Colloquia & Interest-based Groups
Americanist Reading Group
Contact: Rachel S. Cordasco
ARG is devoted to facilitate informal monthly or bimonthly discussions on classic and not-so-classic works of American literature. We choose our readings from the Preliminary Exam Americanist setlists 5 and 6A. Our meetings can be of great help for those of you planning to take prelims on one or several areas related to American literature and culture. However, non-Americanists are also welcome! In the past, our conversations have benefited strongly from the presence of MFAs and Literary Studies scholars in other areas. We look forward to seeing you at the meetings!
Applied Linguistics Student Association
Contact: alsa@english.wisc.edu
Website: www.english.wisc.edu/alsa/
Graduate student run organization in the Master's AEL and Ph.D ELL programs.
American Literature and Culture Research Circle
Contact: Todd Goddard
Website: www.english.wisc.edu/ascs/
![[image] ASCS poster](/resources/images/ASCS.png)
Americanist Speakers and Colloquium Series
Contact: Todd Goddard
Website: www.english.wisc.edu/ascs/
The aim of the Americanist Speakers and Colloquium Series (ASCS) is to bring prominent speakers to campus who have done and continue to do path breaking work in the fields of American literature and American Studies. In the 2007-2008 year, the ASCS will bring Assosciate Professors Elisa Tamarkin (UC-Irvine) and Xiomara Santamarina (Michigan), Professor Michael Elliott (Emory), and Professor Saidiya Hartman (Columbia) to campus. By engaging these scholars in both public lectures and intensive seminars, we additionally hope to provide undergraduate and graduate students with the opportunity to work with prominent scholars from outside the University.
Center for the Humanities
Contact: Sara Guyer
Website: www.humanities.wisc.edu
The Center for the Humanities is the primary vehicle on the University of Wisconsin–Madison campus for interdisciplinary programming in the humanities. The Center’s mission includes engaging faculty, staff, students, and the public in defining the humanities; fostering interdisciplinary and collaborative study and teaching; promoting the humanities; and nurturing connections between the community and the campus.
Contemporary Literature Colloquium
Contact: Thom Dancer
Website: http://mendota.english.wisc.edu/~clc
The Contemporary Literature Colloquium in the Department of English is a research group of faculty members and graduate students who work on literature and culture produced after 1945. The Contemporary Literature Colloquium (CLC) has two principal goals: to create an intellectual space for emerging and established scholars whose research on contemporary literature crosses and includes several national and cultural fields; and to develop new analytic paradigms that respond to and describe the conditions of literary and cultural production in the contemporary period.
![[photo] field trip](/resources/images/dirtSmall.jpg)
D.I.R.T.: the environmentalist reading circle
Contact: Andrew Mahlstedt
In 2007, “D.I.R.T.: the environmentalist reading group” formed in response to Madison’s increasing graduate and faculty interest in environmental criticism. We meet monthly to discuss a range of theoretical and literary questions, often in concert with scheduled speakers and events arranged through the English Department, the Center for Culture, History and Environment, and other affiliated departments and programs. Members range across temporal and geographical fields, though at present postcolonialists and 20th century Americanists are particularly well-represented. We aim to interrogate the traditional boundaries of environmental criticism, exploring potential literary-theoretical contributions to questions of interdisciplinarity, socio-ecology, globalization, film and media studies, etc. Past meetings have included discussions of Marx, Deleuze and Guattari, Ramachandra Guha, Anna Tsing, Edward Burtynsky, as well as the more well ploughed fields of Lawrence Buell and Raymond Williams. (Some of also like Frost.) (And sometimes we leave the coffee shops to explore Wisconsin’s vast, uncharted, virgin wilderness.)
![[image] Medieval Studies Program logo](/resources/images/medlogo.jpg)
Medieval Studies Program
Serial Readers mimics the initial publication and reading experience of Victorian novels by posting comments on each monthly or weekly installment. Since "Serial Readers" began in June 2008, we have read two Charles Dickens novels, Dombey and Son and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Anthony Trollope's The Small House at Allington, and, currently, George Eliot's Romola. Each week we discuss the individual installment of three or four chapters; all the novels are available digitially. While a number of graduate students and faculty have participated in "Serial Readers," other readers include a practicing lawyer and a distinguished playwright. By reading the novels in this fashion, as they were initially published, we're able to attend to the serial format, with its particular rhythms, more closely.
Minority Studies Reading Group
Contact: Sean Teuton
The Minority Studies Reading Group works to bring together faculty members and graduate students across disciplines to share readings in minority literatures. At the heart of this inherently collaborative project is the view that the practice of reading enables social transformation.
Modernisms/Modernities Colloquium (MoMoC)
Music, Race, and Empire Research Circle
Contact: Teju Olaniyan
The Poetry Reading Group
Contact: Lynn Keller
The Poetry Reading Group welcomes any English Department graduate students interested in reading and discussing new volumes of poetry. Our informal meetings take place about once a month during the academic year, and the readings-- one volume per meeting-- are works published in the last five years, usually available in paperback; the titles are suggested and agreed upon by members of the group. Books discussed in 2008-9 include C.D. Wright's /Rising, Falling, Hovering, /Kevin Young's /For the Confederate Dead/, Oni Buchanan's /Spring, /Suheir Hammad's /Breaking Poems, /and, in preparation for her campus visit, recent work by Joan Retallack. A copy of the chosen work is made available in the departmental library in advance of each meeting so that no one has to purchase the book unless he or she wishes to do so. If you wish to join, please contact Lynn Keller by email and she will put you on the contact list.
Rhetoric and Composition Colloquium Series
Contact: Rebecca Lorimer
Rhetoric Society of America Graduate Student Group
Contact: Michael Bernard-Donals
