“Work and Contemporary Literature” Discussion Series
Class will host three discussions on new books about work
Join senior seminar and graduate class “Work and Contemporary Literature” for three discussions on new books about work. Authors will join us virtually on Wednesday evenings in PAHB 216 at 5:30 pm.
October 7: Amy De’Ath, Assistant Professor of English at Tufts University, will discuss Behind Our Backs: Feminized Poetry and Capitalist Abstraction (Stanford University Press, 2026). In this daring study, De'Ath develops a new type of literary criticism attuned to the way our lives are shaped by capital's impersonal compulsions – by what happens "behind our backs."
November 4: Annie McClanahan, Associate Professor of English at University of California, Irvine will discuss Beneath the Wage: Tips, Tasks, and Gigs in the Age of Service Work (Zone Books, 2025). If service work has often been treated as a footnote to modern capitalism, Beneath the Wage reveals it as crucial to understanding how exploitation functions today. McClanahan retheorizes capitalism from the perspective of the service economy, challenging conventional assumptions about how work is waged, regulated, managed, and automated.
November 18: Sarah Dowling, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at University of Toronto, will discuss Here is a Figure: Grounding Literary Form (Northwestern University Press, 2024). The prostitute, the protester, the murder victim, the invalid, the layabout, the depressive: all are associated with lying down. In this study of supine, prone, and recumbent figures in contemporary literature, Dowling reads these figures in dialogue with critical Indigenous studies, disability studies, and horizontalist feminisms, to reveal the potential in thinking with and through a position stretched out across, dependent on, and undetachable from the earth.
This mini-series is sponsored by The Dresher Center in partnership with the Departments of English; Language, Literacy and Culture; and American Studies. All are welcome to attend.
Posted: September 22, 2026, 4:44 PM
