Reading Matters, Vol. 13, Issue 7

From (under) the Chair's Desk

Welcome back to the new academic year and a newly functioning EPB. I think we have recovered from most of the immediate flood challenges, although remember that we still have TAs doubling up in most graduate offices, and that some students are going to be moving excessive distances between classes. Recovering from the damage to the power plant is a current priority, which could have serious implications for heating/cooling. The university is maintaining its flood recovery website.

Thanks and congratulations, once again, to all those who helped out during the flood: the faculty who continued teaching in challenging circumstances, Loren Glass for his summer chairing, the summer advisors, and everyone who volunteered for sandbagging and helped out in myriad ways. And especial thanks to the English Department staff, along with our student workers, who took the brunt of day to day dislocation to establish a department in exile and then relocation, under the imaginative and unflagging leadership of Gayle Sand. Thanks to Cherie, Elizabeth, Erin, Gayle, Linda, Sharry, and to the two student workers active through the summer, Brianne and Kate. It was good to be able to recognize your collective grace under pressure at last Friday’s reception. And I’m happy to report that Gayle’s exceptional achievement was recently recognized by the College with a SPOT award for extra-meritorious performance.

In addition to our existing office staff, Lynne Nugent formally joined us over the summer in a 75% staff position as Managing Editor of The Iowa Review, supporting David Hamilton as editor, and overseeing the work of the three graduate research assistants, from fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, guaranteed and funded by the Provost’s Office, in addition to the volunteer editorial helpers. Welcome aboard, Lynne! An Iowa Review advisory board has now been appointed by the Provost, to be chaired by Dee Morris, which group will be working on the succession of the editor. TIR, like PQ and WWQR, escaped EPB during the floods but has now returned. M/MLA is staying in its temporary home in Schaeffer Hall through the fall semester and their fiftieth annual convention before moving to Loyola University in Chicago at the end of December.

In addition to the regular excitement of the start of semester, what a delight to have Susan Gubar as one of the CLAS Alumni Fellows! Susan took her Ph.D. from this department in 1972 and her selection as a distinguished Alum Fellow not only brought her to talk to the department and to graduate students, but also gave the department added visibility to the Dean’s Advisory Committee and fundraising efforts. Special thanks to Dee for spearheading the nomination, to Garrett Stewart and Teresa Mangum for introducing her, and to Dee and Miriam Gilbert for graciously hosting her.

And now that this year is truly underway, don’t forget that it is time already to start shaping next year’s curriculum. Thanks to Bluford Adams and Sharry Lenhart for their work spearheading this effort. Please plan to attend curriculum area committee meetings in each of the areas you plan to teach in, each held in the Gerber lounge, as follows:

Mon. 9/15, 4:00-5:15 p.m.  Transnational Lit & Postcolonial Studies
Wed. 9/17, 4:00-5:15 p.m.   Modern British Lit & Culture
Thurs. 9/18, 4:00-5:15 p.m. American Literature & Culture
Mon. 9/22, 4:00-5:15 p.m.   Medieval & Early Modern Lit & Culture
Wed. 9/24, 4:00-5:15 p.m.   Nonfiction Writing
Thurs. 9/25, 4:00-5:15 p.m.    Literary Theory & Interdisciplinary Studies

In addition, please note this semester’s personnel meetings, namely Thursday, Nov. 20, 3:45 p.m. for all associate and full professors to discuss the reports on Jeff Porter and Lara Trubowitz and on Thursday, Dec. 4, 3:45 p.m. for all full professors to discuss the report on Phil Round. A full calendar of English Department events is maintained at the associated website, English Department Calendar: please report events of interest to Erin for inclusion here and consult this when scheduling events.

Finally, let me remind you of another upcoming event: the English Department fall reception to be held chez moi on Saturday week, Sept. 20, 5-7 p.m. I look forward to seeing everyone there.

Publications, Presentations, and other Faculty Matters

Linda Bolton was selected as the national recipient of the Inspire Integrity Award, the only national student-nominated award for professors who inspire and instill integrity in their students. The award is sponsored by the National Association of Collegiate Scholars, and was presented to Linda at their annual convention in Lake Buena Vista, Florida on July 18th.

