Talk Examines Literature, Gender, Immigration

Cheri Larsen Hoeckley, Westmont professor of English, examines the crossover between migration of people, literature and gender issues in a talk, “Redundant Women and Expatriates: Victorian Women Writers Abroad and the Language of Global Sojourning,” Tuesday, March 21, at 7 p.m. in Hieronymus Lounge at Westmont’s Kerrwood Hall. The Gender Studies Lecture is free and open to the public.

Larsen Hoeckley will reference works by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, and Charlotte Brontë to uncover and examine issues of migration and refugees. “Their books ‘Aurora Leigh,’ ‘Daniel Deronda,’ and ‘Villette,’ each written about 150 years ago, all represent women living as immigrants,” Larsen Hoeckley says. “The language we use to describe people living away from their birth country can influence our willingness not only to welcome those people, but also to see the contributions those sojourners often make to their new home countries.”

Larsen Hoeckley, who has taught at Westmont since 1997, is a specialist in Victorian studies and gender studies. Her current projects concern the intersection of faith, gender and sexuality. She graduated from UC Riverside, earned a Master of Arts at the University of Texas at Austin and a doctorate at UC Berkeley. She edited “Shakespeare’s Heroines” (Broadview, 2005) and authored “The Dynamics of Forgiveness and Poetics in Adelaide Procter’s ‘Homeless’” (Literature Compass 2014).