English Professor Valerie Rohy will speak on "Gay Identity and the Act of Reading in The Well of Loneliness" for the College of Arts and Sciences spring 2013 Dean's Lecture, to be held Tuesday, March 12 at 5 p.m. in Memorial Lounge, Waterman Building.

Rohy, author of Impossible Women: Lesbian Figures and American Literature (Cornell, 2000) and Anachronism and Its Others: Sexuality, Race, Temporality (SUNY, 2009), will examine how Radclyffe Hall, author of the 1920s novel The Well of Loneliness, "argues that homosexuals are naturally and immutably different -- as we say now, 'born this way' -- yet the novel's scene of reading opposes that claim." This leads us, Rohy says, "to question theories of biological determinism, reframe paranoid notions of queer increase and consider new forms of gay identity."

A recording of the lecture will be made available at the college's online media blog and eventually at the College of Arts and Sciences website.

Information: (802) 656-0756.