Rescuing adventure
Shopping. Driving. Parenting. Eating out. Working out. Today, sources of adventure are as limitless as a marketer’s imagination. No activity is too mundane, no product too crass, no invocation too preposterous. In Adventure: An Argument for Limits, Christopher Schaberg grapples with classical conceptions of adventure, their 21st-century simulacra, and the earnest question: What constitutes adventure today?
‘The distribution of ideas’
Publishing is both a centuries-old intellectual tradition and a sprawling contemporary practice. Yet at its core, publishing seeks to answer one overarching question: How do ideas make their way into the world? So argues Martin Riker, director of the new publishing concentration in the Department of English in Arts & Sciences.
A Film in Which I Play Everyone
Poems
“A Film in Which I Play Everyone” takes its title from a response David Bowie gave to a fan who asked if he had upcoming film roles. “I’m looking for backing for an unauthorized autobiography that I am writing,” Bowie answered. “Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.”
University Libraries awarded grant to preserve born-digital poetry collections
Washington University Libraries received a two-year grant from the Mellon Foundation to support an exploration of essential questions surrounding the acquisition, discoverability, preservation and use of born-digital poetry collections. The $250,000 award will enable the libraries to develop online resources and systems to process, preserve and steward the collections of a new generation of digital-native poets.
A long night of the scholarly mind
Martin Riker directs the new publishing concentration in the Department of English in Arts & Sciences. Here, he talks about fear, imagination and delivering The Guest Lecture.
Phillips wins Pulitzer Prize in Poetry
Carl Phillips, a professor of English in Arts & Sciences, has won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Phillips received the honor for his latest collection, “Then The War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020.” The prizes were announced May 8.
Class Acts: Meera Lee Patel
Sam Fox School graduate student Meera Lee Patel is an author and illustrator who encourages readers to “start where you are” and “create your own calm.” A self-taught artist, she has sold over a million copies of her books and journals. Patel then decided to explore a new interest: children’s literature.
McPherson wins Guggenheim Fellowship
Edward McPherson, an associate professor of English in Arts & Sciences, has won a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.
Parvulescu wins René Wellek Prize
Anca Parvulescu, the Liselotte Dieckmann Professor of Comparative Literature and professor of English in Arts & Sciences, has won the 2023 René Wellek Prize for best monograph from the American Comparative Literature Association.
Entertaining Uncertainty in the Early Modern Theater
Stage Spectacle and Audience Response
Lauren Robertson’s original study shows that the theater of Shakespeare and his contemporaries responded to the crises of knowledge that roiled through early modern England by rendering them spectacular. Revealing the radical, exciting instability of the early modern theater’s representational practices, Robertson uncovers the uncertainty that went to the heart of playgoing experience in this period.
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