Reading Matters, Vol. 14, Issue 5, December 11, 2008
In a policy discussion this semester, as the executive committee attempted a definition of an English Department course, we formulated the following: “minimal criteria for cross-listing a course include the subject matter fitting within the discipline of English as this department conceives it; an undergraduate course contributing to our carefully articulated mission statement and goals for the majors, including a significant writing component, and meaningful opportunity for student discussion.” That seems to me an appealing definition of this department’s sense of doing English. We’re a capacious discipline with fuzzy but not endless boundaries. These are defined in part by the chance of institutional history—an independent Department of Linguistics makes us see that area as not the domain of English, even if it once was, just as creative writing has been the domain of the Writers’ Workshop. But institutions change, of course, and now we have staked a claim to undergraduate creative writing to put alongside our longstanding claim to nonfiction writing. And edges can be plastic, as with our wonderful relationship with African American Studies—a separate program fueled by some of our courses and a healthy crossover of personnel—or American Studies, or Cinema and Comparative Literature, or the Center for the Book. Even those of us without split appointments feel multiple overlapping affiliations—I’m at least as much a medievalist as an English professor. The strength of the English Department has been to provide a welcoming and meaningful intellectual and institutional home for all of us. The image of the department as a circle of chairs gathered in the Gerber Lounge, comfortable with a loose but meaningful concatenation, without needing an occupied center, seems as appropriate now as when I began chairing, a mere three and a half years ago.
And what a quick three and a half years it was! As I ponder my time at this desk, I think of various changes—of the new Introduction to the Major and the new Undergraduate Creative Writing Track, of outcomes assessment and mission statement, of six hires, five resignations, one retirement, twelve promotions and a slew of retentions, of major reorganization of the journals and modest reorganization of the office—but much more I think of continuity, of undergraduate and graduate programs that work well, of a community of scholars that support each other, of the near-constant hum of great teaching in the rooms of EPB, the never-ending round of talks and lecture, and the outpouring of research and creative work. For my brief time as chair, I have also been particularly conscious of the hours of committee work and service that makes all this possible. Thanks to all of you for that amazing work and special thanks to all the associate chairs and directors I have had the pleasure of working with—to Ed and Dee; Claire, Loren, and Mary Lou; Doug, Rob, and Lori; Brooks, Robin, Bonnie, David, and Robyn.
As I have represented English across campus, it has been a pleasure to see the high esteem in which this department is held—rightly so, given how fundamental our teaching and research is to the institution. We are supported in that mission by impressive people throughout the university’s structure. Even when I haven’t agreed with them, it has been an education to see how hardworking, smart, and dedicated most administrators throughout the campus are. And, while it is easy to demonize our immediate boss, I have especially appreciated working with Dean Maxson, whose fierce advocacy and intelligent stewardship has earned my respect and thanks. Thanks, too, to all the support from the College and from the rest of the university, with special thanks to Dianne for her fearless help with our constant IT needs, and to Tom for his meticulous devotion to his job caring for our offices.
My biggest revelation of the last three and half years is the amazing amount of back-room work accomplished by the tiny dedicated English Department staff that allows all us faculty to do our thing. And so let me end with my special appreciation and thanks to all the English Department office—to Erin with her always welcoming manner and always competent help, to Linda with her dedication to every aspect of our General Education Literature operation, to Cherie with her can-do attitude and easy assurance at dealing with everyone who comes her way, to Elizabeth with her problem-solving mind, to Sharry with her amazing command and fearless advance of all things curricular and search, to Maggie just coming aboard, and, above all, to Gayle with her unerring sense of all of our systems and how to make them work, enriched with a humanity that keeps us all sane. You all have made this job a pleasure!
And so ends three and a half years of pondering how to maintain and advance the particular constellation of interests, enthusiasm, and expertise that constitute the Iowa English Department. I have always appreciated the three-legged stool of academe and the way one can shift the seat a bit every now and again. I look forward to continuing to contribute to our joint mission, now leaning a little heavier on the research leg for awhile, as I finally emerge from under the chair’s desk, handing over desk and department with every confidence to my clearly-competent successor…
Bravo to Matt Brown, whose 2007 work, The Pilgrim and the Bee, won special mention in the MLA Prize for a First book competition. See the next item for further details from the full citation.
Matt Brown writes: “The UI Center for the Book will host the first biennial College Book Art Association conference January 8-10, 2009. Titled “Art, Fact, and Artifact: The Book in Time and Place,” the conference will host close to 200 artists, scholars, and curators from around the world. Keynote lectures will be presented by Randall McLeod (University of Toronto) and Tate Shaw (Visual Studies Workshop). McLeod is an anatomist of the book, with witty, erudite essays on everything from Ariosto to Sarah Siddons. A copy of one of his pieces (both as photocopy and as bound article, given that the page turns matter for McLeod) will be available in the Zimansky Room for your procrastination, beginning finals week. Conference details can be found here.
Visiting Assistant Professor Mike Chasar's Guest Opinion "Put Readings On YouTube" appeared in The Iowa City Press-Citizen on November 25. Two of Chasar's poems have also been accepted for publication in The Hiram Poetry Review.
Congratulations, too, to David Dowling who just signed a contract for his second book, The Leviathan of Print Culture: The Moby-Dick Marathon, with The University of Iowa Press.
Ed Folsom was a visiting scholar at the Des Moines University Medical School’s Medical Humanities Program this past spring. His presentation at DMU, “Walt Whitman and the Civil War: Making Poetry Out of Pain, Grief, and Mass Death,” appears in the Fall 2008 issue of Abaton, available here.
Robin Hemley has an essay in the latest issue of the venerable literary journal New Letters (now in its 75th year). Robin writes: “The essay, “Field Notes for the Graveyard Enthusiast” is somewhat different in tone from my Manila dispatches, but I hope you’ll still be able to detect my sense of humor." Here’s a link to the New Letters website.
Congratulations to Priya Kumar on winning a 2009 CLAS Collegiate Teaching Award in recognition of her exemplary performance as a teacher.
Stephen Kuusisto’s poem “Waiting” was featured by Narrative magazine as “poem of the week” for the week of December 8. He recently gave a reading and taught a master class in lyric poetry at Gemini Ink, a non-profit literary arts center in San Antonio, Texas. Kuusisto has also been selected by the Library of Congress to be the keynote speaker at the 2010 national convention of the Talking Book Library for the Blind and Disabled.
And congratulations to Teresa Mangum, who will be co-directing the third Obermann Graduate Institute for Public Engagement. Participants include Matt Low and Ann Pleiss Morris from English and Janet Hendrickson from the NWP, while panelists talking about “Lessons from the Flood -- Collaborating in a Crisis” include Barbara Eckstein.
The most recent issue of The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies (8.2, Fall/Winter 2008) is a special issue devoted to the topic of Climate and Crisis and contains articles by Alvin Snider and Eric Gidal. Alvin’s article, “Hard Frost, 1684” studies written responses to the extreme winter that struck England in 1683-84 and takes up Royal Society reports, diaries, ballads, painting, sermons, and other documents to explore concerns that the temperate climate that supposedly made the English better suited for ascendancy than peoples in frigid or torrid zones could vanish into history. Eric’s article, “ ‘O Happy Earth! Reality of Heaven!: Melancholy and Utopia in Romantic Climatology,” a version of which he presented earlier this semester as part of the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Interdisciplinary Colloquium, reconsiders strains of Romantic utopianism in relation to current perspectives on a changing climate, studying how a renewed emphasis on the correspondence between physical environment and moral character conjoins with a scientifically endorsed historical optimism to give new life to the perennial utopian dream of the banishment of melancholy.
Congratulations to Doris Witt, who organized and hosted a Food Studies Workshop last week featuring, among others, the work of English graduate students Jillian Walker, Lisa Angelella, Lacy Worth, Melissa Schomers, and NWP student Kendra Greene.
Matthew P. Brown, University of Iowa associate professor of English and Director of the Center for the Book, has been awarded the MLA Prize for a First Book, honorable mention, for The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals and Book Culture in Early New England.
This will be the fifteenth annual First Book prize, which serves to recognize the first book-length publication of a literary or linguistic study, critical edition of an important work, or a critical biography. Only those in the MLA (Modern Language Association of America) are allowed to vie for the prize, though competition is in no short supply, as there are 30,000 registered members from around the world.
The judges observed that Brown’s book, which analyzes several aspects of the colonial American literary world, contributes greatly to the fields of religious and early American studies, while calling for new directions in the study of book history and “advocat[ing] for book studies scholarship as an especially valuable method for pursuing a social history of culture.”
At the University of Iowa, Brown centers his research on the history of readership (as is reflected in The Pilgrim and the Bee). He will be on research assignment in the spring to work on his next book at the Library Company of Philadelphia with assistance from a NEH grant. The book, currently titled The Novel and the Blank, is to be, Brown says, an “investigation of how constraints of the print shop affected the literary culture and reading habits of colonial and early national America.”
He is also in the process of helping organize “Art, Fact and Artifact,” the January 8-10, 2009 College Book Art Association conference to be held at the Center for the Book.
The honorable mention category has been granted only four times in the history of the award prior to this year. The recipients will receive the prize this December at the MLA’s annual meeting in San Francisco in front of approximately 9,500 attendees.
FROM: Jordan Cohen, Interim Vice President for Research
Jay Semel, Associate Vice President for Research
RE: 2009-2010 Arts and Humanities Initiative (for projects conducted between July 1, 2009 and June 30, 2010)
DATE: December 10, 2008
The Office of the Vice President for Research is pleased to invite applications for Arts and Humanities Initiative (AHI) grants. The AHI program is dedicated to advancing arts and humanities at the University. AHI grants support important humanities scholarship and work in the creative, visual, and performing arts. Funds are available for research travel, graduate research assistants, equipment, supplies, summer salary stipends, research personnel and conferences. Guidelines are found here.
Although all proposals will be judged on their merits, we especially encourage:
If you or your colleagues have any questions about the guidelines, please direct them to Jay Semel, jay-semel@uiowa.edu or call 335-4034. If you have questions about the electronic submission process, send them to ifi-questions@uiowa.edu or call 335-2119.
Deadline: Applications must be submitted electronically via the UIRIS website by 11:59 p.m., Monday, February 16, 2009.
CLAS has gathered together the information required on every syllabus. For a handy summary and checklist, see here. Dean Dettmer has also sent a reminder of classroom policies and procedures; see here.
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.
UI Master Calendar | UI Academic Calendar | NonFiction Writing Program Calendar | The Writers Workshop Calendar | The International Writing Program Calendar
The English Honors Program Calendar
Reading Matters will resume in the Spring under a new chair-editor. Please send submissions for the next issue to erin-hackathorn@uiowa.edu.