Selected Lectures, Presentations, & Workshops

Unthinkable: The Medical Suppression of Incest Then and Now

Incest Aware

During this presentation, I spoke about the strategies employed by past and present medical professionals to keep incest from public view and to erase incest from the historical record. The social and political consequences of the suppression were also addressed. I concluded with remarks about how we can use this knowledge to help combat internalized oppression, help medical professionals be with their patients, and empower more effective action strategies going forward.

How Come Nobody Talks About Incest and Why it Matters to You: A New Way of Empowering Action

Student Organized Consent Conference, Seattle WA

This presentation focused on suppression tactics used in the past to silence and marginalize women who have experienced sexual violence. We also discussed how we can use our knowledge of the past to effectively strategize ways of dealing with present challenges.

Contemporary American Fiction: Styles of Engagement, in conjunction with a reading of Surviving the Wreck

Universität Basel, sponsored by The British Society for Literature and Science

Because Bowen’s writing style challenges our conventional reading expectations in ways that sometimes parallel those used by feminist activists to disrupt traditional expectations of women, I used this presentation to explore the imaginative and social value of these disruptions. After, I read passages from my novel about incest, Surviving the Wreck.

A Problem and a Wonder: Developing Students’ Metacognitive Abilities in the Creative Writing Classroom

Northeast Modern Language Association

Young writers are often told to revise, but they are not taught how to re-vision, or re-see their writing in order to effect improvement. Using ideas gleaned from reading Adrienne Rich’s feminist essays, I outlined strategies that help students learn how to revise their thinking and writing.

‘This Pointless Verbal Excess:’ A Reconsideration of Bowen’s Stylistic Tics, ‘A Mixture of Showing off and Suspicion, Nearly as Bad as Sex’: Reading Elizabeth Bowen

Symposium, University of Sussex

In this presentation, I once again tackled Bowen’s prose and the gendered criticism that was often deployed to deride and shame her as a “deviant” and “excessive” (i.e., “neurotic”) female writer.

“Elizabeth Bowen Imagining Ireland,” in conjunction with a reading of “Lie About”

Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture

For this conference, I was asked to read some of my fiction and present an aspect of my Bowen scholarship. “Lie About” reflects the social injustices I witnessed every day when I lived in a very affluent Ivy League town. In “Elizabeth Bowen Imagining Ireland,” I spoke about the wonderful and challenging ways Bowen imagined her homeland in her prose fiction. She was not known as a feminist writer, but her syntactical disruptions often echo strategies used by feminist nonfiction writers of the ’60s and ’70s.

Excerpts from My Mother’s Shoes

Rutgers University Reading Series

Elizabeth Bowen’s Ireland

Invited lecture, Trevor/Bowen Literary Summer School, Mitchelstown, Ireland

Although married, Bowen lived most of her married life away from her husband. Bowen did not identify as a feminist. But I took this opportunity to explore the relationship between her life as an independent woman and the tangled history of Ireland.