Susan McHugh delivers endowed lecture in the U.K.

Susan McHugh, Ph.D., professor of English, delivered the Christine Bolt Memorial Lecture in American Studies at the University of Kent, U.K., on May 8, 2013.

An annual event, the Bolt Lecture honors leading-edge interdisciplinary scholarship in U.S. literature, history and culture.  McHugh’s talk, titled “Unsettling the Dead: Natives, Americans, Genocides, and Extinctions,” related national iconography and contemporary fictions of cultures and species subjected to mass killings in North America. The talk is part of a larger research project investigating contemporary representations of how historical human-animal relationships once at the center of cultures became points of vulnerability under colonization.

While in the U.K., McHugh also gave a public lecture at the University of Cardiff, Wales, focusing on contemporary Inuit narratives of the events popularly known as the Mountie Sled Dog Massacre.  She also served as a respondent at “Unruly Creatures 3,” an academic symposium at the Natural History Museum in London.