Colleagues,

We will have our first colloquium of the year on November 6, 2023 at 12pm in University Hall 432. Dr. Lauren Sperandio Phelps<https://www.uta.edu/academics/faculty/profile?username=phelpsle> is a recent graduate of UT Arlington's English doctoral program, where she is currently a lecturer. Her talk is entitled "(Re)Fashioning Identities: Fashion, Dress, and the Modes of Feminist Critique in Women's Writing<https://centerfortheory.uta.edu/2023/10/18/lauren-sperandio-phelps-colloquium-11-6/>." Please share and circulate the attached flyer.

Thanks,
David


ABSTRACT: Dr. Lauren Sperandio Phelps examines how women writers during the modernist period used fashion as a mode of critiquing gender, race, and class oppression in their fiction. She will discuss how the extensive use of fashion imagery gave writers a tangible means of expressing their beliefs about women's place in turn-of-the-century American society. Both fashion and women's political positions were changing rapidly then, just as they are now. In our present moment of hyper consumerism, fast-fashion influencers, and social media politics, the fraught link between fashion and feminism is as relevant as ever. She argues that combining the two in fiction allowed women writers of the 1920s to critique issues of identity and agency for women in modern culture in ways still highly relevant to the 2020s.


Dr. David Arditi
Associate Professor of Sociology
Director of the Center for Theory
University of Texas at Arlington