UBC Emeritus College Conversations - December 1, 2020

Conversations

December 1, 2020, 2:30 pm to 3:30 pm

Zoom link in the text

Writing lives: A Conversation

Seeking to encourage and sustain engagement among Emeritus College members and a wider audience, when even moderately-sized in-person gatherings are impossible, the UBC Emeritus College invites you to join one of our upcoming conversations on a topic of broad and current importance. Convened every month, on the Zoom platform, conversations will be interactive and moderated. They will begin with three short presentations from Emeritus colleagues, offering different perspectives on the chosen topic. After a short discussion among panelists, audience members will be invited to join the conversation. 

In Waterland, English novelist Graham Smith insisted that humans – and only humans – are story-telling animals and observed that “As long as there's a story, it's all right.” Stories of lives lived fascinate (or appall) inspire, guide and help us to understand that we are not alone. Whether as biography, autobiography, memoir or diary, telling the story of a life is a profoundly humanistic endeavour. This conversation carries us into these realms as we hear from: 
Sherrill Grace (English) about her recently published biography of Timothy Findley
Sneja Gunew (English and the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice) about the ways in which refugees and immigrants have rewritten the aesthetic and conceptual scaffolding of the traumascapes that constitute their lives (Behrouz Boochani), 
Philip Resnick (political scientist and poet) about his venture into autobiography with Itineraries.
Our moderator is the noted biographer and literary critic, Ira Nadel.

Please find relevant supplementary material by clicking on the link.

Zoom Registration

Speakers:

Sherrill Grace
University Killam Professor Emeritus of English (2014)

Sherrill Grace, OC, FRSC is a UBC University Killam Professor Emerita.  She has published extensively on Canadian Literature and Culture with books on Malcolm Lowry, Sharon Pollock, Tom Thomson, the two World Wars, the Canadian North, and most recently Tiff: A Life of Timothy Findley (2020).

Photo Sneja Gunew

Sneja Gunew
Professor Emerita of English and the Social Justice Institute (2014)

Sneja Gunew (FRSC) is Professor Emerita of English and the Social Justice Institute at UBC. She has published widely on multicultural, postcolonial and feminist critical theory and is the author of Framing Marginality: Multicultural Literary Studies (1994) and Haunted Nations: The Colonial Dimensions of Multiculturalisms (2004). She has also edited and co-edited eleven books. Her most recent book is titled: Post-Multicultural Writers as Cosmopolitan Mediators (2017). 

Photo Philip Resnick

Philip Resnick
Professor Emeritus of Political Science (2013)

In Itineraries, Philip Resnick focuses on a number of currents that have shaped his intellectual development. His memoir is thematic in character and touches on a broad range of themes including religion, nationalism, socialism and the left, the writing of poetry, academic freedom, Canadian identity, B.C. regionalism, and the passage of time. All this in trying to answer the question “What was it all about?”

Moderator

Photo Ira Nadel

Ira Nadel
Professor Emeritus of English (2020)

Ira Nadel (FRSC), Professor of English Emeritus (2020), has written biographies of Leonard Cohen, Tom Stoppard, David Mamet and Leon Uris. His other publications include Biography: Fiction, Fact & Form, Joyce and the Jews and Modernism’s Second Act. Philip Roth, A Counterlife will appear in the spring of 2021. His new work involves Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes.


Zoom Registration

Privacy and Consent to Recording

Please note that this event will be recorded via Zoom and posted publicly. The recording may contain attendees’ names and images. We recognize that this may be undesirable for some participants. If you do not wish for your name or image to be used in the video, please leave your video turned off during the event. You may also change your name to something generic like “Participant” or “Anonymous” in the Zoom meeting room by selecting yourself from the participants list and editing your name. By registering for this event and clicking the Zoom link that will be emailed to you, you consent to being recorded. If you do not want to participate in the live session, the recording will be posted at a later date to our YouTube channel. 

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Room 4160, Brock Commons South, 6180 Walter Gage Road
Vancouver, BC
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