Luis Machua (Lehman College, ‘17) will speak about his career trajectory and the challenges of putting DST theory into practice through his work with the Epilepsy Foundation and the NYS Commission for the Blind. Mr. Machuca was a (Dis)abilities Studies Minor and English Literature major while at Lehman College and a graduate of the English Honors Program. He obtained his M.A. in Vocational Rehabilitation Counseling from Hunter College in 2019.

All students are welcome! Q&A to follow. Register here for Zoom link.

Professionalization Roundtable with Tricia Lootens, Rae Greiner, and Olivia Moy

Speaker: Devoney Looser
Organizer: Eve Kahn
Moderator: Olivia Loksing Moy

Jane Porter (1775-1840) and Anna Maria Porter (1778-1832) were the most famous sister novelists before the Brontës. The Porters, having published under their own names as teens and achieved early fame, ultimately published 26 books, separately and together. After their deaths, they gradually (and wrongly) disappeared from literary history. Devoney Looser, the author of the first biography of Jane and Anna Maria, Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters: Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës (Bloomsbury, 2022), will lecture on bringing the two writers back into view as innovators. Despite the success of Jane’s bestselling Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803) and The Scottish Chiefs (1810) and Maria’s The Hungarian Brothers (1807), the Porters ultimately lost credit for inventing the modern historical novel. Once Sir Walter Scott’s Waverely (1814) burst onto the scene, the sisters were gradually overshadowed. Scott was declared the genre’s originator and never credited the Porters with inspiring his fictional method, despite having been their childhood friend. In this image-rich talk, Devoney Looser will share 20 years of archival research and beautiful 19th-century editions of the Porters’ books, presenting previously hidden stories of sisters’ lives and literary careers. The lecture will also highlight an important document held in the Grolier Club archives, showing how American publishers, having made a killing off of the novels of Jane Porter, banded together to send the elderly, impoverished author a rocking chair, rather than what she most needed—a share of their profits.

Devoney Looser's Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters: Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës was supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship and an NEH Public Scholar Award. Looser, Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University, is the author or editor of ten other books on the history of women’s writings. Her lecture series on Jane Austen is available through The Great Courses and Audible, and she’s published essays in the Atlantic, New York Times, Times Literary Supplement, and Washington Post.

The Rutgers Book Initiative invites you to a launch party for our new humanities makers-ace, the Scarlet Letterpress on Tuesday, November 7.

Roundtable on Media History Through Making, with speakers: Ryan Cordell, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Christy Potroff, Olivia Moy, and Katherine Ruffin.

Followed by the printing broadside of a poem by Evie Shockley.

A workshop for middle, high school, community college, and senior college instructors to develop lesson plans for use in the Fall 2023 - Spring 2024 semesters.

Commonplacing in the twenty-first century allows us to re-envision the study of Romanticism as a force for connecting globally, yet intimately, and sharing creatively through our love of Romantic-era texts. In addition to introducing teachers and classes to examples of nineteenth-century commonplace books and commonplacing methods, we'll encourage students of all levels (middle schoolers, high schoolers, and college undergraduates at senior and community colleges) to create commonplace books of their own or contribute to our digital, communal commonplace book designed for the Keats-Shelley Association of America. We also encourage students to make their favorite passages and poems their own by recording their own voices or translating and reading poems in different languages.

Sponsored by Rare Book School, The Grolier Club, and The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation
Organizers: Barbara Heritage and Ruth-Ellen St. Onge
Teachers Session speakers: Terry Belanger, Olivia Loksing Moy & Kinohi Nishikawa

“Building the Book: Makers, Teachers, Collectors” takes a holistic approach to how books—and collections—are made. It takes as its premise that books help form the bedrock of our collective historical memory. The symposium will focus on how books are created, received, and interpreted, and how these activities influence the way we consider the past, present, and future of our collective human history. The 11:00-12:15 session will feature a panel led by teachers who focus on the history of the book and/or bibliography in their classrooms and courses. The discussion will explore why hands-on pedagogy with books is significant for students today, while highlighting some of the pedagogical techniques that our speakers draw on in working with students new to book history. The symposium will conclude with a reception held on the second floor of the Grolier Club.

