Event in honor of Vivian Pollak

Event in honor of Vivian Pollak

We would like to invite you to an event celebrating the work of our colleague Vivian Pollak on Thursday, May 5, 2022 at 4:00 pm. This is an occasion to honor Vivian’s contributions to the study of nineteenth-century American literature, the English Department, and the University.

We have invited Rafael Walker, Assistant Professor at Baruch College, to speak. Rafael was Vivian’s undergraduate student and wrote his undergraduate thesis under her supervision. The talk, “Biraciality as Neuter: Jean Toomer’s Cane,” is based on his current book project.

Vivian’s former PhD student Tarah Demant, Interim National Director of Programs, Government Affairs, and Advocacy at Amnesty International, will offer brief closing remarks before Vivian reads a poem or two.

The event will be followed by a reception honoring Vivian’s career at Washington University over the last twenty-seven years.

Vivian Pollak has written field-defining monographs on the work of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Her work has paid special attention to poetry and poetics, to literary biography, and to questions of gender and sexuality. Her books include Dickinson: The Anxiety of Gender (1984), The Erotic Whitman (2000), and Our Emily Dickinsons: American Women Poets and the Intimacies of Difference (2017), which was nominated for the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association. Her current projects include an essay on “Walt Whitman and Muriel Rukeyser Among the Jews” for the Oxford Walt Whitman Handbook and an essay for the Cambridge History of Queer American Literature on “Queer Mythology from Whitman to Frost.”