BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//wp-events-plugin.com//7.4.3//EN TZID:America/Los_Angeles X-WR-TIMEZONE:America/Los_Angeles BEGIN:VEVENT UID:367@1718.ucla.edu DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220210T160000 DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220210T170000 DTSTAMP:20220111T153013Z URL:https://1718.ucla.edu/events/wip-george/ SUMMARY:Works-in-Progress session: “Regency Noir: Romance\, Race\, and th e Rise of 'The Woman of Colour'” DESCRIPTION:by Leigh-Michil George (English/Humanities Educator\, Departmen t of English\, Geffen Academy\, UCLA)\n\nRespondent: Lauren Dembowitz\, (U niversity of Colorado\, Boulder)\n\nPresented online via Zoom meeting. Ple ase register to attend:\nhttps://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwrde2tpjk sG9weq8OG1KdWS_2q6xDxK0cD\n\nThis talk reimagines the term “Regency Noir ” as encompassing two different strands of Regency romance-inspired narr atives which foreground Black characters. The first strand of Regency Noir follows historical events\, while the second strand presents alternative history storylines. An example of the first type is Vanessa Riley’s nove l Island Queen (2021)\, based on the life of Dorothy Kirwan Thomas\, a fre e woman of color\, while Shondaland’s Bridgerton series (2020– )\, ada pted from Julia Quinn’s romances\, represents the second type. The term “Regency Noir” is examined within the recent outgrowth of scholarship on the anonymous novel The Woman of Colour (1808). In The Woman of Colour\ , the mixed-race Jamaican-born heroine Olivia Fairfield\, following the wi shes of her deceased white planter father\, travels to England to marry he r cousin Augustus Merton. The novel\, published a year after the passage o f the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act\, looks towards ameliorating the co ndition of those still enslaved in British colonies. At the end of novel\, Olivia returns to Jamaica\, unmarried\, but not unfulfilled. She seeks to educate those who are enslaved and she desires the end of slavery. By sit uating recent (re)tellings of Black women’s lives in Regency-era Britain against the background of The Woman of Colour\, we see how today’s scho larship (for example\, the “critical fabulation” of Saidiya Hartman or “reading along the bias grain” in Marisa Fuentes’ words) has inform ed the work of Vanessa Riley and Shonda Rhimes. At the same time\, the ses sion considers how scholars of the period may learn from the reimagined an d alternative histories presented in Island Queen and Bridgerton.\n\nLeigh -Michil George (she/her/hers) teaches in the English Department at Geffen Academy. She received her B.A. in Art History from Georgian Court Universi ty\, her M.F.A. in Screenwriting from American Film Institute\, and her Ph .D. in English from UCLA. Her current book project focuses on representati ons of sensibility and laughter in caricature and the novel in the long ei ghteenth century. Her research has been supported by the William Andrews C lark Memorial Library\, the Lewis Walpole Library\, and the Huntington Lib rary.\n\nLauren Dembowitz is a Lecturer in English at the University of Co lorado\, Boulder. Her research examines representations of the Black Venus figure in eighteenth-century British and contemporary African American po etry\, performance\, and visual culture to explore Atlantic entanglements of race\, gender\, commerce\, and intimacy. Her article\, “Plagiarizing Tropes of Womanhood and Literary Passing in Pauline Hopkins’s Hagar’s Daughter\,” was published in American Literary History. She has a for thcoming chapter on race and visual culture in the Cambridge Companion to Romanticism and Race (Cambridge UP\, 2024) based on research supported by the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://1718.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/11 /LMGeorge-1-_website.jpg CATEGORIES:Lectures END:VEVENT BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/Los_Angeles X-LIC-LOCATION:America/Los_Angeles BEGIN:STANDARD DTSTART:20211107T010000 TZOFFSETFROM:-0700 TZOFFSETTO:-0800 TZNAME:PST END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE END:VCALENDAR