Co-organizers: Ann Rowland, Eric Eisner, and Olivia Loksing Moy

Keats and Shelley on the Move is a Stuart Curran symposium to mark the bicentennials of the deaths of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. We look back to 1821 and 1822 as jumping off points to trace how these major figures of the Romantic period and their contemporaries have moved forward and outward – into new worlds, new languages, new media, and new material forms. Our title nods to Ann Rigney’s The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move, and we share her interest in how Romantic-era literary figures and their texts move across media, time periods, and national traditions, becoming fertile sites for both cultural memory and for new creative and cultural practices. Our speakers – poets, critics, curators, and collectors – will address the global, contemporary, remediated, translated, collected, and curated figures of Keats, Shelley, and their contemporaries. We hope the conversations of the day will offer a glimpse of these Romantic writers and texts going global, even as they are already gone, having crossed thresholds and boundaries, having escaped, still on the move.

Speaker: Frank H. Wu
Organizer: Eve Kahn
Moderator: Olivia Loksing Moy

A talk by Grolier Club member Frank H. Wu, President of Queens College and distinguished law professor, scholar and author, on his collection of anti-Asian propaganda, illustrated with examples. Before joining the staff of Queens College, Dr. Wu was a professor of law at the University of California Hastings College of Law and Howard University Law School in DC, and served as dean of Wayne State University Law School in Detroit. He is the author of Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White, and the co-author of Race, Rights and Reparation: Law and the Japanese Internment. He collects ephemera about the Asian-American experience, including anti-Asian propaganda from the late 19th century through WWII, and about immigration.

Organizer: Christopher Rovee

Please join the LSU Department of English this Thursday, April 14 for a talk by Olivia Loksing Moy, Associate Professor at City University of New York, Lehman College, who will deliver a lecture titled “Keats’ Chameleon, Cortázar’s Axolotl: Vida y Cartas de John Keats” in 102 Allen Hall from 4:00-5:15. Moy will treat the Argentinian author Julio Cortázar (1914-1984), a perspicacious reader and avid lover of all things Keats. She will set his translations in the context of Keats's Hispanophone reception and the surprising Latin American afterlife of Keats's poems. Professor Moy will also be hosting a seminar on literary translation:  "The Cortázar Continuum: Translation from Rabassa to Blackburn" from 1:30-2:45, in Allen 202.

The MIddle Modernity Colloquium, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of English

Organizers: Diego Alegría Corona & Brian Lanahan Milthorpe

Join professors Olivia Loksing Moy (CUNY-English) and Marco Ramírez Rojas (CUNY-Spanish) for a discussion of their ongoing work translating Julio Cortázar’s Imagen de John Keats. This talk invites a reconsideration of translation praxis and methodologies against critical discussions around world literature, moving beyond comparative literature debates and theorizations of cosmopolitanism. Provoking disciplinary reconsiderations of space and time — rather than geography, nation, and period – they engage in a discussion of the global cultural and literary networks of the Cortázar-Keats orbit. Moy and Ramírez invite conversation with graduate students from UW-M’s departments of Spanish and English, while amplifying some of their own methodological choices and models for translation, particularly collaborative translation.

Vida y Cartas de John Keats / Life and Letters of John Keats

The famed Argentinian author Julio Cortázar was a perspicacious reader and avid lover of all things Keats—so much so that he communed with the poet by writing a six hundred-page biography-autobiography, a hybrid memoir intertwining both their lives. Throughout the 1950s, Cortázar also translated many Keats poems and letters, introducing Lord Houghton’s seminal Life and Letters of John Keats to a Latin American audience for the first time. Join English professor Olivia Loksing Moy, of the City University of New York, Lehman College, for a virtual discussion on Julio Cortázar’s translations, the Hispanophone reception of John Keats, and a consideration of Keats’ surprising afterlife preceding the Latin American Boom. 

Please note that the program will take place online. After registering, participants will receive a confirmation email with instructions on how to participate using Zoom. We ask that you download the app in advance for the best user experience.

Tickets: Free: limited availability, advance registration is required.