Celebratory Matters
Provisional Department of English Profile for 2007
The University of Iowa English Department promotes the study of literature as an art form, as an expression of cultural preoccupations, and as a means of participating in civil society. Our writing and our teaching ranges across long-celebrated masterpieces by familiar American and British writers as well as provocative reclaimed works from the past and new works that are shaping the future. Our classes explore the power of language in work that speaks from and about diverse U.S. ethnicities and Anglophone communities. Our scholarship engages literature and its relation to culture in all sorts of contexts as well as the analysis and production of creative nonfiction writing in all its variety. While the English Department is small in relation to its peers in the Big Ten, it is large in relation to other departments on campus, comprising (in 2006-07) some 53 tenure track faculty and two lecturers (47.85 Full-Time Equivalents), 113 Ph.D students, 44 MFA students, 992 undergraduate majors, and some 10,000 course enrollments, as well as oversight of the General Education Literature program.
New departmental teaching initiatives in 2007 included articulating an undergraduate mission statement and shared goals (here) and introducing a new gateway course (008:005 Introduction to the English Major: the Theory and Practice of Literary Study). The latter, a large lecture course with discussion sections, now gives our majors a common set of initial skills, namely (1) knowledge and use of basic literary critical terms; (2) insight into the centrality of critical theory and critical debates that constitute the field; (3) familiarity with the periods of literary history; and (4) knowledge of the basic research skills that are essential to the practice of literary criticism. Other curricular initiatives included restructuring the MFA requirements and undergraduate nonfiction writing courses within the Nonfiction Writing Program. The department continues to offer outstanding classes in the whole range of possible configurations, including first-year seminars and first-year honors seminars; a range of summer and winter courses; courses with service learning components (e.g. on the stories of Vietnam veterans, taught by Barbara Eckstein); and international courses (including Victorian London, taught by Florence Boos, and the Overseas Writing Workshop, taught by Robin Hemley in Hong Kong and Macau).
The success of English Department teaching was recognized in many awards in 2007. John Raeburn won a 2007-08 CLAS Collegiate Teaching Award and Linda Bolton won one for 2006-07, joining previous recent department recipients Laura Rigal (2004-05) and Eric Gidal (2003-04), while Mary Lou Emery received the 2007 Graduate College Outstanding Mentor Award, joining past winners from the department Kathleen Diffley (2005) and Florence Boos (2003). A different measure of teaching success came in acknowledgement of the achievements of English Department students in 2007. At the graduate level, Mike Chasar’s 2007 Ph.D. dissertation (dir. Dee Morris) won the Graduate College D.C. Spriestersbach Dissertation Prize and went on to win the Council of Graduate Schools/University Microfilms International Distinguished Dissertation Award, while three graduate students won external fellowships: an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/ACLS Early Career Fellowship awared to Ania Spyra (dir. Claire Fox and Mary Lou Emery), a Newcombe Fellowship through the Woodrow Wilson Foundation awarded to Everett Hamner (dir. Claire Fox and Garrett Stewart), along with a Capitol Fellowship from the US Capitol Historical Society awarded to Eve Rosenbaum (dir. Kathleen Diffley). Other graduate student recognition included four UI Outstanding TA awards, three Ballard/Seashore dissertation awards, and a Marcus Bach Graduate Fellowship. At the undergraduate level, five English majors won competitive CLAS fellowships in 2007, a further seven won University Honors Program scholarships, while a graduating major won a Fulbright Fellowship for teaching in South Korea.
Scholarship and publication was advanced apace by English Department faculty. Collectively, English faculty published eight single-authored books, two essay collections, 24 articles, 16 nonfiction essays, and 21 reviews, while giving 71 conference papers or guest lectures and 26 readings [numbers for all but books from calendar 2006, to be updated in Feb.]. Single authored books ranged from studies of New England reading practices (Matt Brown), Roman Satire in the Eighteenth Century (Bill Kupersmith), Modernism, the Visual, and Caribbean Literature (Mary Lou Emery), the work of Singaporean poet Edwin Thumboo (Peter Nazareth), David Sedaris’s satire (Kevin Kopelson), and postfilmic cinema (Garrett Stewart), to a memoir on growing up during the Cold War (Jeff Porter), and reflections on teaching in a segregated elementary school in 1970 (Huston Diehl, whose Dream Not of Other Worlds received particularly extensive national publicity). Essay publications included two in PMLA, the flagship journal for the profession (by Matt Brown and Ed Folsom), not to mention an op-ed article about the fate of Napoleon's penis in the New York Times (by Judith Pascoe). English faculty continue to edit The Iowa Review, The Journal of the M/MLA, Philological Quarterly, and Walt Whitman Quarterly Review.
