Learn how
sports literature has shaped attitudes about women athletes in a free lecture
at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.
Associate
professor of English Robert Sirabian will present “Playing the
Game: Women’s Sports in Fiction, Prose and Poetry” at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 18.
The talk is part of the year-long “Access to Opportunity” lecture
series at UW-Stevens Point and will be held in the Laird Room at the Dreyfus
University Center on campus.
Using excerpts
from novels, poems and non-fiction, Sirabian will explore the definition of a
female athlete vs. a male athlete and how athletes in literature have
transcended these classifications.
“Sports
literature about female athletes is an imaginative engagement with the issues,
feelings, attitudes and possibilities central to women who play the game,” said
Sirabian.
The lecture
series marks UW-Stevens Point’s hosting of the NCAA Division III Women’s
Basketball Final Four in March 2014, and centers on the access to opportunity
Title IX gave young women playing scholastic sports.
Sirabian
teaches writing and literature courses, with a primary interest in
nineteenth-century British literature. He is serving a research sabbatical
through the end of the spring semester. He has researched play theory and the
novels of Charles Dickens as well as nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism,
Armenian-American literature and sports and literature. He earned degrees at
Purdue University and the University of Michigan.