Prof. Byrd and Prof. Vendrell will focus on printed materials by people whose work has been typically excluded from the mainstream book trade due to gender, sexuality, race, or class—people who have found alternative venues in which to debate and document queer experience and their struggles for freedom. All welcome!

In this lecture, the researcher and novelist Dr. Christina Neuwirth will draw on the experience of writing in different forms and for different audiences, broadening out to introduce the work of other writers and scholars who have drawn on scholarly and creative techniques, to argue for playful, boundary-blurring approaches to academic writing. Everyone interested is welcome to join this event!

Drawing on Shakespeare’s and Hobbes’ work on the intrinsic theatricality of power, Luciana Villas Bôas (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro/Universidade de São Paulo) will talk about Lula’s presidential inauguration and the storming of the esplanade as two recent events that have changed the way we relate to the foundations and the future of democracy. 

This workshop engages with Prof. Bewes’s latest book, Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age (Columbia University Press, 2022), which shakes the grounds on which the theory of the novel has long been standing and offers new ways of seeing and engaging with literature.