Reading Matters, Vol. 12, Issue 3

From (under) the Chair's Desk

A departmental newsletter that goes out to alums, showcases some of our great work, and makes a gentle pitch for donations, is surely a good idea. It is likely to generate goodwill among our many past students, probably pay for itself plus some in a trickle of donations, and may conceivably spark the interest of some major donor. But it is also surely not a high priority. Copying and postage costs up-front money (and some charity experts still swear by the value of a paper newsletter over just e-mail). None of us – faculty or staff – have time to spare to devote to writing or page set up. Our news is already available to anyone who looks at our website. The College and the University are busy and efficient at sending out their glossy promotional material. Our humble effort risks getting lost in all the noise of publicity and consistently stalled as nobody’s top priority.

And so it is that ten thousand copies of the latest Out of Iowa just hit the mailroom – eight pages featuring new faculty, retirements, a couple of award-winning students, and some of our news – opening with a story about Brooks handing over the chairship to me that is only a year and a season out of date. Thanks to Carolyn for doing much of the writing, assembling, and overseeing the page-setting and to Brooks for writing the main story. And having our pictures in a shade of off-greeny-blue is probably a good thing as it suggests that we’re not wasting departmental money on glossy formatting.

This, then, was a rather unfortunate moment for Gayle to spot a small but significant oversight: we had failed to place the CLAS name or logo anywhere on the newsletter. Many of you may not realize that the CLAS has strict rules mandating the use of the CLAS name and logo. In my experience as chair, I can say that I find the dean and the dean’s office to be consistently reasonable to deal with, with one caveat: the dean is notoriously insistent that CLAS be credited in relation to whatever the department or faculty do. It makes sense – CLAS activity tends to be viewed simply as university activity, with the consequence that the College probably doesn’t get its fair share of prestige or, more importantly, funding – but I suspect that the whole idea of branding our work and accomplishments is not something most of us pay much attention to. Still, since the whole point of these ten thousand newsletters was to generate goodwill and perhaps some modest revenue for the department, it was rather unfortunate to discover that we’d actually done the one thing that pretty much guaranteed us losing the goodwill of the conduit through which the vast bulk of our funding passes!

While I was all ready for an embarrassing confession and apology to the dean, Gayle came up with a different solution. My thanks for her initiative in working the mailroom, which it turns out has the ability to spray on logos and wordmarks for a tiny cost per unit (who would have thought it?). And so, ten thousand English Department newsletters are even now heading to our alums (you can see an electronic copy, complete with correctly-placed logo, here) – and I know precisely which bit to proofread first when we get the next number out in about another year. And here’s hopin’ whatever other mistakes I’m making are as easily remediable!

CLAS Matters

The Dean has released her account of the State of the College, first delivered at the CLAS celebration of faculty promotions, available here. The Dean is also forwarding to all faculty a provostial reminder about the United Way, available here. Finally, the Department of Rhetoric is once again making available undergraduate writing fellows to help work with students on their essay writing in discussion-size classes. Details are available here.

Publications, Presentations, and other Faculty Matters

Mary Lou Emery gave a presentation titled “Arts of Seeing: Transatlantic Modernism and Anglophone Caribbean Literature” at Northern Illinois University on September 27.

Patricia Foster has essays in the Massachusetts Review and Antioch Review, essays forthcoming in the Southern Review and Arts & Letters, and two short stories forthcoming in Glimmer Train.

Three-hundred-word abstracts are now being accepted online for the Obermann Humanities Symposium "Obscenity," organized by Loren Glass. The following is taken from the symposium's website: "The opening of the 21st century is a felicitous time to interrogate the 'universality' of obscenity in terms of the globalization of culture and postmodern skepticism in the human sciences. This symposium is intended to enable an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural dialogue that will analyze this notoriously vague yet apparently perennial concept in an historical and global context." Complete details (including a link for submitting an abstract) can be found here.

Cheryl Herr will give a keynote address at the Midwestern division meeting of the American Conference for Irish Studies to be held at the University of Northern Illinois in October.

Advance copies of Garrett Stewart's The Look of Reading: Book, Painting, Text have arrived, and the book should arrive at Prairie Lights in another month or so. You can see the cover in its entirety here. The following comes from the book's webpage at the University of Chicago Press: "We take for granted that words can describe pictures, but we don’t often consider that the reverse is also true: pictures can depict words, as well as the people reading them. In The Look of Reading, Garrett Stewart explores centuries of painted images of reading, arguing that they collectively constitute an overlooked genre in the history of art."

