- Newsletter Archive (Fall 2001–Spring 2015)
- Department of English E-Newsletter
News of Faculty
8/26/15
Pamela Gilbert is pleased to announce the publication of the four-volume, one-million-word Blackwell Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature, of which she is associate editor (one of two, assisting Dino Felluga as general editor).
In July, Kenneth Kidd was the keynote speaker for the 21st Annual Francelia Butler Conference at Hollins University. In early August, Kenneth was an invited seminar leader for a series of masterclasses on children’s archives at Newcastle University, UK.
8/12/15
Barbara Mennel gave a talk at the Council for European Studies in Paris entitled “Female Industrial Labor in Contemporary European Cinema” and an invited talk at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz entitled “Sex and Economy between Gender and Generation in Mildred Pierce and Girls.”
7/29/15
Pamela Gilbert gave a paper on Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White at the annual meeting of NAVSA in Hawaii, where she also participated in the organization’s executive/advisory committee and in a graduate mentoring program.
Andrew Gordon organized the International Conference on Psychology and the Arts at the University of Malta, Msida, Malta, June 24–28, 2015. The conference was dedicated to the memory of Jane K. Holland. There were 61 papers by participants from the U.S., France, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, the U.K., Malta, Czech Republic, Hungary, Armenia, Japan, China, and Saudi Arabia. Gordon spoke on “Mourning and Melancholia in E.L. Doctorow’s Novel The Book of Daniel.” The June 2016 International Conference on Psychology and the Arts will take place at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne, France. For information, contact agordon@ufl.edu.
7/15/15
Marsha Bryant organized, performed in, and emceed a gallery revue at the Harn Museum of Art on June 27 (London Calling: Poetry and Popular Music in the Modernist City). It featured two singers, a keyboardist, and a bass player. The event kicked off the main gallery exhibition, “Hoppé Portraits: Society, Studio and Street.”
7/1/15
Judith W. Page’s review of Theresa M. Kelley’s Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture (Johns Hopkins, 2012) appears in Romanticism 21.2 (July 2015), 196-98.
Anastasia Ulanowicz’s book Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature: Ghost Images (Routledge, 2013) has received the Children’s Literature Association Book Award.
Phil Wegner’s essay “Space and Place in Critical Reading” appears in the revised and expanded second edition of Introducing Criticism in the 21st Century (Edinburgh UP). Also included in the collection are essays by UF alumni Roger Whitson and Frederick Young.
6/17/15
Writing under the pseudonym A. J. Rich, Amy Hempel and Jill Ciment’s novel, The Hand That Feeds You, will be published July 7.
Kenneth Kidd’s review of Paula Connolly’s Slavery in American Children’s Literature, Gary Schmidt’s Making Americans, and Sarah Day’s Reading Like a Girl appears in the June 2015 issue of American Literature.
6/6/15
With Pasqual Bernat, Nicholás Moragues, Ariel Pérez, Cristian Tello, and Volker Dehs, Terry Harpold is co-editor of Jules Verne: Ciencia, literatura e imaginación (Marratxí: Ediciones Paganel, 2015).
Tace Hedrick’s new book, Chica Lit: Popular Latina Fiction and Americanization in the Twenty-First Century, will be out this May from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Additionally, she published two essays in Spring of 2015: “Teaching Matters of Class and Style with Chica Lit,” in Frederick Aldama’s edited volume Latina/o Literature in the Classroom: 21st-Century Approaches to Teaching; and “History is What Hurts: Queer Temporalities and Alien Feelings in Gloria Anzaldúa,” in a special issue of Cultural History. Hedrick has also published an entry on the Afro-Cuban-American writer and activist Evelio Grillo in the Oxford University Press Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Finally, she organized a panel on Cross-Racial Teaching and presented a paper, “You Could be Cuban: Teaching Comparative Race in Florida Latino/a Studies” for the 2014 Latina/o Studies Association Conference in Chicago.
David Leavitt’s essay “The Making of Larry Kramer’s Americans” has been published in The New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog. A review of Anne Enright’s The Green Road appeared in the May 17th, 2015 issue of the New York Times Book Review.
5/20/15
Sid Dobrin’s collection Writing Posthumanism, Posthuman Writing has been published by Parlor Press. The collection includes contributions from Sean Morey (UF PhD, 2010) and J. A. Rice (UF PhD, 2010).
On May 13, Susan Hegeman gave a paper, “Indian Casinos: Neoliberalism and Changing Ideas of the ‘Good Indian,’” at the biennial conference of the Nordic Association for American Studies in Oulu, Finland.
Stephanie A. Smith was awarded a two-week writing residency at the Noepe Center for the Literary Arts, from May 1–15, 2015.
5/6/15
Pamela Gilbert guest-edited a special issue of the postgraduate journal Victorian Networkdevoted to “Bodies and Body Parts.” She also gave the Ian Fletcher Annual Lecture for the Department of English at the Arizona State University in April, 2015, titled “A Mild Erection of the Head: The Meaning of the Blush in Nineteenth-Century Britain.”
News of Current Students
8/26/15
At the 2015 International Gothic Association Conference, held from July 28–August 1 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Norma Aceves presented “Ideological Migrations: Dacre, Fortnum, and the Lost Technotext,” and Jaquelin Elliott presented “Transatlantic Haunted Houses: The Heterotopia of the Ship in Gothic Literature and New Traditions.”
Derrick King’s essay “From Ecological Crisis to Utopian Hope: Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital Trilogy as Realist Critical Dystopia” appears in Extrapolation 56.2 (summer 2015). In addition, his essay “Utopian Futurity and Evental Love: Toward a New Theorization of 1990s Queer Cinema and the Rise of Queer Rom-Com” (Cinephile 10.2 [2014]) is now available here.
