Past Events
David G. Pollart Center for Arts and Humanities Public Lecture Series
David G. Pollart Center for Arts and Humanities is collaborating with Neill Public Library to organize a Public Lecture Series. This Spring, the series has offered three public lectures.
The first event of this series took place on Wednesday, March 22, from 6:00-7:00 pm. Dr. Trevor Bond and Dr. Phil Gruen delivered a lecture titled “Ida Lou Anderson and the renaming of the President’s House.”
The second event of this series took place on Thursday, April 13, from 7:00-8:00 pm. Dr. Jennifer Lodine-Chaffey, Assistant Professor of English at Montana State University, delivered a lecture titled “Women’s Executions in Early Modern England: A Cultural Examination.”
The third event of this series will take place on Tuesday, May 2, from 7:00-8:00 pm. Dr. Donna Campbell (Professor of English), Sara Brock (PhD Student in English), Sezin Zorlu (PhD Student in English), and Nazua Idris (PhD Candidate in English) from Washington State University will deliver a lecture on the Oxford University Press scholarly editorial project titled Complete Works of Edith Wharton.
Below are the details of the third event:
Tuesday, May 2, 7:00-8:00 pm, Neill Public Library, Pullman
“The Unknown Edith Wharton: Secrets from the Unpublished Archives”
Description
Known today through movie adaptations of her novels such as The Age of Innocence (Martin Scorsese, 1993), The House of Mirth (Terence Davies, 2000), and the forthcoming adaptation of The Custom of the Country (Sofia Coppola, 2023), Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, in 1921, and has long been considered one of America’s finest writers. Often associated with Gilded Age society and then-scandalous topics such as divorce, Wharton also turned a critical eye toward rural poverty and the limited options for unmarried women. But in addition to her well-known novels and short stories, Wharton left an archive of fiction, drama, and poetry that has until now remained unpublished.
Under the direction of Professor Donna Campbell, WSU graduate students Sara Brock, Nazua Idris, and Sezin Zorlu have been transcribing and editing Wharton’s unpublished works as part of a 30-volume series, The Complete Works of Edith Wharton, to be published by Oxford University Press. In “The Unknown Edith Wharton” we’ll be talking about Wharton’s life and works, explaining our methods of scholarly editing, and sharing the hidden treasures and surprises we’ve found in the process.
Speakers
Donna M.Campbell is professor of English at Washington State University. She is the author of Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction, 1885-1920, and her articles have appeared in Studies in American Fiction, Legacy, American Literary Realism, the Cambridge History of the American Novel, and the Oxford History of American Naturalism, among other venues. Her most recent book is Bitter Tastes: Literary Naturalism and Early Cinema in American Women’s Writing (University of Georgia Press, 2016). Recent work includes “Edith Wharton and Film” and (with Carol J. Singley and Frederick Wegener) “The Complete Works of Edith Wharton: Preparing the First Authoritative Edition” in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edith Wharton, edited by Emily Orlando (Bloomsbury, 2023); “Falling Stories: Cinematic Naturalism and Disability in Frank Norris’s and Stephen Crane’s City Sketches (American Literary Realism, 2023); and “The Reign of the Dolls: Violence and the Nonhuman in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman,” in New Perspectives on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, edited by Cécile Roudeau, Myrto Drizou, and Stephanie Palmer (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). Her current projects include a critical edition of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth in the 30-volume Oxford University Press edition of the Complete Works of Edith Wharton, a series for which she is associate editor.
Sara Brock is a PhD student in Literary Studies in the Department of English at Washington State University. Sara earned her BA in Literature and Psychology from the University of Evansville and her MA in English and a graduate certificate in Language and Literature from Indiana University. Her research interests are situated at the intersection of literature and psychology, including the application of disability studies, trauma studies, and mental health representation to literature and to the rhetoric of health and medicine. Sara teaches English 101, College Composition, at WSU and serves on several committees in the Department of English. She has worked on the Edith Wharton Project since October of 2022.
Sezin Zorlu is a Doctoral Student in Literary Studies in the Department of English at Washington State University. Her research focuses on Ecocriticism, environmental injustice, the Beat Generation, and contemporary American Literature. Sezin obtained her BA in American Culture and Literature from the Department of American Culture and Literature from Dokuz Eylül University and her MA in American Culture and Literature from the Department of American Culture and Literature, Ege University. Before coming to WSU, she worked as a part-time ESL teacher in Turkey. At WSU, she will teach English 101 Global Campus in the summer of 2023. Sezin is the recipient of the Fulbright Student Program Award 2022.
Nazua Idris is a Doctoral Candidate in Literary Studies in the Department of English at Washington State University. Her research focuses on the intersections of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century global Anglophone literatures, scholarly textual editing, decolonial digital humanities, and decolonial and digital pedagogies. Nazua obtained BA (Hons) in English and MA in English Literature from the Department of English, University of Dhaka, and a second MA in Literary Studies from the Department of English, WSU. Before coming to WSU, she worked as a full-time faculty in the Department of English, at East West University, Bangladesh. At WSU, she has taught courses in the Department of English and in the Department of Digital Technology and Culture. Nazua is the recipient of several awards and fellowships including WSU’s Learning Communities Excellence Award 2020, Graduate Research and Creative Activity Award 2022, and Alexander Hammond Professional Achievement Award 2023.
