Convened by Dr. Patricia A. Matthew, dialogues are scheduled for March 10th, March 24th, April 14th, and April 21st.

Travis Chi Wing Lau and Marcos Gonsalez will be in conversation on April 21^st and will talk about how their research informs their public writing (Marcos’ first book was included in a recent review essay in The New York Times).

Marcos Gonsalez is an essayist and assistant professor of English living in New York City. Marcos’ memoir featuring literary criticism and cultural analysis, Pedro’s Theory, is out now with Melville House. Marcos’ essays have appeared in Literary Hub, Public Books, Inside Higher Education, Ploughshares, Catapult, ASAP/Journal, The New Inquiry, and elsewhere.

Travis Chi Wing Lau joined the Kenyon faculty in 2020 and is Assistant Professor of English. His research and teaching focuses on the intersections between literature and medicine and the longer histories of disability and pathology. Lau is currently working on a book manuscript entitled “Insecure Immunity: Inoculation and Anti-Vaccination, 1720-1898”, which explores the British cultural history of immunity and vaccination in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Alongside his scholarship, Lau frequently writes for venues of public scholarship like Synapsis: A Journal of Health Humanities, Public Books, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. His poetry has appeared in Barren Magazine, Wordgathering, Glass, The New Engagement and in two chapbooks.

Convener: Dr. Patricia A. Matthew, UB CDI Distinguished Visitin Scholar, associate professor of English at Montclair State University, is a specialist in nineteenth-century British literature and culture and an expert on faculty diversity and inclusion. She is the editor of Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure (University of North Carolina Press). Her work has also been published in journals including European Romantic Review, Women’s Writing, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, and PMLA and in the art and culture magazines The Atlantic and Lapham’s Quarterly. Her diversity and inclusion work has been featured in The Chronicle of Higher Education,  The Los Angeles Review of Books,  and New York Public Radio’s The Brian Lehrer Show.  She regularly leads workshops, delivers keynotes, and shares her research in public lectures. She is currently writing a book on sugar, protest, and British abolitionist culture and writing a series of essays on race and contemporary adaptations of Jane Austen’s world.

Sponsored by
The Boston University Center for the Humanities and the Univ. at Buffalo College of Arts & Sciences, Humanities Institute, and James H. McNulty Chair of English Myung Mi Kim

Presented by Boston Area Romanticist Colloquium and the University at Buffalo