Look for Working-Class Women Poets in Victorian Britain: An Anthology edited by Florence Boos to be published by Broadview Press on September 30th. Florence also edited William Morris's Our Country Right or Wrong: A Critical Edition for publication in 2008.

Over the summer, Visiting Assistant Professor Mike Chasar published five poems in The Press-Citizen and two in Mudlark. With Cary Nelson, he also co-wrote "A Poem for Every Product: American Advertising from 1860-1920" for Volume 7 of Oxford's History of Popular Print Culture series.

David Dowling’s article, “’Other and More Terrible Evils’: Anticapitalist Rhetoric in Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig and ProSlavery Propaganda,” has been accepted for publication at College Literature.

The Walt Whitman Archive, co-directed by Ed Folsom, has been awarded two major grants, one from the National Endowment for the Humanities and one from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. Both grants support the work of the Archive in gathering, transcribing, annotating, and presenting Civil War writings related to Whitman. The grants will provide two RA positions for the department this year. In other Whitman news, The PBS “American Experience” film on Walt Whitman, telecast in April and featuring Ed Folsom as a “talking head,” has been nominated for two Emmy Awards (for Exceptional Merit in Nonfiction Filmmaking and Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming). The film is now available for online viewing.

Patricia Foster has an essay forthcoming in New Ohio Review and a short story, "A Meeting in the Garden," forthcoming in Antioch Review. She will chair a panel, The Ambition Gam, at AWP in Chicago with Dorothy Allison, Rosellen Brown, Sue Silverman and Karen McElmurray, give a reading and lecture at Presbyterian College in South Carolina and a reading/lecture in the Philippines in January.

Eric Gidal will be the first speaker for the 2008-09 18th- and 19th-Century Interdisciplinary Colloquium (ENCIC) series, "Historicizing `Sustainability’: Ecological Insights from the Past." Eric will present “O Happy Earth! Reality of Heaven!: Melancholy and Utopia in Romantic Climatology” on Tuesday, October 14 from 4:00-5:30 in Gerber Lounge. Eric’s essay responds to Jonathan Bate’s call for a “Global Warming Criticism,” asking how strains of Romantic utopianism resonate with current perspectives on a changing climate. Gidal draws upon literature from medicine and science as well as the poetry of Shelley and Keats, finding one model of Romantic climatology for current environmental concerns. Everyone is welcome.

Stephen Kuusisto’s short story “Plato, Again” is featured in Telling Stories Out of Court: Narratives About Women and Work Place Discrimination edited by Ruth O’Brien Cornell University Press 2008.

Brooks Landon has become the first UI professor to have a DVD series released by The Teaching Company. "Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer’s Craft" was released as a 4 DVD set and is also available as an audio CD, audiotape, audio download and transcript. More information can be found here.

The first of this year’s MFA in Nonfiction/Museum of Art readings will be Friday, September 19 at 7:30 in the Senate Chamber of the Old Capitol. The readers will be Spring Ulmer, a third year student in the program, and Stephen Kuusisto, from our faculty. More information about the temporarily relocated Writer-in-Residence program can be found here.

Andre Perry has an essay, "Language and other Weapons" in the fall issue of Water~Stone. The essay has also been nominated for inclusion in Be Book cover st of Creative Nonfiction (Vol. 3).

Congratulations to Phil Round on his selection for a Fulbright Teaching Award to Barcelona in Spring 2009.

Visiting Assistant Professor Sean Scanlan's review of Zygmunt Bauman's Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty (Polity 2007) has been accepted by the Journal of American Studies for inclusion in their August 2009 issue.

Robyn Schiff's latest book of poems, Revolver, was recently published by the University of Iowa Press. Click here for more information.

Graduate Student Matters

These are some of the new graduate student faces that you see roaming around EPB:

Melissa Bagley Ph.D. BA/MA University of Kansas British Modernism

Nellene Benhardus Ph.D. BA Union University, TN Victorian Literature

Johanna Tomlinson Ph.D. BA Valparaiso University 19c American Literature

Chad Cripe Ph.D. BA Cornerstore U/MA Grand Avellye St. Late 20th Century

Daniel Davis Ph.D. BA Kansas State 20th Century/African Am.

