Christopher Reed, professor of English, visual culture and women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Penn State, will deliver the Bank Outstanding Teaching Award Lecture in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium at 1:15 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 31. The event is free and open to the public.
Reed is the latest recipient of the Malvin and Lea Bank Outstanding Teaching Award, which was established in 2012 to recognize excellence in undergraduate teaching by a full-time, tenured faculty member in the College of the Liberal Arts. Malvin Bank, a 1952 Penn State graduate with a degree in arts and letters, is an accomplished tax law attorney with Thompson Hine LLP.
Reed, who has been a member of the English faculty since 2007, teaches courses focused on the relationship between literature and visual culture, as well as courses for the Sexuality and Gender Studies Minor. He is also co-founder of the Department of English’s Marathon Read, an annual 24-hour event during which volunteers take turns reading selected well-known texts centered on a specific theme.
Reed’s scholarly work, meanwhile, explores topics as diverse as mass-produced paintings for interior decoration, street furniture designed to mark a gay neighborhood in Chicago, the relationship of British Vogue to emerging forms of queer culture in the 1920s, and the television show "Will & Grace." His primary focus has been on the Bloomsbury group. In his book, Bloomsbury Rooms for example, Reed explores how the domestic spaces created by the Bloomsbury artists relate to the lives and work they contained. With Nancy Green, Reed organized the exhibition "A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections," which is accompanied by a catalog he co-edited. Reed’s other edited volumes include "A Roger Fry Reader" and "Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture".
Reed is also the author of "Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas" and "If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past," co-authored with Christopher Castiglia. He has also published a translation of a novella by the illustrator Félix Régamey as "The Chrysanthème Papers: The Pink Notebook of Madame Chrysanthème and other Documents of French Japonisme" and co-curated the 2014 exhibition "Forging Alliances," which used Penn State’s collections of Japanese prints and ceramics to explore the art’s role in diplomacy between Japan and the United States after World War II. His book, "Bachelor Japanists: Japanese Aesthetics and Western Masculinities," is forthcoming in the Modernist Latitudes Series of Columbia University Press.
“In a period of intense interdisciplinary focus at Penn State and around the world, Christopher Reed’s teaching has served our students exceptionally well,” notes Mark Morrison, professor and head of the Penn State Department of English. “Through the exhibitions he has curated at the Palmer Museum, his classroom activities, and the annual Penn State Marathon Read he co-founded, Reed gives our students an unforgettable experience of the humanities along with the critical skills and knowledge they need to lead the life of the mind that is the goal of every top university.”