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Annual Hoffman Lecture

James Hoffman

James Hoffman, a Comparative Literature major who graduated with High Distinction in 1982, died in a car crash the summer after his graduation...the result of a drunk driver. His thesis, "The Political Connection in Literature: A Study of Four Socialist Novels" reflects James' social awareness and interest in socialism. He was a very caring individual and at the time of his death was working with alcoholics as a volunteer. James' family and colleagues in Comparative Literature established this memorial lecture to host scholars who reflect James' vision of literature as a means of social change.

1984 - Present

Annual Hoffman Lecture

2024 Claudia Rankine, American poet, essayist, playwright and the editor, For Reel, For Real: New Approaches to (Auto)biography 

2022   David Gramling, University of British Columbia on unceded Musquam territory, Vancover, Canada, Literature in Late Mono/lingualism

2019   Michael K. Bourdaghs, Michima in Bandung: Rethinking Postwar Japanese Literature as Cold War Literature

2019   Emily Wilson, Translating the Odyssey Again: How and Why

2018   Jens Andermann, "In the Flesh: Bio Art, Trans-Species Aesthetics and the Question of Technology"

2017   Bruno Carvalho, Forms of the Informal: "Modernist Poetry, Urbanism, and Street Life in 1920s Brazil"

2016   Lisa Nakamura, "Workers Without Bodies: A Feminist Critique of Labor on the Internet Lecturer"

2015   Eric H. Cline, "1177 B.C. The Year Civilization Collapsed"

2015   James Phelan, Affect and Ethics in Roz Chast's "Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?

2014   Lorie Novak, "Photographic Interference"

2013   Michael Rothberg, "What Does It Mean to Inherit the Past? Holocaust Memory Through the Migrant Lens"

2012   Peter Brooks, "Late Work"

2011   Teddy Cruz, "Creative Acts of Citizenship: Performing Neighborhoods"

2010   Susan Meiselas, "In History"

2009   Robert J.C. Young, "Migration and Globalization, from Benjamin to Fanon"

2008   Timothy Brennan, "Intellectual Labor"

2007   Patricia Yaeger, "Throwaway Robots and Luminous Trash"

2006   Simon Gikandi, "On Theory and Exile"

2005   Caryl Emerson, "In Search of the Dialogic Novel"

2004   Jean Franco, "Worrying about the Aztecs: The Strange Case of Coatlicue"

2003   Ihab Hassan, "Realism, Truth and Trust: The Distance of the Other"

2002   Maria Tatar, "Storytelling and Survival: Bedtime Tales from Scheherazad to Peter Pan"

2001   Froma Zeitlin, "Apollo and Dionysus:  Starting from Birth"

2000   Barbara Johnson, "Headnotes: Anthologies and Authorities"

1999   Susan Gubar, "Feminism's Racechanges"

1998   Edward Said, "No Reconciliation Possible:  Exile and Self Invention"

1997   Bruce Robbins, "Harried:  The Spaces and Times of Intellectual Work"

1996   Doris Sommer, "Proceed with Caution:  A Rhetoric of Particularism"

1995   Linda Hutcheon, "The Tragedy of the Post-Ironic Condition: Irony, Nostalgia and the Post-Modern"

1994   Biddy Martin, "Sexualities Without Gender and Other Queer Utopias"

1993   Homi Bhabha, "By Bread Along:  Of Native Soldiers and British Butlers"

1992   Chérrie Moraga, "Making Art in América, con acento"

1991   Douglas Crimp, "Portraits of People with AIDS"

1990   Chandra Mohanty, "Cartographics of Struggle:  On Specifying 'Third World Feminisms"

1989   Ngugi wa Thiong'O, "Language and Liberation"

1988   Michael Denning, "People's Theater/Radio Pictures: The Politics of Citizen Cane"

1987   Henry Louis Gates, "White Power and the Black Critic"

1986   Hayden White, "The Rebirth of Rhetoric"

1985   Beatriz Sarlo, "Intellectual Field-Politics and Fiction in Argentina (1976-84)"

1984   Robert Gonzalez Echevarria, "Socrates Among the Weeds:  Blacks and History in Carpentier's Explosion in a Catherdral"