Dean Family Speaker Series scholar Dana Luciano to visit campus Oct. 19 and 20

The Dean Family Series invites scholar Dana Luciano to give a talk for faculty, staff, students, and the public on Wednesday, October 19, 2022, at 4:00 p.m. in DeTamble Auditorium (A110 Tribble Hall).

“Freedom’s Ammonite: Blackness, Geomorphology, Worldmaking”
This talk centers on the speculative geological thinking of James McCune Smith, a 19th century Black physician, activist, and writer who published numerous pieces in antebellum African American periodicals. McCune Smith’s speculative engagements with geology positioned it as a source of alternate Black worldviews, comprehending the earth as a space capable of gathering not just deep histories of freedom but also re-energized presents and alternate futures. What we might term McCune Smith’s fugitive geology was more than a redeployment of scientific expertise; it was also, importantly, a site for the production of pleasure. Although geologic speculation often shored up the white, Western subject, its pleasures could also undermine that figure, expanding extant genres of the human. Rightly realized, the pleasures of geology not only affirmed the universality of freedom—they could transform its very meaning.

On the following day (Thursday, October 20, at 4 p.m. in Tribble A209), we invite faculty, staff, and students to join Luciano for a roundtable conversation on her new work, titled “Climate Grief, Anxiety and Depression.” We hope that this will bring together some of the people who are thinking about climate and the environment across departments. Recommended reading:

“Embracing Life in the Anthropocene,” the introduction to Sarah Jaquette Ray’s  A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety.   

“Climate Anxiety is an Overwhelmingly White Problem,” a very short piece in Scientific American, also by Sarah Jaquette Ray.

Dana Luciano is Associate Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University, where she has taught since 2018. Previously, she taught at Georgetown University, where she co-directed the Mellon Sawyer seminar, “Approaching the Anthropocene: Global Culture and Planetary Change” (2016-2018) and served as Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program (2009-2012). Her book Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth Century America won the MLA’s First Book Award in 2008. Other publications include Unsettled States: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies (NYU Press, 2014), co-edited with Ivy G. Wilson; “Queer Inhumanisms,” a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, co-edited with Mel Y. Chen (spring/summer 2015); and essays in American Literature, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, ASAP/J, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Capacious, and elsewhere. Her book How the Earth Feels: Geological Fantasy and Biopower in the Nineteenth Century U.S. is forthcoming from Duke University Press. She co-edits Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities and is currently at work on a monograph tentatively titled Time and Again: The Affective Circuits of Spirit Photography.

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The English department’s Dean Family Speaker Series, which is endowed by a gift from the Dean Family, brings nationally and internationally recognized scholars to campus. It encourages critical conversations and dialogue related to the study of English. All talks are open to the public, and everyone is invited to attend.