English and Comparative Literature Dissertation Colloquium: Sharon Kunde
Department: English
Date and Time: May 17, 2017 | 1:30 PM-3:00 PMEvent Location: HG 3301
Event Details
English and Comparative Literature Dissertation Colloquium: Sharon Kunde
May 17th, 1:30-3:00 PM, 3301 HG
"'So Broken was Their Speech': Frederick Douglass's Literacies in My Bondage and My Freedom.”
Sharon's paper explores Frederick Douglass's representation of his literacy acquisition in My Bondage and My Freedom, arguing that Douglass deploys an emergent cultural logic that attaches power and efficacy to formal literacy but also sidesteps that logic by exploring the resistant potential of language practices that do not coincide neatly with the notion of literacy.
Sharon Kunde is a 2016 - 2017 ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellow and a PhD candidate at the University of California, Irvine. Her dissertation, “Down in the Dirt: Undoing Transcendentalism in American Letters,” centers on the cultural politics of reading and representing nature in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature. She has published poetry and stories in a range of literary journals, including recent or forthcoming items in The Fem, Badlands, The Spoon River Poetry Review and Midwestern Gothic. She was a fellow with the Climate Action Training Program at the University of California, Irvine in 2016 and directs a reading group called The Maternal Academic, which seeks to bring greater visibility and institutional support to female graduate students and early-career academics as they seek to start and sustain families.