Leсture: “Post-Secularism and American Literary Studies”

Welocme to a lecture by Dr. Bryce Traister, Professor of English, Faculty of Creative & Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus.

Bryce Traister studies and teaches courses in early American literature and culture. He holds a BA and PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and taught for 20 years at Western University in London, Ontario. He is the author, most recently, of Female Piety and the Invention of American Puritanism, published by Ohio State University Press, and is the editor of American Literature and the New Puritan Studies, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in September 2017. His current work includes a second edited collection for Cambridge, The Cambridge Companion to Early American Literature, and a new monograph project on the history of anti-vaccination rhetoric in the United States—it’s a very long history! In 2016-2017 he was an Eccles-BAAS Fellow in Early American Literature at the British Library

During today’s talk Dr. Bryce will address the issues covered in "American Literature and the New Puritan Studies" book, which contains thirteen original essays about Puritan culture in colonial New England. Prompted by the growing interest in secular studies, as well as postnational, transnational, and postcolonial critique in the humanities, American Literature and the New Puritan Studies seeks to represent and advance contemporary interest in a field long recognized, however problematically, as foundational to the study of American literature. It invites readers of American literature and culture to reconsider the role of seventeenth-century Puritanism in the creation of the United States of America and its consequent cultural and literary histories. It also records the significant transformation in the field of Puritan studies that has taken place in the last quarter century. In addition to re-reading well known texts of seventeenth-century Puritan New England, the volume contains essays focused on unknown or lesser studied events and texts, as well as new scholarship on post-Puritan archives, monuments, and historiography.

#lecture #literature #americanstudies