Bonnie Sunstein reports the publication the third edition of FieldWorking: Reading and Writing Research, co-edited with Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater. Bonnie writes, "This book is a result of teaching 8N:255, Forms of the Essay, "The Ethnographic Essay" every fall in the English Department for FOURTEEN YEARS." Many past and present NWP students make cameo appearances when their writing is used to illustrate good features of ethnographic research and writing. They include Maggie McKnight, Nick Kowalczyk, Courtenay Bouvier, Rick Zollo, Karen Downing, Sam Samuels, Pappi Tomas, Mimi Harvey, Sarah Townsend, Elyse Fields, Leah Williams, and more. The new edition also features essays by Pico Iyer and Mark Singer, writers who visited campus last year and worked with NWP students. Current students Andre Perry and Nick Kowalczyk have been working all summer to re-design and update the FieldWorking Online website thanks to a grant from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and a UI Student Computer Fee grant. Student researchers and writers can use the site to see finished work, find funding sources, consider ethics, learn exercises, and respond to one another's drafts.

News Matters

The UI Museum of Art's new Writer-in-Residence program was the subject of another recent Daily Iowan article. The program, designed through collaboration between Robin Hemley and members of the Museum staff, will provide four different Nonfiction MFA candidates three-month stipends and an office at the museum. Writing that is produced may eventually form an anthology. The first Writer in Residence, Alex Sheshunoff, is interviewed in the article.

The University News Service recently announced Judith Pascoe's ACLS fellowship for her current project, "Siddons Speaks! Theatre Voices, Acoustic Change, and Recorded Memory."

Anne Stapleton was quoted on the subject of Scottish Dancing in this recent article in the Daily Iowan.

NWP Matters

John Bresland (MFA, '06) has just won the Tamarack Award from Minnesota Monthly for one of the essays from his thesis. The essay, "The Cooler," will be published in the November issue of Minnesota Monthly, and John will receive a prize of ten thousand dollars.

Rebecca Sheir ('06) was announced as one of the winners of the Third Coast International Audio Festival Competition. 260 documentaries were submitted from 13 countries (across 5 continents), and the second part of Rebecca's thesis, "The End as Beginning: An Audio Exploration of the Jewish View of Death," was one of nine entries to receive an award. Rebecca will be flown to Chicago from Anchorage (where she's an Associate Producer at Alaska Public Radio) to attend the Festival, and to accept her award at a special ceremony hosted by Peter Segal, host of "Wait, Wait... Don't Tell Me!" More information is available here.

Indian and Native American Matters

Iowa's American Indian and Native Studies Program is pleased to announce the upcoming visit of Paula Gunn Allen, our 2006 Ida Cordelia Beam Distinguished Visiting Professor.

Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna Pueblo/Lakota/Lebanese) is a feminist poet, scholar, and activist whose most recent book, Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat has been hailed as an important step toward engaging scholarly methodologies that better incorporate the work of tribal writers and scholars with that of academicians.

Paula Gunn Allen received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writer's Circle of the Americas in 2001. She also received the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation in 1990 for Spider Woman's Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing.

Paula Gunn Allen will be offering a public lecture on Tuesday Oct. 3 from 5:30-7:00 in W151 John Pappajohn Business Building entitled "Demythologizing Pocahontas." A reception will follow this event. Professor Allen will also be giving a reading of her poetry on Thursday, October 5, 12:00 noon to 1:00 at WRAC (Women's Resource and Action Center). This is a brown bag presentation, so feel free to bring your lunch.

The UI News Service covers Allen's visit here.

Center for the Book Matters

The Center for the Book is pleased to announce the fourteenth annual Brownell Lecture in the History of the Book. Margaret J. M. Ezell, John Paul Abbott Professor of Liberal Arts at Texas A & M University, will present "Performance Texts: Publishing Prophets in the Interregnum” at 8 pm, Thursday, October 12 in the Gerber Lounge. A reception will follow.

Her talk will consider the connections between reading and public performance in seventeenth-century England, and the relations between handwritten documents and spiritual communication in the world of early modern publication. Her test case for this consideration will be the radical prophets of 1650s England, figures such as Arise Evans, Anna Trapnel, and Abiezer Coppe. Ezell’s study of their performances helps enrich central concepts in book history such as orality, publishing, and printedness, while shedding new light on early modern England’s religious politics.

