The Department of English is once again hosting the Mary Louise White Spring Symposium, with Madelyn Detloff, professor of English and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Miami University in Ohio, as the guest speaker.
The talk is slated for April 5 at 4 p.m. in McEwen Hall Room 209. The event is free and the campus and community is invited to attend.
The annual event, which is named after a benefactor of the department to the Fredonia College Foundation, will be centered around Dr. Detloff’s areas of concentration in gender studies, trauma studies and “queer, feminist and anti-racist theories” and how they relate not only to the origins of fascism, but also how its ideologies continue to permeate modern culture. By using the works of Virginia Woolf as a point of departure, Detloff will touch on points relating to biopower, eugenics and “the idea that racism is not just cultural,” according to Dr. Jeanette McVicker, a professor in the English department.
“This understanding of biopower provides impetus for speculation on the persistence of fascism into the 21st century under political guises that look more like neoliberalism than totalitarianism, yet still rely on the populist and eugenicist underpinnings of fascist ideology,” Dr. McVicker noted in her abstract for the event.
The campus bookstore will be carrying three of Detloff’s books, “The Persistence of Modernism: Loss and Mourning in the Twentieth Century,” “The Value of Virginia Woolf” and “Queer Bloomsbury.” There will also be a book signing following the talk at 5 p.m. outside of McEwen Hall 209.
For those interested in gaining some extra information on Detloff prior to the event, here is a link to an interview with her from Cambridge University Press on “The Value of Virginia Woolf” and her thoughts on the impact of Woolf in literature.
