English conference will address 'Contact, Contagion and Containment'

José María Rodríguez-García, assistant professor of Romance studies at Cornell, is the keynote speaker for the Fourth Annual English Graduate Spring Conference, "Contact, Contagion and Containment," which will take place Friday and Saturday, March 4 and 5. The conference will be held in the Goldwin Smith Lounge (Room 258) in Goldwin Smith Hall.

Rodríguez-García will deliver his talk, "Translation, Migration, and Transference in William Carlos Williams," at 11:45 a.m., following introductory comments from James Adams, director of English graduate studies. The talk and the conference are free and open to the public.

Presenters will explore the literary, cultural, and theoretical notions of contact, contagion and containment. The conference will feature not only scholarly papers, but works of poetry and fiction as well. Presenters include graduate students from Cornell, New York University, Harvard University, York University and the University of Michigan, among other institutions. Panel topics range from discussions of corrupted bodies in literature and narratives of imperial contact to fiction readings about the (un)natural environment and explorations of sexuality.

For a complete conference schedule visit the Web site: http://www.arts.cornell.edu/english/Conference_Schedule.html.

Rodríguez-García joined the Department of Romance Studies as assistant professor of Spanish literature in 2002. He received his Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Colorado-Boulder. Before coming to Cornell in the fall of 2002, he held appointments at several universities in his native Spain. He teaches courses in 19th- and 20th-century Spanish and Spanish-American poetry and nonfiction prose. His current research focuses on the impact of John Keats' poetry and poetics on major 20th-century Hispanic authors, from Colombian Guillermo Valencia to Spaniard Carlos Bousoño, as well as on Octavio Paz's contacts with, and appropriation of, Anglo-American poetic traditions. He has also published several essays on the poetry of Garcilaso de la Vega and on the enlightenment polymath Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, and has an ongoing interest in the work of William Carlos Williams, to which he has devoted numerous scholarly articles.

The conference is sponsored by the Department of English, the English Graduate Student Organization and the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly Finance Commission.