Announcements and Ongoing Events

The Graduate Colloquium

This joint M.A.- Ph.D. program sponsors lectures and gatherings throughout the academic year. In recent years, the Colloquium has taken the form of thematic evenings, each with a keynote lectures by one faculty member and then papers delivered and responded to by our graduate students. Contact colloquium organizers.

Ph.D. students in their third and fourth years also participate in a pedagogy seminar. All students are welcome. Pedagogy seminars occur periodically.

Recent Student Activities and Accomplishments

We like to keep a running list of recent accomplishments by students in our program. If you have something to contribute, please email Tracy Downing.

Requests for applications to the doctoral program should be sent to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Literary Research Links

The English Library Newsletter offers students and faculty, information on starting electronic journals, research developments and more.

Are you conducting research and need some guidance? Research Guide.

Information on job listings, conference announcements, and other resources.

Boston College Libraries

Doctoral Student News

Articles, Books, Book Chapters, Creative Works

Fanous, Alison. Review of Music in Irish Cultural History by Gerry Smith (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009) appeared in the Winter 2010/2011 issue of New Hibernia Review.

Iannucci, Alisa Marko. “Summer of '69: Adirondack Murray and the American Wilderness Vacation." ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 14 (Winter 2009). (16:1) 119-136.

Iannucci, Alisa Marko. "A Field Guide to the American Literature Survey: "Doing the Reading" and Literary Tourism." Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice. Summer 2009 (3:1) 

Iannucci, Alisa Marko. "Cosmopolitan Culture: George Catlin's American-ness." Cercles: Revue Pluridisciplinaire du Monde Anglophone 18 (Summer 2009) 152-161.

Kerr, Jason. "De Doctrina Christiana and Milton's Theology of Liberation," has been accepted for publication in Studies in Philology.

Kuhn, Andrew. “Ciaran Carson’s Books: A Bibliographic Mapping of Belfast.” Eire-Ireland 45.1-2 (2010).

Michna, Catherine. "Stories at the Center: Story Circles, Educational Organizing, and the Fate of Neighborhood Schools in New Orleans" appeared in the American Quarterly 61.3 (Fall 2009).

Olivier-Mason, Josh. audio essay - "This Is What Interfaith Sounds Like," was recently published on InterfaithFamily.com. The piece was originally meant as a model for an audio essay assignment for Josh's FWS class.

Olivier-Mason, Joshua. Review of Darwinian Misadventures in the Humanities by Eugene Goodheart Religion and the Arts 14.3 (344-46)

Perry, Emma Katherine. 'Will Fisher, Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006)'. Early Theatre 14.1 (2011): 152-5 (paper). Article 10. 

Puente, Lorenzo Alexander. "Dictee as Testimony." In Prowess and Grace: A Festschrift for Edna Zapanta Manlapaz. Ed. Maria Luz Vilches, Rica Bolipata-Santos and Ana Marie Fernandez. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2010. 50-61.

Shakespeare, Alex. "Hermeneutics of Autumn: Gerard Manley Hopkins and Geoffrey Hill's The Orchard of Syon" was published in The Hopkins Quarterly Vol. 38, Nos. 3-4 (Summer-Fall, 2011): 152-164, and another essay, "'In Strange Christian Hope': Faith and Modern Memory in Geoffrey Hill’s The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy” was published in the journal Christianity & Literature Vol. 60, No. 3 (Spring 2011): 429-447.

Shakespeare, Alex. "The Names of Rivers and the Names of Birds: Ezra Pound, Louis Agassiz, and the ‘Luminous Detail’ in Hemingway’s Early Fiction” was published in Hemingway Review 30.2 (Spring 2011): 36-53.

Shakespeare, Alex. “Reading Hawthorne’s ‘Failure’ at the Wayside: The Uncanny Authorship of Septimius.” Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 35.2 (Fall 2009): 67-83.

Tressler, Beth. "Waking Dreams: George Eliot and the Poetics of Double Consciousness." Victorian Literature and Culture. 39.2 (September 2011): 483-498.

