Ziarek to Deliver IREWG Lecture at UB

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, newly appointed Julian Park Chair in the Humanities in the Department of Comparative Literature in the University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences, will discuss feminist theory and the militant suffrage movement at the annual UB Institute for Research and Education on Women and Gender (IREWG) Distinguished Faculty Lecture.

The lecture, which will be free and open to the public, will be held at 4 p.m. Feb. 3 in the Screening Room of the Center for the Arts on the UB North (Amherst) Campus.

The talk, titled "'You Have Kept Us from the 'Joy' of the Revolt': Feminist Theory and the Militant Suffrage Movement," aims to recover the contributions of the British suffrage movement to a broadly conceived political theory of subjectivity, sexuality and antagonism.

Ziarek's teaching and research interests focus on the intersection of feminist theory and politics, ethics and aesthetics, and on 20th-century literature and literary theory. She is the author of "The Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction of Skepticism, Reinvention of Modernism" (SUNY Press, 1995) and "An Ethics of Dissensus: Postmodernity, Feminism and the Politics of Radical Democracy" (Stanford, 2001), as well as editor of "Gombrowicz's Grimaces: Modernism, Gender, Nationality" (SUNY Press, 1998).

Prior to joining the UB faculty, Ziarek was professor of English and gender studies at the University of Notre Dame. She is completing a new book, titled "Feminist Aesthetics: Art, Gender and Race in Modernity."