Save the Dates: Queer, Jewish, Disability, and Shakespeare Studies
October and early November are chock-a-block with English department or English-affiliated programming. Mark your calendars now for these upcoming events.
October 4: E. Patrick Johnson
The Northwestern University Professor and performer E. Patrick Johnson visits GW during the run of his critically acclaimed one-man show “Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South” at Arlington’s Signature Theater. He will discuss the questions raised by his show in a presentation on October 4 at 2 pm at the Multicultural Student Services Center, 2127 G Street. Look forward to a conversation that draws a diverse crowd. Co-sponsored by Africana Studies, the MSSC, and other GW units.
Johnson’s books include the award-winning Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Duke UP). You can see him discuss “Sweet Tea” here.
Johnson last visited GWU as a guest of Prof. Wald’s “Post-Soul Black Literature and Culture” course in 2007, when he was workshopping an early version of “Sweat Tea.” He also consulted with faculty participants in CCAS’s Performance Studies Seminar.
October 10: Jewish Women Who Rock
Did you know that The New Yorker‘s first pop music critic was Ellen Willis, a Jewish feminist? That Genya Raven, aka Goldie Zekovitz, was the lead singer of an all-female band that toured with the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, and the Kinks? That some of the original Riot Grrrls were Jewish?
On October 10 at 7 p.m. in Phillips 411, join a lively exchange about gender, Jewish identity, and rock & pop music featuring Sara Marcus, author of Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution (2010), and Nona Willis Aronowitz, editor of Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music (2011). We’ll discuss the roles Jewish girls and women have played in pop music history and how Jewish identities are enacted (or not?) by women today. Heard of the Shondes, the Brooklyn-based indie-punk band with Jewish influences and radical politics? You will after this event.
This is not your mother’s “Hava Nagila.” Co-sponsored by English, Judaic Studies, GW Hillel, Jewish Literature Live, the Women’s Leadership Program, Music, and Women’s Studies.
October 20: USC Prof. Karen Tongson
Just announced. Karen Tongson, Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California, will be presenting a talk on Thursday, October 20 at 2 p.m. in Rome 771 titled “Finding the Cloverleaf in Queer Cultural Studies.” Tongson’s hotly anticipated book, Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries, just came out from New York University Press. Here’s what the press has to say about the book:
What queer lives, loves and possibilities teem within suburbia’s little boxes? Moving beyond the imbedded urban/rural binary, Relocations offers the first major queer cultural study of sexuality, race and representation in the suburbs. Focusing on the region humorists have referred to as “Lesser Los Angeles”—a global prototype for sprawl—Karen Tongson weaves through suburbia’s “nowhere”spaces to survey our spatial imaginaries: the aesthetic, creative and popular materials of the new suburbia.
November 3-4: Composing Disability: Writing, Communication, Culture
November 4-5: Korean Shakespeare Coming to GWU
As part of 
Staging Korea: Korean Theatre in Search of New Aesthetics, a day-long event celebrating the beauty of Korean performance traditions, scholars and directors will discuss the internationalization of Korean theatre.
New GW English Prof. Alexa Alice Joubin recently discussed the show. She was interviewed on global Shakespeare by the BBC after her lecture in Edinburgh.
