Nicholas Birns--fall update 2015

Just an update on activities in the recently concluded summer and recently commenced fall--this summer I had an enjoyable five weeks in China lecturing and conferencing in Shanghai, Beijing, and Hohhot, followed by a week in Shropshire, Denbighshire, and Cheshire also conferencing and lecturing. Today I am off to Leuven, Belgium, for a talk at the Catholic University there and a conference on the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Anthony Trollope. I am chairing and opening a panel on Trollope and the Antipodes there. Speaking of the Antipodes, my book on contemporary Australia literature, with a very little bit on New Zealand, is in the final stages of copy editing at Sydney University Press and should be released in the next six weeks. As we have seem recently, Australia  is in great political tumult, and, though I do not make specific references in the book to current politicians, my book does show why Australia right now is a very relevant places for discussions of such issues as neoliberalism, social inequality, and whether we have ever been modern. Another book of mine, co-edited with Nicole Moore and Saraj Shieff, is called Options for Teaching Australian Literature and will come out in 2016 from the Modern Language Association, 

I have also been able to do some traveling in the US, visiting western Pennsylvania, Washington, DC, and various parts of New Jersey over the summer. In late October, I will go to the Cincinnati area for the annual conference of the Guild of Scholars of the Episcopal Church. I will be speaking at Grace Church in NYC on October 4 and October 25 on St. Paul's Epistles to the Corinthians. 


I am continuing my work on Latin America, taking a more active role with the Council on Hemispheric affairs, speaking on Ricardo Palma and Asia at the Asians in the Americas conference in Philadelphia in November, and writing a chapter on the Peruvian literary criticism of late modernity for a major reference work on Peruvian literature. I will also be appearing at a forum on Roberto Bolaño at the New School on October 28 and continuing to edit, along with Juan E. De Castro, Roberto Bolaño as World Literature for Bloomsbury. 

  

I have begun my teaching for the fall and have a full slate of classes and, so far, highly enthusiastic undergraduate students. In October, I will begin the second half of my course on Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time at the New York Society Library. The 2016 conference of the Anthony Powell Society, at which I will be giving a plenary address,  \will be held in York in early April 2016 and the CFP is posted online. 

Finally, the 2016 conference of the American Association for Australian Literary Studies is being held in Seattle March 31-April 2 2016; I will be offering a paper on Eve Langley and Jeannie Gunn as novelists of settler mobility. 

I am also beginning organizing for a third Interim Shared Eucharist in the greater New York area between the Episcopal Church and the United Methodist Church, this one to be held in New Paltz, New York; this is a follow-up to the Eucharist held at the John Street Church last March.