Margaret Ezell is a leading scholar of women’s writing in the early modern period and of textual studies and literary history more broadly conceived. She is the author of The Patriarch’s Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family, Writing Women’s Literary History, and Social Authorship and the Advent of Print. She has edited The Poems and Prose of Mary, Lady Chudleigh and the essay volume Cultural Artifacts and the Production of Meaning.

Medieval Matters

The recently founded Medieval Reading Group for graduate students and faculty will meet every other Wednesday from 12-1 p.m. in 327 EPB to discuss short texts in Middle English, which will be available ahead of time in the Zimansky Reading Room. Anyone and everyone interested in expanding their knowledge of medieval literature is invited to attend. The group will meet next on Wed., Oct. 4, when they will discuss Sir Orfeo. Other sessions are tentatively set for the following Wednesdays: Oct. 18, Nov. 1, Nov. 15, and Nov. 29. Those interested in being added to the mailing list and/or looking for more information on our current reading should contact Travis Johnson at travis-johnson@uiowa.edu.

Staff Matters

Linda Stahle recently celebrated 35 years at the University of Iowa.

Sept. 28 (Thr.), 3:45 p.m., Gerber Lounge – Full Department Meeting: Outcomes Assessment

Sept. 29 (Fri.), 2:30-4:00 p.m., 331 EPB – The Early Modern Reading Group will discuss "Hamlet's Melancholy Character" by Eric Gidal. The chapter is available for copying in 308 EPB or by attachment by emailing Eric.

Sept. 29 (Fri.), 5-7 p.m., University of Iowa Museum of Art's Lasansky Gallery and the Nancy and Craig Willis Atrium – John Raeburn will join other guests discussing Aaron Copland's music and Martha Graham's ballet "Appalachian Spring" in anticipation of the Oct. 3 performance by The Martha Graham Dance Company at Hancher Auditorium. The discussion is part of the series "Know the Score LIVE!" Admission to the program, hosted by Joan Kjaer, is free of charge, and the show will be broadcast live on KSUI-FM 91.7 (101.7 FM in Dubuque). It will be rebroadcast on KSUI 3-5 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 1, and 7-9 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 4. You may also listen to the broadcast on the Internet at http://ksui.uiowa.edu.

Oct. 1 (Sun.), 5 p.m., Prairie Lights Bookstore – Nonfiction Writing Program graduate student Brian Goedde and Writers' Workshop graduate students Lauren Shapiro and Monica Bergers will give a reading as part of events sponsored by the International Writing Program.

Oct. 3 (Tue.), 11:30 a.m.-1 p.m., 331 EPB – Carla Zecher, Director of the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library and author of numerous articles on music and poetry in sixteenth century France, will be the guest of the Early Modern Colloquium and will present and discuss some of her recent work on "Marc Lescarbot: The French Hakluyt." The talk concerns the first French writer to put together a Hakluyt-style travel anthology and thus should be especially engaging for anyone interested in travel writing, the English-French connection, as well as early modern literature and history more broadly. Please feel free to bring your lunch. For more information, contact Gina Bloom at gina-bloom@uiowa.edu.

Oct. 3 (Tue.), 4:30 p.m., Art Building Auditorium – "Against Ekphrasis: a talk by writer and theorist Barrett Watten," jointly sponsored by the English Department, the Writers Workshop, and Intermedia/The School of Art & Art History. More about Barrett Watten is available here.

Oct. 3 (Tue.), 5:30-7:00 p.m., W151 John Pappajohn Business Building – Talk titled "Demythologizing Pocahontas" by Paula Gunn Allen, Ida Beam Visiting Scholar. She is the author of many works in American Indian Studies, including the recent Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat (Harper Collins, 2003). Her visit is being organized by the American Indian & Native Studies Program.

Oct. 4 (Wed.), Noon-1:00 p.m., 327 EPB – The Medieval Reading Group will discuss Sir Orfeo, which will be available in advance in the Zimansky Reading Room.

Oct 4 (Wed.), 4 p.m., 302 Schaeffer Hall – Carla Zecher will give a presentation about the Newberry Library, where she is the Director of the Center for Renaissance Studies. Her talk with give special attention to funding opportunities in medieval and early modern studies. A potluck dinner will follow. For more information, contact Connie Berman at constance-berman@uiowa.edu.

Oct. 5 (Thr.), Noon-1:30 p.m., Women's Resource and Action Center – Paula Gunn Allen will be reading from her poetry. This is a brown bag presentation, so feel free to bring your lunch.

