Reading Matters, Vol. 14, Issue 10, May 6, 2009
It’s a distinct pleasure to say a few words by way of introduction to this issue of Reading Matters, which is dedicated to celebrating the many and varied achievements of our graduate students.
You may share my skepticism about the college-rankings industry, which often seems designed as much to sell magazines as to give a judicious assessment of the qualities of America’s institutions of higher learning. But even skeptics can concede that there’s a kernel of truth in those numbers. In this year’s U.S. News & World Report, hot off the presses, our Ph.D. program comes in at number fifteen among public universities across the U.S. My own, admittedly subjective and biased, impression is that while it’s nice to crack the top-twenty, we’re a stronger program than the Report would suggest, given the impressive achievements of our graduate students.
And what better way to convince you of that than with a record of their successes over this past year?
So, without further ado, let me hand this space over to Mary Lou Emery, who has done outstanding service as this year’s Director of Graduate Studies, and who can fill you in on all the details.
It has been an honor to serve, this past academic year, as the Director of Graduate Studies in English. In the midst of hard times, graduate students in all of our programs—the MA and PhD in English and the MFA in Nonfiction Writing—have not only continued their work as scholars, writers, and teachers with tremendous energy and enthusiasm, they have achieved the extraordinary. In this special issue of Reading Matters, we recognize with pride their accomplishments. To mention only a few of the highlights, these include teaching awards, thesis and dissertation fellowships, and essay prizes. Such award-winning teaching and scholarship composes only part of the picture, however. Extending their work in connection with others, graduate students have organized successful conferences here at the University of Iowa and participated in numerous conferences elsewhere, immersed themselves in our own archives as well as traveled across the country and all over the world to conduct their research, and throughout it all, created and sustained intellectual communities of mutual support. Those who are graduating or taking jobs elsewhere have contributed in valuable ways to these communities and will continue to be a part of our extending networks. Those who are joining us include a fall ‘09 entering class of 5 MA, 14 PhD, and 18 NWP students to whom we extend a warm welcome.
While much of what we do in the Department of English is sustained by the graduate students, the graduate programs in which they study are sustained by the efforts of a remarkable staff. First and foremost, we owe a tremendous thanks to Cherie Hansen-Rieskamp who seems always to be there with the correct information, the right form, and the most helpful words in any situation. I am grateful for her patient guidance throughout this past year. Working with Maggie McKnight in her role as assistant to the NWP, Elizabeth Curl as our Human Resources staff person, and Linda Stahle in General Education in Literature has been a pleasure. Gayle Sand has, of course, backed us all.
To AGSE co-presidents, Raquel Baker and Joseph Rodriguez, I would like to express my deep appreciation for the efforts they have made in organizing information sessions on the budget and the qualifications process and for their invaluable help in recruiting prospective graduate students.
Among the faculty, thanks especially to Jon Wilcox, Department Chair in the fall, and Claire Sponsler, Chair this spring—both have served in past years as DGS, and both have shared generously with me their institutional wisdom, knowledge of the program and its precedents. I am grateful also to the members of the Graduate Steering Committee—David Hamilton, Acting Director of the NWP; Garrett Stewart, Director of Admissions; Judith Pascoe, Director of Finances; Teresa Mangum, Director of Placement; Priya Kumar, Director of the MA; and Kathy Lavezzo, Director of Qualifications—for the thoughtful care they have taken with each aspect of the graduate program. To all faculty who advise and mentor graduate students, thanks for your attention to their work and to the development of their professional lives.
We also owe the Graduate College our appreciation for their generosity in granting PhD fellowships and dissertation awards and for awarding this year Graduate Initiative Funds for three subsequent years of post-comprehensive dissertation fellowships.
To Erin Hackathorn and Cherie Hansen-Rieskamp, many thanks for designing and compiling this Graduate Achievements Special Issue of Reading Matters.
Finally, with gratitude, great pride, and many rounds of virtual applause, I am happy to recognize the following achievements of graduate students in the Department of English.
Mary Lou Emery
Amelia Bird, "Sideyards" (Susan Lohafer, dir.)
Dani Bojanski, "The Slaughterhouse: Love Songs" (David Hamilton, dir.)
