Polymathic Scholars and the English Department presents: A lecture by Lisa May, a former program executive at NASA, on Oct. 29 at 2pm in SAC 2.302. Check out the event details here

Queer Students Alliance exists to foster leadership within lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer communities at the university. In addition to advocating for LGBTQ students and hosting community-wide events, the Alliance acts as an umbrella group for all LGBTQ organizations at the university. As such, our Queer Texas Conference is an event to help people in and outside of the University of Texas to discuss, embrace, and learn about various issues regarding LGBTQ identities. The conference this year is November 21, and throughout the day there will be great interactive and informational workshops given by advocacy groups and individuals from all over Texas! In light of the recent Supreme Court decision regarding marriage equality, our theme for the conference this year is Completing the Ring – Marriage Equality and Our Future Activism. We are hoping to make workshops available that address the need for activism beyond marriage equality that can support a myriad of identities and intersections. To make this event a success, we are still looking for groups and individuals to give workshops. If you or someone you know has a topic they would like to present on, please have them fill out the attached workshop proposal form. We will contact you if your workshop is approved!

To ask further questions or get in contact about this event, feel free to contact Queer Students Alliance at texasqsa@gmail.com. Again, thank you so much for your time in reading this message and we look forward to hearing from you!

This coming Thursday I’ll be screening a documentary film for the College of Communications Senior Fellows program, about the impending death of South Louisiana’s wetlands and its music, called “By the River of Babylon: An Elegy for South Louisiana”. I made the film over the past 7 years, and it played on the PBS/World Channel program “America ReFramed” this past summer.

It’s aimed at viewers who have some sense that Cajun/Creole Louisiana is a special place, but who may not have visited there or know much about these issues in particular. Students who are studying or planning to make documentary films might be interested and they’re welcome to join us.

The screening will take place at 12:30 in the Belo Center for New Media, which is right across from the honors dorm quad, up on the 5th floor (BMC 5.102), and it will be free. There’s a lot of good music in the film, and enough science to understand the problem in the wetlands, and afterward there will be a discussion of the process we went through to make it, and a little time for Q&A.

Don Howard

Associate Professor and UT3D Director

Department of Radio/Television/Film, UT Austin

Please join us for The Americas Project Faculty Workshop with David Kornhaber, Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature, on Wednesday, October 28 from 4:00-5:30 at the Carillon (AT&T Center).

We will meet to discuss David’s work-in-progress, an essay entitled “Adapting Despair: Tony Kushner, George Bernard Shaw, and The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures.” David has also provided us with a copy of the unpublished play.

Please rsvp to jhcox@austin.utexas.edu at your earliest convenience, and Jim will send you the essay and play.

We will have food and drinks aplenty.

Hope to see you there,

Jim Cox and Cole Hutchison

Join us for a historic evening in Austin at Monkeywrench Books, where Dalit women activists from the frontlines of the Dalit Women’s Self-Respect movement will join host Dalit-American artist Thenmozhi Soundarajan to break the silence on caste apartheid in India and the diaspora.

Follow up event: An informal discussion on leadership and organizing strategies with the #DalitWomenFight tour on campus. Refreshments will be provided.

Dear All,

We hope this message finds everyone settled into the new semester.

We write today to invite you to join us for The Americas Project 2015-2016 events. We introduced TAP last year as an effort to highlight American literary studies at all levels of our department and to bring undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty into conversation with our field’s leading scholars. This year, we’ve scheduled a slate of events to continue and build on that effort. More specific details will follow.

David Kornhaber, Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UT Austin, will circulate a work in progress for the second TAP Faculty Workshop on Wednesday, October 28 from 4:00-5:30pm at the Carillon (AT&T Center) . David is the author of The Birth of Theatre from the Spirit of Philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche and the Development of the Modern Drama, forthcoming from Northwestern University Press, as well as articles on Tony Kushner (PMLA) and George Bernard Shaw (Modern Drama) and many pieces in the theatre sections of The New York Times, The Village Voice, and The New York Sun. Two weeks prior to the event, we will request RSVPs and send David’s work to all participants.

In the spring, Leonard Cassuto, Professor of American Literature at Fordham University will visit as a special guest of TAP from February 18-20. 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). Earlier this month, 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 4:00pm in CLA 1.302E. Walkowitz has published Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (2006) and, this 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 the second TAP Distinguished Lecture of the year on Friday, April 22 at 4:30pm 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.

Please see below for the vital information on the events. We encourage you to circulate it widely.

And we hope to see you there,

Jim Cox and Cole Hutchison

The Americas Project 2015-2016

TAP Faculty Workshop

David Kornhaber, The University of Texas at Austin

Wednesday, October 28, 2015, 4:00-5:30 PM, Carillon (AT&T Center)

TAP Special Event

Leonard Cassuto, Fordham University

Friday, February 19, 2016, TBD

TAP Distinguished Lecture Series

Rebecca Walkowitz, Rutgers University

Friday, April 1, 2016, 4:00 PM, CLA 1.302E

Co-sponsored by Comparative Literature

TAP Distinguished Lecture Series

Matthew Taylor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Friday, April 22, 2016, 4:30 pm, CLA 1.302E

(Co-sponsored by TILTS 2015-2016)

Join The Daily Texan for its weekly speaker’s series, The Texan Talks! This week, we are focusing on student political engagement on the national and state scales, and specifically, how students can influence policies through the upcoming elections and political process. Please join Daily Texan Editor-in-Chief Claire Smith and Forum Editor Walker Fountain for a moderated discussion in the Texas Union Sinclair Suite at 11 a.m. on Thursday, October 15.