Tara Tatum’s poems “Origin” and “Order of Things” will appear in issue 43 of Birmingham Poetry Review (spring 2016). Her poem “A.A. Behind a Texas Church” appears in Southwestern American Literature (spring 2015), and “Hermes and the God Epidemic” is forthcoming in the Chiron Review.
8/12/15
Michael Hammerle’s poem “Cento anni” will be published in Mosaic Art and Literary Journal54. He was recently named a finalist for Press 53’s Prime Number Magazine Award.
7/15/15
The following students presented at the 2015 Children’s Literature Association Conference, held June 18–20 in Richmond, VA:
Poushali Bhadury, “The Female Sleuth in Early Bengali Children’s Crime Fiction Series”; Spencer Chalifour, “Judica Me Deus: Apocalypse in The House with a Clock in Its Walls”; Jaquelin Elliott, “Chocolate and Honey: Disenfranchised Teachers and Children in Harry Potter and Matilda”; Natoya Faughnder, “Liberty and Agency for All: Or, At Least, For the Subversive Readers/Players/Cheaters of Interactive Narratives”; Rebekah Fitzsimmons, “YA Shaming, or, The Generation Who Wouldnt Grow Up”; Kristen Gregory, “You’re Responsible Because You Choose: The High Stakes of Childhood Agency in Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Novels”; Michele Lee, “Cultural Cringe and the Hideous FOB: Transnational Identity and Race in Frank Chin’s Donald Duk and Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese”; Anuja Madan, “Children’s War Trauma and the Fissures in the Collective in When the Emperor Was Divine”; KaTosha O’Daniel, “The High Stakes and Dark Sides of Adapting Children’s Literature to Themed Environments”; Sean Printz, “The Ideological Game System: Challenging the Constructing of Gender in Video Games”; Mary Roca, “DNA Doesnt Make a Family: Investigating Incest in ABC Family’s The Fosters”; Mariko Turk, “Personal and Political: The High Stakes of Girls’ Historical Fiction Series”; and Casey Wilson, “Instruments of Death: Teenage Assassins and the Reclamation of American Innocence.”
Rob Short’s “David Foster Wallace and the Postmodern Novel of Ideas,” given in May at DFW15: The 2nd Annual David Foster Wallace Conference, will be published by the Illinois State University Press in an upcoming anthology of selections from this year’s conference. His piece “Becoming Himself: The Progression of David Foster Wallace’s Writing Ethic”appears on Just Words, the companion website for James Ponsoldt’s upcoming film, The End of the Tour.
6/17/15
On June 6th, Megan Fowler presented “A Person, Not a Pin-Up: Subverting the Asian Action Heroine with Pacific Rim’s Mako Mori” at the annual Fandom and Neomedia Studies Conference in Dallas, Texas.
6/6/15
Lyndsay Brown has received a Brittain Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
5/6/15
The following students presented at the 2015 UF Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels, held April 10–12:
Spencer Chalifour, “‘Trouble or Pleasure’: The Problematic Representation of John Constantine’s Bisexuality”; Jaquelin Elliott, “‘Welcome to “White” Vale’: (Non)Visual Rhetoric and The Erasure of Racial Minorities in Welcome to Night Vale Fan Art”; Megan Fowler, “The Case of Renee Montoya: The Potential for Intersectional Feminist Narrative through Transmedia Storytelling”; Asmaa Ghonim, “When They’re at Home: The Dotted Line Between Super-Abilities and Disabilities”; and Ashley Manchester, “The Queer Language of Comics: Visual Narrative and Marginalized Experience in How Loathsome.”
News of Former Students
8/12/15
Andrea Wood recently received tenure and promotion at Winona State University. She will also be a Visiting Research Fellow at Arizona State University’s Institute for Humanities Research for Spring 2016.
7/15/15
Marlo D. David (UF PhD, 2009) was recently promoted with tenure to the rank of Associate Professor in the Department of English and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Purdue University. Her first book, Mama’s Gun: Black Maternal Figures and the Politics of Transgression, is forthcoming from the Ohio State University Press (2016).
Three of Eric Otto’s previously-published science fiction haiku have been selected for inclusion in the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Dwarf Stars anthology.
7/1/15
Christopher Merkner’s first book, The Rise & Fall of the ScandAmerican Domestic, (Coffee House Press, 2014) won the 2015 Colorado Book Award in the category of the Short Story Collection.
Sandy Weems was awarded funding for her proposal to present an interdisciplinary paper at the International John Bunyan Society’s conference next summer in Aix-en-Provence. The paper, “Voicing Trauma: Time and Memory in Bunyan’s Grace Abounding,” draws on early modern literary scholarship, neuroscience, and phenomenology to explore narrative gaps and temporal oddities in this autobiography.
6/17/15
Chris Adrian and Eli Horowitz’s novel, The New World, appears in the Sunday Book Review at The New York Times.
5/20/15
Parlor Press has published Jeff Rice’s (UF PhD, 2002) collection Florida, which includes contributions from Sid Dobrin, Greg Ulmer, Sean Morey (UF PhD, 2010), and Bradley Dilger (UF PhD, 2003).
Justin Taylor’s short story “So You’re Just What, Gone?” appears in the May 18, 2015 issue of The New Yorker.
5/6/15
Lisa Dusenberry accepted a position as an Assistant Professor of Professional Communication (tenure track) at Armstrong State University in Savannah, Georgia, beginning in August 2015.
Jamie Fisher’s review of Phyllis Birnbaum’s Manchu Princess, Japanese Spy appears in The New York Times Sunday Book Review.
Yen Loh presented “Feeding the Hungry Ghost: Peristalsis as Aesthetics in Lan Samantha Chang’s Hunger” at the annual conference of the Association for Asian American Studies in Chicago, which ran from April 23–25.