This Fall the English Department is excited to welcome Duke alum, Lucy Corin, as Visiting Blackburn Professor and UC Irvine scholar, Ryan Ku, as Asian American Postdoctoral Associate. Professor Corin will teach creative writing and Professor Ku will teach a course in Asian American Studies.
Lucy CorinLucy has a BA from Duke University and an MFA from Brown. She’s a Professor at the University of California, Davis where she teaches in the English Department and Creative Writing Program.
She is the author of two short story collections One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses (McSweeney's Books, 2013); The Entire Predicament (Tin House Books, 2007), and the novel Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls (FC2 in 2004). Her work has appeared in journals including American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, Conjunctions, and Tin House Magazine, and in anthologies such as New American Stories (Vintage Contemporaries). She was an American Academy of Arts and Letters John Guare Writers Fund Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome in 2012-13 and won a 2016 fellowship in literature from the NEA. Lucy was the 2017 Reynolds Price Fiction Series featured guest.
At Duke this Fall, Lucy Corin will be teaching the following courses:
English 221S.01
Intro to the Writing of Fiction
Wednesdays 3:20 p.m. – 5:50 p.m.
This course will introduce students to conventional wisdom about the craft of fiction—both its uses and abuses.
ENGLISH 421S-01
Advance Workshop Writing Fiction
Thursdays 3:20 p.m.- 5:50 p.m.
The goal of this course is to gather together a group of students equally dedicated to learning about fiction writing, students who want to develop a writing practice they can carry into their lives beyond class and who read challenging fiction because they like it.
Ryan KuRyan Ku, a Ph.D. from the University of California at Irvine (2017), holds his doctorate in Comparative Literature works on critical theory; postcolonial, race, class, and sexuality studies; and Asian/Filipino/American literature. In addition to his Ph.D., Ku received his MA in Philosophy and Comparative Literature from Louisiana State University (2009) and his bachelors in Economics from The George Washington University (2004).
Ryan’s current book project, “Wounded Language/Time,” explores how various identities—hegemonic and minor, Asian and American, in the US and across the Pacific—linked by the Filipino—minor among minorities—involve processing the trauma of US empire through a study of literature as the working through of history. Influenced by semiotics, genealogy, and pragmatics as poststructuralist reading practices, Ryan is more broadly interested in economies (“real” and sublimated), space/time, utopia/dystopia, war, identity, queerness, and democracy.
Through attention to the radical origins of minority positions in the context of empire, Ryan aims to queer geographies and identities in pursuit of theoretical and comparative Asian/American studies.
At Duke this Fall, Ryan Ku will be teaching the following course:
ENGLISH 290-7.01/Literature 290S
ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE
Tuesdays and Thursdays 4:40 p.m. - 5:55 p.m.
This interdisciplinary course is a critical introduction to the multiple, heterogeneous histories, cultural productions, and experiences that shape the lives of Asians in the U.S.
The English Department is looking forward to having both Lucy and Ryan with us.
English Department
