Department News
Kalpana Rahita Seshadri “After Teresa Brennan” Living Attention: On Teresa Brennan eds. Alice A. Jardine, Shannon Lundeen and Kelly Oliver, NY; SUNY Press, 79-90.
On May 1st, Kalpana Rahita Seshadri presented a paper at Wellesley College as part of the Newhouse Humanities Center Fellows Series entitled “Human Display: The Bio-Politics of Looking at Others”.
Lisa Fluet has been awarded a fellowship by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She will be a Visiting Scholar at the AAAS for 2007-2008.
James M. Smith, "The Magdalene Sisters: Evidence, Testimony...Action?" Signs:Journal of Women in Culture and Society 32,1 (2007): 431-58.
Suzanne Matson was part of an Author Panel (along with Ward Just and Kim McLarin) at the Concord Book Festival on October 21.
Caroline Bicks was on a panel, "Life Writing in the Classroom: Dealing with the Biographical Reading," at the Attending to Early Modern Women conference at the University of Maryland on November 11th. She also delivered a paper,"Apostles in Schoolgirls' Clothing; Staging the Jesuitess in Early Modern England,"on Nov.19th at the The North American Conference on British Studies.
Paul Lewis, "Borat tells us much about ourselves" (op-ed), News Tribune (Tacoma), November 12, 2006. Cracking Up: American Humor in a Time of Conflict was included in The Chronicle of Higher Education's "New Scholarly Books" feature (November 3) and in the Page 69 series on the America Reads Web site: http://americareads.blogspot.com/2006/11/pg-69-cracking-up.html
James Najarian, "Introduction" to The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2006).
On September 21 Paul Lewis appeared as the first speaker in the "Semester on Comedy and Humor" series sponsored by the American Studies department and the Art Gliner Center for Humor Studies at the University of Maryland--College Park.
John Mahoney was Guest Visiting Professor at the Humanities Division Convocation at Franklin Pierce College,New Hampshire on October 23,lecturing on "Freedom:America's Literary Voices'at the evening session. He also spoke on"'Tintern Abbey':Religion and Spirituality"at James Maybury's "Romanticism" class during the day.
On Thursday, October 26, Patrick Moran delivered a lecture, "The Book of Kells and Modalities of the Visible in Joyce" at Wentworth Institute of Technology.
Elizabeth Graver's essay, "Something to Tell You," has appeared in the anthology Searching for Mary Poppins: Women Writers Write About The Intense Relationship Between Mothers and Nannies (Penguin/Hudson Street Press, 2006).
Cynthia Young's book "Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left" was just published by Duke University Press.
James Smith presented paper entitled "The Adoption Act (1952), Baptismal Certificates, and Adoptive Parents’ Identity Crisis," at The Women in Irish Culture and History Conference, University College Dublin, Ireland. 20th-22nd October 2006
Heather Braun presented at the Harvard Humanities Center on October 16, 2006 for a panel on "New Research in Romanticism." Her paper was entitled "The Seductive Ballad in Keats's Lamia and Joanna Baillie's 'The Moody Seer.'"
Patrick Moran presented the paper, "Redefining Conrad's 'Utopian Vocation of Style'" as part of the seminar, "The Modern Utopian, Revisited" at the Modernist Studies Association conference in Tulsa, OK.
John Mahoney,rev. of Eric G.Wilson,COLERIDGE"S MELANCHOLIA: AN ANATOMY OF LIMBO. University Press of Florida, 2004 in EUROPEAN ROMANTIC REVIEW.17.4 (October,2006):495-499.
Paul Lewis, "Liberal Bias of the Late-Night Comics?" (op-ed), The Providence Journal, October 21.
Cynthia Young delivered a paper entitled "Afro Brits Remake the Nation State" at the annual American Studies Association Conference in Oakland, CA on October 14, 2006. This new work looks at the ways that forms of state violence in the U.K. impacts the way that various generations of West Indian immigrants articulate racial and political identity.
Tina Klein organized and participated in roundtable discussion at the American Studies Association annual meeting on Thursday. The topic of the panel was: "Rethinking Center and Periphery: Making the 'Foreign' Central to American Studies." Her paper was entitled "Indigenizing Hollywood: Local Uses of Global Styles."
Last Monday, Caroline Bicks gave a public lecture, “Shaping Babies, Making Men: The Politics of Birth in Shakespeare’s Richard III,” as part of Washington College’s Renaissance Lecture Series in Chestertown, MD.
Rosemarie Bodenheimer, review of Catherine Gallagher, The Body Economic: Life, Death and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel in Nineteenth-Century Literature 61.1 (2006) 103-107.
Richard Schrader wrote the introduction for The Robert A. Wilson Collection of H. L. Mencken, a catalogue published by the Sheridan Libraries of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The collection will be formally opened on Oct. 27. In 2005 he compiled A New Census of H. L. Mencken's Ventures Into Verse and edited a reprint of Mencken's Erez Israel, both privately printed for the benefit of the Pratt Library, home of the Mencken archive.
John Mahoney, a Resident Member of THE JOHNSONIANS,participated in the Annual Meeting of the group at the PENN CLUB,New York City,September 22.
Carlo Rotella received a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2006.
Dayton Haskin recently presented a talk at the Folger Library in Washington: "Three Bombshells in the First Shakespeare Course at Radcliffe College.