Joshua Casteel, "Letters from Abu Ghraib" (Patricia Foster, dir.)
Matthew Clark, "Millions Now Living" (Jeff Porter, dir.)
Hali Felt, "Soundings: The Life of Marie Tharp, Oceanographic Cartographer" (Susan Lohafer, dir.)
Tom Fleischmann, title unavailable (John D'Agata, dir.)
Gabriel Houck, "Architecture of the Imaginary" (Bonnie Sunstein, dir.)
Jeremy Jones, "The Disillusionment of Bearwallow Mountain" (Robin Hemley, dir.)
Margaret MacInnis, "Sweet Life" (Robin Hemley, dir.)
June Melby, "Little House on the Astroturf" (David Hamilton, dir.)
David Peters, title unavailable (Robin Hemley, dir.)
Emma Rainey, title unavailable (David Hamilton, dir.)
Jennifer Sunny-Cheng Tsang, "Parachutes: A Book of Shut" (Xu Xi, Patricia Foster, co-dirs.)
Spring Ulmer, “A Barefoot Language” (Steve Kuusisto, dir.)
Ryan Van Meter, "If You Knew Then What I Know Now" (Susan Lohafer, dir.)
Stephen West, "The West, Alchemic: An Essay" (Jeff Porter, dir.)
Matthew Clark’s essay "Millions Now Living Will Never Die" was a Finalist for The 2008 Montana Prize in Creative Nonfiction and was published in CutBank Issue # 69. His essay “And Therefore Paranormal" was selected as a Finalist for the 2009 Montana Prize in Creative Nonfiction.
Becca Epstein's story "When We Were Stardust," originally published in 2008 in Fantasy Magazine, was selected recently to be included in the anthology Unplugged: Best Sci Fi and Fantasy of the Web, due for release in June.
Hali Felt’s book, tentatively titled "Soundings: The Story of Marie Tharp and How She Became the First Person to Map the Ocean Floor," was recently sold to Henry Holt & Company.
Nina Feng received the Stanley Award for International Research to study myth and superstition in modern-day China.
Janet Hendrickson has several translations in Zoetrope: All Story.
Jeremy Jones published an essay, "In Search of Dreadlocks (and Captain Zero)," in Relief Magazine in November (Volume 2, Issue 4) and he also presented it on a panel at the Craft Critique Culture Conference. Jeremy also published an essay, "Silver Trumpets," on Killing the Buddha (www.killingthebuddha.com) in February and won 3rd prize (Arts and Research Division) at the Jakobsen Conference for an essay called "Of Throwing Rocks".
Margaret MacInnis has essays in the Winter 2009 issue of Calyx and the Winter 2008 issue of River Teeth. Her essay "No" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by the editors of River Teeth.
Dylan Nice has two short stories in the 2009 edition of NOON annual: "Thin Enough to Break" and "Other Kinds." And one short short in issue 15 of Quick Fiction: "Their Health."
Jennifer Percy's essay "Training Ground" is forthcoming in The Literary Review and she also just received the Stanley Award for International Research to study post-war Serbia. Jennifer was also a work-study scholar at the 2008 Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. She was a finalist for the 2008 Arts & Letters Susan Atefat Prize for Creative Nonfiction and has essays forthcoming in The Literary Review and Redivider.
David Peters’ essay, "The Bamenda Syndrome," won the Solas Grand Prize for Travel Writing and was anthologized in Best Travel Writing 2009. David was also a finalist in Narrative Magazine's First-Person Story Contest.
Spring Ulmer has a book of essays, The Age of Virtual Reproduction, coming out this June with Essay Press.
Ryan Van Meter published essays in The Gettysburg Review, The Southeast Review, Ascent and Gulf Coast and an interview for Seneca Review's website. His essay "First" was selected by Mary Oliver for Best American Essays 2009, due in October, and his essay "Lake Effect," originally published in Indiana Review, was named a Notable Essay of 2007 in Best American Essays 2008. An essay was also selected for You Must Be This Tall To Ride: Contemporary Writers Take You Inside The Story, to be released in May from Writers' Digest Books. He was also awarded a summer residency fellowship at The MacDowell Colony.
