The English Institute

09/30/2026

Our last (but certainly not least!) speaker feature is Heather Love, whose presentation is titled “Doubling Back.” Hear Love speak and close out the English Institute THIS WEEKEND!

A Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of numerous awards, Heather stands at the vanguard of contemporary literary and cultural studies. Her wide-ranging scholarship encompasses q***r theory and gender studies, 20th and 21st century literature and culture, affect theory, disability studies, performance theory, and visual/media studies. Her work bridges literature and sociology and engages deeply with questions of critical methodology. Heather is the author of over 60 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and has edited several pathbreaking journal special issues. Her landmark 2007 book, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Q***r History, remains central to ongoing conversations about emotion and politics in q***r studies. Her most recent book, Underdogs: Social Deviance and Q***r Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2021), has generated a major-and widely remarked upon-disciplinary rapprochement between sociology and literary studies, one with which scholars across fields continue to grapple. Heather is currently at work on To Be Real: The Uses of the Personal in Q***r Criticism, under contract with the University of Chicago Press.

09/28/2026

Our next speaker feature is Bonnie Honig, whose presentation is titled “The Accidental Ordinary, Euripedes’ Hippolytus in Reverse.” Hear Honig speak when the English Institute comes to Yale THIS WEEK!

Bonnie Honig is Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Modern Culture and Media (MCM) and Political Science at Brown University, and (by courtesy) Religious Studies (RS) and Theater and Performance Studies (TAPS). She is author of several books, including: Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Cornell, 1993, Scripps Prize for best first book, reissued in 30th annversary edition, Cornell, 2023), Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, 2001), Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton, 2009, David Easton Prize), Antigone, Interrupted (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair (Fordham, 2017), A Feminist Theory of Refusal (Harvard, 2021) and Shell Shocked: Feminist Criticism After Trump (Fordham, 2021: a collection of revised versions of her public writing since 2016).

09/24/2026

Our next speaker feature for this year’s English Institute is Daniel Hack, whose presentation is titled “Expectations? Great!”

Daniel Hack’s work asks how literary texts move through the world and how this very distinction between text and world has been constructed, contested, and imbued with meaning. He is the author of two books: The Material Interests of the Victorian Novel (University of Virginia Press, 2005), which shows how Victorian novelists sought to turn their work’s potentially troubling implication in the material world as physical objects and commodities into a source of literary value and cultural authority; and Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature (Princeton University Press, 2017), which reveals the scope and importance of African American writers’ and editors’ repurposings and rewritings of contemporary British literature in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His current project considers different ways of understanding the relationship between the meaning-making practices and logic of novels and those of real life, a topic he locates within a broader story about the rise of meaningfulness as a central aesthetic, ethical, and affective value in modern life.

09/18/2026

Our next speaker feature for this year’s English Institute is Emily Greenwood, whose presentation is titled “Third Person Regret: Shipwreck and Black Atlantic Counterfactuals”!

Emily Greenwood is a historian of classical antiquity and comparative literature, whose research centers on ancient Greek historiography—especially Thucydides and Herodotus—and how classical texts have been received within Black and postcolonial traditions. She is the author of the award-winning Afro-Greeks: Dialogues between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century (2010), which received the Runciman Prize in 2011. Her scholarship investigates the appropriation and reinvention of Greco-Roman classics across local, transnational, and diasporic contexts from the nineteenth century to the present.

09/11/2026

Our next speaker feature for REVERSAL is Mel Y. Chen. whose presentation is titled “Method’s Negative Spaces”!

Mel Y. Chen is Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at U.C. Berkeley and the writer of Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Q***r Affect (2012) and Intoxicated: Race, Disability and Chemical Intimacies of Empire (2023), and coeditor of Crip Genealogies (2023) at Duke University Press, where they coedit the Anima book series. They are currently developing a multimedia project on trans*, racial, and migrant inhumanisms. Besides publishing widely in journals and art venues, Chen is a member of the Board of Directors of the San Francisco-based Q***r Women of Color Media Arts Project.

Register for this year’s English Institute at the link in bio to hear Chen and so many other incredible scholars!

09/02/2026

Next up for REVERSAL is Sarah Beckwith, whose presentation is titled “The Impossibility of Reversal: Shakespeare’s Turnings in The Winter’s Tale and Some Intertexts”!

Sarah Beckwith works on late medieval religious writing, medieval and early modern drama, and ordinary language philosophy. She is the author of Christ’s Body: Identity, Religion and Society in Medieval English Writing (London: Routledge, 1993, pbk 1996); Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in York’s Play of Corpus Christi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001, pbk 2003), and Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011, pbk 2013). She is currently working on a book about Shakespearean tragedy and about philosophy’s love affair with the genre of tragedy and The Book of Second Chances, a book about versions of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. She co-edited JMEMS for several years, and co-founded the book series Re-Formations with the University of Notre Dame Press and is the editor of numerous collections of essays and journals.

08/24/2026

Introducing the scholars of REVERSAL ⭐️ First up is Minou Arjomand, whose presentation is titled “Aesthetic Labor from Wagner to Abortion Theater.” Register now at the link in bio so you can hear it at this year’s English Institute!

Minou Arjomand is an associate professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Staged: Show Trials, Political Theater, and the Aesthetics of Judgment (Columbia University Press, 2018) and is currently writing a book about motherhood, performance, and reproductive rights.

09/03/2025

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DON'T SPECULATE! REGISTER!!!! 82nd Annual English Institute at UC Irvine October 17-18 featuring NAN Z. DA, PATRICIA INGRAM, ANNIE MCCLANAHAN, CHRISTOPHER PEXA, ANTHONY REED, AVERY SLATER, ADELINE JOHNS-PUTRA

October 17th-18th, 2025 at University of California, Irvine

07/17/2025

WHAT? It's ALREADY TIME TO REGISTER??
Sure is! Let's go! 82nd EI at Irvine October 17-18 come remember what it feels like to use the best LLM out there, your BRAIN.

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05/05/2025

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