Check Out Our Upcoming and Previous Events!
- Spring 2025: English Education Workshop Series (Multiple Dates)
- Wednesday, February 26th, 2025, 5:30 PM EST On Zoom: Dr. Ileana Jiménez: "Reading
Black Feminism to Read Ourselves"
Participants will have the opportunityto read excerpts of Black feminist theory to explore teacher identity and critical feminist pedagogies in the high school English classroom.
- Monday, March 10th, 2025, 12:30 PM EST On Zoom: Joshua Cabat: "It Is as a Hammer that
I Use this Medium"; The Rhetoric of Documentary Film
In this workshop, we will make the case for using documentary film in English classrooms from middle school through the university.
- Monday, March 31st, 2025, 12:30 PM EST in the Poetry Center, Humanities 2001 and on
Zoom: Dr. Karen Buechner: Transformative Dialogue in the ELA Classroom
This workshop explores the power of dialogic pedagogy in transforming classrooms into student-centered, discussion-driven spaces. Participants will learn strategies for fostering meaningful student-to-student dialogue that deepens understanding, encourages critical thinking, and builds a more engaged learning community.
- Wednesday, April 9th, 2025, 5:00 PM EST in the Poetry Center, Humanities 2001: Dr.
Mindy Fried: English Education Symposium
Dr. Mindy Fried will screen her short film and engage attendees in dialogue surrounding how to support our immigrant students through digital storytelling and film creation.
- Tuesday, May 6th, 2025, 5:00 PM EST in the Poetry Center, Humanities 2001 and on Zoom: Dr.
Andrew Newman and Dr. Neisha Terry Young: Critical Approaches for Teaching The Great
Gatsby in Contemporary Contexts
We will explore various critical approaches to teaching The Great Gatsby and examine how to apply critical pedagogies to other canonical texts.
- Wednesday, February 26th, 2025, 5:30 PM EST On Zoom: Dr. Ileana Jiménez: "Reading
Black Feminism to Read Ourselves"
- Spring 2025: This Beautiful, Ridiculous City Book Talk 4/2/25
Kay Sohini, PhD Alumnus
This Beautiful, Ridiculous City (Penguin Random House, 2025)
April 2, 2025 | 4:00 pm Humanities Building, Poetry Center
Kay Sohini is a writer and comics maker based in New York. She holds a PhD in English from Stony Brook University and her essays and comics have been featured in The Washington Post, The Nib, and more. This Beautiful, Ridiculous City (Penguin Random House, 2025) is her first book.
“The graphic memoir shows New York as a muse, a mystical place where the lore of the city is perhaps as powerful as the place itself, if not more potent. . . . Rarely have I seen someone capture a feeling so well—in text or visuals—as Sohini does with New York’s beauty, and in building out the emotional landscape for each part of her life through her masterful command of form, flow, and color.”—The Associated Press
“Visually, “This Beautiful, Ridiculous City” is a tour de force. Sohini utilizes a bright and vivid color palette, paired with exquisitely appealing geometric page layouts, to depict subjects from city landscapes and domestic interiors to diagrammatic cultural and historical mini lessons. The effect is a work of careful artisanship rivaling some of Sohini’s self-professed mentors and guides in comics storytelling: Alison Bechdel and Kristen Radtke and Thi Bui.”
—The Washington Post“Sohini's book, with its glorious, candy-coloured drawings of the Empire State Building, Grand Central Station and the Gimbels Skybridge, presents its allure in a fresh, enchanting way, while also offering a reminder that Sohini is one of a long line of women who have found KAY SOHINI themselves in the city, made their mark, remade themselves.” —Financial Times
- Spring 2025: Department of English Annual Book Giveaway 4/3/25
- Spring 2025: Poetry Reading 4/16/25
Eric Wertheimer, Professor
Poetry Reading of his works Regulus and mylar
April 16, 2025 | 4:00 pm Humanities Building, Poetry Center
- Spring 2025: Oil Book Talk 4/22/25
Michael Tondre, Associate Professor
Oil (Bloomsburg Object Lessons)
April 22, 2025 | 4:00 pm Humanities Building, Poetry Center
Black gold. Liquid sunlight. Texas tea. Oil remains the ur-commodity of our global era, having been distilled from ancient algae to turn modernity's wheels. Wars are fought over it. Some communities are displaced by its extraction, so that others may reap its benefits. But despite its heated history, few will ever see oil on the ground. Oil, in Bloombsury's Object Lessons series, reveals how hydrocarbon became today's pre-eminent power.
