- Newsletter Archive (Fall 2001–Fall 2013)
- Department of English E-Newsletter
News of Faculty
5/13/14
Marsha Bryant is coauthor of “Women in Cardiology: The X Factor and the Heart of Medicine,” which appears in Journal of Clinical & Experimental Cardiology 5.2 (2014), doi: 10.4172/2155-9880.1000e134. The other co-authors are Alexandra Lucas (UF Medicine), Mary Ann Eaverly (UF Classics), and Grant McFadden (UF Molecular Genetics and Microbiology). Marsha Bryant organized a panel for the MRG and presented a paper, “Gentry, the New Criticism, and the Aesthetics of Postwar Masculinity” on 3/27/14. Her co-panelists were Craig Smith (Creative Photography) and Carol McCusker (Harn Museum). On April 11, she participated in PechaKucha 9 at Volta Coffee & Tea with her presentation “It’s a Boy! It’s a Girl! It’s…Tupperware!”
On April 18, Susan Hegeman delivered an invited lecture, “We Have Always Been Critical or, the Humanities Inside and Out,” at the Indiana University Cultural Studies Conference, “Engagements, Events, Energies: The Humanities Between Affirmation and Critique.”
Sidney Homan directed graduate-student and undergraduate actors in a performance of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildensetern Are Dead, on April 11.
In April Kenneth Kidd delivered a keynote address entitled “What is a Children’s Classic?” for the Ethnic and Third World Literature “Sequels” program in the Department of English at the University of Texas-Austin.
Judith W. Page presented “Beatrix Potter’s Urban Tale: The Origins and Significance of The Tailor of Gloucester” at the Nineteenth Century Studies Association meeting in Chicago on March 21. On March 22, graduate student Katherine Peters presented “Visionary in a Dystopian City: Wollstonecraft to ‘Set the World on Fire’” at the same meeting. Cambridge University Press has just brought out a paperback edition of Women, Literature, and the Domesticated Landscape: England’s Disciples of Flora, 1780–1870 (by Judith W. Page and Elise L. Smith).
Stephanie A. Smith gave a reading from her third published novel in The Warpaint Trilogy, Content Burns, (April 2014) at this year’s MRG, and she delivered an academic paper about the Prometheus myth on stage and in film, “Prometheus Redux” at the ICFA, in Orlando March 21, 2014. She has served as the prose judge for the Harn’s inaugural Words On Canvas student fiction and poetry prize to be awarded April 5 and has been commissioned by the Harn to write a short story to accompany next year’s traveling exhibit about Monet’s influence on American Impressionists.
Maureen Turim gave a paper entitled “A Time of Historical Weight and Feminist Consequence in the Films of Jia and Hou” for a panel she chaired entitled “Framing Temporality and Terrain in the Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien and Jia Zhangke” at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Seattle, March 2014. Scott Nygren had been scheduled to present “Landscape as Determining Figure: Hou’s and Jia’s Conceptual and Visual Framing” but his illness prevented his participation.
Anastasia Ulanowicz’s essay “Shopping Like It’s 1899: Gilded Age Nostalgia and Commodity Fetishism in Alloy’s Gossip Girl,” has been published in Little Red Readings: Historical Materialist Perspectives on Children’s Literature, edited by Angela E. Hubler (U of Mississippi P, 2014).
Sidney Wade and Efe Murad’s translations, “Selected Poems of Melih Cevdet Anday,” has won the first annual Meral Divitci Prize for Turkish Literature in Translation and will be published in the coming year. Wade gave a reading of her own poems at Roanoke College April 3 and will once again serve on the faculty of the Gettysburg Review Summer Writers’ Conference in early June.
Phil Wegner presented “Karatani’s Dialectic: Absolute Formalism and Utopic Figuration,” at Duke University as an invited participant in a colloquium held on the occasion of the recent publication of the English translation of Kojin Karatani’s The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange. Wegner dedicated the paper to the memory of Scott Nygren, who was a deep admirer of Karatani’s work, and with whom Scott had met on Karatani’s last visit to UF.
