Past Events

2008

Dylan Rodríguez Lecture: “American Apocalypse: Prisons, the Racist State, and U.S. Globality.”
Thursday, June 5, 2008, 7 pm, Smith 296

Dylan Rodríguez Workshop
Friday, June 6, 2008, 11 am, Neuberger 407

Download "Domestic War Zones and the Extremities of Power: Conceptualizing the U.S. Prision Regime" from his book Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime.

Dylan Rodriguez, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside, is a scholar-activist whose inter-disciplinary scholarship links critical race studies and cultural studies to examine race, state violence, and community/identity formations. His book, Forced Passages: Imprisoned Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime, offers a lineage of radical prison thought through the writings of imprisoned intellectuals such as Mumia Abu-Jamal, Angela Davis, and Leonard Peltier. He is also a co-founder of the Critical Resistance organizing collective, a national grassroots organization committed to challenging the prison industrial complex as the answer to social problems.

Jonathan Walker Talk about "The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore”
Tuesday, June 10, 2008, 1 pm, Neuberger 407

Jonathan Walker is Assistant Professor of English at Portland State University, where he teaches English Renaissance drama and critical theory. His research interests include medieval and Renaissance drama in English, performance theory, feminism and gender studies, and print and manuscript culture in early modern England. He has co-edited a collection of essays titled Early Modern Academic Drama (Ashgate, forthcoming 2008), and his current book project is titled Theater of the Obscæne: Offstage Action on the English Renaissance Stage. Jonathan has also published on transvestism in medieval hagiographic literature, on lesbianism in Ovid and Augustan Rome, and on the place of “offstage action” in classical dramatic criticism.

Julie Sze Lecture: "Environmental Justice and Environmental Humanities at the Crossroads"
Tuesday, May 20, 2008, 5-6:30 pm, Location Smith 238

Julie Sze Workshop
Wednesday, May 21, 2008, 10:30 am, Dean's Conference Room (Neuberger 491).

Download Julie's article, "Boundaries and Border Wars: DES, Technology and Environmental Justice."

Exhibit: "Children and War"
February 1-February 29, Portland State University Millar Library lobby (1875 SW Park.)

Everybody Reads Workshop: Writing to Heal
Tuesday, February 26, 11 a.m. and 7 p.m., Smith Memorial Student Union, room 327 (1825 SW Broadway)

Susan Reese, PSU English professor, will conduct a practical workshop for the public on the healing power of memoir.

Everybody Reads Workshop: “The Disappeared: Images of the Environment at Freetown’s Urban Margins”
Thursday, February 8, 2008, 10:30 am-12 pm, @ English Department Lounge, NH 405

Discussion with Daniel Hoffman on his article, “The Disappeared,”
which charts a different path for engaged visual ethnography and for
intervening in the politics of visual representation.

Roundtable with Local Scholars: "A Long Way Gone"
Tuesday, February 19, at 11 a.m. and 7 p.m., Smith Memorial Student Union, room 327 (1825 SW Broadway)

Documentary Screening: "Diamonds, Guns and Rice"
Friday, February 8, at 8 p.m., Fifth Avenue Cinema (510 SW Hall St.)

Everybody Reads Lecture: “Like Beasts in the Bush:” Youth Violence and the War in Sierra Leone”
Thursday, February 7, 2008, 7-9 pm, @ PSU Library, Second Floor

Lecture in conjunction with 2008’s Everybody Reads selection,
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah.

Everybody Reads Workshop: Memoir-Writing
Tuesday, February 5, at 11 a.m. and 7 p.m., Smith Memorial Student Union, room 328 (1825 SW Broadway)

This workshop is led by Debra Gwartney, PSU writing professor and former correspondent for Newseek and the Oregonian

Symposium on Experimental Poetry and Poetics

Distinguished writers Marjorie Perloff, (2006 President of the Modern Language Association and author of 13 books of criticism), Lyn Hejinian (current Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, whose thirty-four books include Writing is An Aid to Memory, My Life and The Language of Inquiry), and Joan Retallack (John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities at Bard College and author of 9 books of poetry as well as Musicage, a series of her conversations with John Cage) will be in Portland February 8 and 9, to give symposiums at Lewis & Clark College, and at Portland State University where they will be joined by Hank Lazer (editor of the Modern and Contemporary Poetics series for the University of Alabama Press and author of 12 books of poetry). Both events are free and open to the public.

Portland State University Poetry Symposium: Radical Poetics and Avant-garde Poetry
Friday, February 8, 2-4 p.m.

