The seminar on “Adaptation and Cross Cultural Appropriation” included a diverse, interdisciplinary and international assembly of scholars. Presentations explored the adaptation of literature and the appropriation of cultural forms in classical, Islamic, European, Asian, Latin American, U.S., and African and African Diaspora literature, philosophy and film.  The panel encompassed the writings of Aristotle, Averroës, Hafez, Rumi, Byrd, Jefferson, Emerson, Dreiser, Hurston, Borges, Alammedine and Coelho, as well as topical discussions of appropriations of Native American and South Korean cultures and adaptation and appropriation in the contemporary films A Better Tomorrow, Haider, and Inception.

Hairston’s paper, “Watching What God(s) Exactly? Classical Influence in the Works of Zora Neale Hurston,” examined Hurston’s classical training and classical allusions in her works. Hairston contextualized her work within the broader African American uses of the classics and tensions between adaptation and appropriation and racial authenticity and identity in 20th and 21st century writing. 

The American Comparative Literature Association, founded in 1960, is the principal learned society in the U. S. for scholars whose work involves several literatures and cultures, as well as the premises of cross-cultural literary study itself.  ACLA also supports Comparative Literature, the oldest journal in the field.

Hairston was selected as a 2014-15 Virginia Foundation for the Humanities Fellow and has spent the spring in residence at VFH.  Open to scholars and writers in the humanities, VFH fellowships are awarded annually for recipients to pursue projects with the support of a stipend, offices at the VFH, access to University of Virginia libraries and resources and UVA faculty status.  Fellows present regularly on the topics of their research and have the opportunity to participate in the many programs of the VFH, including the Virginia Festival of the Book and the radio program With Good Reason. 

Hairston presented his research findings on classical influences on African American literature, which he is conducting for his book project The Shadow of Olympus.  The volume will examine the continuing influence of the works of antiquity on African American writers in the 20th and 21st centuries. The project demonstrates that modern and contemporary black writers have continued a nuanced, multigenerational intellectual engagement with the classics, crafting complex cosmopolitan, global and multicultural positions, while working within the historic American racial context.

In January, Hairston’s most recent publication, The Ebony Column: Classics, Civilization and the African American Reclamation of the West (University of Tennessee Press, 2013), which inaugurated the Classicism in American Culture Series at UT Press, was named a . Publications selected for the distinction reflect overall excellence in presentation and scholarship, importance relative to other literature in the field, distinction as a first treatment of a given subject in book or electronic form, originality or uniqueness of treatment, value to 消消犯 students and importance in building 消消犯 library collections.

Hairston contributed the major historical and analytical entry on African-Americans, as well as entries on The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and the Chinese Exclusion Act.  

Hairston’s next work, The Ebony Column: Classics, Civilization, and the African-American Reclamation of the West, is slated for publication in early 2013 by The University of Tennessee Press.

The image of Thomas Jefferson as passionate gardener and man of the soil is firmly entrenched as an aspect of the myth of the great sage of Monticello. But a deeper look at the generation of the “founding farmers” reveals a more complex portrait, as Jefferson’s “chosen people,” his celebrated yeoman farmers, were, in fact, abandoning the state in droves, unable to cope with the combination of ruined soils and adverse market forces. Placing the multiple dependencies produced by tobacco cultivation at the center of her inquiry—dependencies on the drug itself, on plantation slavery and a ruinous method of cultivation, on fickle global market forces—Hamilton explores these “hidden wounds” and evaluates anew the powerful counterexamples provided by Jefferson peers such as George Washington and John Hartwell Cocke: men who were able to “kick the tobacco habit,” restoring and nourishing their soils with diversified, sustainable cultivation methods, while creating new relationships within the plantation “family” with their rejection of slavery.

Kendra Hamilton is a poet, essayist, and a scholar of the literature and culture of the South. Hamilton has degrees from Duke University, Louisiana State University, and the University of Virginia and is published in journals such as Callaloo, the Southern Review, Southern Cultures, and Shenandoah. Hamilton’s research, writing, and advocacy related to fragile (coastal) environments and endangered indigenous communities have attracted the interest and support of foundations such as the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities (2012-2013), the International Center for Jefferson Studies (2011), the Skinner Foundation (2008-2009), and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio program 2006. Recent work on the Gullah/Geechee from her scholarly book in progress, Code-Switching: Vernacular Visions in the Age of Porgy and Bess, is forthcoming in Mississippi Quarterly. In addition, she has a poetry collection, The Goddess of Gumbo (2006)  and is featured in such recent anthologies as Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry (2012), Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (2009), and Shaping Memories: Reflections of 25 African American Women Writers (2009).
 
 

Wheatley’s volume of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral, was the first African-American publication in America, but generations of literary critics resisted the idea that a black woman could produce classically-infused, rich verse or influence other American and European writers.

The editors of the volume note that “in recent decades, however, Wheatley’s work has come under new scrutiny as the literature of the eighteenth century and the impact of African American literature have been reconceived. In these never-before-published essays, fourteen prominent Wheatley scholars consider her work from a variety of angles, affirming her rise into the first rank of American writers.”

Information on the book can be found at .

Taylor was the first person exonerated after the creation of the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission. As part of their speech, Mumma and Taylor will address the question of how to rectify an imperfect system. The event is free and open to the public.
 

Shields, whose work is an interdisciplinary study of classics, American literature and culture, religion, and ethnic literature, will present “George Washington, the American Aeneas,” and explore the classical influences on the founding of America. 

Shields’ visit is sponsored by the Center for Law and Humanities and the Department of English.

The event is sponsored by Phi Alpha Delta, the Prelaw Program and The Center for Law and Humanities.
 

消消犯 interested in the European program can also contact Dr. Betty Morgan morganb@elon.edu.  General questions about Prelaw should go to Dr. Eric Ashley Hairston, ahairston@elon.edu.