This Friday: Lisa Hager on Steampunk, Gender Nonconformity, and Victorian Studies

[John Savarese]

Dear colleagues, students, and friends,

Please join English Language & Literature this Friday for a talk by Lisa Hager (University of Wisconsin-Waukesha), who will be giving a talk titled “Towards a Queer Literary History of Gender Identity: Steampunk, Gender Nonconformity, and Victorian Studies.”

As an alternate history genre, steampunk literature builds its worlds by answering the “what if?” question of science fiction and fantasy with a re-imagining of nineteenth-century history and literature and engaging with cultural discourses of the day. Indeed, one of the primary methods by which steampunk enacts and revises the Victorian is through its deployment of period aesthetics and its thematisation of the relationship between aesthetics and technology. Through a reading of comingled aesthetics and technology in Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan trilogy, this talk will consider how the series suggests a more trans- and nonbinary-inclusive vision of how Victorian studies might conceptualise nineteenth-century gender identities and, in so doing, will contend that such a critical approach ultimately provides the field with provocative and productive methodological questions.

Dr. Hager’s talk will take place at 1:00 pm in PAS 2438, and is free and open to the public. Please feel free to forward this email and the attached poster to any interested parties.

—
John Savarese
Assistant Professor
Department of English Language and Literature
University of Waterloo
https://uwaterloo.ca/english/people-profiles/john-savarese

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