Keynote Speakers
This conference brings together two key figures in the area of feminist literary studies:
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Rachel Blau DuPlessis is internationally renowned as a feminist scholar and poet. Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work was published by University of Alabama Press in 2006; in the same year, Alabama reprinted DuPlessis’s classic work The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice. A professor of English at Temple University, DuPlessis is also the author of Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908-1934 (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (1985), H.D.: The Career of that Struggle (1986), both from Indiana University Press, and The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice (Routledge, 1990). She is the editor of The Selected Letters of George Oppen (Duke University Press, 1990), and the co-editor with Peter Quartermain of The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics (University of Alabama Press, 1999). The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women’s Liberation, co-edited with Ann Snitow, was published by Three Rivers/Crown in 1998; it will be reprinted by Rutgers University Press in 2007. She is also the co-editor with Susan Stanford Friedman, of Signets: Reading H.D. (University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). Her recent books of poetry are Drafts 1-38, Toll (Wesleyan University Press, 2001) and DRAFTS. Drafts 39-57, Pledge with Draft, Unnumbered: Précis (Salt Publishing, 2004). Torques: Drafts 58-76 is forthcoming. An interview of DuPlessis conducted by Jeanne Heuving appears in Contemporary Literature (2004).
Susan Sheridan
Sue Sheridan is one of Australia’s most eminent feminist critics. An adjunct professor of Women’s Studies and English at Flinders University, Sue is the author of Along the Faultlines: Sex, Race, and Nation in Australian Women’s Writing, 1880s to 1930s (Allen & Unwin, 1995) and Christina Stead (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1988). She is the editor of Grafts: Feminist Cultural Criticism (Verso, 1988) and Debutante Nation: Feminism Contests the 1890s (with Susan Magarey and Sue Rowley) (Allen and Unwin, 1993). With Barbara Baird, Kate Borrett, and Lyndall Ryan, she produced Who Was That Woman? The Australian Women’s Weekly in the Postwar Years (University of New South Wales Press, 2002). Recent publications include “Adrienne Rich and the Women’s Liberation Movement: A Politics of Reception,” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 35.1 (2006): 17-46 and “Feminism in the News” (with Susan Magarey and Sandra Lilburn) in Feminism in Popular Culture, ed. Joanne Hollows and Rachel Moseley (Berg, 2006). She recently published articles on Thea Astley and presented papers on various aspects of Australian poetry and its publication in the 1960s.
This conference will be a festschrift, honouring Sue Sheridan’s place in literary and feminist studies, both within Australia and internationally.
