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W&L’s Annual Shannon-Clark Lecture Features University of Michigan Professor

The Washington and Lee University Department of English will present the 2008 Shannon-Clark Lecture on Thursday, Oct. 16, at 8 p.m. in the Stackhouse Theater in the Elrod Commons. A reception will immediately follow in the Elrod Commons Outing Club Room, Room 114.

Valerie Traub, professor of English and Women’s Studies and director of the Women’s Studies Program at the University of Michigan, will give a lecture titled “Mapping Embodiment in the Early Modern West.”

The lecture is free and open to the public.

An expert in the literature of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Traub is a leading scholar of the history of sexuality, especially female homoeroticism in the early modern period. Her books include Desire & Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (Routledge 1992) and The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge 2002); and two co-edited volumes: Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects (Cambridge 1996) and Gay Shame (Chicago, forthcoming).

She has published articles as well as edited collections in GLQ, English Literary Renaissance, and Shakespeare Quarterly, among others. Her essays have been widely reprinted.

Traub has held fellowships at the Newberry Library and Folger Library and has twice won the Modern Language Association Lesbian and Gay Caucus Crompton-Noll Award for best essay. In 2006, she received the John H. D’Arms Faculty Award for Distinguished Graduate Mentoring in the Humanities from the University of Michigan.

Traub earned her bachelor’s degree at the University of California-Santa Cruz, and her master’s and doctorate degrees at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She has taught at Swarthmore College, Vanderbilt University, and, since 1996, the University of Michigan.

The Shannon-Clark Lectures, established by a gift from a Washington and Lee alumnus who wishes to remain anonymous, honor the memories of Edgar Finley Shannon, chairman of Washington and Lee’s Department of English from 1914 until his death in 1938, and Harriet Mabel Fishburn Clark, a grandmother of the donor and a woman vitally interested in liberal education.

Pennsylvania Campaign.”

Retreat from Gettysburg received the Bachelder-Coddington Award for the best book on the Gettysburg Campaign and the Battle of Gettysburg, the U.S. Army Historical Foundation Award for Distinguished Writing and the Dr. James I. Robertson Jr. Literary Prize.

Brown is also the creator and first editor of “The Civil War” magazine.

Brown received his B.A. from Centre College in Danville, Ky., and his J.D. from Washington and Lee University School of Law.

Brown will be in the Lee Chapel Museum Shop before his talk from 10-11:30 a.m. for a book signing and preview of his Emmy- and Telly-nominated DVD, “Retreat from Gettysburg.”