English faculty achievement saw significant recognition in 2007. Horace Porter was named to an F. Wendell Miller Chair in 2006-07, joining the three other named chairs in the department, namely Garrett Stewart (James O. Freedman Chair in Letters since 1993), Ed Folsom (Roy J. Carver Professor since 2002), Dee Morris (John C. Gerber Professor since 2000), and two Collegiate Fellows, namely Brooks Landon (since 2003) and Huston Diehl (since 2005). Other recognition within the university included the selection of Dee Morris to win the 2007 Regents Award for Faculty Excellence; Loren Glass named a 2007-09 CLAS Dean’s Scholar; Barbara Eckstein winning the 2006-07 Michael J. Brody Award for faculty excellence in service; while Claire Fox continues as a UI Faculty Scholar. English faculty also won important external awards. Ed Folsom’s research was recognized with a 2007-08 Guggenheim Fellowship (to support work on "Walt Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass': The Biography of a Book"); Miriam Thaggert held a 2006-07 Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Diversity Fellowship; while John D’Agata’s writing was recently recognized with the award of an NEA fellowship. Other awards included a grant-in-aid from the Rockefeller Archive Center for Claire Fox and the recognition of Chris Merrill as a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Government of France for his work with the International Writing Program.
The English department continued to be a hotbed of intellectual foment in 2007, with numerous symposiums and conferences organized by English faculty and graduate students, including:
-- Obermann Symposium on Obscenity: An Interdisciplinary Discussion, organized principally by Loren Glass;
-- Craft Critique Culture Conference on Sex in Public/Sex in Private organized by graduate students;
-- A Poetries Symposium on the interplay of poetry and cultural studies, organized principally by Dee Morris;
-- NonfictioNow conference, organized by Robin Hemley and the NWP, mostly self-funded through a substantial donation by alumna Barbara Bedell.
In addition, Teresa Mangum co-organized a graduate institute on engagement and the academy; Horace Porter was the university’s Spring commencement speaker; Corey Creekmur led a summer workshop on terrorism and mass media for Iowa middle and high school educators; Linda Bolton gave a Saturday Scholar presentation; Barbara Eckstein organized the first of three moving events, An Endangered River Runs through Us: Three Iowa River Journeys; Ed Folsom continued to bring Walt Whitman to an unbelievably large audience through The Whitman Archive, supported with a major NEH grant; while the newly-appointed Steve Kuusisto provided the keynote address at the conference, Art Beyond Sight: Multimodal Approaches to Learning, Creativity and Communication, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
English Department faculty engaged fully in the running of the university and our profession. English faculty served on the recent presidential search committee and continue to serve on Faculty Council and on CLAS executive committee and educational policy committee, as well as on all the major elected bodies. We provided a Co-Director for the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies (Teresa Mangum) and are about to provide an interim Associate Provost for Administration (Barbara Eckstein). [More on external leadership positions from cvs; we have just countless plenary speakers and guest lecturers in any context.]
Continuing departmental initiatives include attending to the Ph.D. program, where in 2007 we introduced a second Dissertation Research-Teaching Fellowship; expanded support for graduate students to attend discipline-appropriate summer institutes; and attempts to reduce the characteristic teaching load of Ph.D. students with a non-teaching semester after the comprehensive exam through a pilot scheme funded by the Graduate College. In addition, we are currently collaborating with the Writers’ Workshop on the introduction of a selective Creative Writing Track within the English major; and we are reorganizing the support and structure of departmental journals.
English is a large department that encompasses teaching and research in a great array of periods and fields—brought together by shared interest in critical reading, critical writing, and critical thinking. English faculty and graduate students maintained high scholarly visibility in 2007. It is little wonder that the department maintains a high national and international standing.
Faculty Matters
Lori Branch's recent book was selected by the Conference on Christianity and Literature for their book of the year award. The following from John Cox, President of CCL: "I'm very pleased to tell you, Lori, that the Conference on Christianity and Literature has selected Rituals of Spontaneity for its Book of the Year Award. Please know that this was not my decision, though I have been hoping it would happen. I appointed a three-person committee last January, and they have read a lot of books in arriving at their decision completely independently of me. The award will be made formally at CCL's annual luncheon, held in conjunction with the MLA meeting in Chicago."
John D'Agata's writing has been recognized with the award of a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship. Full details here.
Lola L. Lopes, interim executive vice president and provost at the University of Iowa, has appointed English professor Barbara Eckstein interim associate provost for academic administration, effective Jan. 1, 2008. Full details here.
The University of Iowa Graduate College presented three faculty members with Outstanding Mentor Awards this week: Mary Lou Emery, associate professor of English in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Karen B. Farris, associate professor of clinical and administrative pharmacy in the College of Pharmacy, and Judith Liskin-Gasparro, associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese and second language acquisition in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Click here for more information.
The University of Nebraska Press recently published Ed Folsom's book, Leaves of Grass: The Sesquicentennial Essays. Co-edited with Susan Belasco and Kenneth M. Price, the UN Press website states that "The essays weave a rich tapestry of the most current, innovative criticism on this foundational book of American poetry. The contributors treat Whitman’s poetry, his biography, his politics, his reception in the United States and abroad, race and ethnic issues, nineteenth-century America, and even the complex typographical history of the first edition of Leaves of Grass." An excerpt can be found here.
Cheryl Herr chairs the Anglo-Irish Discussion Group meeting at MLA on December 28th. The panel, "Interacting with Ireland," features Michael Valdez Moses discussing Seamus Heaney, Magdalena Kay speaking on "the liminal cosmopolitan," and Deirdre McCloskey detailing the work of Irish poets in the Netherlands.
John Raeburn has been selected as a winner of a 2007-08 Collegiate Teaching Award in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Congratulations, John!