SMC 238
Marjorie Perloff will offer a critical perspective on the tradition of avant- garde or experimental writing, followed by brief readings by each of the three poets, and an open Q & A with the audience.

Sponsored by The Department of English, University Studies, and the
Portland Center for Public Humanities

Lewis & Clark College
Saturday, February 9, 1-5 p.m.

January 29, 2008, 5 pm
Location: Smith Student Center, Room 238 (Browsing Lounge)
PSU Center for Japanese Studies presents:

Linda Angst & Leila Wice, L&C College "Kabuki Girls and Beauty Queens:
Women, Class, and Propriety in the Edo Period and Postwar Okinaw"

2007

November 30, 2007, 4 pm
"Reading Portland," a Panel Discussion of the New Anthology
Location: Smith Student Center, Room 238 (Browsing Lounge)

John Trombold, co-editor of the anthology Reading Portland
Assistant Professor of English, Linfield College

Carl Abbott, Volume Contributor
Professor of Urban and Public Affairs, Portland State

Sandy Polishuk, Volume Contributor
Independent Scholar

Moderated by:
Dennis Stovall, Coordinator of the PSU Publishing Program
Assistant Professor of English, Portland State University

This panel builds upon the groundbreaking new anthology, Reading Portland, one of the first thorough literary explorations of our city's past and present. In over eighty selections, Portland is revealed through histories, memoirs, autobiographies, short stories, novels, and new reports. This single volume gives voice to women and men; the colonizers and the colonized; white, Hispanic, African American, Asian American, and Native American storytellers; and the lower, middle, and upper classes.

November 16th, 2007, 10 am
Matthew Sparke Workshop, a reading and workshop on political and cultural resistance and the “global south."
Location: NH 407, English Department Reading Room.

To download the two workshop readings, click on these titles:
"Political Geographies of Globalization III: Resistance"
"Everywhere but Always Somewhere: Geographies of the Global South"

November 16, 2007, 3:30 pm
Matthew Sparke Lecture on "Imaginative Geographies of Global Health."
Location: Smith Memorial Student Union, Room 238.

Matthew Sparke is a Professor of Geography and International Studies, University of Washington. In recent years his work has been focused on globalization. Sparke teaches a large introductory course on the topic at UW, and is writing a textbook entitled Introduction to Globalization for Blackwell Press. Based on research funded by a National Science Foundation CAREER grant, Professor Sparke also authored another book and a number of articles for academic journals on related themes: including the ways in which globalization processes are remaking nation-states, the links between globalization and American dominance, and the impact of economic interdependency on border regions.

Please click here for more information on Matthew Sparke.

Recent Articles:

Matthew Sparke, 2003, with Sue Roberts and Anna Secord, "Neoliberal Geopolitics" Antipode, 35, 5: pages 886 ? 897.

Matthew Sparke, 2006 "Political Geographies of Globalization: Governance," Progress in Human Geography, 30,2 1?16.

Matthew Sparke, 2004 with James Sidaway, Tim Bunnell and Carl Grundy-Warr, "Triangulating the Borderless World: Geographies of Power in the Indonesia-Malaysia-Singapore Growth Triangle " Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, NS 29 485?498.

April 19th-21st, 2007
National Cultural Studies Assoication Conference hosted by PCCS
Please click here for the past schedule/program

March 16th, 2007
Donald Pease Workshop on "9/11..." published in Boundary 2
Please click here for the reading: 9/11:When Was "American Studies After the New Americanists?"

March 15th, 2007
"American Studies after U.S. Exceptionalism"
Donald Pease is a professor of English, Avalon Foundation Chair of the Humanities, Chair of the Dartmouth Liberal Studies Program, and one of the major figures working today in American Studies. He is the author of Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context (which won the Mark Ingraham Prize for the best new book in the Humanities in 1987) and of over seventy articles on figures in American and British literature. He is the editor of National Identities and Post-Americanist Narratives (Duke 1994), The Futures of American Studies (Duke 2002), and co-editor with Amy Kaplan of The Culture of United States Imperialism (Duke 1993).

Please click here for more information on Donald Pease

CULTURES OF THE CHINESE DIASPORA - A PUBLIC LEARNING SERIES
January 18th to March 2nd, 2007
Gateway to Gold Mountain: A Traveling Exhibit
“Gateway to Gold Mountain” - an exhibit created by the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation. The exhibit featured photographs, videotaped testimony and other artifacts that helped audiences better understand and visually experience Asian immigration in America during the period of the Chinese Exclusion laws.

