UTSA presents author Shelley Fisher Fishkin April 8-12

Shelley Fishkin

Author Shelley Fisher Fishkin

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(April 8, 2013) -- The UTSA Department of English will present author and scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin as the featured speaker in the 26th annual Brackenridge Distinguished Visiting Lecture Series April 8-12 on the UTSA Main Campus. The speaking events are free and open to the public.

Much of Fishkin's work has centered on Mark Twain, but she also has published works that have focused on recovering and interpreting voices that were silenced, marginalized or ignored in America's past. The diverse mix of authors in Fishkin's writings include Gloria Anzaldua, John Dos Passos, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Erica Jong, Theresa Malkiel and Walt Whitman.

At 7 p.m., Wednesday, April 10, Fishkin will present "Originally of Missouri... Now of the Universe's Mark Twain and the World" in the Business Building University Room (2.06.04) on the UTSA Main Campus.

Her second lecture, "Reading America Through Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee: Literature Through Place and Place Through Literature," will be 2 p.m., Friday, April 12 in the University Center Ballroom I (1.106) on the Main Campus.

An author, editor or co-editor of more than 40 books, Fishkin's published works also have appeared in more than 100 articles, essays, columns or reviews. Her writings have been translated into Arabic, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Georgian and Italian. Japanese, Korean and Turkish journals also have published her English language works.

Fishkin's research has been featured four times in the New York Times, twice on the front page and twice in the arts section.

A recipient of numerous awards, Fishkin received the Mark Twain Circle's Certificate of Merit in 2009. In 2007, she received a Tony nomination as one of the producers of the Broadway adaptation of Mark Twain's "Is He Dead?" production. Her book "Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices" (Oxford, 1993) was selected as an "Outstanding Academic Book" by Choice, which provides reviews for more than 25,000 academic librarians.

Fishkin is the founding editor of the online Journal of Transnational American Studies and co-founder of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman society. Additionally, she has served as past president for the American Studies Association, the Mark Twain Circle of America and as chair of the MLA Nonfiction Prose Division.

A frequent invited speaker at international conferences over the last nine years, Fishkin has given keynote talks in Beijing, Cambridge, Copenhagen, Dublin, Hong Kong, Kyoto, Lisbon, Seoul, St. Petersburg, Taipei, Toky, and across the United States.

Her academic accomplishments include serving as a life member as a visiting fellow at Cambridge University, as visiting scholar at Stanford's Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and as a faculty research fellow at Stanford's Clayman Institute for Gender Research. Fishkin was awarded an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship and was a Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer in Japan. At the University of Texas at Austin, she received the Harry H. Ransom Teaching Excellence Award.

Fishkin's most recent project is a collaborative transnational, bilingual research project dealing with the Chinese Railroad Workers, whose labor helped establish the wealth that allowed Leland Stanford to build Stanford University. The goal of the project is to try to recover their experience and their world more fully than ever before, and to understand how these workers have figured in cultural memory in the U.S. and China.

Currently serving as the Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities at Stanford University, Fishkin also directs the American Studies Program at Stanford. Previously, she taught American studies and English and chaired the Department of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her doctoral degree in American studies, her master's degree in English and her bachelor's degree in English from Yale University.

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Inaugurated in 1987, the UTSA Brackenridge Distinguished Visiting Lecture Series is supported by the George W. Brackenridge Foundation, the UTSA College of Liberal and Fine Arts, and the UTSA Department of English. Through the generous support of the foundation, UTSA has invited distinguished scholars in literature and the humanities to engage members of the campus community and San Antonio in public lectures, classroom visits and faculty symposia as part of weeklong residencies.

For more information visit the UTSA Department of English website.

 

 

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