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Guest English Professor and Literary Scholar to Present Talk

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. — Illinois Wesleyan University’s International English Honor Society, Sigma Tau Delta, will welcome guest speaker Molly Ball, to present a talk, “Sick White Men: The Time of Neurasthenia in Naturalist Texts” on Thursday, Nov. 29 at 4 p.m. in State Farm Hall Room 203.

Assistant Professor of English at Eureka College, Ball teaches courses ranging from composition, to American and Gothic literature, to science fiction and citizenship. Ball said in every course she teaches, she urges “students to consider how a text’s form impacts its content, and how form can bring texts into larger social debates.”

Having earned a doctorate in English from the University of California-Davis in 2016, Ball’s research interests include narrative form, queer and feminist theory, and literature produced in and around the 19th-century United States. Her work has been featured in multiple publications, including the ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, and GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. She is currently working on a project that examines how literatures of social protest alter narrative investments in progressive time over the course of the 19th century.

Ball’s lecture is part of Sigma Tau Delta’s initiative to continue the English writing tradition by inviting literary scholars, speakers and writers to campus.

By Vi Kakares ’20