CANCELED: New Faculty Reading

Join us next spring to hear from our new assistant professors!
Head and shoulders photos of three people, all with shoulder-length dark hair
New professors Aamina Ahmad, Megan Giddings, and Jessica Horvath Williams
Event Date & Time
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Event Location
412 Pillsbury Hall

310 Pillsbury Dr SE
Minneapolis, MN 55455

Unfortunately we have had to cancel this event. It will be rescheduled for spring 2023.

Hear from the three new assistant professors welcomed to the Department of English in 2022-2023! Aamina Ahmad and Megan Giddings, who joined the Creative Writing Program this fall, will read from their 2022 novels. Jessica Horvath Williams, who begins teaching in spring 2023, will share new scholarship.

The event is free and open to the public. No reservations or tickets necessary. For questions about accessibility services and the venue, please email sutt0063@umn.edu or call 612-626-1528. This event will also stream live on the English YouTube channel.

Aamina Ahmad is the author of the novel The Return of Faraz Ali (Riverhead), published April 2022. Her short fiction has appeared in One Story, The Southern Review, The Normal School, The Missouri Review, Ecotone, and the anthology And the World Changed. Her play The Dishonored was produced by Kali and toured the UK in 2016. She has received a Pushcart Prize and a Rona Jaffe Writer's Award.

Raised in London, Ahmad holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and received a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. She was Li-shen Visiting Writer at Mills College 2020-2021 and taught creative writing and English at San Jose State University.

Megan Giddings is the author of the novels The Women Could Fly (Amistad, 2022) and Lakewood (Amistad, 2020), the latter a Best Book of 2020 at New York Magazine and NPR, nominee for two NAACP Image Awards, and finalist for the 2020 LA Times Book Prize's Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculative Fiction. An essay of hers appears in The Lonely Stories, edited by Natalie Eve Garrett (Catapult, 2022).

In 2018, Giddings was a recipient of a Barbara Deming Memorial fund grant for feminist fiction. She holds an MFA from Indiana University-Bloomington and served as visiting assistant professor of Creative Writing at Michigan State University.

Jessica Horvath Williams earned her PhD in English Literature from UCLA in 2020, and is the co-chair of the Critical Disability Studies Collective at the University of Minnesota. She researches at the intersection of feminist disability studies and 19th-century US history and literature, with particular emphasis on domestic and slave labor and early eugenicist discourse. Her current project investigates how female ideality served as a precursor for the development of three ideologies commonly critiqued by critical disability studies: the individual responsibility for health, the absence of futurity for disabled people, and the role of wage labor in the construction of (dis)ability. Williams was a President's Postdoctoral Fellow for the Departments of English and Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies.

Masks encouraged. Staff and visitors are reminded to wash hands often, get tested, and stay home when ill or exhibiting symptoms of COVID-19.

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