Established in 2023, the Len Tennenhouse Lecture honors Professor Leonard Tennenhouse, who retired at the end of the 2022 Fall semester. Tennenhouse joined the Duke English faculty in 2008, and during his tenure, he served as department chair, interim DUS, and on numerous departmental and university committees. His areas of research included Shakespeare and American and British literature, which were often the focus of the courses he taught during his decade and a half at Duke.
"Lukács and Baldwin: A Conversation Between Novel Theory and Black Studies"
Brown University Professor Tim Bewes presented "Lukács and Baldwin: A Conversation Between Novel Theory and Black Studies" for the inaugural Len Tennenhouse Lecture. A capacity crowd joined Bewes for his lecture focused on the first of a projected three essay study of "Race and the Novel."
Julius Fleming delivered this year’s Tennenhouse-Armstrong Lecture. Fleming, an Associate Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, gave the audience a glimpse into his current project, “Empire After Civil Rights: Race, Outer Space, and the New Geographies of Colonialism.”
Recently, Duke English hosted the third annual Tennenhouse-Armstrong Lecture. This year's guest lecturer was Blue Devil alum Nathan K. Hensley, who received his PhD in English from Duke University, and is currently a professor at Georgetown University. Hensley presented a lecture titled “The Women on the Stairs: Gesture, Improvisation, Solidarity,” which centered around his recent book, Action without Hope: Victorian Literature after Climate Collapse.
The lecture highlighted the enduring importance of thinking and art, even — and maybe especially — when the world around you feels almost beyond repair. Hensley talked about paintings and literary art from the nineteenth century. He presented to the audience how these early thinkers felt through early premonitions that the modern world they saw developing was destined to fail at some level.