Arts at Vassar

POUGHKEEPSIE, NY-The Vassar College Department of English will present three series of readings and lectures this spring. All are free and open to the public without charge.

PRIMARY SOURCES LECTURE SERIES
The Primary Sources series-lectures by eminent scholars who are mapping new fields or are the most prominent voices in the existing disciplines-will open with a public lecture, "Pan to the Sky," by Thomas Keenan, discussing speech acts, politics, and interrupted transmissions, on Wednesday, March 4 at 6pm in Taylor Hall, room 203. Keenan who teaches human rights, media, and literature at Bard College, is the author of Fables of Responsibility (Stanford University Press, 1997), edited New Media, Old Media (with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Routledge, 2005), is currently finishing a book on war, crisis, and media.

The series will continue on Thursday, April 16, at 5pm in Sanders Classroom's Spitzer Auditorium (room 212) with a lecture by William H. Pritchard. The Henry Clay Folger Professor of English at Amherst College, Pritchard, is the author of Updike: America's Man of Letters (Steerforth Press, 2000; paperbook edition with new preface, University of Massachusetts Press, 2005); English Papers: A Teaching Life  (Graywolf Press, 1995); Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990); Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered (Oxford, 1984; second edition with new preface, University of Massachusetts Press, 1993). He reviews regularly for the Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Washington Times, and the Times Literary Supplement (London) and is an advisory editor of the Hudson Review, where his essays appear frequently.

FIRST PROOF SERIES

The First Proof series—lectures and readings by young writers, most of them who have just published their first work—will include a reading Rivka Galchen on Monday, February 16, at 5:30pm, in the Class of ‘51 reading room of the Vassar Library. Galchen, whose first novel Atmospheric Disturbances was published in June 2008. Other works have appeared or are forthcoming in Harper's, Zoetrope, the New Yorker, the Believer, Scientific American, and the New York Times.

Joshua Poteat and Allison Titus will give the next reading in the series on Monday, February 23, at 5:30pm, in the Class of ‘51 reading room of the Vassar Library.

Poteat is the author of Ornithologies (2006), which won the Anhinga Poetry Prize, and Meditations (2004), which won the Poetry Society of America National Chapbook Prize, as well as the forthcoming book Illustrating the Machine that Makes the World: From J.G. Heck's 1851 Pictorial Archive of Nature and Science (University of Georgia Press poetry series, Fall 2009). He currently teaches poetry at Virginia Commonwealth University. Titus’s first full-length book of poems, Sum of Every Lost Ship, won the Editor's Choice Prize from the Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Competition and will be published by Cleveland State University Press in 2009. Her chapbook, Instructions from the Narwhal, won the 2006 Bateau Press BOOM Chapbook Prize. She is co-editor of the poetry journal Handsome.

The next in the series, a reading Ed Park will be on Tuesday, March 31, at 5:00pm in the Class of ‘51 reading room of the Vassar Library. Park is author of Personal Days. He is a founding editor of The Believer and former editor of the Voice Literary Supplement. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review and many other publications. He lives in Manhattan, where he publishes The New-York Ghost.

PUBLIC VOICES LECTURE SERIES
The Public Voices series, which invites speakers who are adept at crossing the divisions not only between genres but between also academic institutions and the broader world outside, will open with a lecture by Luc Sante on Monday, April 6, at 6pm, in Sanders Classroom's Spitzer Auditorium (room 212). Sante's books include Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, and Kill All Your Darlings. He has written for many magazines, blogs sporadically (ekotodi.blogspot.com), and teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard College.

These series are presented by the Vassar Department of English, a diverse group of intellectually wide-ranging, and constantly evolving teachers, scholars, and writers as well as one of the largest and most engaged groups of majors at Vassar (http://english.vassar.edu).

Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations or information on accessibility should contact Campus Activities Office at (845) 437-5370. Without sufficient notice, appropriate space and/or assistance may not be available. Directions to the Vassar campus are available at www.vassar.edu/directions.

Vassar College is a highly selective, coeducational, independent, residential liberal arts college founded in 1861.

CALENDAR LISTINGS

Date and time: Monday, February 16, at 5:30pm
Location: Class of ‘51 reading room of the Vassar Library
First Proof Series: Reading by Rivka Galchen

Date and time: Monday, February 23, at 5:30pm
Location: Class of ‘51 reading room of the Vassar Library
First Proof Series: Reading by Joshua Poteat and Allison Titus

Date and time: Wednesday, March 4 at 6pm
Location: Taylor Hall, room 203
Primary Sources Series: Thomas Keenan
"Pan to the Sky: on speech acts, politics, and interrupted transmissions"

Date and time: Tuesday, March 31, at 5:00pm
Location: Class of ‘51 reading room of the Vassar Library
First Proof Series: Reading by Ed Park

Date and time: Monday, April 6, at 6pm
Location: Sanders Classroom's Spitzer Auditorium (room 212)
Public Voices Series: Luc Sante

Date and time: Thursday, April 16, at 5pm
Location: Sanders Classroom's Spitzer Auditorium (room 212)
Primary Sources Series: Lecture by William H. Pritchard.