Reading Matters, Vol. 12, Issue 5

From (under) the Chair's Desk

Wasn’t it interesting to get that e-mail from Sheldon Kurtz, President of Faculty Senate, on Monday? After rumors in the local press, and partial revelations at Faculty Assembly and Faculty Senate, it was nice to have our Senate President out our two most activist Regents as working with the Presidents of the three universities on a secret strategic planning exercise. I share the outrage of many at the tone of Regent Gartner’s questions, although I would add that I think it perfectly appropriate for the Board of Regents to be involved in strategic planning for the university—just not in secret and not without consultation. For more on the Faculty Senate’s concerns with that planning exercise, see here.

At the same time, as also mentioned in Professor Kurtz’s letter, the Board of Regents has commissioned a more public internal assessment comparing programs within the university. In relation to that exercise, the Provost’s Office assembled a whole array of data about each department within each college and used these to compare different departments. Apparently, in a commendable spirit of openness, the Provost’s Office will soon release these comparisons for all faculty to view on the web. I’ve seen the data for CLAS since it was discussed by the college’s executive committee and I can report that the comparisons aren’t all that informative, mostly based on crude calculations of cost (numbers of students taught divided by cost of faculty and instructors) or predictable markers of prestige (published rankings), as well as a few more interesting comparisons of diversity. Frankly, the English Department makes out well on most of the criteria and comes out looking pretty good in the university, although I wouldn’t want to put much value on the exercise.

That kind of statistical snapshot is necessarily crude. In one odd move, for example, it only counts what students declare as their first major. This avoids double counting, but means our student numbers (and presumably everybody else’s) are significantly lower than reality. That kind of weakness leads me to wonder about the true size of our major and various other assessments of the size of the department. Here follows my attempt at a truer statistical snapshot of the department, based on the Profile of Students at the University of Iowa, Fall Semester 2006, just released by the Office of the Registrar.

We now have 992 majors (slightly shy of the 1018 in Fall 2005 and 998 in Fall 2004), 399 men and 593 women. Of the 825 who declared English as their first major we get additional information telling us that 81 are members of underrepresented minorities (compared with 78 last year) and 2 are foreign (compared with 0 last year). English proves to be the fifth most popular major in the university and the third most popular in CLAS, following Business, Engineering, Psychology, and Communication Studies. The number of first-year students entering the university increased by 440 to 4289 in Fall 2006 compared with 3849 in Fall 2005, so perhaps we should anticipate a slight increase of majors to come. Those 992 English majors constitute some 6% of the 16,396 students enrolled in CLAS.

In another way of measuring our undergraduate activity, we awarded 262 BA degrees in 2005-06 (compared with 246 in 2004-05 and 238 in 2003-04), constituting some 9% of the 2,916 BAs awarded in CLAS. We also awarded 65 minors in 2005-06 (compared with 57 in 2004-05).

In terms of graduate numbers, looking at the enrollment in the Ph.D. program and the NWP MFA program but not at the Writers’ Workshop, we have 113 graduate students enrolled in English (compared with 116 in Fall 2005 and 111 in Fall 2004), 49 men and 64 women. Of these, 17 are members of underrepresented minorities and 5 are foreign (compared with 10 and 6 last year). Those numbers make us the tenth most popular graduate major on campus and give us some 2% of the 5388 students enrolled in the Graduate College. In 2005-06 we awarded 14 MA and MFAs and 9 Ph.D.s (compared with 10 and 11 last year).

In general, all those numbers suggest to me that we are remarkably stable in terms of our size although, obviously, that could always change. Any changes in access to Communication Studies, for example, could affect our numbers in view of the high popularity of that major with 935 students declaring it their first major and 35 who declare it their second. (Since broad comparisons are based on students’ first declared major, Communication Studies is ranked as more popular than English in the Registrar’s listings, even though they have fewer total majors.)