Jonathan Freitas Ph.D. BA Western Conn. St. Medieval/Early Modern

Catherine Garnet Ph.D. BA Bard College 19th & 20th C Poetry

Robert Gillespie Ph.D. BA University of Iowa 20th C. Postmodernism

Joshua Grinolds Ph.D. BA U of MN/MA U of St. Thomas Medieval

Sonia Johnson Ph.D. BA/MA Victoria U. of Wellington 20th C. American Lit.

Katherine Montgomery Ph.D. BA Williams College Victorian Lit.

Elizabeth Sanders Ph.D. BA St. Olaf Victorian Lit.

Michael Sarabia Ph.D. BA Montana St./ JD U of Iowa Law and Literature

Eric Siegel Ph.D. BA U. of Vermont 19th C. American Lit.

Taryne Taylor Ph.D. BA/MA Florida Atlantic Victorian/Postmodern

Angela Watkins Ph.D. BA DePaul University African-American Lit.

Andrew Williams Ph.D. BA University of Iowa 18th C. British Lit.

Melissa Schomers M.A. BA University of Iowa Literary Studies

Susan Caswell M.F.A. BA University of Iowa Non-Fiction

Jennifer Davis M.F.A. BA Indiana University Non-Fiction

Rebecca Epstein M.F.A. BS Cornell U/MA U of AZ Non-Fiction

Kendra Greene M.F.A. BA Lake Forest College Non-Fiction

Kerry Howley M.F.A. BA Georgetown University Non-Fiction

Nancy Newkirk M.F.A. BA University of Iowa Non-Fiction

Dylan Nice M.F.A. BA University of Pittsburgh Non-Fiction

Annie Nilsson M.F.A. BA Pitzer College Non-Fiction

David Rompf M.F.A. BA U of S. CA/MA Harvard/JD U of CA Non-Fiction

Amy Scott M.F.A. BA Bringham Young Non-Fiction

Sarah Viren M.F.A. BA New College, FL Non-Fiction

Jessica Wilson M.F.A. BA Brown University Non-Fiction

Rachel Yoder M.F.A. BA Georgetown/MFA U of AZ Non-Fiction

Jennifer Zoble M.F.A. BA Wellesley/MS The New School Non-Fiction

Freedman Matters

Please mark your calendars, everybody. We have an unusually packed October roster of Freedman Lectures this year. On Thursday Oct 2 at 7:30 in the Gerber Lounge, Professor Susan Wolfson of Princeton University, author of three influential books on Romanticism, most recently Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism (2006), and editor of a dozen more volumes, both critical and textual, will speak on "Romantic Measures: Stressing the Sound of Sound."

The next afternoon, Oct 3, at 4:00 in the Gerber Lounge, Ronald Levao, Associate Professor of English at Rutgers, author of Renaissance Minds and Their Fictions: Cusanus, Sidney, Shakespeare, as well as editor of several early modern texts, will speak from his work-in-progress, Shakespeare's Twins, a lecture called "Fitful Sympathies in The Comedy of Errors."

Dee Morris will be in touch about the brown bag lunch featuring sample essays from these tandem speakers, as well as, down the road, about another lunchtime session in anticipation of the visit by renowned novel critic Peter Brooks, long of Yale, recently moved to Princeton, and winner of the most recent Mellon Lifetime Achievement Award, who will lecture in the Gerber Lounge at 7:30, Thurs Oct 23, a paper drawn from his latest project called "Derealization of the Self (Rousseau, Freud, Proust)."

The usual champagne and dessert reception will follow both evening lectures, Wolfson's and Brooks's, at our house, 419 S. Summit St. All cordially invited.

Alumni Matters

Former graduate student and visiting assistant professor Matt Miller’s book manuscript, Collage of Myself: Walt Whitman and the Making of Leaves of Grass, was formally accepted for publication by the University of Nebraska Press and is forthcoming in 2009.

Department Calendar

The calendar is now housed on its own page, and both the calendar and Reading Matters are now available via links from the main English Department webpage, making them easier to access. You can find a full listing of upcoming events at the English Department Calendar.

Other Calendars

UI Master Calendar of Events | UI Academic Calendar | The Writers Workshop Reading Schedule | The International Writing Program Calendar

Future Issues

The next issue of Reading Matters will be on Thursday, September 25. Please send submissions for the next issue by 5 p.m. on Wednesday, September 24 to erin-hackathorn@uiowa.edu.