On January 13th, the Daily Palette published Jess Wilson’s prose poem 'Thirteen Ways of Flying' online. On June 3rd, she will be presenting a paper entitled “Imag(in)ing Greenbelt: Landscape and Natalism in Documentary Film and Farm Security Administration Photography” at the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE)'s biennial conference in Vancouver, BC. This summer Jess will be teaching writing at the Deerfield Academy Summer Arts Camp in Deerfield, MA.
Rachel Yoder's short story, "Arizona's Lonely," appears in Necessary Fiction (www.necessaryfiction.com). Her memoir "Creatures" is a finalist in Opium Magazine's 500-Word Memoir Contest. "Who Is Greg Stalfa and What Does He Mean" is forthcoming in Issue 14 of Quick Fiction. Rachel received a scholarship to attend Writing The Sacred, a retreat held in Snowmass, Colorado in January. She has a lyric essay ("Letters To My First Love") in the 2009 issue of PANK, which she also read at the AWP Conference in Chicago. She also participated in Opium's Literary Death Match as the Quick Fiction representative. Her story "Shark" received honorable mention in Glimmer Train's Very Short Story Contest.
Jen Zoble has received a Stanley Graduate Award to support research on cultural transition in Croatia.
FALL 2008
| Craig Carey | Bryan Mangano | ||
| Andrew Crooke | Christine Norquest | ||
| Robert Fernandez | Jillian Walker |
SPRING 2009
| Cassandra Bausman | Kerry Delaney | Sarah Fay McCarthy | Ross Salinas |
| Thomas Blake | Mary Hickman-Fernandez | Paul McCullough | Lacey Worth |
| Blake Bronson-Bartlett | Sunghyn Jang | Melanie Reichwald |
Judith Coleman
Bridget Draxler
Gabriel Downs
Marta Holliday
Adele Holoch
Travis Johnson
Matthew Lavin
Jessica Lawson
Erin Mann
Robert McLoone
Joseph Rodriguez
Anna Stenson
Chris Vinsonhaler
Ryan Clark
Brian Deutschendorf
Jeremy Knapp
Jailyn Moreland
Paige Nelson
Mellon Research and Dissertation Award
Chad Wriglesworth, "Geographies of Reclamation: A Literary History of the Columbia River Basin"
Generations of literary critics recognize that place plays a prominent role in Pacific Northwest literature; however, as it stands, this observation is little more than a cultural platitude, a well received assertion that lacks analysis as to why geography matters to literary studies or people of the Northwest. Chad's dissertation addresses this interpretive void from historical and spatial perspectives, using literary and visual arts as a means of navigating and mapping ways that religious and national narratives transformed the Columbia River Basin into a federally managed Promised Land, a mechanized monument of social and economic progress that is currently being undermined and re-inscribed by bioregional writers and activists who establish social and spiritual identities through more localized commitments to place.
Ada Louise Ballard and Seashore Dissertation Fellowships
Joanne Janssen, “Performances of Memory: Quotation and the Self in Nineteenth-Century Fiction” (Mangum, dir.) examines literary characters who quote bits of poetry, devotional texts, and the Bible that they have learned in their secular and religious education. Joanne argues that these moments of memorization remain centrally connected to nineteenth-century identity: people are what they remember, even if those memories do not relate to their own lives, but instead to the information stocked in their minds. In addition, she explores the insights these moments offer about nineteenth-century forms of reading, functions of memory, ideas about gender, beliefs about religion, and methods of imperialism.
Deborah Manion, "The Ekphrastic Fantastic: Uncanny Portraits in Victorian and Modernist Fiction" (Stewart, dir.) examines a virtual gallery of magic portraits from that of Dickens’ Lady Dedlock to Wilde’s Dorian Gray to Joyce’s Rudy Bloom. Deborah argues that the meditations on representation and desire that these novels and stories perform not only anticipate but augment theories of the gaze developed primarily since the advent of cinema. In explicating the evolution of the magic portrait trope, she analyzes the differences these pictures make evident between an imagined image and an externally visible one, and thereby aims to advance current notions of image perception in literary and film studies.