Oct. 12 (Thr.), 8 p.m., Gerber Lounge – Margaret J. M. Ezell, John Paul Abbott Professor of Liberal Arts at Texas A & M University, will present the Center for the Book's fourteenth annual Brownell Lecture in the History of the Book with her talk, "Performance Texts: Publishing Prophets in the Interregnum.” A reception will follow.

Oct. 13 (Fri.), 3 p.m., Gerber Lounge – David Shumway will give a talk titled "A New Kind of Star: Rock & Roll and the Politicization of Celebrity." Shumway is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon Univ., and one of the founders of the Cultural Studies Association of the US. He is author of Creating American Civilization: A Genealogy of American Literature as an Academic Discipline (Minnesota) and Modern Love: Marriage, Intimacy, and the Marriage Crisis (NYU), and he is completing a book to be called Classic Rockers: The Cultural Significance of the Stars.

~~Oct. 13 (Fri.), 2:30-4:00 p.m., 331 EPB~~ – The Early Modern Reading Group meeting has been moved to Oct. 20.

Oct. 13 (Fri.), 8 p.m., Shambaugh Auditorium – Denis Johnson will give the Paul Engle Memorial Reading, which honors the long-time head of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and co-founder of the International Writing Program. More information is available here.

Oct. 16 (Mon.), 3 p.m., E205 AJB – An informal discussion of the question "Is there a correct use of philosophy in the political field?" with Alain Badiou. For more on Badiou, please see below. A reception follows in the lobby of BCSB

Oct 17 (Tue.), 4 p.m., 101 Becker Communication Studies Building – "Contemporary Materialism and its Division: Bodies, Languages, Truths" with Alain Badiou. For more on Badiou, please see below.

Oct. 17 (Tue.), 7:30 p.m., Shambaugh Auditorium – Distinguished Visiting Professor Alain Badiou will present the Ida Beam Memorial Lecture titled "What is Philosophy? A Creative Repetition." Among Badiou's recently published works in English translation are Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (2003), Handbook of Inaesthetics (2004), Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy (2005), and Alain Badiou and Cultural Revolution, a special issue of the journal Positions: "East Asia Cultures Critique" (2005). A reception follows in the lobby of Becker Communication Studies Building (BCSB). This event is sponsored by the Office of the Provost and the Department of Communication Studies, in conjunction with the Departments of English, Cinema and Comparative Literature, and the Project on the Rhetoric of Inquiry (POROI).

Oct. 18 (Wed.), Noon-1:00 p.m., 327 EPB – Meeting of the Medieval Reading Group

Oct. 18 (Wed.), 8 p.m., Buchanan Auditorium of the John Pappajohn Business Building – Fiction writer Michael Chabon will present an Ida Beam Lecture. More details are available here. The English Department is a co-sponsor of this event.

Oct. 20 (Fri.), 2:30-4:00 p.m., 331 EPB – The Early Modern Reading Group will discuss "Milton and Oneness" by Doug Trevor. A copy of the essay will be available in the Zimansky Reading Room after Oct. 13. For an electronic copy, please email douglas-trevor@uiowa.edu.

Oct. 20 (Fri.), 3 p.m., Gerber Lounge – Talk by John Carlos Rowe, Univ. of Southern California, titled "Reading Reading Lolita in Tehran in Idaho"

Oct. 25 (Wed.), 3:30 p.m., Gerber Lounge – “Show me the Money!”: Tips and Strategies for Finding External Funding Opportunities for Graduate Students, by Diane Crosby, Division of Sponsored Programs

Oct. 27 (Fri.), 7:30 p.m., UI Museum of Art – Gallery Talk on the exhibition "Animal Expressions: International Perspectives from the Collection." See flyer for more details.

Nov. 1 (Wed.), Noon-1:00 p.m., 327 EPB – Meeting of the Medieval Reading Group

Nov. 2 (Thr.), 7:30 p.m., Gerber Lounge – This year's Freedman Lecture will be given by Bill Brown, Univ. of Chicago. His talk will be titled "Novel Objects: Object Relations in an Expanded Field." Professor Brown is the author of The Material Unconscious: American Amusements, Stephen Crane, and the Economics of Play (Harvard, 1996) and the award-winning A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago, 2003), as well as the similarly award-winning PMLA essay on the theological overtones, in part, of Freedman veteran Fredric Jameson’s work, called “The Dark Wood of Postmodernity (Space, Faith, Allegory)” (May 2005), plus any number of influential position papers on materialist cultural studies, both in Critical Inquiry, which he co-edits, and elsewhere. A reception at 419 S. Summit St. will follow.

