UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Monica Popescu, associate professor and William Dawson Scholar of African Literature at McGill University, will present “Mythologies of Realism and Modernism: African Literature and the Cold War” at 12:15 p.m. on Monday, March 25, in 102 Kern Building on Penn State’s University Park campus.
Popescu is the author of “South African Literature Beyond the Cold War,” which won the 2012 Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities, and “The Politics of Violence in Post-Communist Films,” and the co-editor of a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing on Alternative Solidarities: Black Diasporas and Cultural Alliances during the Cold War. Together with Katie Zien and Sandeep Banerjee, she is the co-editor of the Routledge Studies in Cultures of the Global Cold War. She has published articles on African culture and the Cold War, post-communist cultures, and post-apartheid literature and nationalism, which have appeared in journals like Studies in the Novel, Research in African Literatures, Current Writing, and The Yale Journal of Criticism. She is currently finishing a book manuscript titled “African Literatures, Postcolonial Cultures and the Cold War,” which is under contract with Duke University Press.
This event is a part of the Comparative Literature Luncheon lecture series, a weekly, informal lunchtime gathering of students, faculty and other members of the University community. Each week the event begins at 12:15 p.m. — lunch is provided. At 12:30 p.m. there will be a presentation, by a visitor or a local speaker, on a topic related to any humanities discipline. All students, faculty, colleagues and friends are welcome.
For a full list of Comparative Literature lunches, visit http://complit.la.psu.edu/news-events/comp-lit-luncheon-series. This event is sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature, the Center for Global Studies, the Weiss Chair of the Humanities, and the African Studies Program.