Since 2006, the speaker has been teaching at Williams College, which was ranked in 2014 by Forbes magazine as # 1 on its annual ranking of “America’s Top Colleges” and by U.S. News and World Report as # 1 on its list of national liberal arts colleges. In this talk, the speaker will discuss both the potentials and realities of a liberal arts curriculum, which is unique to the American higher education system. The promises of such a humanistic education echo in many ways the mythic promises of the American Dream. But as with “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, some partake freely and benefit enormously while others are excluded. The speaker argues that the actuality of a liberal art education reflects to a large degree the limits of (white) liberalism.

 

 

Dorothy Wang is an Associate Professor in the American Studies Program and Faculty Affiliate in the English Department at Williams College. Her book Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry was published by Stanford University Press at the end of last year. It received an Honorable Mention this year for the first annual Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism, given by The Poetry Foundation. In April of this year, the University of Montana's Writing Program held a three-day conference based on Thinking Its Presence. Wang's research focuses on Asian American literature; twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry and poetics, particularly experimental minority writing; and Anglophone Chinese diasporic writing.

 

Wang previously taught in the English departments at Northwestern University and Wesleyan University. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of California at Berkeley, an M.A. in poetry writing from Johns Hopkins University, and an M.P.A. from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. She worked for two years at Newsweek magazine before starting her Ph.D.

 

 

该讲座使用语言为英文。

 

欢迎各院系感兴趣的教师和研究生以及校外师生踊跃参加并参与讨论！

 

 

******本演讲由“清华大学海外学者邀请聘请支持计划”全额资助，特此感谢。

 

(This lecture is financially supported by the Tsinghua Global Scholars Fellowship Program. ）