Faculty numbers are not included in the Registrar’s Statistical Profile, but those are somewhat easier to keep track of. English currently has 53 faculty with more than a 0% position (12 assistant, 19 associate, and 22 full professors), along with two lecturers. When due calculation is made for joint appointments, English has 47.85 FTEs. Many of you may have seen the letter by Kembrew McLeod about the appalling student:teacher ratio in Communications Studies (100:1, he reports). If you divide our undergraduate majors by our FTE, we would appear to have a student:teacher ratio of approximately 20:1 (compared with an average CLAS ratio of about 28:1). Graduate students would add some 2 and a bit:1 ratio.

It was nice to see so many of those graduate students and faculty gathered to take on together the intellectual activity of an English Department in our lunchtime discussion today of Bill Brown’s thing theory. Thanks to Ed for organizing the lunchtime series and to Garrett for leading the discussion. To return to the material level, I’m pleased to report that the Dean recognized the value of breaking bread together to seal community in such a large department and pre-approved our omnibus request for food and drink expenditures through the year. This means we can continue to provide a sandwich at these lunchtime discussions. Any further food expenditures that are not in our annual plan are still possible, although I will be discouraging of them in view of the disproportionate burden of paperwork to get pre-approval for any additional individual events. Bill Brown will be providing more food for thought at the Freedman lecture next Thursday, Nov. 2, and at an open seminar on the following Friday. I look forward to seeing many of you there.

PS. Delighted to have our virtues trumpeted in the Chicago Tribune! See News Matters below.

NWP Matters

Andy Douglas (NWP ‘05) had a cover story about prairie restoration, “Where the Buffalo Roam”, published in a recent issue of The Source. He also had a nonfiction story entitled “Articles of Faith” accepted by Iowa Writes—part of the Daily Palette on the UI website—which will be published shortly.

Bernadette Esposito ran the Chicago Marathon on Sunday, Oct. 22 in 3:31:52, easily making the 3:40 cut for the Boston Marathon.

Brian Goedde will present his essay, "Lorraine's Story", at the Midwest Writing Center Conference in St. Louis on October 28th.

Jessie Harriman’s essay “This Soul Has Six Wings" appears in the 2006 edition of Best American Spiritual Writing.

Steve McNutt’s accident essay ("SUV vs. Bike") was one of two finalists in the Florida Review's 2006 Lit Contest.

June Melby’s lyric essay “In the Future” was published in the literary journal [sic]; her prose poem, "the prudence of living a flexible life" will appear in the anthology Kaffee.Satz.Lesen v.2, out of Hamburg, Germany, this fall; and the poem “Cupcakes” recently appeared in Loudmouth, a lit journal out of Cal State Los Angeles.

Andre Perry has a new music feature—"Indie-Rock Stripes"—up on the PopMatters website. The feature discusses the band Film School and can be accessed here.

Three NWP alums appear in the fall issue of The Wilson Quarterly. Eric Jones reviews the book Route 66: Iconography of the American Highway; Aviya Kushner reviews Isaac B. Singer: A Life; and an excerpt of Amy Leach's work from the summer issue of A Public Space appears in the "In Essence" section.

Rebecca Sheir (NWP ‘06) has won an award from the Third Coast International Audio Festival for the second part of her three-part MFA thesis, a radio documentary titled "The End as Beginning: An Audio Exploration of the Jewish View of Death." She will accept the award for "Honoring the Body: Taharah" in Chicago, at a ceremony hosted by Peter Segal, host of Wait Wait . . . Don't Tell Me! "Honoring the Body: Taharah" is available for listening here (scroll down).

Alex Sheshunoff had a cover story about building a house in Palau in the October issue of National Geographic Adventure.

Craft Critique Culture Conference Matters

The 7th annual Craft Critique Culture Conference has been scheduled for April 13-15, 2007 and will focus on the topic "Sex in Public/Sex in Private." The keynote speakers will include Lauren Berlant, George M. Pullman Professor of Literature at the University of Chicago, Sasha Waters, Associate Professor of Cinema and Comparative Literature, University of Iowa, and others to be announced later.

