It is that time of year, again, when undergraduates start electronically filing into our courses for the spring. Thanks to Lori Branch and the graduate student advisors (Melanie Reichwald, Katie Montgomery, Eliza Sanders, and Andrew Williams) for doing a remarkably efficient job at giving guidance to our 940 majors, and special thanks to Lena Hill and Phil Round for helping out in the advising crunch this week. Congratulations, too, to Eric Gidal, Cheryl Herr, and Harry Stecopoulos, who offered the three courses that filled first for next semester, within three days of the beginning of early registration (nicely ranging in subject matter from British Romanticism to contemporary British culture to Mark Twain). We will once again try initially capping all discussion courses at 26 in the hopes that we can serve all the students with classes maxing out at roughly that size, while we will place an initial temporary cap at 18 for courses below 100-level to reserve some spaces for students in earlier years who don’t get to register until after Thanksgiving break, raising that cap to 26 after the break. You should feel free to add deserving students to your courses up to the capacity for the room, particularly after all English courses have filled to minimums (12 students for an undergraduate course during the Fall/Spring semester). Thanks to Sharry for maintaining our ISIS listing, and please talk with her if you have any concerns.
It is nice to see the department featured highly in this season’s Arts and Sciences, the glossy magazine for the alumni and friends of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The four-page spread on English touches on our range of strengths and hints at our worthiness for donor support. It is followed by an impressive two-page spread on Steve Kuusisto, “Publicly Blind: A Journey,” written by recent NWP MFA graduate Nick Kowalczyk.
Much of the policy business of the moment remains work in progress—rationalizing our involvement in GIS and cross-listed courses, securing funding for the Intro. to the Major TAs, and the regular excitement of promotion reviews and new searches—but one piece of newly-breaking news is worth highlighting: Iowa City just received notification that it has been selected as a UNESCO City of Literature. More details in the next story. Congratulations to Chris Merrill, in particular, for his energetic work in pursuing this designation!
Publications, Presentations, and other Faculty Matters
Congratulations to Matt Brown, whose work, The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals and Book Culture in Early New England, received honorable mention in the competition for the MLA Prize for a First Book.
Visiting Assistant Professor Mike Chasar's essay "Writing Good Bad Poetry" appeared in the Nov/Dec 2008 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. Chasar's poems "At the Foxhead on Election Night" and "November 5" appeared in the Iowa City Press-Citizen on November 7 and November 5 respectively. He also presented two papers at the MMLA conference in Minneapolis: "The Case for Vachel Lindsay: Celebrity, Poetry, and the Program Era" and "When the Scrapbook Came of Age".
Loren Glass published an editorial in last Sunday’s Iowa City Press-Citizen (11/16) exhorting the nation’s educators to teach the truth about the Bush Administration. More information can be found here.
Robin Hemley has begun to provide a regular column chronicling his life on research leave in the Philippines. “Dispatches from Manila” will be a regular column on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency; see here.
At the October ASA meeting in Albuquerque, Cheryl Herr was discussant on "Critical Regionalism and American Studies: The Comparative Case of Chicana/o Regionalisms." Also, Cheryl's essay "Roll-over Beethoven: Johnnie Ray in context" will appear in Popular Music in a special issue on popular music and disability scheduled for Fall 2009.
Stephen Kuusisto recently published a poem entitled “Autobiographia Litteraria” in Sweet: A Literary Confection, found here. His essay “Flawless Memory” appears in the inaugural issue of Waccamaw. He has recently served as the distinguished visiting writer at the University of Idaho’s graduate creative writing program. He also spoke on November 13 on Emily Dickinson and 19th century attitudes towards blindness at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.
An article discussing Robyn Schiff's book Revolver was in the November 18 edition of The Daily Iowan. The article can be found here.
Congratulations, also, to Doris Witt, who will be co-directing an interdisciplinary seminar on food studies, "World Fares: Food, Culture, and Society since the Age of Industrialization," at the Obermann Center Fall 2009 Cmiel Research Seminar. Full details here.