Fall 2025 Lecture
“Drafting, Editing, and Imagination”
Presented by
Dr. John K. Young
Professor in the Department of English
2024-2025 Hedrick Outstanding Faculty Award Recipient
Thursday, October 16, 2025 | 4-5 pm | Drinko Library 349 and via Teams
Abstract:
Narrative theorists distinguish between “worlding the story”—how authors and audiences collaborate to fill out the spaces containing fictional characters and events—and “storying the world”—how people use narrative frameworks to interpret the “real” world. This lecture investigates the kinds of choices made by a range of 20th- and 21st-century writers as they have drafted and revised their fictional environments. Young also considers how editors, professional and otherwise, have intervened in the composition process, in ways that have both nurtured and interfered with the kinds of stories being produced. The talk will conclude by asking how we might revise the kinds of narratives circulated about American culture and history.
Lecturer Bio:
John Young has been teaching at Marshall since 2000. Publications include Black Writers, White Publishers (2006), How to Revise a True War Story (2017), The Roots of Cane (2024), Publishing Blackness (co-edited with George Hutchinson, 2013), and Approaches to Teaching Post-1945 Short Fiction from the United States (2026, co-edited with Jeehyun Lim).
Fall 2024
A World Perilous and Beautiful: The Life of Sigrid Undset
Presented by
Dr. Laura Michele Diener
Professor in the Department of History
2023-2024 Hedrick Outstanding Faculty Award Recipient
Thursday, September 26, 2024 | 4-5 pm | Drinko Library 402*
Abstract:
This talk will introduce the audience to the willful and passionate life of Sigrid Undset, one of Norway’s most beloved novelists. Born to an adventurous couple in the closing years of the nineteenth century, Sigrid grew up in a world poised for radical change—she would experience the Norwegian independence movement and women’s suffrage as well as the horrors of the two world wars. Her unconventional choices often shocked those who loved her—from her engagement to a married painter with three children, to her divorce, to her deeply controversial conversion to Catholicism. Self-educated and impoverished for much of her youth, she nevertheless forged a career as a novelist, and by the mid-1920’s, became an internationally- bestselling author due to her acclaimed Kristen Lavransdatter trilogy, which recounts the tumultuous life of a medieval woman who died during the Black Death. Sigrid won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928, and today remains one of only seventeen women holding the prize. Laura Michele Diener’s biography of Sigrid Undset is forthcoming with the University of Minnesota Press.
If you have questions about ASI lectures, please email ctl@marshall.edu.