Trivedi, Nirmal. Review of Gin Before Breakfast: The Dilemma of the Poet in the Newsroom. Published by Jhistory@h-net.msu.edu

Waters, Alice.  "Hoping for the Best, Imagining the Worst: Systopian Anxieties in Women's Pulp SF Stories, 1930-1948." Extrapolation (2009). (forthcoming)

Recent Conference Presentations and Talks

Katie Daily-Bruckner, “(re)Envisioning Jewish America: Counterfactual History in The Plot Against America and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.” New England American Studies Association (NEASA) Annual Conference, November, 2011.

Rowena Clarke, "The City of Whose Dreams? Modernization and Redevelopment as a Nightmare of Control in Alex Proyas' 'Dark City'" at the NeMLA (Northeast Modern Language Association) conference in Rochester, March 2012.

Alison Fanous, presented a paper, "The Role of Comics in Patrick McCabe's 'The Butcher Boy'" at the Boston College Biennial English Graduate Conference on March 19th, 2011.

Alison Fanous, "Material Life and Sydney Owenson's The Wild Irish Girl" Meeting in New Orleans: American Comparative Literature  Association Annual Assoc. Annual Meeting, New Orleans, April 2010.

Alison Fanous, "Indian Geography of the Irish Imagination: Sydney Owenson's The Missionary", British Women Writers Conference, College Station Texas, April 2010.

On Dec. 16, 2011, Ph.D. Candidate Gene Gorman appeared on WUNC, the NPR-affiliate in Durham, NC, as a guest on "The State of Things." Gene discussed the life and work of African-American novelist Charles Chesnutt as part of the show's occasional series "NC Literary Lights." 

Gene Gorman, "Awakening a Dormant Appetite: Captain McBane, Convict Labor, and The Marrow of Tradition, American Literature Association (ALA) 22nd Annual Conference on American Literature, Boston, MA, May 27, 2011.

Gene Gorman, "'Somebody's been readin' a book or something': Southern Chain Gangs in All the King's Men, American Studies Association (ASA) annual meeting, San Antonio, TX, Nov. 18, 2010.

Gene Gorman presented "Confining the Coens: Chain Gang History amid the Mythical Ruins of O Brother, Where Art Thou?" at the New England American Studies Association annual conference, which took place on November 4-5 at Plimoth Plantation.

Matthew Heitzman presented a paper entitled ""A Long and Constant Fusion of the Two Great Nations': Dickens, the Crossing, and A Tale of Two Cities" at the international conference "Dickens and the Idea of 'The Dickensian" in Condette, France on February 5, 2012.

Kiara Kharpertian, "A Measure of Place: Space in Text and Context." Bodies on the Move: Migratory Identities and Topographies in Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange 2010 McGill Graduate English conference, February 2010.

Andrew Kuhn, “Walking Ulysses” Boston College E-Teaching Day, May 2010.

Deanna Malvesti, Chair, “Spenser in Conversation.” Invited by the International Spenser Society.  46th International Congress for Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May 12-15, 2011.

Deanna Malvesti, “Engaging the ‘Sympathetic Imagination’: Animal Studies and Edna O’Brien’s Down by the River.” International Meeting of the American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS), Madison, WI, March 30-April 2, 2011.

Deanna Malvesti, “The Animal in Edna O’Brien’s Down by the River.” Boston College Department of English Graduate Student Colloquium, “When Animals Look Back,” November 19, 2010.

Linda Martin, "“The Dark Places of Psychology: Consciousness Theory in The Waves" at the Cognitive Approaches to Literature panel at the NeMLA annual convention in Rochester, NY, held March 15-18, 2012.

Emma Perry trained at Shakespeare and Company in Lenox, MA as part of Dennis Krausnick's First Folio Workshop for specialized study in Shakespeare performance and text. (August 2011)

Emma Perry gave a paper entitled "You Can't Burn the Koran Onstage: Marlowe's Tamburlaine Meets the 21st Century" at the Northeast MLA on April 8, 2011.

