Eileen Gillooly to Speak about "Dickens, Our Contemporary" on March 21

“Dickens, Our Contemporary”—Wednesday, March 21, 3:30 p.m., Hodges Special Collections Reading Room, Jackson Library 2nd Floor
Professor Eileen Gillooly, Associate Director of the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University

Professor Gillooly will discuss Dickens’s continuing transatlantic, trans-cultural, and trans-historical appeal, which, like Shakespeare’s, has much to do with the essentially dramatic quality of his imagination. She will consider the ethical and therapeutic power of role-playing for Dickens, for his characters, and for the reader in some scenes from his novels.

Eileen Gillooly specializes in 19th-century British literature and culture; gender and psychoanalytic studies; 19th-century moral psychology; and 19th-century British colonial literature and culture. She is the author of Smile of Discontent: Humor, Gender, and Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (University of Chicago Press, 1999)—which was awarded the Perkins Prize by the International Society for the Study of Narrative (2001)—and of numerous articles and essays.

Her appearance at UNCG is sponsored by the Atlantic World Research Network.