Seely Distinguished Dissertation Fellowship
Eve Rosenbaum, ""The Shifting City Street: Writing the Civil War in Washington, D.C." (Diffley, dir.) Eve’s project examines the work of writers who came to Washington during the Civil War and how this work both shaped and was shaped by the capital city. She argues that just as these writers -- including Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, and Elizabeth Keckley -- stepped off the train into a city being overhauled and rebuilt, they too were engaged with a project of rebuilding: they were constructing the realities of a wartime capital for their audience during a time of national uncertainty. Washington, and its emblematic architecture, served simultaneously as an inspiration for their literary work and as a moldable reflection of how they imagined the national city should be.
Dietz Distinguished Dissertation Fellowship
Cory Hutchinson-Reuss, "Mystical Modernisms, Empire, and the Figure of the Female" (Emery, dir.) explores early twentieth-century literary responses to mysticism’s entanglement with empire and the female figure at the center of each. Through an examination of works by women writers from Evelyn Underhill to Virginia Woolf, her project posits that the discourse of mysticism underwrites modernist aesthetic choices and explorations of ethical questions, particularly the pressing concerns of how to relate to religious, colonial, and socioeconomic others within the strictures of imperialist nationalism
Best Essay
Amit Baishya, "Conjuring the Nation-State: the Vicissitudes of 'Life' in The Discovery of India." Studies of the former Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s magnum opus The Discovery of India (1946) tend to treat the text as a compendium of his authoritative statements on nationalism and the emerging nation-state. Refocusing attention on the narrative of The Discovery of India, Amit's essay analyzes the implications and effects of the concept-metaphor that weaves the multiple strands of this massive text together: the vitalist philosopheme of “life.” He also argues that if the concept-metaphor of “life” attempts to define an ontological essence for the (Indian) nation-form, then this project is constantly haunted by the troubling and incessant irruption of the nation-form’s “undead” other—the undecidable, liminal figure of the “Muslim”—into the identitarian space-time of the nationalist project.
Dietz Best Poetry Essay
Chad Wriglesworth, ‘What the River Says,’ Reading William Stafford’s Methow River Poems as New Genre Public Art”. William Stafford’s Methow River poems were originally published as a series of seven poetry signs that were installed along a fifty mile stretch of the Methow River in Washington State. The project began in 1993, as a collaborative effort initiated by two U.S. Forest Service Rangers, local conservationists, and the poet, William Stafford. This essay reads the poetry signs as a site based project that invites readers to consider the interdependent relationship that humans share with the natural world.
Graduate College Summer Fellowships
Katherine Gubbels
James Lambert
Joshua Matthews
Fellowships for Graduate College Initiative Funds
Provides funds for graduate students who have been selected to receive a post-comps research fellowship
Gabriel Downs
Bridget Draxler
Adele Holoch
Matthew Lavin
Jessica Lawson
Robert McLoone
Anna Stenson
Chris Vinsonhaler
The John C. Gerber Award for Excellence in Teaching General Education Literature
Eve Rosenbaum has proved to be a superbly dedicated and effective teacher, and, more important, a leader, organizer, and innovator in the General Education Literature Program. This year she has served as Chairman of our program’s Textbook Committee—frequently a complicated and contentious job, always time-consuming, and always absolutely crucial to the continued vitality and success of our General Education Literature Program. She has calmly and efficiently overseen the reconsideration by this committee of the textbook selections available to our new teachers, producing an innovative approach to genre that includes graphic novels and a novel in verse and a more diverse and historically balanced textbook list. Most important, however, Eve has led the most ambitious project ever undertaken by our Gen Ed Textbook Committee: the design and creation of a custom literature anthology that represents the collective experience of our program’s teachers. Congratulations to her and to her committee-- Carolyn Hall, Stephanie Blalock, Joyce Turner, Li Guo, Haihong Yang, Adam Roberts, Erica Daigle, and Joseph Rodriguez-- for producing such a pedagogically well-designed literature anthology for our program—The Interpretation of Literature: A Custom Anthology for the University of Iowa.
The W. R. Irwin Award for Excellence in Teaching General Education Literature
In her capacity as a Program Associate, Carolyn Hall has proved to be a terrific mentor, leader, and organizer in the General Education Literature Program. We relied heavily on her advice and initiatives for expanding the vision of our program, and have particularly benefited from her work to update our pedagogical archive. She has also served as a most effective liaison during the past year between our Program Associates and our Textbook Committee as it has undertaken the momentous task of designing and creating a custom literature anthology for the Gen Ed Lit Program. Her own teaching has been exemplary, as impressively demonstrated in a recent meeting of her Fictions Class in which an amazing number of imaginatively designed, well-coordinated, and different class activities produced equally amazing lively and insightful student discussion.