February 26th, 2007
Roundtable Discussion, Comparative Perspectives on Asian American and Asian-Canadian Literature
Marie Lo (English, PSU); Patti Duncan (Women’s Studies, PSU); Patti Sakurai (English, Oregon State University ); Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt (English, Linfield College).

February 23rd, 2007
“Reading North and South, East and West: Asian Literature in Canada and the United States: A Comparative Vision” by Tomo Hattori
Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Loyola University in Los Angeles. Hattori is a specialist in the comparison of Asian American and Asian Canadian literature. He spoke on the differences in the American and Canadian trajectories of Asian minority fiction.
Please click here for more information on Tomo Hattori
Email: thattori@lmu.edu

February 23rd, 2007
Tomo Hattori Workshop
Please click here for readings: Intricate Agonies: Chapter Three

February 16, 2007
“Expressive Desire in Chinese Cinema” by David Eng
Professor of English at Rutgers University. Eng specializes in the intersection of racial and sexual issues in both Chinese and Asian American cultures. He discussed present trends in Chinese cinema, from part of his new research for a forthcoming book
Queer Diasporas/Psychic Diasporas.
Please click here for more information on David Eng
Email: david.eng@rutgers.edu

February 15th, 2007
David Eng Workshop: "Race, Diaspora, and Loss in Transnational Adoption"
Please click here for readings: Transnational Adoption & Desegregating Love

February 13th, 2007
Roundtable Discussion of Contemporary Chinese Cinema and the Chinese Diaspora
Jacqueline Arante (English, PSU); Jing Jiang (Chinese, Reed College);
Jason Mak (filmmaker and city of Eugene Diversity Consultant) “Selling Louie’s Village”

February 9th, 2007
Roundtable Discussion of Chinatowns in the Pacific Northwest
Marie Rose Wong (author of Sweet Cakes, Long Journeys: The Chinatowns of Portland, Oregon); Carl Abbott (Urban Studies, PSU); Chet Orloff (PSU, Director Emeritus, Oregon Historical Society).

February 6th, 2007
“The ‘Yellow Peril’ and the Pacific Coast Race Riots of 1907” by Erika Lee
Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. Lee is a specialist on the
history of Asian migration and exclusion in the United States and Canada, especially the
Pacific Northwest.
Please click here for more information on Erika Lee
Email: erikalee@tc.umn.edu

February 6th, 2007
Erika Lee Workshop:"The 'Yellow Peril' in the Americas: A Transnational History of Migration and Race"
Please click here for readings: The 'Yellow Peril' in the Americas & Selected Chronology.

2006

November 2nd & 3rd, 2006
"American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism and De-Democratization"
& "Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire"
by Wendy Brown
Professor in Political Philosophy
Berkeley University
Please click here for more information on Wendy Brown
Email: wlbrown@socrates.berkeley.edu

May 23rd, 2006
“The Holocaust and Twentieth Century History,” by Moishe Postone
Professor of modern European history and sits on the Committee on Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago.
Please click here for more information on Moishe Postone
Email: m-postone@uchicago.edu

April 29th-30th, 2006
“SPELLING DISASTER”
A conference sought to investigate the meaning of “disaster” and the political stakes involved in defining it.

April 28th, 2006
“From Trauma and Disaster to Public Feelings: The Uses of Oral History”
by Ann Cvetkovich
Professor of English, University of Texas. Current Editor of GLQ.
Please click here for more information on Ann Cvetkovich
Email: cvet@mail.utexas.edu

April 18th, 2006
“Censoring Culture” by Robert Atkins
Fellow at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University and an instructor at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Please click here for Robert Atkins' website
Email: robert@robertatkins.net

April 6th, 2006
"Into the Light of Day: Torture, Human Rights, and Bush's State of Exception"
by Mark Danner
Award-winning journalist and professor of journalism at the University of California-Berkeley and Bard College
Please click here for Mark Danner's website
Email at: http://journalism.berkeley.edu/faculty/danner/

February 27th, 2006
“Afghanistan Four Years After the Invasion: a Success Story or Squandered U.S. Credibility” by M. Nazif Shahrani
Professor of Anthropology, Central Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Indiana University
Please click here for more information on M. Nazif Shahrani
Email: shahrani@indiana.edu

February 24th, 2006
“The Kite Runner and the Myth of Afghanistan” by Amardeep Singh
Assistant Professor
Lehigh University
Please click here for more information on Amardeep Singh
Email: amsp@lehigh.edu

2005