Intimate Environments: Considering the Muriel Rukeyser Archive
The Elaine Stavro Distinguished Visiting Scholar in Theory, Politics & Gender
Event Details
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Thursday, February 8, 2018
7:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Building: Traill College
Room: Bagnani Hall
Cost: Free
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) is most well-known as a poet who was loosely affiliated with Communist Party activities in her early twenties. Rukeyser travelled to West Virginia accompanied by a photographer friend to report on the deaths of hundreds of miners from silicosis, events she documented in her monumental poem, The Book of the Dead (1938). This work and her research on the history of physical chemistry, together with the archives of her lifelong loves, offer provocations for feminist theory to consider the scope of what we mean by environments and the intimacies they shelter.
Dr. Rosemary Hennessy is the L.H. Favrot Professor of Humanities and professor of English at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and is a faculty affiliate with the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality which she directed from 2006-2015. Her current research project considers the work of women writers whose reportage and fiction of and about the 1930s challenges conventional understandings of time, labour, bio-regulation, and the erotic, and has much to teach us about maintaining life in the twenty-first century.