrated than in 'Conduct of Our Loves.' Read this poem in the book store and you will want to buy the book. –Thom Gunn

David Gewanter is a professor of English at Georgetown University. He is the author of In the Belly, winner of the John C. Zacharis First Book Award; The Sleep of Reason, and War Bird, all published by the University of Chicago Press. His honors include a Witter Bynner Fellowship at the US Library of Congress and a Whiting Emerging Writer's Award. Gewanter’s work has appeared in Threepenny Review, Poetry Magazine, Boston Review, and TriQuarterly, among others.

POETRY
A series of readings hosted by Stephen Yenser, professor at UCLA and author most recently of A Boundless Field: American Poetry at Large and Blue Guide (poems).

Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 5:00 P.M. in Humanities 193

The UCLA Department of English and the Friends of English invite you to a lecture

Manolos, Matrimony, Motherhood:
Buying Female Identity in Sex and the City
Presented by Lisa Mendelman

Although certain classic songs insist otherwise, in the 21st century, love can indeed be bought – and sold and worn. This talk will discuss the disconcerting buying power of the central female characters in the recent film Sex and the City. For Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda, the duties of their respective professions come second to their primary occupation as consumers. As they collect and display high-end shoes and hundred-dollar handbags, the object the women are most interested in constructing and circulating is image of their own bodies. Even more troubling than her white, upper class counterparts, however, Louise, Carrie’s African American personal assistant, performs the work of the film’s ideal woman: conscious of herself as a consumer and yet a willing participant in her objectification–all concealed in the name of love.

Lisa Mendelman is a graduate student in the English department at UCLA, where her research interests include love, desire, and intimacy in 20th century American prose, drama, and film.

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010 at the Faculty Center

The UCLA Friends of English cordially invite you to the12th ANNUAL DINNER
-Invitations will be sent in May-

Dinner Speaker:
Dr. Karen Cunningham
UCLA Department of English

Shakespeare, Women and the Early Modern Law

In many studies legal historians have shown that Renaissance English women were at a disadvantage under the law.  But if we focus not on the official legal history but on the Shakespearean imaginary, we find a different story, one in which the theatre is a crucial public jurisdiction for speaking and shaping the law.  Dr. Cunningham will explore the ways in which fictional women imagine their relationships to laws and legal practices in Shakespeare's comedies, and suggest how those fictions may contribute to the development of early modern law.

Karen Cunningham (Ph.D. UC Santa Barbara, 1986) is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at UCLA.  She came to UCLA in 2000 from the Florida State University in Tallahassee, where she was a tenured Associate Professor, a charter member of the University Committee on Excellence in Teaching, the co-founder with the Chair of the Criminology Department of the "Crime and Justice in the Humanities" program, and a member of the statewide Florida Commission on the Status of Women, to which she was appointed by the Chairman of the House of Representatives.  Specializing in Shakespeare and Renaissance drama, Dr. Cunningham has published on early modern women and pedagogy, rhetoric and the Raleigh trial, public executions and stage violence, and a range of topics related to the intersection of law and literature in Shakespeare's comedies.  The author of Imaginary Betrayals: Subjectivity and the Discourses of Treason in Early Modern England (2002), she is also the coeditor of the essay collection The Law in Shakespeare (2007).

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010 at 7:00 PM at the Hammer Museum

HAMMER POETRY SERIES: Poetry by UCLA Award-Winning Student Poets

To conclude this year’s series of poetry readings, the Department of English is pleased to honor student poets, who will read from their work.

POETRY
A series of readings hosted by Stephen Yenser, professor at UCLA and author most recently of A Boundless Field: American Poetry at Large and Blue Guide (poems).