We’re writing to extend a warm invitation to the spring events of The Americas Project (TAP).

Leonard Cassuto, Professor of American Literature at Fordham University, will visit as a special guest of TAP and give a lecture on Thursday, February 18 at 4:30 PM in CLA 1.302E. Cassuto is an expert on both crime fiction and academic culture. In addition to Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories (Columbia, 2008), Cassuto edited The Cambridge History of the American Novel (2011) and The Cambridge Companion to Baseball (2011). Last fall, he published The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It (Harvard, 2015). In it, he observes that “to pursue a professorship at the expense of all other options can hardly be called rational” and argues for a much more student-centered graduate education.

Rebecca Walkowitz, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the English Department at Rutgers University and current President of the Modernist Studies Association, will join us for the TAP Distinguished Lecture Series on Friday, April 1 at 4:00 PM in CLA 1.302E. Walkowitz has published Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (2006) and, late last year, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature, in which she argues, “Like born-digital literature, which is made on or for the computer, born-translated literature approaches translation as medium and origin rather than as afterthought.” Walkowitz’s visit is co-sponsored by the Program in Comparative Literature.

Finally, Matthew Taylor, Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will give a second TAP Distinguished Lecture on April 22 at 4:30 PM in CLA 1.302E.  Taylor’s Universes without Us: Posthuman Cosmologies in American Literature (Minnesota, 2013) situates Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Adams, Charles Chesnutt, and Zora Neale Hurston in an alternative posthumanist tradition in which “both our separation from the universe and our identity with it are exposed as fantasies.” Taylor’s visit is co-sponsored by TILTS: Environmental Humanities.