Professor Elizabeth Maddock Dillon of Northeastern University will be speaking at the University of Connecticut on TODAY, March 3, at 4 PM in the Homer Babbidge Library Class of 1947 Room. Her visit is sponsored by the English Graduate Student Association.
Professor Dillon’s new book, New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649-1849 (Duke UP, 2014), examines the “riotous scene of theatre” throughout the eighteenth-century Atlantic, and explores the emergence of a new public that included indigenous peoples, diasporic Africans, and diasporic Europeans. Centrally, New World Drama examines the paradoxes and contradictions of colonialism, and the ways in which a massive slave economy and a nascent politics of freedom were able to coexist. Professor Dillon’s account traces the intersections of performance, aesthetics, and modernity throughout the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.
She is also the author of The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (Stanford UP, 2004), which reassessed scholarly accounts of a literary “public,” from the colonial era to the rise of sentimentalism in the antebellum period. Engaging a long theoretical tradition, from Adam Smith to Jürgen Habermas, Professor Dillon compellingly revised common assumptions about the relationship between liberalism and gender difference.
Professor Dillon is also the co-director of the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks, a center for Digital Humanities and Computational Social Science at Northeastern University, and she is currently at work on a project dealing with the intersections of geography, sex, race, and reproduction, especially in the early Caribbean.
For more information, contact: English Department at gordon.fraser@uconn.edu