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Fall 2014 Newsletter

News of Faculty

12/3/14

Marsha Bryant co-led a seminar on Camp Modernism and presented at a roundtable on Women’s Poetry at this year’s meeting of the Modernist Studies Association in Pittsburgh. Her essay “Epic Encounters: The Modernist Long Poem Goes to the Movies” appears in Journal of Modern Literature 37.4. The essay reproduces movie posters of long poems designed by recent UF students.

Sid Dobrin has guest edited Digital Environments, a special issue of Green Letters, the journal of the UK-Ireland branch of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. The issues considers the possibilities of bringing ecocritical approaches into conversation with digital environments. The issue includes articles by current UF graduate students Melissa Bianchi and Kyle Bohunicky, as well as 2014 PhD grad Caroline Stone Short.

Pamela Gilbert gave an invited presentation on “The Will to Touch” for the WINCS Speakers Series at the University of Toronto in November. She then travelled on to London, where she attended NAVSA and gave a paper entitled “Classifying Emotion: Transindividual Affect in A Tale of Two Cities.”

Where Have You Been?Michael Hofmann’s new book of essays on poetry and other matters, is out on December 2 from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Raúl Sánchez participated in the opening roundtable of the inaugural Cultural Rhetorics Conference at Michigan State University in October/November. The title of his presentation was “Coming to Terms With(out) Rhetoric.”

Sidney Wade presented the keynote speech to the Florida State Poets Association in Daytona Beach on October 25. In early November, she participated on two panels at the American Literary Translators Association: “Engineering Intention,” which explored how Turkey’s modern writers struggled with their language revolution, and the “Poetry Editors’ Roundtable.”

Phillip Wegner presented his essay “The Ambiguous Utopia of the Multiverse” at the 39th annual conference of the Society for Utopian Studies in Montreal. There were also presentations by a number of graduates of our programs, including Stephanie BolukWylie LenzMike MayneChristian Haines, and Matt Stoddard. Dr. Wegner concluded at the Society’s business meeting his four-year term of service as the Society’s President-Chair.

11/14/14

Pamela Gilbert’s article “The Will to Touch: David Copperfield’s Hand” was published in 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century in November 2014.

Susan Hegeman was chair and respondent for the panel “Learning the Left: Popular Culture and Liberal Politics” at the History of Education Society meetings in Indianapolis.

Susan Hegeman’s article “A Sociological Imagination” was published in Studia Neophilologica (10 Nov. 2014).

Brandon Kershner’s chapter “Intertextuality” appears in Sean Latham, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Ulysses (Cambridge UP, 2014).

Malini Schueller gave a talk entitled “Resisting the Pedagogical Subject and the Aesthetics of Subaltern Space in Carlos Bulosan’s Short Stories” at the American Studies Association meeting in Los Angeles.

Malini Schueller’s review of A History of Prejudice: Race, Caste, and Difference in India and the United States by Gyanendra Pandey (Cambridge UP, 2013) appeared in Journal of Asian Studies 73.iii (2014).

Phillip Wegner’s essay “Utopianism” has been published in The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction, edited by former UF undergraduate Rob Latham. Rob is also scheduled to participate in our spring 2015 event, “James Joyce, Science Fiction, Cultural Studies, and other Modernist Wonders: A Symposium in Honor of R. Brandon Kershner.”

10/29/14

In October, Pamela Gilbert gave an invited talk for the Long Nineteenth Century Colloquium (speakers series) at Northwestern University titled “‘Oh Blush Not So!’ The Victorian Evolution of the Blush.”

Michael Hofmann’s translation of Wolfgang Koeppen’s memoir “Youth” is published by Dalkey Archive.

Brandon Kershner’s recent book The Culture of Joyce’s “Ulysses” has been reissued in paperback.

Jodi Schorb’s book Reading Prisoners: Literature, Literacy, and the Transformation of American Punishment, 1700–1845 has been published by Rutgers University Press as part of its Critical Issues in Crime and Society Series. The book analyzes how prisoners entered print as readers and writers from the colonial era to the rise of the early national penitentiary.

