Hello RISE Supporters!
We are delighted to welcome Dr. Paula Moya, who will be sharing some of her work with us in a talk titled: “No unraveling the rope”: Murder, Music, and Mirth in Louise Erdrich’s The Plague of Doves.
Thursday, April 16, 2026
12:00 - 1:15pm CT
In-person: Norris University Center, Arch Room (2-264)
1999 Campus Drive, Evanston, IL
Abstract:
In this talk, Paula Moya focuses on prize-winning author Louise Erdrich’s novel The Plague of Doves to address several inter-related concerns that run throughout her substantial body of work. Noting Erdrich’s tendency to employ multiple narrators, Moya discusses the narrative choices Erdrich makes, and the motifs she uses, as she revises several previously published short stories into the novel. Much like her master-storytelling character Seraph (Mooshum) Milk, Erdrich tells and retells her stories to serve particular dialogical purposes. At stake is not only how “history works itself out in the living,” but also how those who share Erdrich’s ancestral heritage might accept their own complicated place among the inheritors of the pain and trauma resulting from the land dispossession of Native Americans in the Northern Midwest.
Speaker Bio:
Paula M. L. Moya is the Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor of the Humanities at Stanford University where she is appointed as Professor of English and, by courtesy, of Iberian and Latin American Cultures and African and African American Studies.
Moya is the author of two books: The Social Imperative: Race, Close Reading, and Contemporary Literary Criticism and Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles. She also co-edited three collections of original essays: Doing Race:21 Essays for the 21st Century; Identity Politics Reconsidered; and Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism.
This year, Moya is on sabbatical leave as the Ellen Andrews Wright Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center where she is working on a manuscript entitled “Dark Aesthetics: The Decolonial Possibilities of Multifocal Narratives,” from which this presentation is drawn.
This presentation will take place in-person (Norris Center, 2-264 Arch Room). Please RSVP via link provided.
We look forward to seeing you as we continue another exciting season of RISE Colloquia!
Cost: N/A
Danesha Binkowski
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