Jill Richards: “Specters of the Present Tense: Anti-Bildungsroman and the Women’s Revolution in the Era of the Second International”

February 4, 2014

Tuesday, February 4, 2014  LC 317, 4:00 p.m.  Jill Richards is a graduate student in the English department at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation project, “Fire-Starters: Women’s Rights, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes,” explores the intersection of radical women’s movements, early forms of socialism, and aesthetic experiments that imagined themselves in the service of revolution. Moving from the military trials of the pétroleuse to queer resistance cells active during World War II, the dissertation argues that women’s rights movements and the avant-gardes offered one another a conceptual language to re-imagine subjects exceptional to the “rights of man and citizen.” These dialogues, the dissertation argues, present a radical alternative to liberal human rights discourses in formation at the same historical moment, one that re-imagines citizenship beyond the institutions of the nation-state. A second book project considers the ways that international austerity measures beginning in the 1970’s have affected the historical and aesthetic category of another seeming exception to the “rights of man”: the adolescent. Her published or forthcoming articles can be found in Camera Obscura, Journal of Modern Literature, Victorian Poetry, The Volta, and The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism.

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