UNC Asheville to host three free Critical Perspectives lectures this spring

Press release from UNC Asheville: 

UNC Asheville will host three virtual author lectures throughout the spring semester. The first two public lectures, both in March, will consider the recently published novel, Even As We Breathe, with scholar Kirstin Squint and the novel’s author, Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, respectively. The series will conclude with literary scholar Toril Moi.  All events are free and available to stream live through Zoom.

Kristin Squint, Whichard Visiting Distinguished Professor at East Carolina University, will present her lecture, “Native Southern Literature and EBCI Author Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle,” at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 24. She has published and lectured on Native American literatures and cultures and U.S. multi-ethnic literatures, particularly in the Southeast. She is a contributor to the award-winning Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy, and is the author of LeAnne Howe at the Intersections of Southern and Native American Literature and Swamp Souths: Literary and Cultural Ecologies.

Author Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle will discuss her novel, Even As We Breathe, at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 31. Clapsaddle, the first enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) to publish a novel, holds degrees from Yale University and the College of William and Mary. Her first novel manuscript, Going to Water, is winner of The Morning Star Award for Creative Writing from the Native American Literature Symposium (2012) and a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction (2014). After serving as executive director of the Cherokee Preservation Foundation, Clapsaddle returned to teaching English and Cherokee studies at Swain County High School.

Toril Moi, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Literature at Duke University, will conclude the series with her lecture, “A Wittgensteinian Phenomenology of Criticism,” at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, April 22. Moi’s scholarship includes feminist theory and women’s writing; the intersection of literature, philosophy and aesthetics; and ordinary language philosophy in the tradition of Wittgenstein, Cavell and Austin. She is the author of a number of books, including Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory; Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman; What Is a Woman? And Other Essays; and Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell.

For more information and to register for these events, visit unca.edu/events.