FAU to Host MELUS 2011
The department of English in Florida Atlantic University’s Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters will host the 25th Multi Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS) Conference from Thursday, April 7 through Sunday, April 10 at the Renaissance Hotel in Boca Raton, Florida. The conference will feature a variety of educational panels, roundtables, readings and plenary speakers, including Karla Holloway, Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, and Gary Shteyngart. All events are free and open to the public.
“This promises to be an especially intellectually stimulating conference, since it marks the first formal collaboration between MELUS and the United States Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (USACLALS),” said Wenying Xu, chair of the department of English. “The presentations by members of both organizations will engender productive and lively debates over the intersections of multi-ethnic American and postcolonial world literatures.”
Founded in 1973, MELUS’ mission is to expand the definition of American literature through the study and teaching of African American, Asian and Pacific American, Jewish American, U.S. Latino, Native American, and ethnically specific Euro-American literary works. MELUS has held a national conference annually every April at various sites across the country for the past 25 years.
More than 250 people are expected to attend this year’s conference, and many of the activities will center on the event’s theme, “Ethnic Canons in Global Contexts.” The attendees come from a variety of academic institutions in the United States as well as from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. The keynote literary readings by Gary Shteyngart and Shirley Geok-lin Lim will take place in the Coral Ballroom of the Renaissance Hotel on Friday, April 8 at 7:30 p.m. Dean Pendakur, dean of the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters, will open the evening with welcoming remarks.
Shteyngart, who teaches creative writing at Columbia University, will be reading from his new book, Super Sad True Love Story, which was named one of the top ten books of 2010 by Michiko Kakutani of the “New York Times.” Geok-lin Lim, professor of English at University of California, Santa Barbara, and winner of the American Book Award, will be reading from her book of poetry, Walking Backwards.
The keynote scholar, Karla Holloway, will be presenting her talk, “Bound by Law: The Literary Consequence of Constitutionally Conferred Equity” on Saturday, April 9 at 11:30 a.m. President Mary J. Saunders of FAU will give the welcoming remarks for this lecture. Holloway is the James B. Duke Professor of English at Duke University. She also holds appointments in the Law School, Women's Studies, and African and African American Studies. Her research and teaching interests focus on African American cultural studies, biocultural studies, gender, ethics, and law.
For more information about MELUS and the program for this year’s conference, visit http://webspace.ship.edu/kmlong/melus/.
