Deborah Madsen Collège lectures: January 2020
Professor Madsen made two visits to collèges in Geneva, in January 2020:
“ 'Indians' – Witches – Communists – Terrorists: The Spectral Enemies of American Exceptionalism” was presented to three different class groups at Collège Madame de Staël. This talk offered historical and cultural contexts for two texts studied by the class: Arthur Miller's play The Crucible and Mohsin Hamid's novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist. “Poetry and US Settler Colonialism” was presented at Collège Voltaire to a third-year Maturité class. This talk, which was not related to a specific text studied by the class, focused on two poems -- Robert Frost's "The Gift Outright" and Heid Erdrich's Anishinaabe response to Frost in "The Theft Outright" -- to explore tensions between Indigenous and US settler forms of literary expression.