The W. R. Irwin Award for Excellence in Teaching General Education Literature
In his capacity as a Program Associate for Gen Ed Lit, LeDon Sweeney has proved to be a terrific mentor, leader, and innovator in the General Education Literature Program. We relied heavily on his initiatives, advice, and expertise in getting our program invested in the advantages of using ICON. What we learned from him about ICON has made a huge difference to the Gen Ed Lit teaching practice and countless numbers of our Gen Ed Lit instructors owe him for introducing them to the advantages and technicalities of this online resource. His own teaching is exemplary and it is also noteworthy that a number of LeDon’s colleagues, both other Program Associates and other teachers in the Gen Ed Lit Program, give him credit for teaching exercises and procedures they have found highly valuable in their own teaching.
The 2009 Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award
Congratulations to Joanna Davis-McElligatt for winning one of the University of Iowa Outstanding Teaching Assistant Awards for 2009. Joanna has taught for the General Education Literature Program since Fall 2005, coming to us after teaching two years in Rhetoric, but, as she puts it, she found teaching literature difficult and demanding, quickly discovering that “knowing how to do a thing is not the same as teaching the thing.” So she immediately dedicated herself to learning more about the teaching of literature. Two books proved particularly influential on her teaching, Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book and bell hooks’s Teaching to Transgress. As her superlative student evaluations clearly reflect, Joanna took from Adler an approach to breaking down literary concepts into more easily learnable bits and took from hooks the importance of truly respecting and personally engaging her students. She notes of her teaching: "I taught my students according to the principles of radical pedagogy, and it worked. I gave my students controversial novels about apartheid, colonization, lynching, rape, murder, death, despair, terror, and horror, and I asked them to talk about how those things related to them. I asked them to place these novels in a global context, to eliminate the selfish American “I” and begin to think of themselves as a “we.” I told them what they did in my class would affect them for the rest of their lives, and that I believed that was true."
Lisa Angelella, "Alimentary Modernism" (Cheryl Herr, dir.)
Jennifer Banash, “No Last Word: Revision in Contemporary Narratives” (Cheryl Herr, dir.)
Mark Bresnan, "Fantasy Sports: Athletics and Identity in Postmodern American Literature, 1967-2008" (Rob Latham, dir.)
Patricia Brogan, “Becoming Fantasy: Christianity in British Fantasy Fiction: 1863-2008” (Rob Latham, dir.)
Nicole Buscemi, "Diagnosing Narratives: Illness, The Case History and Victorian Fiction" (Garrett Stewart, dir.)
J.P. Craig, "Generous Constructions: Gift Exchange and Mentoring in Radical Modernist Poetics" (Dee Morris, dir.)
Erica Daigle, "Reconciling Matter and Spirit: The Galenic Brain and Identity in Early Modern Literature" (Alvin Snider, dir.)
Melissa Donegan, "Writing for Their Lives: British Women's Survival Narratives, 1848-1900" (Florence Boos, dir.)
Jeffrey Doty, "Popularity and Publicity in Early Modern England" (Huston Diehl, dir.)
Vickie Larsen, “The Pious Fringe: Julian of Norwich’s Readers and their Books, 1373-1843” (Claire Sponsler, dir.)
Angie Warfield, "Utopia Unlimited: Reassessing American Literary Utopias" (Tom Lutz, dir.)
Amit Baishya’s essay “Conjuring the Nation-State: the Vicissitudes of “Life” in Jawaharlal Nehru’s The Discovery of India” was published in the March 2009 issue of Postcolonial Studies.
Stephanie Blalock passed he Prospectus Meeting in February 2009. She presented the following papers at the Midwestern Modern Language Association Conference (MMLA) November 2009: "Whitman Sober?, or Signing the Pledge and (Re)forming the Reader: Walt Whitman's Washingtonian Experience" and "Periodical Haunting: Persistent Bodies and Ghostly Minor Characters in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone"; she also read her original poetry as part of the "Creative Writing I: Poetry" Panel. In March she presented "Signing the Pledge and (Re)forming the Reader: Walt Whitman's Washingtonian Experience" at the Jakobsen Conference. Stephanie has also been accepted to the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College to be held this June.
