For the City-Times

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. It is open to the public.

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.