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2009 Woodman Lecture
The Department of English welcomes you to the Leonora Woodman Lecture Series website. This lecture series was established to honor the memory of a cherished colleague.
The Department is pleased to announce that the 2009 Leonora Woodman Memorial lecturer will be:
Dana D. Nelson, the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English and American Studies at Vanderbilt University
The lecture will be held on Thursday, October 22, 2009, 4:30 p.m., in Krannert Auditorium. The title of Professor Nelson's talk is:
"Downsizing Citizenship" (or, "Why Everyone Should Read James Fenimore Cooper")
Professor Nelson is an internationally-acclaimed scholar of early American literature and culture whose research and teaching are chiefly concerned with issues of citizenship and theories of democratic government. Her most recent book is Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People (Minnesota, 2008). Her current book project, Ugly Democracy, tracks the interplay of aesthetic, social and political models of democratic representation, as a way to a) trace out alternative conceptions of democracy practiced and imagined in the early United States, b) to understand how they were lost from our democratic archive for citizenship, and c) to think about how these alternative might work for us today.
Other books by Professor Nelson include National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Duke, 1998); The Word in Black and White: Reading ‘Race’ in American Literature, 1638-1867 (Oxford, 1992); and Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics (co-edited with Russ Castronovo; Duke, 2002).