Dan Boscaljon attended the 2008 meeting of the International Society of Religion, Literature and Culture held in Aarhus, Denmark. He was also the student organizer of the 2009 Religion, Literature and the Arts: Reading the Book of Nature conference, and presented papers in both.
Mark Bresnan's article, "The Work of Play in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest," appeared in the Fall 2008 issue of Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. This April, he presented a paper on the textual practices of sports fans at the Media in Transitions conference hosted by Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also tended the MLA conference in San Francisco.
Craig Carey attended the Northeast Modern Language Association conference in Boston, MA.
Ryan Clark attended the Northeast Modern Language Association Conference in February.
Kim Cohen's essay, "'True and Faithful in Everything': Recipes for Servant and Class Reform in Catherine Owen’s Cookbook Novels," will be published in the forthcoming collection Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature in October 2009.
Andrew Crooke gave a talk titled "Tenure in the Land: Humans and Animals in Ceremony and House Made of Dawn" at the Western Literature Association in Boulder. In April, at our own CCC conference, he gave a talk titled "Abashed Ambition: James Agee's Intentions and Performance in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men."
Erica Daigle attended the Modern Language Association conference in San Francisco, CA. She also attended the UVA "CFP: Navigating the Body; Mapping, Spaces and Embodiment" conference in Charlottesville, VA.
Joanna Davis-McElligatt's article "Confronting the Intersections of Race, Immigration and Representation in Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth” is forthcoming in The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing is a Way of Thinking. She also won the 2009 John F. Hunt William Faulkner Society Fellow.
Last summer Doug Dowland received the Graduate Student College Summer Fellowship to pursue completion of the dissertation chapter on Truman Capote. He also organized a panel on Truman Capote and gave a paper on his unfinished novel Answered Prayers at the MMLA conference in Minneapolis.
Bridget Draxler curated a museum exhibit at the Old Capitol titled "Fresh Threads of Connection: Mother Nature and British Women Writers."
Joshua Gooch attended the Modern Language Association conference in San Francisco, CA.
Berneta Haynes attended The Body: Perceptions, Images and Representations conference in Macomb, IL.
Joanne Janssen attended the North American Victorian Studies conference in New Haven, CT.
Travis Johnson attended the Medieval Academy of America meeting in Chicago, IL.
James Lambert attended the Shakespeare Association of America annual conference in Washington, DC.
Matthew Lavin attended the Underground-CUNY 2008 Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference in November.
Jessica Lawson presented at the International Pynchon Week 2008 conference "Against the Grain: Reading Pynchon's Counternarratives" in Munich last June. Her paper, titled "'The Real And Only Fucking Is Done On Paper': Penetrative Readings and Pynchon's Sexual Text," has been accepted for a manuscript collection from the conference proceedings. Jessica also presented a paper titled "Family Material: Bodily Others and Textual Selves in 'Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose'" at the NeMLA in Boston this February.
Matt Low’s essay “The Rhetorics of Place / Teaching Place as Text” appeared in Elsewhere: A Journal for the Literature of Place in 2008. “Rereading Hamlin Garland’s The Book of the American Indian” is forthcoming in MidAmerica, and “‘Heard gripe hruson’ (the hard grip of the earth): Ecopoetry and the Anglo-Saxon Elegy” is forthcoming in Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature. He has also contributed five short articles to the forthcoming Encyclopedia of American Environmental History, to be published by the University of Houston Center for Public History: “Bernard DeVoto,” “Backcountry,” “Recreational Fishing,” “Central Plains Indians,” and “Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.” He presented “John Neihardt Writes: Textual Appropriations of Indigenous Storytelling” at the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature (SSML) and “A Flood to Remember? Lessons from William Faulkner’s ‘Old Man’” at the College English Association (CEA).
Deborah Manion attended The Dickens Universe in Santa Cruz, CA last summer.
Robert McLoone attended the Society of Early Americanist conference in March.
Lynne Nugent attended The Dickens Universe last summer in Santa Cruz, CA.
