English professor leads off Arts and Humanities October lectures

The College of Arts and Humanities 2005-06 lecture series, “Intellectual and Artistic Exploration” will include two presentations in October.

On Thursday, Oct. 6, Dr. John Beynon, assistant professor of English at Fresno State, will speak on "Tea and Sodomy" from 7-8 p.m. in the Conley Lecture Hall.

On Friday, Oct. 14, the Roger Tatarian Journalism Symposium will be hosted by the Department of Mass Communication and Journalism.

Although a rare commodity in 17th century England, tea had become the national beverage by the end of the 18th century. Beynon's scholarship examines a body of literature that manifests anxiety over the ways in which tea was presumed to pervert the national, gender and sexual identities of 18th century British subjects.

Benyon has been a member of the English department since 2000. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degree at the University of Utah and his Ph.D. at the University of California, Riverside. He teaches courses in Restoration and eighteenth-century British literature and culture, and in lesbian and gay literature.

He served as assistant editor for “The Encyclopedia of Gay Histories and Cultures” (Garland 2000) and has recently published essays on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and “Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.”

His current projects include co-editing an anthology of scholarship on same-sex desire between women in 18th century Britain and a study of the role tea plays in early modern British culture.

He has presented numerous papers on topics relating to 18th century discourses of desire, aesthetics, consumerism and colonialism. Currently he co-chairs the Lesbian & Gay Caucus of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and he is the faculty advisor for United Student Pride, an organization for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender students at Fresno State.

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