+Sara & Jess Cloud Lecture Series
In 2004 Sara Cloud made a bequest to support a lecture series in the Department of English to honor the achievements and perpetuate the memory of Dr. Jess Cloud, accomplished poet, author, scholar, and former development officer and teacher in the College's Honors Program. Selected speakers are of national renown and may be outstanding scholars in the areas of Dr. Cloud’s achievements and scholarship: poetry, the Renaissance, and sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and twentieth-century literature.
Sara Cloud's bequest also supports the Sara & Jess Cloud Professorship in the English Department. We are enormously grateful to her for all her generosity.
Cloud Lecturers:
2023, Susheila Nasta MBE FRSL is Founding Editor of Wasafiri, the Magazine of International Contemporary Writing she launched in 1984 and edited till 2019. Educated in India, Holland, Germany, and Britain, she is currently Emerita Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literatures at Queen Mary University of London. Well-known as a pioneer in decolonising the curriculum, she has published widely, especially on women’s writing, the Caribbean, the South Asian diaspora, and black Britain. Her books include: Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain (2002), Writing Across Worlds: Contemporary Writers Talk (2004), India in Britain (2012), Asian Britain: A Photographic History (2013), Brave New Words: The Power of Writing Now (2019), and the co-editing of the first Cambridge history of Black and Asian British Writing (2020). She is currently completing, The Bloomsbury Indians, a group biography. Judge of a number of literary prizes, including the 2018 OGM Bocas Award for Caribbean Literature, the 2021 David Cohen Prize for a lifetime’s work and the 2022 Saif Ghobash Prize for Arab Literary Translation, she has led a number of major arts and humanities public engagement projects; in particular for over a decade, she led a major research team and curated several exhibitions on the contributions South Asians have made to Britain in the period 1850-1950. The exhibitions toured to eight Indian cities and displayed in the UK and Europe. Honoured with an MBE in 2011, in 2019 she received the Royal Society of Literature’s distinguished Benson Medal for her exceptional contribution to literature (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benson_Medal) In 2020 she was nominated Honorary Fellow of the English Association for her work in English Studies and remains literary executor of the major Caribbean and black British writer Sam Selvon.
2020, Juana Maria Rodriguez is Professor and Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of two books, Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (NYU Press, 2003) and Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (NYU Press 2014) which won the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize at the Modern Language Association and was a Lambda Literary Foundation Finalist for LGBT Studies. In 2019, she co-edited a special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly on "Trans Studies en las Americas." In addition to her publications in academic journals internationally, her work has been featured in Aperture; NPR’s Latino USA, NBC.com, Canadian News Network, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Cosmopolitan for Latinas. She is completing a book on visual culture and Latina sexual labor, under contract with Duke University Press.
2019 [postponed due to pandemic], Susheila Nasta FRSL MBE is Founding Editor of Wasafiri, the Magazine of International Contemporary Writing. Recognised for its promotion of the early works of some of the world’s now most distinguished writers, Wasafiri celebrated its 35th anniversary in 2019 and its 100th issue. An activist, postcolonial critic and scholar, Professor Nasta is currently Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literatures at Queen Mary College, University of London. She has published widely, especially on the Caribbean, the South Asian diaspora and black Britain. Recent books include: Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain (2002), Writing Across Worlds: Contemporary Writers Talk (2004), India in Britain (2012), Asian Britain: A Photographic History (2013) and the co-editing with Mark Stein of the first Cambridge history of Black and Asian British Writing which stretches from 1800 to the present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Jan 2020). In 2019 she also completed the compilation of Brave New Words: The Power of Writing Now (Myriad Books 2019), an essay collection highlighting the vital significance of critical thinking in current times and marking Wasafiri’s 35th anniversary. She is currently completing a group biography, The Bloomsbury Indians. Judge of a number of literary prizes, she was honoured in 2011, when she received an MBE for her services to black and Asian literature; and in 2019, when she was elected Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and awarded the 2019 Benson Medal for exceptional contribution to literature.
2018, Mary Jean Corbett is the University Distinguished Professor of English at Miami University (Ohio). Her research interests include nineteenth-century English and Irish writing, feminist and postcolonial theory, and women's writing. She has published numerous articles in journals including Twentieth-Century Literature, English Literary History, and Victorian Review; and published essays in books including Replotting Marriage in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, edited by Jill Galvan and Elsie Michie, and The Politics of Gender in Trollope: New Readings for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Regenia Gagnier, Deborah Denenholz Morse, and Margaret Markwick.
Professor Corbett is the author of four monographs, most recently Behind the Times: Virginia Woolf in Late-Victorian Contexts. Each of Professor Corbett’s books has been recognized as deeply important, from the early brilliance of Representing Femininity: Middle-Class Subjectivity in Victorian and Edwardian Women’s Autobiographies through the groundbreaking Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing, 1790-1870: Politics, History, and the Family from Edgeworth to Arnold to the influential Family Likeness:Sex, Marriage, and Incest from Austen to Virginia Woolf.
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2016, Catherine Robson specializes in nineteenth-century British cultural and literary studies. Her work |
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![]() 2014, Mark Edmundson, Professor of English, UVA, a scholar of 19th-century British and American poetry, is also a public intellectual whose work appears regularly in the New York Times, the Chronicle, Harper's, The American Scholar, etc |
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2012, Susan Morgan is Distinguished Professor of English and Women's Studies Affiliate at Miami![]() University. She received her Ph.D. from University of Chicago and taught at Cornell University, Stanford University, California Institute of Technology and Vassar College before coming to Miami in 1991. Her critical books include In the Meantime: Character and Perception on Jane Austen's Fiction (1980), Sisters in Time: Imagining Gender in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (1989), and Place Matters: Gendered Geography in Victorian Women's Travel Books about Southeast Asia (1996). She is the author of many articles and has edited three Victorian travel memoirs: Anna Leonowens's 1873 The Romance of the Harem (1991), Marianne North's 1892 Recollections of a Happy Life, Vol 1 (1993), and Ada Pryer's 1892 A Decade in Borneo (2001). Her awards include an NEH Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and the Jane Austen Society of North America North American Scholar Award. At Miami University she was appointed Distinguished Professor in 2000 and has also received the Outstanding Professor Award, the Distinguished Scholar Award and the Outstanding Scholar of the Graduate Faculty Award. Bombay Anna: The Real Story and Incredible Adventures of The King and I Governess, a biography of Anna Leonowens, was published in 2008 by University of California Press, with a paperback in 2009, a second, significantly revised edition (published by Silkworm Books) in 2010, and a Thai translation in 2011. |
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2010, Geoffrey Harpham, president and director of the National Humanities Center in Research ![]() |
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2009. Harvard Professor of English Leah Price gave a talk entitled, "From the History of the Book to ![]() |
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2008. Emory University Professor of English Craig Womack is the author of Red on Red: Native ![]() |
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2006. Marjorie Perloff, the first Cloud Lecturer, has been for 30 years a leading critic and scholar in![]() |