1.      Friday, January 27th at 3:30pm.
Media Room, Visual Arts Building
University of Texas at Dallas

JONATHAN KATZ
Director, Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian & Gay Studies, Yale University
Associate Professor of Art History, SUNY-Stony Brook

"Lovers & Divers: Interpictorial Romance in
Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg"

Buried beneath the paint in Johns' impassive, iconic Target with Four Faces there is  a
collaged scrap of newsprint reading, quite legibly, "History and Biography."  Taking
seriously Johns'  pictorial promise, this talk traces a nearly ten year interpictorial dialogue
with his then romantic partner Robert Rauschenberg beginning when they met in 1954
and extending long beyond their break-up.  Along the way some of the most iconic
images in American art will be revealed as carrying, in addition to their other meanings,
some quite specifically homoerotic associations. A relationship between the two men that
could not be lived out in public was nonetheless successfully realized in paint.

2.      February 28, 2006 at 4:00 p.m.

UTD Library McDermott Suite.

The Center for Translation Studies will host a talk by

Sherry Simon

Author, Gender in Translation & influential Canadian feminist translator

Speaking on  “The Translator in the Plot: Unforeseen Entanglements”

3. Thursday 16 March 2006, 5 – 6:15 p.m.

UTD School of Management Building, Room 1.110

The Gender Studies Program is sponsoring:

Trysh Travis

Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and Consociate Professor of English

The University of Florida at Gainesville. 

Speaking on “Trauma, Recovery, and Spirituality in Late 20^th-Century American Women’s Literary Fiction (Or, Where Did Oprah’s Book Club Come From, and Why Should Anybody Care?)”

 The genre known casually as “the Oprah Book” did not spring fully-formed from the head of the talk show queen.  This talk looks at the literary history that lies back of that popular genre, and locates its origin in the immediate aftermath of Second Wave feminism, when a new vocabulary for discussing trauma and recovery became available to women writers, and a new set of publishing practices helped to popularize stories about those issues.  After laying that history out, the paper asks, how does knowing this (or knowing any literary or cultural history) change the way we look at the texts in question?

 Trysh Travis is Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and a Consociate Professor of English at the University of Florida in Gainesville.  She received an MA in English from the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College, and a PhD in American Studies from Yale University.  With funding this year from the National Endowment for the Humanities, she is completing work on a book entitled “The Persistence of Sentiment: Contemporary American Literature and the Culture of 12-Step Recovery.”

 

Send your suggestions for speakers: mailto:kprager@utdallas.edu