TEACHING AND UNDERSTANDING AUTOBIOGRAPHY• AUSTIN
HUMANITIES TEXAS TEACHER PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT WORKSHOP
Byrne-Reed House • 1410 Rio Grande Street • Austin
Thursday, October 29, 2015
7:45–8:30 a.m.
Check-in and breakfast
8:30–8:45 a.m.
Opening remarks
Eric Lupfer, Humanities Texas
Portrait of Frederick Douglas Date
unknown. Collection of the New–
York Historical Society .
8:45–9:45 a.m.
The Autobiographical Tradition
Carol MacKay, The University of Texas at
Austin
9:45–10:00 a.m.
Break
10:00–10:45 a.m.
Subscribing (to) the Self: Authorship
and Reception of the American Personal
Narrative
Evan Carton, The University of Texas at Austin
10:45–11:30 a.m.
True Stories and True Lies: How to Read a
Memoir
Elizabeth McCracken, The University of Texas at
Austin
11:30–12:15 p.m.
Lunch
12:15–1:00 p.m.
The Ancestral Journey to Now: Reading &
Writing Memoir in Search of the Cosmic Self
Carl Van Vechten, Portrait of Zora
Neale Hurston, April 3, 1938. Library
of Congress Prints and Photographs
Division.
Portrait of Benjamin Franklin, painting
by Joseph–Siffrein Dupleissi. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.
John Phillip Santos, The University of Texas at San
Antonio
1:00–2:00 p.m.
Critical reading seminars
2:00–2:15 p.m.
Break
2:15–3:15 p.m.
Critical reading seminars
3:15–3:30 p.m
Closing announcements
THIS WORKSHOP IS MADE POSSIBLE WITH MAJOR FUNDING
FROM THE STATE OF TEXAS AND ONGOING SUPPORT FROM THE
NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES.
TEACHING SHAKESPEARE • AUSTIN
EVAN CARTON holds the Joan Negley Kelleher Centennial Professorship in the Department of English at The University of Texas at Austin. His principal research areas include nineteenth-­‐ and twentieth-­‐century U. S. literature and culture, the history of literary criticism, and literary pedagogy. He is the author of The Rhetoric of American Romance (1985), The Marble Faun: Hawthorne’s Transformations (1992), and Patriotic Treason: John Brown and the Soul of America (2006); the co-­‐author with Gerald Graff and Robert von Hallberg of The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 8: Poetry and Criticism, 1940–
1995 (1996); and the co-­‐editor with Alan W. Friedman of Situating College English: Lessons From an American State University (1996). Between 2001 and 2009, he served as the founding director of UT Austin’s Humanities Institute. His current interests include the role of new pedagogical methods and new technologies in the teaching of large-­‐section introduction to literature classes and the role of Africa in contemporary American fiction. CAROL HANBERY MACKAY is the J.R. Millikan Centennial Professor of English Literature at the University of Texas at Austin, where she primarily teaches courses on Victorian novels, Women’s and Gender Studies, and autobiography. She is the author of two books, Soliloquy in Nineteenth-­‐Century Fiction: Consciousness Creating Itself (1987) and Creative Negativity: Four Victorian Exemplars of the Female Quest (2001), as well as editor of The Two Thackerays: Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s Biographical Introductions to the Centenary Edition of the Works of William Makepeace Thackeray (1988) and Dramatic Dickens (1989). Her most recent book-­‐length publication is a critical edition of Annie Besant’s first autobiography—
out of print since 1885—Autobiographical Sketches (2009). She is also the recipient of a number of teaching awards, including the Harry Ransom Teaching Award, the Presidents’ Associates Award for Teaching Excellence, and the Regents Outstanding Teaching Award. She has been a member of the Distinguished Teaching Academy since 2003. ELIZABETH MCCRACKEN is the author of two collections of short stories, two novels, and a memoir. She teaches at The University of Texas at Austin, where she holds the James A. Michener Chair in Fiction. JOHN PHILLIP SANTOS is a widely published author and media producer who has produced documentaries and news programs in sixteen countries for CBS and PBS. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the San Antonio Express-­‐
News, the Manchester Guardian, Texas Monthly, and numerous other publications in the U.S., Mexico, and Europe. Santos was the first Latino to be elected as a Rhodes Scholar and holds degrees in English Literature and Language from Oxford University, and Philosophy and Literature from the University of Notre Dame. Santos’s memoir Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (Viking/Penguin) was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1999, and the inaugural selection of the 1 Book 1 San Antonio project in 2006. His collection of poems Songs Older Than Any Known Singer was published in 2007 by Wings Press, and the sequel to his memoir, The Farthest Home is in an Empire of Fire, was published by Viking/Penguin in 2010. Since 2010, he has been University Distinguished Scholar in Mestizo Cultural Studies, teaching in the Honors College at the University of Texas San Antonio.