Events

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Current Events

Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 7:00 pm
Mount Holyoke Professor Nigel Alderman and Smith College Professor Michael Thurston, A Concise Companion to Post-War British and Irish Poetry
The Odyssey Bookshop, South Hadley, MA

 

Past Events

Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Prospective English Majors' & Minors' Fall Lunch
102 Shattuck Hall, The Cassani Room
12:15 pm-1:30 pm
All are welcome to attend!  

Monday, October 5th, 2009, from 4-5 pm
Frank Brownlow, Gwen and Allen Smith Professor of English, "Shakespeare"
Hooker Auditorium, Mount Holyoke College

Tuesday, September 15, 2009 at 7:00 pm
Valerie Martin will read from and sign her new novel The Confessions of Edward Day
New York Room, Mary Woolley Hall
Cosponsored by The Odyssey Bookshop and the Mount Holyoke English Department

Monday, May 04, 2009 at 7:00 pm
Ronaldo V. Wilson:  Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man
Odyssey Bookshop, Village Commons
The visiting instructor in English will read from and sign his collection of poetry, which won the 2007 Cave Canem Poetry Prize.

Blue Straw Hat
A one-act play by Corinne Demas
Directed by Steve Morgan
Featuring Sarah Wilson as Beryl
Produced by Maryanne Alos FP ‘02

Beryl is divorced and her two kids are grown and far away. A friend has given her a gift of ten potential dates from an online Match service. What are the chances she can find someone who'll love her for who she is?

Wednesday, March 25th and Thursday, March 26 at 8:00 pm
Mount Holyoke - Blanchard Student Center Great Room
Free Admission
Donations to benefit the Frances Perkins Program's Deborah Light Memorial Emergency Loan Fund
Parking after 7:00 pm in any staff or faculty parking place

Monday, April 6th at 7:00 pm at Amherst Cinema
Tickets $8 reserved and at the door
To benefit the Amherst Survival Center
For further information and advance tickets...

Thursday, February 19 at 8:00 pm
Reading by Amity Gaige
Location: Amherst Books, 8 Main St, Amherst

Amity Gaige will read from The Folded World, newly published in paperback. Gaige, who lives in Amherst and teaches at Mount Holyoke College, is also author of O My Darling. The Chicago Tribune, which chose The Folded World as one of the best books of 2007, wrote that it "will appeal to readers who like to dive into the muck of internal and interpersonal conflicts, and break the surface with breath born of insight and empathy. Amity Gaige's second novel lives up to the reputation she earned with her first one, as an original, compelling voice." It was named ForeWord Book of the Year and best book of fiction in the Independent Publisher Book Awards.

Monday, February 23 at 4:00 pm
Reading by Professor Lois Brown
Race-ing the Curtain: Performing Race in Post-Slavery America
Associate Professor of English and Director of the Weissman Center for Leadership (Mount Holyoke College)
Location: Five College Women's Studies Research Center, 83 College Street

In the 1880s, New Englanders flocked to theatres and outdoor entertainment venues to see gripping and extravagant historical reenactments of American antebellum life. Many of these shows, however, extended the pervasive and demoralizing racial stereotypes that were at the core of minstrelsy and blackface performances. One of the most memorable challenges to such troubling racial reconstructions came from Pauline Hopkins, a celebrated Boston vocalist and writer who became the first woman of color in the United States to write and star in her own dramatic plays. This talk analyzes the politics of racialized historical reenactments, chronicles Hopkins's sophisticated response to damaging essentializations of African Americans and American history, and considers the nature of racial uplift and cultural critique that shaped New England's continued recovery from America's history of enslavement.

Sunday, February 15 at 2:00 pm
Reading by Ayesha Harruna Attah '05
Harmattan Rain
Location: Library Stimson Room, Mount Holyoke College

Ayesha Harruna Attah is a writer and journalist. She has worked as a freelance writer for the Accra Daily Mail, a Ghanaian newspaper, the African Magazine and Yachting Magazine.

