Mark your calendars! You are invited to attend:
Emily Dickinson at the County Fair: The Land Grant College and the Birth of Agricultural Capitalism presented by Maria Farland
The CEAH is hosting its fall lecture with speaker Maria Farland, Associate Professor at Fordham University. Attendees will have the opportunity to learn about Farland’s research and participate in a Q&A.
This lecture charts the affinities between the Dickinson family's involvement in the founding of the land grant college, the Massachusetts College of Agriculture, and related agricultural modernization efforts: scientific education, the invention of new plant species, the improvement of soil conditions, and the rise of technical expertise. Farland argues that Dickinson’s poems took shape around efforts to improve and remake farming in communities like Amherst. Dickinson’s poems often critique the highly speculative agricultural ventures that engaged her family, along with the new forms of rural expertise (botany, horticulture, and geology) that took hold in Amherst and other communities in these years. Poems like “A faded Boy—in sallow Clothes” and “Perhaps you’d like to buy a flower” depict a highly unstable rural world, and the poet’s multiform responses—comedic, satiric, somber—to these upheavals in the agrarian economy.
A specialist in U.S. literature from 1850-2000, Maria Farland has taught at Johns Hopkins, Columbia, and Wesleyan Universities before accepting a permanent position at Fordham University in New York City. Her forthcoming book, Degraded Heartland: Antipastoral, Agricultural Reform, and the Rural Modern in U.S. Literature, 1840-1950 (Johns Hopkins UP), is a history of ideas of rural backwardness in terms of antipastoral as a literary mode. Inspired in part by the Trump administration and our heightened awareness of rural-urban divisions, it is a literary and cultural history of ideas of rural inferiority, as seen in shocking events like the Eugenics Survey of Vermont. She is currently completing a study of the antipsychiatry movement and post-1945 U.S. literary representations of mental breakdown, around neoliberal models of healthcare privatization in the 1950s-1980s decades.
Date: Thursday, September 26
Time: 5:00–6:30pm
Location: 2155 Marston Hall
Refreshments will be served.
Attendance is free and registration is not required. Contact ceah@iastate.edu with questions.
