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Department of English

Robert & Lillian Drake Lecture Series

About the 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.

Fall 2025

Image of Mariah MinMariah Min

Friday, October 17, 12:00PM

Divinity Library 211

“Desperate Measures Call for Desperate Times: Richard Coer de Lyon and the State of Exception”

The Middle English Romance Richard Coer de Lyon considers the crusades to be an emergency that necessitates extreme measures. Simultaneously, the enormity of Richard’s transgressions is what works to supposedly prove the Crusades are a difficult task; desperate measures and desperate time ontologically produce each other in a closed loop of exigency.

Mariah Min is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Brown University. Her research concerns the cultural output of the Late Middle Ages in Britain and interlinked regions, centering on characterization and portrayals of identity formation, in particular literary depictions of race. Her current book project, Figure Writing: Technologies of Character in Medieval Literature, examines medieval literary characters in order to disentangle the longstanding conflation of character and human subjectivity within both critical and popular discourse. She is also at work on a second project about the memorializing functions of cannibalism.

 

Image of Soraya MurraySoraya Miller

Friday, October 24, 12:00PM

Divinity Library 211

“Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination”

For this lecture, Soraya Murray contemplates the pivotal figure of the Black technologist, also known as ‘Black tech,’ in technothriller films. This work is part of Murray’s forthcoming Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination (MIT, 2026), the first examination of popular movies classified as “thrillers” that channel societal anxiety or dread about advanced technologies like supercomputers, robotics, AI, biotech, military weaponry, and digital surveillance.

Technothriller traces the changing imagination of technology within an American context and its role in engineering some of the most profound ideologies of modern life. Murray considers beloved but often underrated films from the 1970s to the present, like The Andromeda Train (1971), Westworld (1973), Rollerball (1975), Demon Seed (1977), WarGames (1983), The Hunt for Red October (1990), Jurassic Park (1993), Clear and Present Danger (1994), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), the Mission: Impossible franchise (1996- ), Ex Machina (2014), Tenet (2020), M3GAN (2022), and The Creator (2023) in order to think through deeply embedded popular beliefs about technology, innovation, and their imaginaries—in other words, the mechanics of power within our technological lives and the troubled, sometimes catastrophic relationships between humans and their innovations.

Dr. Murray is Associate Professor in the Film and Digital Media Department at UC Santa Cruz.

Recent Lectures

  • Grant Farred, Cornell University, “Monstrous Hands: Thinking Martin Heidegger” (2022)
  • Elisa Tamarkin, UC – Berkeley, “Resurrection and Reconstruction” (2022)
  • Cannon Schmitt, University of Toronto, “Literal Reading; or, How to Be Taken in Everything” (2019)
  • Ros Ballaster, University of Oxford, “Being There: The Fiction of the Presense in 18th Century British Theatre & Novels” (2018)
  • Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University, “Weak Network: Melville, C.L.R. James, Frank Stella” (2015)
  • Tiffany Stern, University of Oxford, “Such Place, Such Men, Such Language And Such Ware: The Theatre of London’s Fairs” (2014)