A talk by Dr. Agata Szczeszak-Brewer
Georgetown University’s Global Irish Studies Initiative is proud to present:
“Queer Writing Against Fascism: Irish and Senegalese Literary Resistance”
A talk by Dr. Agata Szczeszak-Brewer
The Global Irish Studies Initiative is delighted to welcome award-winning writer Dr. Agata Szczeszak-Brewer to Georgetown University. The event will occur on Monday, November 3 from 6:30 – 8:00 pm in New North 311, Hilltop Campus. The talk is free to attend, and all are welcome, but reservations are required.
This event is a celebration of the recent publication of Dr. Szczeszak-Brewer’s newest book, Sex and Nation in Transatlantic Literatures. Sex and Nation examines the urgency for contemporary geopolitics to imagine new discourses of community against the backdrop of a rise in neo-nationalisms steeped in homophobic and misogynistic rhetoric. This book is published in a Bloomsbury Press series of which our program director, Professor Cóilín Parsons, is a co-editor.
About the talk:
Authoritarian and fascist regimes have historically relied on the image of a powerful, virile, and healthy male leader and defined women’s primary function as reproductive and domestic to create the myth of the nation rooted in the metaphorical currency of fertility, degeneracy, and homophobia. Global narratives, including those of Irish writer Patrick McCabe and Senegalese-French writer David Diop, queer the narrow concept of “nation” that is racialized and gendered. In this talk, Dr. Szczeszak-Brewer will explore how McCabe’s and Diop’s stories of marginalized sexualities mock political discourse that conflates national and human boundaries and resist the clarity and unity of nationalist myths.
About the author:
Dr. Szczeszak-Brewer was born and raised in Poland. She came to the U.S. as an MFA student and graduated with a Ph.D. in English from the University of South Carolina. Her publications include an award-winning memoir, The Hunger Book, scholarly books on 20th-century literature, as well as essays and short stories in Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Contrary Magazine, River Poets Journal, Entropy, Hektoen International: A Journal of Medical Humanities, and Wabash Magazine. She is the winner of the 2022 Gournay Prize and the 2019 Black Warrior Review Nonfiction Prize. The Hunger Book has been shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
Dr. Szczeszak-Brewer lives in Indiana, where she teaches at Wabash College and volunteers as a Court Appointed Special Advocate. She is the founder of Immigrant Allies .
Here’s how to pronounce her name: Agata Izabela Brewer