What's Happening

Fall events will be listed soon.

Here's a sampling of events from the past semester.

Thursday, April 28, 2011. Sigma Tau Delta Induction

Bucknell's Epsilon Beta chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, the international English honor society, will hold its first annual induction ceremony on Thursday, April 28, at 5 p.m. in Willard Smith Library. Please join the English Department in honoring the academic achievement of Sigma Tau Delta's new members and recently elected officers. Light food and drinks will be served.

Thursday, April 28, 2011. Charles Borkhuis, playright

Playwright Charles Borkhuis will discuss his work and the state of the theatre today.

Aspiring playwrights and fans of theatre are welcome to join the discussion, which has been sponsored by the English Department and the Stadler Center for Poetry.

Tuesday, April 19, 2011. Kristin Whissel, University of California

Film/Media Studies presents: "The Life and Death of Digital Creatures" a lecture by University of California Professor of Film and Media Kristin Whissel. || Event Poster

Tuesday, March 22, 2011. Aleš Šteger, poet and essayist

Reading by renowned Slovanian poet and essayist, Aleš Šteger, March 22, 2011 at 7:00pm in the Willard Smith Library. A Q&A will also be held in the Willard Smith Library at 4:00pm, that same day.

This event is sponsored by the English Department, University Lectureship Committee and Russian Studies.

Thursday, March 3, 2011. Katey Castellano, James Madison University

Katey Castellano (M.A. Bucknell '01), Assistant Professor of English at James Madison University, will present a lecture entitled “'Their Graves are Green': Conservation in Wordsworth’s Epitaphic Ballads" at 7:00 pm in the Smith Library, Vaughan Literature Building, on March 3, 2011. Professor Castellano, an expert on British Romantic literature, will speak about poet William Wordsworth's "Romantic conservation," his writing about nature and landscape in 19th century England in response to industrialization and modernization.

Co-sponsored by the Bucknell English Department and the Vivian Miller Fund for English; the public is welcome.

Saturday, November 20, 2010. Dancing Mind Challenge

This event, based on Toni Morrison’s reflections in her essay “The Dancing Mind,” is an opportunity for Bucknell students, faculty and staff and community members to “unplug” for eight consecutive hours and to make an exclusive commitment to reading during that time. In this age of Google, we have become addicted to instant gratification and are at risk for losing the ability to concentrate deeply for any serious length of time.

The Griot Institute for Africana Studies, along with its partners the English department, Multicultural Student Services, the English Club, Library and Information Technology, the Bucknell /Barnes and Noble bookstore, and the University Press will sponsor the Dancing Mind Challenge.

Tuesday, November 9, 2010. Sally Wolff, Emory University

Sally Wolff, Emory University, will be on campus to tell the story of making "one of the most sensational literary discoveries in recent history," a plantation diary previously unrecognized as a source of Faulkner's fiction. She will tell the story of her almost accidental find and its significance to understanding Faulkner as a historian and as a writer treating issues of race on Tuesday, Nov. 9 at 7:30 in the Willard Smith Library. Her presentation title is William Faulkner and the Ledgers of History. || See NYT article for more about this discovery.

Thursday, September 30, 2010. Ursula Heise, Stanford University

The English Department invites you to a lecture by Ursula Heise, author of Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. An acclaimed literary critic and theorist of environmental studies and globalization, Professor Heise will speak on two different ways of representing species extinction: the elegiac mode and the database/red list mode, which doesn't focus on individual charismatic species but on the inventorying of endangered species. She proposes that databases are a contemporary form of nature writing, specifically of epic.

Wednesday, September 8, 2010. Noriyuki Harada, scholar and translator

Translation or Transformation: Japanese Reception and Adaptation of Eighteenth-Century English Literature. Professor Noriyuki Harada will lecture on translating eighteenth-century English literature into Japanese on Wednesday September 8, 2010 in the Willard Smith Library at. 5.00 p.m. Mr. Harada, a notable translator, is also Professor of English at Keio University and Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, President of the English Institute of Japan, and serves as an adviser to the Japanese minister of education. This illuminating, cross-cultural talk will appeal to students, faculty, and staff interested in the productive and profound intersections between literatures and cultures. All are welcome.

Sponsored by the University Lectureship Committee, the English Department, the Spanish Department, and the University Press.