Resumo

The seminar will weave a discussion of the literary history of regional writing in the United States together with several theoretical projects − understanding the nature of place, probing the current fascination with the phrase “the local and the global,” and imagining a rooted cosmopolitanism.  The texts engaged were both popular and critically admired in the late 19th century, but are now often obscure or forgotten.  They open up new ways of talking about different kinds of knowledge, but also about the classroom as a mediating space, our practice as scholars and teachers, and the public role of the university. 


Nota biográfica

June Howard, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and Professor of English, American Culture and Women's Studies; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, earned her B.A. at Antioch College and her Ph.D. at the University of California at San Diego, joining the University of Michigan faculty in 1979. Her research focuses on the literature and culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in the United States, and also addresses broad questions about the social life of reading in the modern world and, more generally, the production of knowledge.

Main publications: Form and History in American Literary Naturalism (1985), now available through a digital edition;  a volume of essays on Sarah Orne Jewett (1994); Publishing the Family (2001). Howard’s recent essays include studies of the Chinese-Canadian author Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton, and a reassessment of naturalism as part of the generic system of American literature. 

Howard is currently engaged on a book-length study of American regionalism as a literary movement and cultural force, which has the working title “The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Paradoxes of Place.“ Howard has a longstanding interest in the history of disciplines and the project of interdisciplinarity, in the relationship between everyday and expert knowledge, and in understanding the place of higher education in the region, the nation, and the world. 

She received the University of Michigan’s Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award in Fall 2004.  During Winter-Spring 2013 June Howard is in residence as Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense.

Nota: Atividade no âmbito do Programa de Doutoramento em "Estudos Americanos"