Robert Kern presented a paper called "Emerson, Dickinson, and the Ecopoet's Impossible Task" at the "Discordant Harmonies" Conference sponsored by the UK branch of ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and Environment) at the University of Lincoln, September 8-10. Also, Rob's article, "Fabricating Ecocentric Discourse in the American Poem (and Elsewhere)," has just been published in New Literary History.
On September 21 Paul Lewis appeared as the first speaker in the "Semester on Comedy and Humor" series sponsored by the American Studies department and the Art Gliner Center for Humor Studies at the University of Maryland—College Park.
Tina Klein presented a paper titled "Kung Fu Hustle and the Globalization of Asian Cinema" at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Minnesota on Thursday, May 4.
Kalpana Seshadri has been awarded a Resident Fellowship at the Newhouse Humanities Center at Wellesley College for 2006-07.
Rhonda Frederick was recently invited to Rhode Island College and Brandeis University to present on her new research on African Diaspora writers and popular fiction. She gave Rhode Island College English Department's Eighth Annual John Roche Memorial Lecture on 20 April 2006. She was a guest lecturer for Faith Smith's African American literature class on Monday, 1 May 2006
Andrew Sofer’s poetry manuscript, "The Whale Road," was one of twenty short-listed for the 2005 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, awarded to the best unpublished book by an English or American poet. Two poems from the manuscript appear on the Waywiser Press Hecht Prize website at http://www.waywiser-press.com/andrewsofer.html.
Laura Tanner's new book, Lost Bodies: Inhabiting the Borders of Life and Death, was published this month by Cornell University Press.
Carlo Rotella's essay "Into South Shore" appears in city (3 Book Publishing, 2006): 214-216. The book presents a selection of photographs from the CITY 2000 project, an archive of 500,000 pictures taken by 2,000 photographers assigned to make a record of life in Chicago in the year 2000. The archive is available online at http://www.uic.edu/depts/lib/resources/city2000/index.shtml.
Frances Restuccia gave an invited lecture, "Kristeva's Intimate Revolt and the Thought Specular: Encountering the (Mulholland) Drive," on April 7th - sponsored by the Group for the Study of the History of Ideas and the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture, at SUNY Buffalo.
Ricco Villanueva Siasoco was recently invited to speak about writing and publishing at a panel sponsored by Emerson College's Department of Writing, Literature, and Publishing. In addition, he gave a reading and lecture at Simmons College as part of the anthology "Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Media" (Coffeehouse Press, 2004).
Congratulations to Sara Choi and Heather Braun, who have each been awarded a Dissertation Fellowship for 2006-2007.
Andrew Sofer delivered the fifteenth annual McElroy Shakespeare Celebration Lecture, "The Gravedigger's Forceps: Beckett on Shakespeare on Beckett," at Loyola University, Chicago, on April 11th, in honor of Beckett's 100th birthday (April 13th).
Judith Wilt gave a paper, "Rescuing the Aristocracy: Emmuska Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel and Mary Ward's The Marriage of William Ashe," on April 9 at Drew University, at the annual conference of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association.
Suzanne Matson read from The Tree-Sitter at Stockbridge Booksellers in the Berkshires on 3/25. She also gave readings during spring break at Portland State University, Powell's Bookstore (Portland, OR), The University of Oregon Bookstore, The University of Washington Bookstore, University of Puget Sound (Tacoma, WA), and Charles Wright Academy (Tacoma, WA). Recently she has given media interviews to KLCC's "Northwest Passage" (NPR, Eugene, OR), KUOW's "The Beat" (NPR, Seattle, WA), WBNW's "Pages to People" (Needham, MA), The Eugene-Register Guard, The Portland Tribune, and Newton Magazine.
John Mahoney,"BROOKLYN BOY and DOUBT:A PARABLE":Religion and Contemporary Drama," Religion and the Arts"9.3/4(2005):332-337.
Henry Blackwell presented a paper entitled,"Paul Laurence Dunbar's Library," at the Annual Meeting of the MLA, in Washington, D.C., on Thursday December 29, 2005.
Elizabeth Graver's essay, "Gathered," appeared in the anthology Why I'm Still Married: Women Write Their Hearts Out on Love, Loss, Sex, and Who Does the Dishes (Penguin/Hudson Street Press, 2006; eds. Karen Propp and Jean Trounstine). Elizabeth and other contributors will read from the anthology at the following places: Brookline Booksmith, Feb. 15th, 7 p.m.; Middlesex Community College, Feb. 15, 11:30 a.m.; Women's National Book Association Conference, Omni Parker House, Feb 9, 7 p.m..
Dennis Taylor gave a talk, “Pope and the Puzzle of Catholicism,” at the MLA, 2005; he was also elected to the Literature and Religion division.
Paul Lewis, "Islamic Rage: Sometimes, it Hurts to Laugh," Hartford Courant (op-ed), February 6, 2006. View online here.
Sue Roberts is a finalist for the 2005 Mississippi Review poetry prize for her poem "Blues: 'Bars' work-clothes quilt", which will be published in the journal's Spring 2006 issue.
Robert Stanton, "Linguistic Fragmentation and Redemption Before King Alfred," Yearbook of English Studies 36 (2006): 12-26.
Judith Wilt, review of Emily Allen's Theater Figures: the Production of the Nineteenth Century British Novel, in Modern Language Quarterly 66: 4 (December 2005) 555-558.