Wanda Raiford’s essay “Race, Robots and the Law” was published in New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction in 2008. She also received the R.D. Mullen Fellowship to conduct research in the J. Lloyd Eaton Collection at UC Riverside during the 2009-10 year.
Melanie Reichwald presented a paper titled "Refusing to 'Shut Up': Mark Nowak’s Poethics and the Anticapitalist Counterpublic" at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900 this Spring. She also gave a paper at this April's Craft Critique Culture conference entitled “Revising the Anglo Empire: Colored American Magazine and the African American Response to U.S. Imperialisms, 1900-1904."
Joseph Rodriguez presented his paper "'With the grace off God at thentryng off the Brigge': Royal Authority and the Giant of London Bridge in Lydgate's Triumphal Entry of Henry VI" as part of a panel on "Poetry and Politics" at the Mid-America Medieval Association's 33rd annual conference on "Urban Life and Culture," held at the University of Missouri-Kansas City on February 28, 2009. He will also be presenting a paper entitled "'Fro heuen to helle': Social and Moral Degree and Upward Mobility in Cleanness" at the 44th International Congress on Medieval Studies, as part of a panel on "The Page, the Poem, and the Word: Biblical Interpretation in Medieval Literature and Manuscripts" (presided over by our very own Erin Mann). The Congress will be held at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo and will run May 7-10, 2009.
Eve Rosenbaum attended the Midwest Modern Language Association conference in Minneapolis, MN in November.
Elizabeth Shane attended the Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference at CUNY in November.
Taryne Taylor’s essay “Investigating the Role and Origin of Goldberry in Tolkien’s Mythology” was published in the Fall 2008 issue of Mythlore. She also presented two papers this spring: “New Amazonia: Proto-feminist Utopic and Dystopic Warning?” at the British Women’s Writers Conference and “The Forgotten Victorian Proto-Feminist Fantasy of Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett" at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts conference in Orlando, FL.
Brenton Thompson attended the CUNY Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference in November and the Projections Conference in New York City this March.
Chris Vinsonhaler performed Beowulf at the University of Iowa and at the Mississippi Whole Schools Institute. She also presented a paper at the Southeastern Medieval Association Conference: "Virginal Sex and Lydgate's The Lives of SS Edmund and Fremund."
Mark Bresnan (Rob Latham, dir.) has accepted a one-year Visiting Assistant position at St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN.
Michael Chasar (Dee Morris, dir.) has accepted an Assistant Professor of English position at Willamette University in Salem, OR.
Erica Daigle (Alvin Snider, dir.) has accepted a Visiting Assistant Professor of English position at The University of Minnesota in Duluth.
Melissa Donegan (Florence Boos, dir.) has accepted a Visiting Assistant Professor of English position at The University of Iowa.
Sucheta Mallick Choudhuri (Kevin Kopelson and Priya Kumar, dirs.) has accepted a one-year tenure-track Instructor position renewable at the rank of Assistant Professor, at the University of Houston—Downtown.
Jeff Doty (Huston Diehl, dir.) has accepted an Assistant Professor of English position at West Texas A & M University in Canyon, TX.
Richard Garrett (ABD) has accepted a Lecturer position at The University of Wisconsin at Platteville.
Vickie (Clarke) Larsen (Claire Sponsler, dir.) has accepted an Assistant Professor of English position at the University of Michigan in Flint, MI.
Heidi Lavine (ABD) has accepted a Visiting Assistant Professor of English position at Wesminster College in Fulton, MO.
Matt Low (ABD) has accepted a Visiting Assistant Professor of English position at Creighton University.
Jen McGovern (Kathleen Diffley, dir.) has accepted the Johnston Visiting Professor in Native American Literature position at Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA for the 2009-2010 academic year.
Angie Warfield (Rob Latham and Tom Lutz, dirs.) has accepted an Assistant Professor of English position at Forest Park College in St. Louis, MO.
Congratulations are also in order for the English Department Whiffle Ball Team. The team, made up of graduate students Andrew Crooke, Paul McCullough, Craig Carey, Ross Salinas, Christine Norquest, Tom Blake, and James Lambert, recently took home the UI Whiffle Ball Championship trophy after routing the UI Medical School team.