Oct. 26 (Tue.), 4-5 p.m., Lasansky Room, UI Museum of Art – Teresa Mangum will give a talk titled “Penned In: Animals and Genre in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Art.” Dorothy Johnson, Roy J. Carver Professor of Art History, and Kim Marra, American Studies and Theatre Arts, will respond. The half-hour lecture will be followed by brief responses that launch a discussion both of the paper and of interdisciplinary framings and reframings of the topic. This is the first lecture in the 2006-07 Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Interdisciplinary Studies Colloquium. The topic for this year’s events is Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Fauna and Flora.

Oct. 26 (Tue.), 8 p.m., Lecture Room 2, Van Allen Hall – Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Tate, a distinguished alumnus of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, will present a free Ida Beam lecture. More details are available here. The English Department is a co-sponsor of this event.

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 p.m., 704 Jefferson Building—Bluford Adams will give a talk called “Peasants or Progressive Farmers?: Immigrants on the Land in Gilded Age New England,” part of the “Thinking Outside the Box: Ethnic Studies and the Arts” series organized by the Center for Ethnic Studies and the Arts.

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. 8 (Wed.), 7:30 p.m., 107 EPB~~ – David Jasper's talk has been moved to Nov. 15. See new details below.

~~Nov. 10 (Fri.), 1:30 p.m., Gerber Lounge~~ – The Literature and Religious Studies Colloquium has been moved to Nov. 29. See new details below.

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. 15 (Wed.), 7 p.m., 107 EPB – Joanne Meyerowitz, Professor of American Studies at Yale University, will give a talk titled “When Gender Studies Meets Transgender History,” as part of her vist as an Ida Beam Distinguished Visiting Lecturer. Professor Meyerowitz is the author of How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States and a major scholar of gender and sexuality studies. Her visit is sponsored by the Sexuality Studies Program, with support from the Departments of History, English, and American Studies.

Nov. 15 (Wed.), 7:30 p.m., The Stanley Auditorium (Room 1505) in the lower level of the UI Seamans Center– The Geneva Lecture Series presents David Jasper, Professor of Literature and Theology at the University of Glasgow. His talk is titled “Asceticism as a Way of Love: The Life and Loves of a Desert Saint,” and the respondent for the talk will be Lori Branch. Dr. Jasper is the author or editor of ten books, including The Sacred Desert: Religion, Literature, Art, and Culture (2004).

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

Nov. 16 (Thr.), 4 p.m., 704 JB – Joanne Meyerowitz will give a talk titled “Sexuality, Race, and the History of Social Constructionist Thought,” as part of her vist as an Ida Beam Distinguished Visiting Lecturer. A reception will follow. For more on Professor Meyerowitz and her visit, please see the Nov. 15 entry.

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. 29 (Wed.), 4:00 p.m., 3rd floor of Gilmore Hall– Colloquium: “Literature and Religious Studies: Challenges and Opportunities for New Interdisciplinary Work.” This event, featuring David Jasper, Professor of Literature and Theology at the University of Glasgow, will reflect on the problems and possibilities for the study of religion and the arts in the 21st century.

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

March 15, 2007 – Submission deadline for the 7th annual Craft Critique Culture Conference. Details available here.

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

Apr. 27 (Fri.), 2007, 3:30-5:00 p.m., the Museum of Art's Lasansky Print Room and Willis Atrium – Undergraduate Honors Award Ceremony. Thesis advisors: Please note this date on your calendars and that this year the event is scheduled on a Friday rather than a Thursday as has been the tradition in the past.

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., Nov. 8. Thanks very much.

From (under) the Chair's Desk

Computer Matters

Publications, Presentations, and other Faculty Matters

News Matters

You can see the entire essay here.

Grad Matters

NWP Matters

Craft Critique Culture Conference Matters

Department Calendar

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Future Issues