SUNY Fredonia’s English Department will welcome three of its counterparts at SUNY Brockport to campus to discuss World Literature in English Curriculum. Drs. J. Roger Kurtz, Austin Busch, and Sharon Lubkemann Allen will appear on Monday, April 27 at 5:30 p.m. in 105 Fenton Hall, to deliver a presentation that is free and open to the public.
Following a 15-minute presentation from each of the visiting professors, a discussion will ensue with members of Fredonia’s English department joining the presenters to discuss how they approach World Literature in their teaching.
These presentations are part of an ongoing discussion in Fredonia’s English Department involving a multi-year focus on global literature featured in the department-sponsored Mary Louise White Symposium in each of the last two years. This presentation will preview another event in May that will also address global literature, featuring visiting speaker Wai-Chee Dimock, a renowned Professor of English & American Studies from Yale University.
Dr. Kurtz, a professor of postcolonial literatures and the incoming English department chair at SUNY Brockport, will give a presentation entitled, “How Not to Teach ‘Things That Fall Apart.’” He teaches courses in African, Caribbean and Postcolonial literatures as well as Magical Realism. Dr. Kurtz is presently compiling an anthology of criticism of East African writing by East Africans. His scholarly work focuses on contemporary East African writing and includes two books: “Nyarloka’s Gift: The Writing of Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye,” published by the Mvule Africa Publishers in 2005, and “Urban Obsessions, Urban Fears: The Postcolonial Kenyan Novel,” published in the James Currey/Africa World Press in 1998. He also has had research essays published in African Literatures, the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and the Journal of African Cultural Studies. He has held major research fellowships from Fulbright and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Dr. Kurtz has earned the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and holds a Ph. D. from the University of Iowa.
Dr. Busch’s presentation is entitled, “The Sin of Sodom and the Problem of Context.” As assistant professor of early world literatures at Brockport, he teaches courses in ancient and medieval Mediterranean epic, Greek and Roman poetry, classical mythology, and the Bible as Literature. He is presently co-editing the forthcoming Norton critical edition of the New Testament and Apocrypha. Recently, he has contributed to the collection of essays “Seneca and the Self,” available this July. His scholarship focuses on New Testament and Roman imperial literature. He has been published in Biblical Interpretation, The Journal of Biblical Literature, and The Classical Journal. Dr. Busch holds a double Ph.D. in comparative literature and classical studies from Indiana University.
The last presentation, to be given by Dr. Allen, will be, “Re-framing Literary Inquiry in Comparative Literature Courses: Transculturation, Translation, and Theory.” Dr. Allen is an assistant professor of comparative literature and theory at Brockport. Her teaching and research interests embrace 19th through 21st century Russian and East European, French, Luso-Brazilian, and transnational narrative fiction, modernist and post-modern aesthetics, the problematics of cultural memory and (re)locations of cultural discourse, the relationship between dissent, displacement and creativity, translation, translingualism, and transculturation, and literary and cultural theory. She is about to embark upon a Fulbright fellowship teaching comparative literature and theory at the University of Lisbon, in Portugal. Her manuscript, entitled “EccentriCities: Writing in the Margins of Modernism, St. Petersburg to Rio de Janeiro” is presently under review. She has completed a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Princeton University and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. She has published essays in Comparative Literature, Review of the Literatures of the European Union, The Slavic and East European Journal.