Emma Perry, “Titania and the Early Modern Cougar” NeMLA Annual Conference, Shakespeare’s Cougars Panel, Montreal, April 2010.

Alex Shakespeare,“Try to Come Home a Different Way Each Night: Street Names, Cat Names, and Théophile Gautier in Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream.” International Ernest Hemingway Conference: Lausanne, Switzerland. June-July 2010.

Alex Shakespeare, “’Poetry Which Moves By Its Music’: Pound, Hemingway, & Imagisme.” International Imagism Conference. Brunnenburg, Italy. June 2010.

Alex Shakespeare, “Otherworldly Concord: Memory & Forgetting in Hawthorne and Emerson.” Nathaniel Hawthorne Society Conference. Concord, MA. June 10-13 2010.

Alex Shakespeare, “What Is a Traditional Imagiste?: Allen Tate, Ezra Pound, and Elizabeth Madox Roberts’ Under the Tree.” Elizabeth Madox Roberts Conference: Springfield, Kentucky, April 2010.

Kelly Sullivan, Seminar Series, Notre Dame Irish Seminar in Dublin, June 13-July 2, 2010.

Beth Tressler, “Strange Souls: Ecstatic Spectatorship in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette,” Victorian Spectatorship Seminar, North American Victorian Studies Association.
(November 2011)

Beth Tressler,  “The Ongoings of the Infernal World: The Ecstatic Mind in Charlotte Brontë;” Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University. (October 2011)

Beth Tressler, "Rosamond and the Reader: Sympathy and Selfhood in George Eliot's Middlemarch." Lessons in Sympathy in 19th Century British Literature, 2010 NeMLA, Montreal, Quebec.

Benjamin Walker, “Great Expectations of Human Rights: The Postcolonial Bildungsroman in Mr. Pip.” 8th Annual English Graduate Student Conference, SUNY Albany, Albany, NY. 17 April  2010.

Alice Waters, “Englishing” Utopia in London: Translation and print in the sixteenth century." MLA Annual Convention, Boston, January 2013. Translation Discussion group panel, "Materialities of Translation."

Other News

Emma Atwood (Perry) was awarded the Donald J. White Teaching Excellence Award for 2011-2012.

Emma Atwood (Perry) was awarded the Betty Jo Hudson Graduate Fellowship from Alpha Lambda Delta for the 2012-13 academic year.

Emma Atwood (Perry) was awarded a graduate student travel grant for the 2011 NeMLA conference in New Brunswick, N.J.

Emma Atwood (Perry) was awarded the 2011 Andrew Von Hendy prize for graduate writing for her essay "Fashionably Late: Temporality and the Restoration Fop."

Emma Atwood (Perry) was awarded a $3000 graduate fellowship from the National Honor Society Alpha Lambda Delta for the 2010-11 academic year.

Kaitie Daily-Bruckner was awarded the Donald J. White Teaching Excellence Award for 2011-2012.

Alison Fanous was awarded the 2012 Andrew Von Hendy Prize for Graduate Writing at Boston College for her essay "Narrating Through Comics in Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy."

Gene Gorman was awarded the PhD program Director's Service Award for 2010-2011.

Gene Gorman was awarded a Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Fellowship for 2011-2012.

Matthew Heitzman was awarded the PhD Program Director's Service Award for 2011-2012.

Kristin Imre was awarded the Donald J. White Teaching Excellence Award for 2010-2011.

Andrew Kuhn was awarded the 2010 Bookbuilder’s of Boston Internship.

Alex Puente was awarded the 2012 Andrew Von Hendy Prize for Graduate Writing for his essay "Finley Peter Dunne's Mr. Dooley and the Philippine-American War at the Turn of the Twentieth Century"

Alex Shakespeare - Conference for Christianity Literature Graduate Student Award, December 2009.

Beth Tressler was awarded the Donald J. White Teaching Excellence Award for 2009-2010 and The Von Hendy Prize for Graduate Writing 2010.

Alice Waters was awarded the Donald J. White Teaching Excellence Award for 2010-2011.