4/1/14
Marsha Bryant and Amy Ongiri collaborated on the current UF Libraries exhibit, “failure,” created by the Arts and Humanities Research Group. AHRG also includes Mary Ann Eaverly (Classics), Peggy McBride (University Archives), Eric Segal (the Harn), and Craig Smith (Creative Photography). For more information, visit the website.
On March 21, Terry Harpold presented a paper titled “Portentosa Africa—Imperial and Anthropological Pessimism in Jules Verne’s Le Village aérien (1901)” at the 2014 International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, in Orlando, FL. Also at the Conference, he announced the creation of the Walter James Miller Memorial Award for Student Scholarship in the International Fantastic. Named for the American literary critic, playwright, poet, and translator Walter James Miller (1918–2010), the Award will be given at each year’s ICFA for the best student paper devoted to a work or works of the fantastic originally created in a language other than English. In addition to its scholarly excellence, the winning paper must also demonstrate the author’s command of relevant linguistic, national, and cultural contexts of the work or works discussed. Benefits of the award include a cash prize, a plaque honoring the winner, and one year’s free membership in the IAFA. Winning papers will also be considered for publication in the Association’s Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. With the generous support of an anonymous donor and the assistance of Miller’s widow Mary Hume and the members of the IAFA Executive Board, Harpold has established a permanent endowment to fund the award. He will serve as the Award’s Jury Chair for its first five years.
Susan Hegeman’s essay “The Novel and the Rise of Social Science” is a chapter in The American Novel 1870–1940: The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Vol. 6, Ed. Priscilla Wald and Michael A. Elliott. Oxford, 2014. Also, the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Novel, of which Susan is the co-editor (along with Peter Logan, Olakunle George, and Efraín Krystal) has just been republished in a one-volume paperback edition.
Brandon Kershner’s book The Culture of Joyce’s Ulysses is being issued in a paperback edition.
In March, Kenneth Kidd delivered the Joseph Keene Chadwick Memorial Lecture at the University of Hawai’i-Mānoa.
Maureen Turim co-authored with Michael Walsh a chapter entitled “Sound Events: Innovation in Projection and Installation,” in The Oxford Handbook of New Audio-Aesthetics, edited by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis. 543–562. The publication of the volume was honored by the Oxford Press with a reception at the Society for Film and Media Studies International Conference in Seattle, WA, March 19–23.
Phil Wegner’s essay “The British Dystopian Novel from Wells to Ishiguro” appears in A Companion to British Literature, Volume 4: Victorian and Twentieth-Century Literature, 1837–2000(Wiley-Blackwell).
3/3/14
On January 26 Marsha Bryant was a panelist for a Hippodrome Theatre Talk-Back on the film The Punk Singer. Discussing “Gender, Feminism & Pop Culture: Riot Grrrl & Beyond,” the panel included Hazel Levy and Trysh Travis (CWSGR). Bryant wrote about the event on her blog.
In February, Pamela Gilbert was the invited speaker for the Workshop Series in History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Her talk was entitled “Skin: Surface and Self in the Nineteenth Century.” Earlier in the month, she served as the outside examiner for University of Toronto PhD student Alisha Walters, who successfully defended her dissertation, “Racial Hybridity and Victorian Nationalism: 1850-1901.”
Laurie Gries delivered a paper “Researching Remix as a Transnational Political Practice” at the Writing Research Across Borders III conference in Paris. The conference was held at Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense on February 19–22.
Terry Harpold and Tim Davis (CISE) have won a 2014–15 “Interdisciplinary Team-Teaching in the Humanities” grant from UF’s Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere. Their graduate course, “Digital English—Text Mining & Manipulation, Information Visualization, & Digital Poetics” will be taught in Fall 2014.
