English professor,
literary scholar discusses
2012 Kubal Lecture at Cal State L.A.
Thursday, May 17
Los
Angeles, CA –
This year’s David L. Kubal Memorial Lecture at Cal State L.A.
will be delivered by Douglas Mao, chair of and professor in the
Department of English at Johns Hopkins University (JHU).
Mao’s
talk, “The Vortex of Celebrity,” begins with Wyndham Lewis’s
transformation from literary celebrity to soldier in World War I and
goes on to consider relationships between war and the fantasies of
celebrity life in multiple 19th- and 20th-century contexts.
The
lecture, which is free to public, will take place Thursday, May 17,
6:15 p.m., in the University-Student Union, Los Angeles Room, on the
CSULA campus.
Mao
received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1993 and taught in the
English departments at Princeton, Harvard, and Cornell before heading to
JHU in 2007.
A
specialist in modernist fiction and poetry of Britain, Ireland, and the
United States, Mao is author of Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test
of Production (Princeton, 1998) and Fateful Beauty: Aesthetic
Environments, Juvenile Development, and Literature 1860-1960
(Princeton, 2008). He is also the co-editor, with Rebecca Walkowitz, of
Bad Modernisms (Duke, 2006) and the editor of the Longman
Cultural Edition of E. M. Forster's Howards End (2009).
Mao has
been president of the Modernist Studies Association and held a
Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. He currently serves on the faculty
editorial board of JHU Press and on the editorial board of Textual
Practice. His courses have treated a range of topics in late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature, from gender in
modern writing to the aftermath of literary naturalism, from narratives
of utopia to authority in modern poetry.
Honoring the late David L. Kubal, a member of the Cal State L.A. English
Department faculty from 1968 to 1981, the lecture series brings
distinguished writers, scholars and critics to the CSULA campus. Past
lecturers included Renaissance scholar Arthur F. Kinney, cognitive
scientist and linguist Mark Turner, literary theorist J. Hillis Miller,
culture critic Geoffrey Hartman, and literary editor Adolf Wood. For
more about the David L. Kubal Memorial Lecture Series at Cal State L.A.,
go to
http://www.calstatela.edu/academic/english/dkubal.php
What &
Who:
The
30th Annual David L. Kubal Memorial Lecture Series at Cal State L.A.
will present “The Vortex of Celebrity”
by Douglas Mao, chair and professor of Department of English at
Johns Hopkins University.
When:
Thursday, May 17, 2011, 6:15 – 8 p.m.
(A
reception will follow immediately after the lecture.)
Where:
Los
Angeles Room, University-Student Union, on the CSULA campus. The
University is located at the Eastern Avenue exit, San Bernardino (I-10)
Freeway, at the interchange of 10 and 710 Freeways. Public permit
dispenser parking is available in Lot 5 or upper level Parking Structure
C.
Info:
Free to
the public.
For more information, call the CSULA English Department at (323)
343-4140.
# # #
‘The Vortex of Celebrity’
Working for California since 1947: The 175-acre hilltop campus of California State University, Los Angeles is at the heart of a major metropolitan city, just five miles from Los Angeles’ civic and cultural center. More than 20,000 students and 220,000 alumni—with a wide variety of interests, ages and backgrounds—reflect the city’s dynamic mix of populations. Six Colleges offer nationally recognized science, arts, business, criminal justice, engineering, nursing, education and humanities programs, among others, led by an award-winning faculty. Cal State L.A. is home to the critically-acclaimed Luckman Jazz Orchestra and to the Honors College for high-achieving students. Programs that provide exciting enrichment opportunities to students and community include an NEH-supported humanities center; a NASA-funded center for space research; and a growing forensic science program, housed in the Hertzberg-Davis Forensic Science Center. www.calstatela.edu
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