The English Department will host guest lecturer Jonathan Alexander, associate professor of English, at the University of California at Irving, today in Ellis 214 at 3 p.m.
The title of his speech is Jean Cocteau
Queerness Multimodality and focuses on how Cocteau used his style of writing to give intricate representations of queerness.
Ohio University graduate students already have asked Alexander questions online about his works that they have studied in class, but undergraduates have not had much exposure to Alexander's work in the classroom because there is no one teaching a specific queer theory class in the English department, said Mara Holt, professor of rhetoric and composition at OU.
That doesn't mean that undergraduates won't benefit from his lecture, she said. He's sort of a transgressive pro-democracy
pro-freedom poet
and I believe the Internet has possibilities for democratic freedom that plain print text doesn't have and he (Alexander) demonstrates that
Holt said.
Alexander has focused his research on digital media, rhetoric, composition, and he also writes poetry.
He's a very well-known scholar in rhetoric
composition and computer sciences
and he's combined all of that with his expertise in queer theory to make something different
Holt said.
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