On February 1, Stephanie A. Smith did a book event for Broken Shelves, a new indie bookstore in GNV’s Sun Center, co-owned by UF’s own Eric Chianese, a former English major and recent Harvard JD.
2/7/14
Richard Burt delivered an invited paper entitled “‘Reading Madness’ in the Archive: Shakespeare’s Contagious Cu(n)t” at the “Global Shakespeares” symposium at George Washington University, January 24–25, 2014. Julie Taymor and Harry Lennix also spoke at the conference.
Susan Hegeman organized and chaired a panel on “Reconsidering Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City” at the 2014 MLA convention in Chicago.
Michael Hofmann’s translation of Markus Werner’s cult novel Zundel’s Exit, is just out from Dalkey Archive.
Maureen Turim’s book Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History was just reissued by Routledge University Press Library Editions: Cinema.
Anastasia Ulanowicz presented a paper entitled “Witness, Re-Vision, and the Constraints of Child Authorship in Nadja Halilbegovic’s My Childhood Under Fire: A Sarajevo Story” at the annual MLA conference in Chicago. The paper was part of a panel called “Diaries of the Young Girl: The Craft of Female Selfhood.”
1/17/14
Richard Burt delivered an invited plenary paper entitled “Pacific G/Rim: Un-translating Shakespeare” at the First University of the Philippines International Shakespeare Conference December 5–6, in Manila, and met afterwards with the other foundational members of the Asian Shakespeare Association. The conference program is available on the conference website.
Ron Carpenter published “When ‘Surge’ Signifies Rapid Increases of American Combatants Sent to Foreign Warfare: Classical Enargeia for Contemporary Warfare,” Style (Fall 2013): 315–332. His co-author is Courtney Caudle Travers, a former English Department Honors student who went to UGA for her MA in rhetoric and is now completing her dissertation in rhetoric at the University of Illinois.
Stephanie A. Smith’s essay “Union Blues: Melville’s Poetic In(ter)ventions” appears in the Spring 2014 Genre (Duke) vol. 47, No. 1, and her creative memoir/essay “A Meditation on ‘Brit’” appears in the Pea River Journal’s collection Re-making Moby-Dick, both in print and online at www.remakingmoby.wordpress.com . In November, she did a book-signing/reading from her novel Baby Rocket at the Westfield Town Bookstore in N.J., and she took part in the ABA Sherman Alexie national indie-author-independent book-sellers at The Book Mark in Neptune Beach. For more information, see the story in USA Today.
Maureen Turim’s essay “Renoir’s Jews in Context,” appears in A Companion to Jean Renoir, ed. Alastair Phillips and Ginette Vincendeau, Wiley-Blackwell Press, 2013. 474–98.
News of Current Students
5/13/14
On March 28, Berit Brink presented “Performing Power, Resisting the Absurd: Excavating Ideological Constructions of Blackness in ‘Assata’” at the 8th annual EGSA Conference at Northeastern University.
Kristin Denslow contributed “Hamlet’s Ghost Meme: Accidental Shakespeare as Repetition Compulsion in Gossip Girl and Arrested Development,” as part of the “Accidental Shakespeare” seminar at the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America held in St. Louis from April 10–12.
On March 25 Andrea Krafft was honored at the President’s house as a 2014 Lockhart Dissertation Fellowship and AAW Emerging Scholar Finalist, receiving a $1,000 award. Her project is on “The Domestic Fantastic” (dir. Marsha Bryant).
Anuja Madan presented “Baby Hanuman: a Subaltern Superhero?” at the Northeast Modern Language Association’s 45th annual convention, held in Harrisburg,PA, from April 3–6
4/1/14
Poushali Bhadury’s essay “Metafiction, Narrative Metalepsis, and New Media Forms in The Neverending Story and the Inkworld Trilogy” appears in The Lion and the Unicorn 37.3 (Sept. 2013): 301–326.