Born in Accra, Ghana, Ayesha lived there for 17 years before moving to Massachusetts to study biochemistry at Mount Holyoke College. She also holds an M.S. in magazine journalism from Columbia University.

At the Per Sesh Writer's Workshop, with a fellowship from TrustAfrica and the Ford Foundation, she wrote her first novel, Harmattan Rain. It tells the story of three generations of a family from the independence of Ghana till the late 1990s.  Published by Ayi Kwei Armah's cooperative Per Ankh Publishers, the book is being launched this week in New York City.

Reading sponsored by MHCASA (Mount Holyoke Caribbean and African Students Association) and the Department of English and African-American/African Studies.

Friday, December 12, 2008 4:15-6:00 pm
 English Department Winter Social 102
Shattuck Hall, The Cassani Room

Please join the English Department as we celebrate the last day of classes with winter cheer and to hear seasonal readings from Peter Berek, Frank Brownlow, and Karen Osborn on Friday, December 12 from 4:15 to 6:00 pm in 102 Shattuck Hall, The Cassani Room.  Refreshments will be served.

Saturday, December 13, 2008 3:00 pm
Reading by Professor Corinne Demas
Always in Trouble
The Odyssey Bookshop, Village Commons

Tuesday, December 2, 2008 7:00 pm
Reading by Professor Lois Brown
Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution
The Odyssey Bookshop, Village Commons

Sponsored by the English Department

 Monday, November 24, 2008 4:00-5:00 pm
A Lecture by Professor William H. Quillian
Virginia Woolf
Hooker Auditorium MHC

Part of the First-Year Seminar Lecture Series

Thursday, October 30, 2008 4:15 pm
Reading and Conversation with Ama Ata Aidoo
Everything Counts
Ghanaian writer, feminist, cultural critic; Visiting Professor, Brown University
Stimson Room, MHC Williston Library

Sponsored by Mount Holyoke College First-Year Seminar Program, English and African American and African Studies, and the Five College African Studies Council.

Thursday, October 23, 2008 4:15 pm
A lecture by Eric Avila
Barrio Urbanism: Freeways and the Art of East Los Angeles
101 Dwight, MHC
View the event flyer...

Eric Avila is Associate Professor of UCLA's César E. Chávez Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies and the Department of History.  He is the author of Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and  Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (UC Press, 2004) and is currently at  work on a second book, Folklore of the Freeway: Highway Construction and the Making of Race in the Modernist City. This new book project,  from which his lecture will be drawn, examines how freeways engender subjective expressions of social identity.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008 7:00 pm
 A Reading by Professor Elizabeth Young
Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor
The Odyssey Book Shop, Village Commons

For all the scholarship devoted to Mary Shelley's English novel, Frankenstein, there has been surprisingly little attention paid to its role in American culture, and virtually none to its racial resonance in the United States. In Black Frankenstein, Elizabeth Young identifies and interprets the figure of a black American Frankenstein monster as it appears with surprising frequency throughout nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. culture, in fiction, film, essays, oratory, painting, and other media, and in works by both whites and African Americans.

Tuesday, October 7, 2008 4:15 pm
Jeffrey Harrison to Read His Poems
Stimson Room, MHC Library
Refreshments will be served
View event flyer...

Since 1988, when his first volume was chosen by James Merrill for the National Poetry Series, Harrison has published five collections of poems, the most recent being The Names of Things: New and Selected Poems, and Incomplete Knowledge. A recipient of numerous awards, including Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, he has taught at George Washington University, Phillips Academy, and the College of the Holy Cross. He is currently on the faculty of the Stonecoast MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine.

Please contact Professor Robert Shaw for more information.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008 8:00 pm
Live Web Broadcast with Philip Roth
Indignation
Hooker Auditorium, Clapp Laboratory, MHC

Monday, September 15, 2008 7:00 pm
Alison Bass
Side Effects: A Prosecutor, a Whistleblower, and a Bestselling Antidepressant on Trial
The Odyssey Bookshop, Village Commons

Thursday, September 11, 2008 7:00 pm
Tom Piazza
City of Refuge
Gamble Auditorium, Side B, Art Museum, MHC