April 18: Schocket Memorial Lecture by Lisa Henderson

Hampshire College invites the public to the Sixth Annual Eric N. Schocket Memorial Lecture on Class and Culture on Thursday, April 18, at 4 p.m. in Franklin Patterson Hall (Main Lecture Hall). The 2013 lecturer is Lisa Henderson, whose talk is entitled "Queers and Class: Toward a Cultural Politics of Love and Solidarity."

Professor Henderson is the author of Love and Money: Queers, Class and Cultural Production (NYU Press). She is a professor and former chair of the department of communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She holds a doctorate in communication and sociology from the University of Pennsylvania.

Essays by Professor Henderson have been published in collections and journals such as Signs, Journal of Communication, GLQ, Feminist Media Studies, and Screen.

Professor Henderson's research interests include cultural production, sexual representation, feminist media studies, and cultural studies of social class. In most projects, these categories combine and redefine each other while addressing questions of personal, community, and institutional power and autonomy. Her work also addresses questions of feeling, identification, and everyday life, in as deeply and broadly contextualized a way as she can, and in the spirit—when it makes sense—of optimism and social solidarity.

Hampshire's annual Schocket Lecture honors the memory of Eric Schocket, who taught American literature at the College from 1996 until his death in 2006. He was a much-admired teacher and colleague, and his courses inspired a decade of students. Nationally, he was a leading figure in working-class studies. His writings on figures like Herman Melville, Rebecca Harding Davis, William Dean Howells, and Langston Hughes engaged the important relationship between class and culture. His book, Vanishing Moments: Class and American Literature, was published in 2006.

For more information on the Schocket lecture, please email lmcdaniel@hampshire.edu or call 413.559.5362.