Thomas Cole’s book review of Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel by Anne DeWitt (Cambridge University Press, 2013) appears on the pre-publication website for RaVoN: Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, issue 64.
Kayley Thomas presented a paper entitled “Crime for Art’s Sake: Economic, Social, and Aesthetic Value in E.W. Hornung’s Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman” at the 35th Annual Southwest Popular/American Culture Association Conference on February 20, 2014.
Dhanashree Thorat presented a paper entitled “A Pedagogy for the Digital Age: Reading and Critiquing Digital Networks, Spaces, and Objects” at the Digital Media and Learning Conference held in Boston from 6–8 March 2014.
On February 24th, Sandy Weems gave an interactive presentation at the Medical University of South Carolina’s interdisciplinary “Narrative Bridge” conference in Charleston, S.C., entitled “Reflective Writing for Post-traumatic Stress Disorder: Coping and Community.” The presentation is part of a community outreach initiative for under-served citizens.
3/3/14
On February 28, Berit Brink presented a paper “‘But It Could Also Be Very Different’: Space, Place, and Memory in Dutch Caribbean Travel Literature and Cola Debrot’s My Black Sister” at the 8th Annual Landscape, Space, & Place Graduate Student Conference at Indiana University in Bloomington.
The 2014 Symposium of UF’s Institute for the Psychological Study of the Arts (February 7–8) included a graduate student panel on psychoanalysis, film, and literature, with papers by:
- Melissa Molloy, “Female Desire, Maternity, and Heterosexual Aesthetics”
- Matthew Snyder, “Shame and Chivalric Law: Gawain’s Speech to the Court in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”
- Sandy Weems, “Prison Time: John Bunyan and the Temporal Limits of Grace Abounding”
1/17/14
In November, Mitch Murray presented his paper, “Intolerable Utopia,” at the 38th annual conference of The Society for Utopian Studies held this year in Charleston, South Carolina.
News of Former Students
5/13/14
Eric Otto’s essay “‘The Rain Feels New’: Ecotopian Strategies in the Short Fiction of Paolo Bacigalupi” appears in Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction (Wesleyan UP), edited by Gerry Canavan and Kim Stanley Robinson.
C. Dale Young, Poetry Editor of New England Review, is the recipient of the 2014 Stanley W. Lindberg Award for Literary Editing. This award is presented by the Rainier Writers’ Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University to someone who has labored to uphold the highest literary standards in a magazine or small press. It is given in honor of the late Stanley Lindberg, a well-known man of letters who brought The Georgia Review to national eminence. The award will be conferred at the annual residency of the Program in August.
4/1/14
Amy Robinson received the 2012–2013 Chancellor’s Award for Clinical Teaching at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg where she is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English.
3/3/14
Sharmain van Blommestein (PhD 2005) is now tenured as of Spring 2013 and is now an Associate Professor at SUNY Potsdam in the Department of English and Communication. She is the Director of Graduate Studies in that Department and the Interim Director of Women and Gender Studies.
Andrew Donovan’s poem, “Ithaca (No Suitors)” appears in the March 3 issue of The New Republic. He is hoping the poem will be freely available online around that date as well.
Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar presented her paper, “We Have to Take Writing Classes?” as part of the panel on “Students, Faculty, and Home Culture” at the (Re)thinking Global Connectedness: Critical Perspectives on Globalization, Liberal Arts International Conference on January 28.
John Tinnell’s (PhD, 2013) article “Computing En Plein Air: Augmented Reality and Impressionist Aesthetics” appeared in Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. 20.1: 69–84.
2/7/14
Chip Livingston’s book of short stories, Naming Ceremony, will be published Feb. 8, 2014. Livingston joined the MFA faculty in Creative Nonfiction at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM.
1/17/14
In January, Lisa Dusenberry (PhD, 2013) became the Assistant Director of the Writing and Communication Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology.