- Newsletter Archive (Fall 2001–Fall 2016)
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News of Faculty
12/14/16
On December 11, “The World is Dying and We’re Filming It,” a one-night festival of original short films by students in Lauren DeFilippo’s “Cinema of Climate Change” course, was screened to a standing-room only audience at The Wooly performance space in downtown Gainesville. The festival included films by Brianne Ambrose, Noah Avidan, Miller Bradford, Joseph Cadden, Blake Dixon, Jack Edmondson, James Evans, Jacob Gordon,Malcolm Jackson, Amanda Musa, Emily Pariseau, Renato Rios, Ethan Teigland, and Mary Willis. The event was sponsored by the “Imagining Climate Change” initiative.
On November 19, Susan Hegeman participated in the “Is there a Place of the Commons?” roundtable at the American Studies Association meeting in Denver, Colorado.
Ange Mlinko has an essay on Delmore Schwartz in the December issue of Poetry magazine, and the London Review of Books has published an excerpt from a long poem that will be included in her new collection, forthcoming in 2017. Other poems from the collection were published this year in The Nation, Southern Review, Literary Imagination, and Poetry.
Stephanie A. Smith’s short story “Migh’T’y” was chosen for the Art + Literature Lab’s upcoming installation, “Future Perfect,” to accompany photographer Marissa Mackey’s ongoing series called Vehicle, which will run Dec. 8–31, 2016.
11/30/16
Richard Burt’s “What is Called Thinking with ShaXXXspeares and Walter Benjamin? Managing De/Kon/struction, Toying with Letters in The Lego Movie,” appears in the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies special issue on “Cute Shakespeare,” ed. Julia Lupton and Tommy Anderson (Volume 16, 2016, 94-115).
Pamela Gilbert presented a paper, “Sympathy and Disgust: The Social Emotions and Literature,” at NAVSA, Phoenix, AZ, in November, where she also chaired a panel and participated in governance meetings for the organization. In October, she gave an invited talk, “Victims of History: Marsyas in the Nineteenth-Century,” at the CUNY Victorian Seminar in New York City.
Roger Maioli’s review of Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder by Sarah Tindal Kareem appears in Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe and his Contemporaries.
Maureen Turim’s chapter “There’s No Geneva Convention Here: Torture in Three Films Set in World War II,” appears in Screening the Tortured Body: Cinema as Scaffold, ed. Mark de Valk (Palgrave 2016, 159-174).
Phil Wegner was one of two keynote speakers along with Alain Badiou at “The Real Possibilities of Fiction: A Symposium on the Thought of Alain Badiou,” held in mid-November at the University of Alabama, Huntsville. The title of Phil’s talk was “(Greimas avec Lacan) avec Badiou: The Event of the New Criticism and the Fate of the Republic,” while Badiou discussed the continued importance of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. The event was organized by our department’s graduate, Eric D. Smith.
11/16/16
Marsha Bryant and the students in her PostPunk Cultures seminar on the British 1980s published their collective collage, “inFESTation,” in punknews.org on Nov. 11 and Nov. 12, 2016. The two–part piece on Gainesville’s own FEST 15 was the weekend feature. Marsha co-authored with Ashley Tisdale, Kel Martin, Michael Lupi, Chloe Lane, Thomas Johnson, Madeline B. Gangnes, Megan Fowler, Jason Crider, Jill Coste, Kevin Cooley, and Kelly Beck. Our collaborating editor was Samantha Barrett.
Leah Rosenberg presented “Cobham-Sander’s Scholarship: Transforming the Corpus and Conception of Anglophone Caribbean Literature” at the 35th Annual West Indian Literature Conference in Montego Bay. She also participated in two roundtables on teaching using digital archives with Laurie Taylor (UF PhD 2006 and UF digital scholarship librarian). Her article on African American tourist writing on Haiti, “Diaspora Through Tourist Eyes,” recently appeared in Social and Economic Studies in a special issue which also included an article by Christopher Garland (UF PhD 2014) entitled “The Visual Rhetoric of ‘Voluntourists’ and Aid Workers in Post-Earthquake Haiti.”
In mid-October, Phil Wegner had the great honor of presenting one of the keynote addresses, “Towards Non-reading Utopia or, How I Learned to Be Quiet and Became a Better Teacher. A Talk on the Occasion of the Quincentennial of Thomas More’s Truly Golden Handbook,” at this year’s English Graduate Organization (EGO) Conference. A week later, he presented a shorter version of the paper, now entitled, “Towards Non-reading Utopia or, Locating Utopia in Utopia,” at the 41st Annual Conference of the Society for Utopian Studies. At the conference, there were also presentations by current UF English graduate students Derrick King and Mitch Murray and alumni Wylie Lenz, Regina Martin, and Mark Tabone.
11/2/16
Between September 21 and October 13, Andrew Gordon gave a series of invited lectures at universities in South Korea, Japan, and China on various topics in American literature and film: Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl, The Silence of the Lambs, To Kill a Mockingbird (the novel and the film), and children in the films of Steven Spielberg. In South Korea, he spoke at Kyung Hee University in Suwon, at Chung Ang University in Seoul, at Wonkwang University in Iksan, and to the Critical Theory Group of Seoul. In Japan he spoke at Notre Dame Seishin University in Okayama. In Okayama he also delivered the keynote address to the American Literature Society of Japan, and lastly, he lectured at the University of Hiroshima. In China, he spoke on the films of Spielberg at NYU Shanghai, at Shanghai University, and at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Finally, he spoke on To Kill a Mockingbirdat Nanjing University on October 13.
Judith W. Page presented a paper, “The Garden and the Wider World: Women and Gardening Education in Nineteenth-Century England,” at the Victorians Institute, North Carolina State University, October 14, 2016.
Raúl Sánchez co-chaired the second biennial Cultural Rhetorics Conference, which was held September 30–October 2 in East Lansing, Michigan.
Maureen Turim gave an invited talk, “Next to Chantal Akerman: an Installation of Generations and the Shoah,” at the Symposium Zur Schwierigkeit des Vergessen: Das Kino von Chantal Akerman in Basel, Switzerland, October 22–24.
10/5/16
Michael Hofmann has a jaunty little piece on translating in the online Times Literary Supplement this week.
On September 17, Judith W. Page gave an invited talk at the fall meeting of Women’s Studies Group, 1588–1837. The talk, “Austen and Shakespeare: Shylock, Mansfield Park and the ‘exquisite acting’ of Edmund Kean,” took place at the Foundling Museum in London.
9/21/16
Kim Emery contributed the chapter “Not Working: Shared Services and the Production of Unemployment” to Academic Labour, Unemployment, and Global Higher Education: Neoliberal Policies of Funding and Management, ed. Suman Gupta, Jernej Habjan, and Hrvoje Tutek (London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2016). Her essay on activism, academic freedom, and the 1967 tenure case of UF faculty member Marshall B. Jones, “Rights and Rebellion: the Faculty Role, Revisited,” appears in the current issue of Works & Days (33/34), 2016.
Michael Hofmann has a piece on Wallace Stevens in the latest London Review of Books (“Snap Among the Witherlings”).
8/24/16
Richard Burt and Ryuta Minami (Shirayuri College, Japan) co-directed a seminar entitled “Shakespeares Tattered and Re-imagined in Manga / Comics, Animation, and World Cinema” at the 2016 World Shakespeare Congress in Stratford-Upon-Avon and London, July 31–August 6, 2016.
8/10/16
Marsha Bryant’s essay “The WP Network: Anthologies and Affiliations in Contemporary American Women’s Poetry” appears in A History of Twentieth-Century American Women’s Poetry, ed. Linda Kinnahan (Cambridge UP, June 2016): 186–201. Her collaborations with Mary Ann Eaverly (UF Classics) are featured in the current Print Plus edition ofModernism/modernity.
During the month of July, Terry Harpold was an invited panelist for roundtable discussions before and after screenings of three films in the 2016 “Creative B” summer film series of the Florida Museum of Natural History: Ishirō Honda’s beloved 1961 kaijū film Mothra (July 8) Christian Nyby and Howard Hawks’s 1951 science fiction horror classic The Thing from Another World (July 22) and Ishirō Honda’s 1963 Matango (aka Attack of the Mushroom People, Fungus of Terror), a hallucinatory tokusatsu horror film based on a 1907 short story by English weird fiction author William Hope Hodgson (July 29). On July 26, Harpold curated and presented an evening of contemporary international short sf films for the College of Arts’ “Creative B” summer film series.
Mark A. Reid has recently published “Agency as Remembering and Retelling,” the Foreword in Delphine Letort’s The Spike Lee Brand: A Study of Documentary Filmmaking(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015), “Charles Burnett’s Urban Blues as Agency in Killer of Sheep (1977) and To Sleep With Anger (1990)” in Charles Burnett: A Troublesome Filmmaker, and in the Spanish edition “El blues urbano de Charles Burnett como agencia: Killer of Sheep (1977) y Nunca te acuestes enfadado (To Sleep with Anger, 1990)” en Charles Burnett Un cineasta incómodo María Míguez / Víctor Paz (Coordinadores), eds. María Míguez / Víctor Paz (Tui, Spain: Play-Doc Books-Asociación Cultural Enfoques, March 2016).
During the summers of 2016 and 2015, he presented “The Relevance of Baldwin, the Post-Civil Rights Movement and Not-So Post-Racial Imaginary” at the conference “A Language to Dwell In: James Baldwin, Paris, and International Visions” at The American University of Paris, 26th–28th May, 2016, and the summer before last, “The Fictional and Reel Depiction of Slavery in Two Contemporary Films” at the CAAR conference “Mobilising Memory: Creating African Atlantic Identities” at Liverpool Hope University, 24th–28th June 2015.
News of Current Students
12/14/16
Romy Rajan presented a paper titled “Migrating Beyond the Horizon: Utopia and Transnational Migration in Amma Darko” at the 88th Annual SAMLA Conference in Jacksonville on November 6, 2016. He also presented a paper titled “Borders and Nativism in the Kamirithu Experiment” at the 58th Annual MMLA conference, St. Louis, November 10, 2016.
11/30/16
Srimayee Basu presented “The Political Uses of the Surreal in Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro” for the “Women Writing Dystopias” panel at SAMLA’s annual conference, which was held in Jacksonville, Florida, November 4–6, 2016.
Madeline Gangnes’s interview with comics creator Dan McDaid has been published in issue 7.1 of Studies in Comics. Gangnes also wrote the issue’s Editorial. Additionally, she presented her paper “‘Terrifyingly Substantiated’: Climate Fiction as Near-Future History” at the 88th SAMLA Conference in Jacksonville, November 4–6, 2016.;
11/16/16
Leila Estes presented “Cat People (1942) and the Frigid Femme Fatale” at the Gods & Heretics: Figures of Power and Subversion in Film & Television conference in Milwaukee, WI, October 26–30, 2016.
10/5/16
Wynne Hungerford has a short story forthcoming in the January 2017 issue of Epoch.
9/21/16
Leila Estes co-authored a chapter with Dr. Katherine Kelp-Stebbins in the recent film anthology The Laughing Dead: The Horror-Comedy Film from Bride of Frankenstein to Zombieland.Their chapter is entitled “Undead in Suburbia: Teaching Children to Love Thy Neighbor, Fangs and All,” which focuses on undead characters in suburban films such as Addams Family and Beetlejuice. She also reviewed Doug Dibbern’s new book “Hollywood Riots: Violent Crowds and Progressive Politics in American Film” for the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television.
8/24/16
Madison Jones’s article “Plato’s Apocalyptic Rhetoric: Interpreting Bioregionalism in the Critias-Timaeus Dialogs” was just released online from ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. It will appear in print issue 23.3 later this semester.
Rob Short presented “I Want a New Drug: Reading David Foster Wallace’s Fiction through His Criticism” and chaired the panel “The Solitary Made Social: Crowdreading Infinite Jest” at the 3rd Annual International David Foster Wallace Conference at Illinois State University, July 28–30, 2016.
8/10/16
Madeline Gangnes presented “‘Expressing Myself Wordlessly’: Intertextual Self-Portraiture in David Small’s Stitches: A Memoir” at the Graphic Medicine conference at the University of Dundee, Scotland, July 7–9, 2016. She also presented “Hysterical Reality: Weimar Germany and the Victorian Gothic in Mattotti and Kramsky’s Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde” at the International Graphic Novel and Comics Conference at Manchester Metropolitan University in Manchester, England, July 11–13, 2016.
Olga Rukovets’s poems “Leonard” and “The Urge to Belong” are forthcoming in the next issue (59) of Potomac Review.
Marissa Secades co-directed the short film “Make Love Happen” with fellow film production classmate Kristen Van Dyke. They created the film as part of Lauren DeFilippo’s fall 2015 Film and Video Production course. “Make Love Happen” was screened on July 8th at the Big River Film Festival in Savannah, Georgia.
News of Former Students
12/14/16
Chris Waldron received an Emmy in September 2016 for his work and leadership on The Cartoon Network’s app.
11/16/16
Michael Hammerle’s poem “When I Was Beautiful” has been published by Eunoia Review. His short story “Killerman” is forthcoming in the 25th issue of Steel Toe Review.
8/24/16
Paulette Guerin Bane’s poem “The Lady Eve” recently appeared in SLANT. “Epiphany” and “Polish Wedding” are forthcoming in The Fem.
8/10/16
Tom Bragg has published his book Space and Narrative in the 19th-century British Historical Novel with Routledge. The book is a study of the spatial dynamics at work in the novels of Walter Scott, W. H. Ainsworth, and Edward Bulwer Lytton.
Michael Hammerle’s poem “A Father’s Lessons Stick” has been published in Poetry Quarterly, where the poem is a contender for the Rebecca Lard Award. Hammerle was recently named a finalist in the 2016 Hayden’s Ferry Review flash fiction contest.