English Department Roundtable: Austin Lillywhite
Friday, March 13, 2:30 p.m.
English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall
Moderator: TBA

Austin Lillywhite will present. More details TBA.

Copies of the paper will be available in the English Department Roundtable (EDR) mailbox in the English Department mailroom (250 GSH), on the far right of the wall of English grad student boxes.

Austin Lillywhite is a PhD candidate in English focusing on 20th and 21st century American and Caribbean literature, continental philosophy, and theory, with an emphasis on issues of embodiment, race, gender and sexuality. His dissertation research surveys the poetic powers of queer world-making at stake in contemporary Afro-diasporic and Native literature. He argues that such world-making functions through the twinned practices of the embodied, sensuous fabrication of lived spatialities, and the imaginative, linguistic fabulation of different possibilities of life beyond the human. As a critical and creative practice of moving beyond what is deemed possible and real within the present aesthetic and epistemological orders of existence, fabulist literary forms provide a crucial response to the pessimistic, racialized forces of social death and planetary degradation looming ever larger in the era of the Anthropocene. His past work on posthumanism and new materialism has been published in Diacritics and Chiasma. Most recently, his work theorizing an embodied phenomenological approach to literature was awarded Honorable Mention for the 2019 Ralph Cohen Prize from New Literary History. His work has been funded by a grant for research in sustainability from the Society for the Humanities. He is also the recipient of the Society for the Humanities’ Mellon Foundation Graduate Fellowship for the 2020-2021 academic year, centered on the theme of “Fabrication.”

The English Department Roundtable is a forum for graduate students in the English Department to share ideas across a wide variety of fields, time periods, and methodologies.  Open to students at all stages of the program, the EDR gives us an opportunity to discuss our work in an informal setting with a group of our peers, to give and receive feedback about current projects, and to learn about the work being done by our colleagues. At a time in which the tremendous diversity of literary study has made it increasingly difficult to grasp the discipline as a whole, the purpose of the EDR is to foster a greater sense of intellectual community and cohesion within Cornell’s English Department, and to strengthen our work through increased collaboration with our peers.

Refreshments will be served

Sponsored by the Class of 1916 Chair