Phillip Wegner’s essay “Musings from a Veteran of the Culture Wars or, Hope Today” appears in the newly revised and expanded edition of Tom Moylan’s Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction.

10/8/14

Pamela Gilbert presented an invited talk in May at Birkbeck College, University of London, titled “Body Objects and History: The Skin of the Marquis.” In September, she presented at the British Association for Victorian Studies in Canterbury on “Springs of Sympathy & Floods of Sentiment: Sustainable & Unsustainable Emotions in the Mid-19th Century.” Her review of Knowledge in the Time of Cholera: The Struggle over American Medicine in the Nineteenth Century by Owen Whooley appeared in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine 88.1 (2014): 204–205.

With M. Elizabeth Ginway (UF Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies), Terry Harpold has founded the Science Fiction Working Group. The SFWG brings together UF faculty and graduate students working in historical and critical science fiction studies in order to promote innovative research and teaching in the field. Ginway and Harpold also co-organized the SFWG’s inaugural public event, an October 1 workshop on “International and Minority Science Fiction in a Global World.” Nine UF faculty gave talks at the workshop, including current and former Department of English members Andrew GordonTerry HarpoldTace HedrickStephanie A. Smith, and Phillip E. Wegner. English PhD candidates Melissa BianchiShaun DukeAndrea Krafft, and Joseph Weakland served as workshop moderators.

A re-launch by FSG of some of John Berryman’s books in the context of his centenary year includes The Dream Songs with an introduction by Michael Hofmann.

Phil Wegner’s book Shockwaves of Possibility: Essays on Science Fiction, Globalization, and Utopiahas been published by the Ralahine Utopian Studies series at Peter Lang. His book Periodizing Jameson: Dialectics, the University, and the Desire for Narrative came out in July as part of the FlashPoints series at Northwestern University Press.

News of Current Students

11/14/14

On November 7, Emily Brooks presented “The Paradox of Treasure Bindings’ Preservation” at the 86th annual South Atlantic Modern Language Association conference in Atlanta, Georgia.

Scott Sundvall’s video book review of Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation recently appeared in Itineration.

Kayley Thomas presented her paper entitled “‘To Reveal Art and Conceal the Artist Is Art’s Aim’: John Keats and the Aesthetics of Negative Capability in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray” at the 43rd Annual Victorians Institute Conference in Charlotte, NC on October 24.

10/29/14

On October 12, Berit Brink presented her paper “Think Differently, Think Otherwise: Imagination, Totality, and Noetic Plasticity in David Bradley’s ‘The Chaneysville Incident’” at the 40th annual meeting of the Society for Comparative Literature and the Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida.

10/8/14

Gentris L. Jointe’s “Tearing Down the Horseshoe & Star” appears in Green Briar Review (Fall 2013). His “The Other Side” and “Waiting for the Diverted Trolley at 40th & Market St.” appear in Blackbird (Spring 2015).

News of Former Students

12/3/14

Robert G. Walker (PhD, 1974) has recently been elected to the Board of Trustees at Washington and Jefferson College. He has been a contributing editor to the Scriblerian since 2013. In 2014, he published “Sterne’s Locked Up Boots” in Notes & Queries as well as two reviews in the Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer. In 2015, his essay “The Rough-Hewn Patterns of Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honor” will appear in the Sewanee Review.

10/29/14

Kevin Canty’s (MA, 1990) “Story, With Bird” was published in the New Yorker. He reads in the UF Writers Festival next month.

Monica White Ndounou, PhD (MA English, 2003) has been granted tenure and promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in the Department of Drama and Dance at Tufts University. Dr. Ndounou is affiliate faculty for American Studies, Africana Studies, International Literary and Visual Studies, Communications and Media Studies, as well as Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is also part of working group dedicated to establishing a Film and Media Studies Program at Tufts.

10/8/14

In the last year or so, Zacc Dukowitz had stories appear in the American Literary Review, the Red Savina Review, the Fine Flu JournalEvery Writer’s Resource, and the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature.