Purdue University North Central will welcome Dr. Elizabeth Evans for a lecture entitled “Virginia Woolf's Airplanes: Air Power and Aerial Views Between the World Wars,” on Feb. 17 in Technology Building Room 301. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Evans, assistant teaching professor at the University of Notre Dame, will examine how the growing importance of military air power affected art and literature in Britain during the years between World War One and Two. Evans’s research focuses specifically on the work of the feminist writer Virginia Woolf, who experiments with the airplane as model for novelistic point of view in her novels “Mrs. Dalloway” and “The Years.”
In a recent essay that appeared in the journal “Modern Fiction Studies in 2013,” Evans argues that Woolf is both attracted to and troubled by the aerial point of view – she admired its aesthetic possibilities but was disturbed by its seemingly necessary links to warfare.
This lecture, sponsored by the Chancellor’s Diversity Fund, will appeal to students and community members interested in subjects as diverse as British and European literature, women writers and the history of the world wars.
Evans is an active member of the community of Woolf scholars and recently edited a volume of essays from the annual international conference on Woolf. She is currently working on a book about aerial views in British and Anglophone writing from the early twentieth century to the present.
Further information can be obtained by contacting Dr. Heather Fielding, PNC Assistant Professor of English, at hfieldin@pnc.edu or 219-785-5327.