Dr. Douglas Mao of Johns Hopkins University will deliver the David L. Kubal Memorial Lecture on Thursday, May 17, 2012 at 6:15pm in the Los Angeles Room, located on the third floor of the University-Student Union. (Click here for a map to this event.) Refreshments will be served.
Professor Mao's talk, "The Vortex of Celebrity," will begin with Wyndham Lewis' transformation from literary celebrity to soldier in the Great War. It will then explore relationships between the scene of war and fantasies of celebrity life in multiple nineteenth- and twentieth-century contexts.
About the Speaker
(from Johns Hopkins University website)
Douglas Mao received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1993 and taught in the English departments at Princeton, Harvard, and Cornell before coming to Johns Hopkins in 2007.
A specialist in modernist fiction and poetry of Britain, Ireland, and the United States, he is the author of Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production (Princeton, 1998) and Fateful Beauty: Aesthetic Environments, Juvenile Development, and Literature 1860-1960 (Princeton, 2008). He is also the co-editor, with Rebecca Walkowitz, of Bad Modernisms (Duke, 2006) and the editor of the Longman Cultural Edition of E. M. Forster's Howards End (2009).
He has been president of the Modernist Studies Association and held a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship; he currently serves on the editorial boards of Textual Practice and Modernism/modernity. His courses have treated a wide range of topics in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature, from gender in modern writing to the aftermath of literary naturalism, from narratives of utopia to social organization in poetic texts.
For more information, call the Cal State L.A. English Department at (323) 343-4140.