Stringer Speaker Series

The generous bequest from the estate of John G. Stringer is intended for the “advancement of British and American 18th and 19th century literary studies.” Since its inception in 2014, we have used the Stringer fund to sponsor a range of speakers and professionalization events for graduate students specializing in 18th- and 19th-century literary studies.

• February 21, 2020: Russ Castronovo, Tom Paine Professor of English and Dorothy Draheim Professor of American Studies (Wisconsin, Madison), led a professionalization workshop on dissertation and article abstracts for graduate students and delivered a public talk, “Terror and the Information Sublime: The Insecurity of the Gothic Novel”
• November 9, 2018: Samuel Otter (UC Berkeley), Vivasvan Soni (Northwestern), and Yoon Sun Lee (Wellesley College) to participate in “The Body of Frankenstein: A One Day Anatomy” symposium, which concluded the month-long bicentennial celebration on campus of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
• October 12, 2017: Wai Chee Dimock (Yale), editor of the PMLA, led a professional development workshop reviewing dissertation abstracts for pre-registered graduate students and gave a public interview on the state of article publishing in literary studies.  
• October 15, 2016: Tricia Lootens (Georgia) and Alexandra Socarides (Missouri) with the Historical Poetics working group led a professional development workshop on journal- and book-length publications for graduate students in the field.
• March 23, 2016: The Stringer fund helped bring three speakers, Cristobal Silva (Columbia), Kelly Wisecup (Northwestern), and Jonathan Lamb (Vanderbilt), for an interdisciplinary mini-symposium, “Disease, Medicine, and Literature in New World Colonial Studies.”
• November 6, 2014: Gordon Hutner (Illinois), editor of American Literary History, led a professional development workshop on publishing scholarly articles for graduate students and gave a public interview on the state of publishing in the field of nineteenth-century American literary studies.