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Keynote speaker: Dr. Michael Loudon

"Hearing Other Voices: Imagination and Identity in Just People"

Michael Loudon, Professor of English, has taught at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Illinois for the past twenty-two years. He completed his AB at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana and his MA and PhD at the State University of New York at Buffalo, writing his doctoral dissertation on William Blake's The Four Zoas. At EIU, he has taught courses on the British Romantic poets, 19th C. and 20th C. American literature, African American literature, Native American literature, Anglophone postcolonial literatures, cultural studies and criticism, and, with colleagues in the Department of Philosophy, the interdisciplinary courses Cultural Foundations I and II, which survey the sacred texts of the world's major religions. He studied Ghandian nonviolent resistance in India as an undergraduate, was Fulbright Professor of African American Literature in 1990-91 at the University of the West Indies--St. Augustine in Trinidad, and has taught recently at the University of Guam. His current research focuses on New Zealand writer Patricia Grace and the experience of Pacific Islanders during WW II. He enjoys hiking, gardening, writing poetry and listening to the blues.

Prof. Loudon's keynote address, "Hearing Other Voices: Imagination and Identity in Just People," will draw upon John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony. He will discuss how these works show that culture shapes (not determines) our identity, and that literary representation shakes and opens that shaping into possibilities to imagine our identities anew. Literary experience enables us to keep what works for us, to junk what does not and to invent what we need (or think we do) in order to be neither wholly constrained by cultural identity nor wholly isolated from it.