The Americanists Reading Group is pleased to host a seminar on Tuesday, September 23, at 5:00 pm, by Dr. Christopher Looby, Professor of English at UCLA. Dr. Looby's talk, "Of Billy's Time" will explore the relationship between queer sexuality, historicism, and narrative organization in Herman Melville's classic novella, Billy Budd, Sailor.
Dr. Looby works on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature, with special focus on queer studies, cultural history, and print culture. He is the author of The Complete Civil War Journal and Selected Letters of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000) and Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998).