- Fall 2024: Book and Dagger Book Talk 10/30/24
Elyse Graham, Professor
Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II (HarperCollins)
October 30, 2024 | 5:00 pm Humanities Building, Poetry Center
At the start of WWII, the U.S. found itself in desperate need of an intelligence agency. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor to today’s CIA, was quickly formed—and, in an effort to fill its ranks with experts, the OSS turned to academia for recruits. Suddenly, literature professors, librarians, and historians were training to perform undercover operations and investigative work—and these surprising spies would go on to profoundly shape both the course of the war and our cultural institutions with their efforts.
In Book and Dagger, Elyse Graham draws on personal histories, letters, and declassified OSS files to tell the story of a small but connected group of humanities scholars turned spies. Among them are Joseph Curtiss, a literature professor who hunted down German spies and turned them into double agents; Sherman Kent, a smart-mouthed history professor who rose to become the head of analysis for all of Europe and Africa; and Adele Kibre, an archivist who was sent to Stockholm to secretly acquire documents for the OSS. These unforgettable characters would ultimately help lay the foundations of modern intelligence and transform American higher education when they returned after the war. Thrillingly paced and rigorously researched, Book and Dagger is an inspiring and gripping true story about a group of academics who helped beat the Nazis—a tale that reveals the indelible power of the humanities to change the world.
“An engaging study of wartime American intelligence. . . . Graham makes a good case for studying the humanities as both an instrument of learning and a weapon of war. Bibliophiles with a taste for cloak-and-dagger work will enjoy this lively book.” — Kirkus Reviews
- Fall 2024: Crazy Fish Sing Book Talk 11/7/24
Simone Brioni, Professor
Crazy Fish Sing (Yogurt Editions)
November 7, 2024 | 5:00 pm Humanities Building, Poetry Center
With the participation of contributor Loredana Polezzi, D’Amato Chair in Italian and Italian American Studies, Department of Languages and Cultures, and editorial assistant Peter Bruno, doctoral candidate, Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
Bibliophiles with a taste for cloak-and-dagger work will enjoy this lively book.” — Kirkus Reviews
“Entertainingly conveyed, with great respect and deep appreciation for their ingenuity and drive, Graham’s history is a powerful symphony for these unsung heroes whose professional skills and personal courage brought down the Nazi state. The modern intelligence community owes its existence to their rigor and resourcefulness.
Readers fascinated by espionage will be eager to checkout Graham’s fresh telling of the surprising story of the OSS.” — Booklist (starred review)
“Book and Dagger brings to light a spellbinding, untold aspect of World War II history...Graham takes readers all over the world to show that as the Nazis burned books, book lovers were defending the freedom of ideas, with relish.” — BookPage, 14 Most Anticipated Books of Fall
- Fall 2024: Silver Poetry Reading 11/14/24
Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Distinguished Professor
Silver (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
November 14, 2024 | 5:00 pm Humanities Building, Poetry Center
This is work that brings into acute focus the singular and glorious power of poetry in our complex world.
“To meet an increasingly isolating and terrifying era, Phillips retrenches in poetry, which, he claims, can be found everywhere. “The imagination hides in plain sight.” Poetry stands by us, ready, Phillips seems to say, to console us with the truth, whether or not we want to hear it.” —Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR
“A collection to ponder in wonder.” —Michael Ruzicka, Booklist
“Musical and erudite, the latest from Phillips offers an extended ars poetica in which poetry is ‘a ritual that the sun organizes/ and arranges’ . . . Readers will take pleasure in this poetical flowering.” —Publishers Weekly
“Phillips refines and reworks his own poetics against the backdrop of tradition. . . This tension between what “has never been done before” and the knowledge that “every poem has already been written” is central to Phillips; tradition is what he coaxes music from. He uses echo, reprisal, repetition and recurrence as strategies for invention.” —Lorna Knowles Blake, The Hudson Review
This beautiful, slender collection—small and weighted like a coin—is Rowan Ricardo Phillips at his very best. These luminous, unsparing, dreamlike poems are as lyrical as they are virtuosic. “Not the meaning,” Phillips writes, “but the meaningfulness of this mystery we call life” powers these poems as they conjure their prismatic array of characters, textures, and moods. As it reverberates through several styles (blank verse, elegy, terza rima, rhyme royal, translation, rap), Silver reimagines them with such extraordinary vision and alluring strangeness that they sound irrepressibly fresh and vibrant. From beginning to end, Silver is a collection that reflects Phillips’s guiding principle—“part physics, part faith, part void”—that all is reflected in poetry and poetry is reflected in all.