Professor Rebecca L. Walkowitz
Barnard College
Susan Stanford Friedman MEMORIAL LECTURE
September 11, 17:00 – 18:30, Central European University in Vienna, Auditorium
Wine and cheese reception to follow
This lecture pays tribute to the legacy of Susan Stanford Friedman as a scholar and mentor by reflecting on the concept of “reshuffling,” which she developed in her later work as a way of thinking about feminist collaboration across differences of generation, nationality, race, religion, and class. Sewing together moments from Friedman’s scholarship across several decades, we see her persistent engagement with models of feminist collaboration and transnational solidarity she finds in the writings of Virginia Woolf, and with the models she finds in other readers and re-writers of Woolf’s writings. Reshuffling is the methodology Friedman derives from this dynamic of reading and writing over generations. It is a methodology she describes as well as performs, and in that sense it demonstrates her commitment to creativity as well as criticism, to building up ideas in the presence and on the shoulders of distant others and to making room for future generations to build up anew and to stand on her shoulders in turn.
Rebecca L. Walkowitz is Claire Tow Professor of English and Provost and Dean of the Faculty at Barnard College. Her research and teaching consider aspects of cosmopolitanism, multilateralism, and multilingualism and their relationships to questions of idiom, narrative structure, typography, and media in modernist and contemporary literature. She is currently writing The New Multilingualism: Knowing and Not Knowing Languages in Literature, Culture, and the Classroom (forthcoming from Columbia University Press), which calls for new ways of counting, organizing, and valuing world languages both within and outside the university and traces the emergence of historically new examples of multilingual art and entertainment. Walkowitz is the author of Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (2015) and Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (2006) and the editor of 8 additional volumes, including Bad Modernisms (2006) and A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism (2016). She has also written several widely cited and field-defining articles, including “The New Modernist Studies” (2008), co-authored with Douglas Mao, which helped to describe and set a new agenda for the field of modernist studies and is one of the most-cited articles in the flagship journal PMLA. She served as President of the Modernist Studies Association in 2014-2015.
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