OUSD
Presenters
On March 5 and 12, 2005, the Oakland Unified School District and the Interactive University Project will host a lecture/discussion for each of the four texts listed below. Below is a brief introduction to each presenter.
Please note that unless specifically stated, materials presented or linked to in other parts of this website have not been chosen or endorsed by the presenters; gathered from many sources, materials referenced at this site are a compliment to, not an extension of, the four oral presentations.
March 5, Night, Elie Wiesel — UC Berkeley Doctoral Candidate, Christine Hong
Christine Hong is a doctoral candidate in the English department at UC Berkeley. She has been honored with an Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, and designed a university-level reading-and-composition syllabus entitled “Bearing Witness: Contemporary Literature of Testimony” that will be included in the upcoming Teachers’ Guide for AP English Literature and Composition, from the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey. Ms. Hong specializes in late twentieth-century literature and focuses on the intersection of law, cultural representation, and politics in literature produced after World War II. Her dissertation is called "In What Way More Human?": Posttraumatic Subjectivity and Legal Authority in Contemporary Human Rights Literature.
March 5, Fallen Angels, Walter Dean Myers — OUSD English Teacher (ret.), Elizabeth Lay
Elizabeth Lay, was an English teacher and Chair of the department at Oakland Tech, and she is now an educational consultant for the district's New Teacher Support and Development program. She has also been a curriculum writer for the Oakland Museum of California since 1997, where her latest project involves writing supplementary lessons on the Vietnam War for high school history teachers.
March 12, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass — UC Berkeley Professor of English, Abdul R. JanMohamed
Abdul JanMohamed is professor of English at UC Berkeley; he writes about post-colonial fiction and theory; his work has explored the politics of literature and the nature of discourse in colonial and post-colonial cultures. Raised in Kenya, Mr. JanMohamed witnessed efforts there to eliminate indigenous cultures; in early work he tried to demonstrate “the importance of accounting for . . . the cultural resistance of the colonized.” In May 2005 Duke University will publish, The Death-bound-subject: Richard Wright's Archaeology Of Death. The new book explores how Wright’s characters are shaped and coerced living with the constant threat of violent death. The founding editor of the journal Cultural Critique, Professor JanMohamed is also the author of Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa, and a coeditor, with David Lloyd, of The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse.
March 12, Macbeth — UC Berkeley Professor of English, Janet Adelman
Janet Adelman is professor of English at UC Berkeley, the recipient of a UCB Distinguished Teaching Award, and a former department chairperson; her work has focused on English Renaissance Literature and Drama, Shakespeare in particular, and also on Gender and Sexuality Studies. She describes her dominant interests as, “psychoanalysis, gender, and race, usually practiced somewhere in proximity to Shakespeare, although I have been planning a long essay on Toni Morrison for some time. At the moment I am writing a book about issues of conversion, race, identity, and blood as they inflect the anxiety-fraught relation of Christian to Jew in The Merchant of Venice and elsewhere in the culture.” Professor Adelman’s books include: The Common Liar: An essay on Antony and Cleopatra (Yale studies in English); and most recently, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, "Hamlet" to the "Tempest" (Routledge). She is also the editor of, Twentieth Century Interpretations of King Lear: A Collection of Critical Essays. In addition to Shakespeare, she routinely teaches Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, and Toni Morrison.
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