Nov. 3 (Fri.), 3:45-5:30, Gerber Lounge – Open seminar with Bill Brown (see above) on the subject of "Commodity Nationalism and the Lost Object"

Nov. 6 (Mon.) – Deadline for area committees to submit graduate student professional development proposals to Cherie Rieskamp. The Graduate Steering Committee will consider the proposals at its Nov. 13 meeting.

Nov. 6 (Mon.), 10:30 a.m., 331 EPB – The Graduate Steering Committee will meet to consider graduate students’ applications for candidacy—otherwise known as quals. Any faculty member is welcome to attend this meeting. When the list of applicants is confirmed, that list will appear in Reading Matters.

Nov. 8 (Wed.) – Instructional Improvement Award proposals due. See here for details.

Nov. 13 (Mon.) – Proposal deadline for The Obermann Center for Advanced Studies' Interdisciplinary Research Grants for collaborative scholarship or creative work to be conducted at the Obermann Center during summer 2007. Details available here.

Nov. 13th (Mon.), 10:30 a.m., 331 EPB – The Graduate Steering Committee will meet to discuss the Marcus Bach Fellowship and graduate student professional development proposals.

Nov. 15 (Wed.), Noon-1:00 p.m., 327 EPB – Meeting of the Medieval Reading Group

Nov. 16 (Thr.), 3:45 p.m., Gerber Lounge – DCG Meeting to discuss promotion and tenure cases

Nov. 17 (Fri.), 2:30-4:00 p.m., 331 EPB – The Early Modern Reading Group will discuss "Dream Loops and Short-Circuited Nightmares: Redrawing The Tempest in Post-Communist Bulgaria" by Katy Stavreva, Cornell College.

Nov. 29 (Wed.), Noon-1:00 p.m., 327 EPB – Meeting of the Medieval Reading Group

Nov. 30 (Thr.), 3:45 p.m., Gerber Lounge – DCG Meeting to discuss promotion and tenure cases and fifth-year reviews.

Nov. 30 (Thr.), 7:30 p.m., Art Building West, Auditorium – Robert Rosenblum will give a lecture titled “From Stubbs to Delacroix: Animal Liberation in Romantic Art.” Professor Rosenblum is the Henry Ittleson, Jr., Professor of Modern European Art, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and Stephen and Nan Swid Curator of Twentieth-Century Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. His lecture is linked to the UI Art Museum "Animal Expressions" exhibit and is hosted by the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Interdisciplinary Colloquium, International Programs, the UI Museum of Art, and the School of Art and Art History. All are invited to attend a reception in the Willis Atrium of the Museum after the lecture.

Dec. 1 (Fri.) – Deadline for submissions to the Obermann Symposium "Obscenity."

Dec. 7 (Thr.), 3:45 p.m., Gerber Lounge – Full Department Meeting: Outcomes Assessment

Dec. 8 (Fri.), 2:30-4:00 p.m., 331 EPB – The Early Modern Reading Group will discuss a chapter from "Collaboration in the Marketplace: Writers, Publishers, and Printers in Early Modern London" by Stacy Erickson.

Jan. 9-15, 2007 – Obermann Graduate Institute on Engagement and the Academy, directed by Teresa Mangum (English) and David Redlawsk (Political Science)

Feb. 22 (Thr.) - Feb. 24 (Sat.), 2007 – Studies in Sound: Listening in the Age of Visual Culture, an interdisciplinary graduate conference hosted by the Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature. The conference will feature Caryl Flinn as the keynote speaker as well as "The Audible Picture Show," a performance of sound works for a "dark screen." The Call for Papers is available here.

Mar. 1-4, 2007 – Obermann Symposium "Obscenity," organized by Loren Glass

Apr. 5-7, 2007 – Poetries Symposium, beginning with a keynote lecture by Cary Nelson

Apr. 19 (Thr.), 2007 - 3:45-5:15 p.m., Ritchey Ballroom, IMU - The Graduate Awards Ceremony

Other Calendars

Future Issues

Please send any items for Reading Matters or the departmental calendar to Carolyn Jacobson at carolyn-jacobson@uiowa.edu. Reading Matters will appear every other Thursday, and submissions should be received by 5 p.m. the day before. Please send submissions for the next issue by 5 p.m. on Wed., Oct. 11. Thanks very much.