Date/Time
Date(s) - September 19, 2018
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

Categories No Categories

Please join us Wednesday, September 19, 7:00 pm for the fall semester colloquium, at which we gather to enjoy one another’s company and hear about the work our colleagues are doing. All department faculty and graduate students are invited.

Here’s a very brief preview of the evening:

Lynn Badia will present “The Absolute Indeterminacy of Karel Čapek’s Science Fiction”:

Lynn’s talk will focus on the science fiction novel The Absolute at Large (1922), by Karel Čapek, one of the most influential but currently unacknowledged voices in early twentieth-century literature. She’ll frame The Absolute as a narrative about “free energy,” a term she proposes to examine a range of relationships implicated in speculation about super-abundant or ‘”virtually-limitless” energy sources. She will analyze how Čapek’s commentary emerges in the double meaning of the titular “Absolute”—a reference to both free energy and the divine—which foregrounds an inherent indeterminacy folded into the promise of abundance.

Ricki Ginsberg will present “Moments of Pause: A Model for Understanding Students’ Experiences with Muslim Young Adult Literature”:

Although scholarship has explored the representation of Muslims in literature for children and young adults and provided reference materials for classroom instruction, no scholars have considered the complexities of this work in a classroom context. Drawing from Braun and Clarke’s (2006) conception of thematic analysis as both a methodology and theoretical approach, Ricki will describe the distinct learning process of a high school English class as student participants read and discussed young adult texts featuring Muslim protagonists and Islamic content. Her research offers a model for understanding participants’ learning process and how it ultimately resulted in students’ ability and willingness to challenge their initial beliefs about Muslim cultures and the Islamic faith.