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Department of English

Robert & Lillian Drake Lecture Series

The Robert & Lillian Drake Lecture Series was established in 2002 in the College of Arts and Science to fund annual lectures in the English Department. The series presents opportunities for students to engage in emerging debates and new methodologies as they hone their research, expand their networks, and gain fresh perspectives from leading scholars and practitioners.

Spring 2026

Shelby Johnson

Friday, March 20
10:00 – 11:00 AM
Divinity 127

“Dreaming Sacagawea”

Across the thousands of pages that comprise the 18modern volumes of William Clark and Meriweather Lewis’s journals on the Corps of Discovery (1803-1806), Sacagawea appears in just a hundred passages. Although she may be the most well-documented Indigenous woman of the early 19th century, few of these entries referred to her by name. By contrast, in many public parks, museum exhibits, and popular images she emerges with immense, but static, legibility. She appears as an archetype of what Patricia Vettel-Becker names “America’s maternal feminine,” for she is always portrayed walking thousands of miles while carrying her child—a posture largely invented by white suffragettes in the early 20th century. In its aspiration to do more than merely recount the sedimentations of sexual violence and settler expropriation deposited by the expedition’s records and popular mythology, this presentation forges another itinerary for writing about Sacagawea’s life, one that subsumes colonial regimes of verifiable “facts” with other ways of knowing. I imagine what it could look like to write over and tear through the empirical “truths” assembled in Lewis and Clark’s journals, as well as her overdetermined mythology in popular images, with the lived experiences of Sacagawea’s community, human and otherwise.

Photo of Shelby JohnsonShelby Johnson is an assistant professor of English at Oklahoma State University, where she researches and teaches on sexuality, race and, environmental studies in the long eighteenth century. She is the author of “The Rich Earth between Us: The Intimate Grounds of Race and Sexuality in the Atlantic World,” which analyzes the works of Black and Indigenous writers in the Atlantic World and examines how their literary production informs “modes of being” that confronted violent colonial times. She was co-editor of Unsettling Sexuality: Queer Horizons in the Long Eighteenth Century (Delaware University Press, 2024), and her work has appeared in MELUS, English Language Notes, and The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation. She is at work on Climates of Consent: Population Relocation, Cooperative Movements, and Slow Violence, 1783-1840, which investigates imperial configurations of consent and coercion that animated both large-scale population relocations of communities of color and the organization of white cooperative movements. She holds a PhD in English from Vanderbilt.

Keegan C. Finberg

Friday, February 27
2:00 – 3:00 PM
Divinity 127

“Reproduction and Generality: Feminist Diets in Poetry by Bernadette Mayer, Adrian Piper and Eleanor Antin”

This talk will examine feminist performance art and poetry that experiments with food intake to consider effects of the political economic welfare conditions of the 1970s. Speaking directly to the tightening of food assistance and health care service in the US, Bernadette Mayer, Adrian Piper, and Eleanor Antin use constraint as a public form to center hunger as resistance. These experiments can be seen as part of a trajectory of artwork that expands what we consider poetry and how we think about the public good.

photo of Keegan FinbergKeegan Cook Finberg is an assistant profess or English and affiliated faculty in Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies and Language, Literacy, and Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore Country. Her first book of criticism, Poetry in General, How a Literary Form Became Public, about the transformation of the welfare state in the United States after 1960, was just published by Columbia University Press. Her next book will be about the changing state surveillance culture, poetic forms, and myths about the family. Her academic essays about poetry, urban space, and queer practice have been published in Textual Practice and Canada and Beyond, and her public scholarship has appeared in Jacket2, The Rumpus, The Believer, and elsewhere. Her debut poetry chapbook, The Thought of Preservation (Ursus Americanus Press 2019), considers the language of polite racism and misogyny in online social forums for neighborhoods undergoing gentrification.

Previous Lectures

  • Ros Ballaster, University of Oxford, “Being There: The Fiction of the Presence in 18th Century British Theatre & Novels,” 2018
  • Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University, “Weak Network: Melville, C.L.R. James, Frank Stella,” 2015
  • Soraya Miller, UC Santa Cruz, “Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination, 2025”
  • Mariah Min, Brown University “Desperate Measures Call for Desperate Times: Richard Coer de Lyon and the State of Exception,” 2025
  • Cannon Schmitt, University of Toronto, “Literal Reading; or, How to Be Taken in Everything,” 2019
  • Tiffany Stern, University of Oxford, “Such Place, Such Men, Such Language And Such Ware: The Theatre of London’s Fairs,” 2014
  • Elisa Tamarkin, University of California – Berkeley, “Resurrection and Reconstruction,” 2022