Thursday, March 30, 12 pm, CUE 518
Pettyjohn Lecture: “More than Casinos: Concepts of Wealth and Tradition in Indian Gaming”
Speaker
Dr. Laurie Arnold
Sinixt Band of the Colville Confederate Tribes & Gonzaga University
Description
Today’s casinos serve as gathering places for native American communities just as sites of games and competitions did for our ancestors. Dr. Arnold will explain how contemporary Indian gaming connects to cultural traditions of spirituality and gambling that reinforce tribal political sovereignty in the present.
Please see the flyer.
Tuesday, April 6, 2 pm, Terrell Library Atrium
Beauty and Resilience: Voices from Contemporary Ukraine Poetry
Join us as we host Lost Horse Press publisher Christine Lysnewycz Holbert for readings from the Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series.
Founded in 2017, by editor Grace Mahoney and Christine Lynsnewycz Holbert (founder of Spokane’s Get Lit! Literary Arts Festival), the series publishes works by both established and new Ukrainian poets in a dual-language format, bringing their voices to an English-speaking world. Please see the flyer.
This event is sponsored by the WSU Libraries, the David G. Pollart Center for Arts and Humanities, and the WSU Press.
Friday, April 7, 12:00-1:00 pm, via Zoom
“Moving in the Right Direction: Language Justice in Academia & Beyond”
Speaker
Dr. Shyam Sharma
Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric
and Graduate Program Director at Stony Brook, State University of New York
Description
All societies, and especially diverse ones like the US, are multilingual; translingual communication mediates life and professions and makes knowledge grow and work. Yet, myths about language set up barriers, inhibiting free exchange and application of knowledge. These myths not just adversely affect knowledge production and application but undermine justice and harm societies. Drawing on the research and his own efforts to counter harmful language ideologies in academe, Dr. Shyam Sharma will present a framework and share practical strategies, showing how to move in the right direction toward greater language justice and thereby social justice in the world. The session will include strategies for advancing social justice by approaching language, genre, and modes of writing more mindfully. See this flyer.
Friday and Saturday, April 21 and 22
WSU’s Interdisciplinary Social Justice Conference
“Native Sovereignty, Decolonization, Divestment, Reparations, and Environmental Justice: Constructing Coalitions at the Intersections”
Conference Details and Registration Link
Description
This year’s conference features panels on:
- The Historic 1982 Salmon Scam: Criminalization and Exoneration of Treaty Fisher People
- The role of Indigenous Traditional Ecological and Cultural Knowledge (ITECK) in Decolonizing Academia and Nurturing Healthy Futures Through First Foods and Plant Relatives
- Missing and Murdered Indigenous People, Fossil Fuels, and a Case for Divestment, Reinvestment, and Reparations
- A screening and discussion of Atomic Bamboozle, the False Promise of a Nuclear Renaissance
- Black-Indigenous Solidarity: from AIM and the Black Panthers to Standing Rock and the George Floyd Uprising
- The Erasure of Historically Under-represented Communities in the Academy
- Indigenous Rights and Food Sovereignty as Environmental Justice
- Speaking to the Gap: Health Disparities and Mortality in Indian Country
- Centering Culture in Climate Resilience
February 3-March 6 (every Friday), 4:00-6:00 pm, The Bundy Reading Room, Avery Hall
The David G. Pollart Center for Arts and Humanities Spring 2023 Seminar Series for First Generation Graduate Students. For the details and the full schedule, click here.
January-March 2023
David G. Pollart Center for Arts and Humanities Graduate Workshop: Call for “Papers” for Spring 2023
The CAH Graduate Workshop is looking for students to offer their scholarship or creative works for sessions in February, March, and April. These sessions can take any form that students find useful. For example, last Fall we held a seminar to discuss a pre-circulated dissertation chapter from History and then hosted a performance from students in Music.
These sessions provide students with an opportunity to share their scholarly and creative work with a broader, interdisciplinary audience within the WSU Arts and Humanities community.
If a student, or group of students, is interested in participating in Spring 2023, please contact Dr. Lawrence Hatter – lawrence.hatter@wsu.edu to discuss times and locations.
David G. Pollart Center for Arts and Humanities and Departmental Events
We asked and you delivered! The CAH sent out an all-call to departments and organizations from across WSU for events you feel would resonate with our theme of Beyond Boundaries. If you would like to add your event to this calendar, as well as a monthly newsletter sent out by the Center, please email us at arts.humanities@wsu.edu. We are excited to hear about the wonderful work you are doing!
Op-Ed Workshop
Conducted by Brian Rosenwald, co-founder and senior editor of The Washington Post’s “Made by History” – hosted Jan. 18, 2023, workshop, now available on Zoom, digs into reasons to write for the public and how to do it. He covers everything from the benefits of writing for general audiences to how to write various types of op-eds, how to pitch ideas to editors, and how to publicize your work both within and outside of the academy. This session addresses the differences stylistically between academic and public writing and how to adapt to the new form, benefits and downsides to social media, citations, and other elements of public scholarship.