Professor Lissa Paul to Give Lecture on May 1st

"In Search of Eliza Fenwick (1766-1840): Or, the Trials and Tribulations of Writing a Life"

Wednesday, May 1, 5:00pm – 6:30pm
Location: SSE 1401

Open to the Public

The National Center for the Study of Children's Literature and the Department of English & Comparative Literature are proud to co-sponsor Professor Lissa Paul's lecture on Eliza Fenwick. Paul's lecture concerns her latest book project, which she originally intended to be a standard biographical “life” of Eliza Fenwick (1766-1840), what one might call a literary biography. However, over the course of her research and writing, Paul realized that a Possession-like narrative, something that entwines Fenwick's life story with Paul's own search for that life, provided the better structure. As Fenwick’s story is an adventure story, an immigrant’s story, a mother’s story, a writer’s story, and the story of an abolitionist slave-holder, its narrative structure is fraught, especially as there are missing pieces and complicated ethical questions to negotiate. Paul's talk is an attempt to navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of writing Eliza’s life. It is a public lecture, for students, faculty, and our community. 

Lissa Paul (Ph.D. York University) is a professor of education at Brock University. She is the author of Reading Otherways (1998), which was a finalist for the F. Harvey Darton Award for historical criticism. Her work on children’s literature has appeared in Signal, The Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, and The Horn Book, among others. Paul is a former co-editor of the children’s literature journal The Lion and the Unicorn and recently, with Philip Nel, co-edited the essay collection Keywords in Children's Literature (NYU Press).