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Summer 2016 Newsletter

News of Faculty

7/20/16

Andrew Gordon presented “Politics and Purity in the Fiction of Philip Roth” for a panel he chaired, titled “Philip Roth and American Politics,” which was organized by the Philip Roth Society at the American Literature Association conference May 26–29th in San Francisco.

On June 24, Terry Harpold led a workshop on “Climate Fiction and the Sympathetic Imagination” for “What Sustains Us? Florida Ecosystems in an Era of Rapid Change,” a week-long seminar for humanities and science teachers, grades K–12, sponsored by the Florida Humanities Council and organized by the UF Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere. In mid-July, Harpold presented “‘Des inondés de Mars’: Sans dessus dessousand the Argument from Analogy” at the 2016 annual meeting of the North American Jules Verne Society, held in Philadelphia July 14–16.

6/15/16

Richard Burt gave a plenary address entitled “Filming Othello? Orson Welles’s Cinemal d’Archive and the Post-Faux-pas-calypse of Philm” at “Shakespeare: the Next 400 years” in Kronborg Castle, Elsisnore, Denmark, April 22–24, 2016.

Pamela Gilbert was in residence in May as a Visiting International Research Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Warwick. On May 11, she conducted a two-hour advice “surgery” for PhD students, postdoctoral associates, and early career colleagues about professionalization and the US market. On May 19, Dr. Gilbert gave a fifteen minute talk on building a research career at the IAS symposium “Global Futures: Building Interdisciplinary Postdoctoral Research Careers.” She also gave three invited scholarly talks: the first, an interdisciplinary discussion co-sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study, the Centre for the History of Medicine and the Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning, was titled “Be Afraid! Be Very Afraid!” was followed by a workshop on how we aesthetically enjoy normally aversive emotions like fear and sadness. Respondents included Jonny Heron (IATL), Lorenzo More (Life Sciences), Liz Barry (English), and Emilie Taylor-Brown (English/IAS). On May 18, Dr. Gilbert offered a Research Seminar sponsored by the Department of English/Comparative Literary Studies and French Studies/the School of Modern Languages and Cultures on “Flaying History: The French Revolution, Historical Progress, and Marsyas.” She finished her visit with a keynote lecture at the “World Victorians” conference titled “Dangerous Lesions: Skin, History, and Realism in Britain and France” on May 19.

Cindy Spence’s interview with Terry Harpold on the “Imagining Climate Change” initiative, “Climate Conversation,” appears in the Summer 2016 issue (21.2) of UF’s Explore magazine. The interview is available online at http://explore.research.ufl.edu/climate-conversation.html.

Anastasia Ulanowicz presented a paper entitled “Second World War History and the Aesthetics and Politics of Music in M.T. Anderson’s Symphony for the City of the Dead” at the annual Child and the Book conference held in Wroclaw, Poland. She was also a plenary speaker at the Trauma as Cultural Palimpsest conference in Wroclaw, where she presented a paper entitled “Re-Framing Ukrainian History: Igort’s The Ukrainian Notebooks and the Role of Western Journalism in Contemporary Representations of Ukraine.”

Phillip Wegner’s essay “‘The Great Sea Voyage which Marriage Can Be’: Repetition, Love, and Concrete Utopia in 50 First Dates” appears in Minnesota Review 86. The essay is part of a special section, “Marxism and Utopia Again,” for which Dr. Wegner wrote the introduction, and which also includes an essay by UF alumnus Eric D. Smith.

6/1/16

Marsha Bryant and Mary Ann Eaverly (Classics) presented at the conference “Portals, Gates: The Classics in Modernist Translation” at McGill University (April 30–May 1, Montreal). Their antiphonal paper was “Mythic Migrations: Ange Mlinko and the Modernist Imagination.” You can read about the conference on Marsha’s blog.

Hitler in the Movies: Finding Der Führer on Film, by Sidney Homan and Hernan Vera, has been published by the Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and Rowman and Littlefield.

William Logan gave the PhD Commencement Speech at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium on April 28. There’s apparently a live stream still available.

Phillip Wegner was one of the invited guests for the “Utopia 500” workshop and symposium organized by the Onassis Cultural Centre and held in Delphi and Athens, Greece, May 14–17. For the Delphi workshop, Dr. Wegner presented his paper “The Making of Bricks Without Straw: The Problem of Form in Contemporary Utopian Narratives.” Back in Athens, Dr. Wegner participated in a public symposium, where he discussed the utopianism of love and listening.

5/4/16

Judith Page presented a paper, “Frances Garnet Wolseley and the New Art of Garden Design for Women,” at the Nineteenth Century Studies Association meeting in Lincoln, Nebraska on April 14, 2016.

Phillip Wegner presented his essay “When It Changed: Bodies, Cities, and Worlds in SF, circa 1984” as the plenary address for the “Power and the Space of the Planet” conference, held at Columbia University’s Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. The keynote lecture was by Kim Stanley Robison, and Dr. Wegner also served as the respondent to his talk. See this link for video of Dr. Wegner’s address.

News of Current Students

7/20/16

Emily Brooks presented “Digitization and Dissemination of Movable Books Data” at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute Colloquium at the University of Victoria, Canada, June 13–17, 2016.

The following students presented at the American Literature Association conference May 26-29th in San Francisco: Alyssa Hunziker presented “Joyce, Race, and (American) Empire in LeAnne Howe’s Shell Shaker” for a panel titled “Transnational Community in Multi-Ethnic American Women’s Literature,” which was organized by the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. Norma Aceves presented “Twilight Online Fandom: Cixous’ Écriture Féminine and the Digital Text” for a panel called “Children’s Literature Adaptations Digital Transformations—from TV and Film to New Media,” which was organized by the Children’s Literature Society. Derrick King presented “Representing Crisis: Modernist Realism and the Eco-Crisis Novels of Ruth Ozeki and Lauren Groff” for a panel on speculative landscapes.

Gentris L. Jointe’s poems “Playing Frisbee with My Father” and “Watching” are forthcoming in the Summer 2016 issue of The Journal. His poem “Another Elegy” is forthcoming in the Summer 2016 issue of Muzzle Magazine. His poem “Consolations” is forthcoming in the Fall 2016 issue of The National Poetry Review.

Michael Lupi’s poem “Still Life of Laughter as a Bowlful of Dense Objects,” was published in issue 16.5 of DIAGRAM, and can be found online here.

6/1/16

Erin Jones’s poems “From a Distance” and “A Difficult Birth” appeared in the April 2016 issue of Word Riot. “Stranger” is forthcoming in the Summer 2016 issue of The Journal, and her poems “Hot Mouth” and “Kitchen Wound” will appear in the Fall 2016 issues of Sou’wester. “Remembering Winter” will appear in the 2017 edition of Moon City Review.

5/4/16

Norma Aceves published an article, “Twilight Online Fandom: Cixous’ Écriture Féminine and the Digital Text,” in Frontiers in American Children’s Literature (Cambridge Scholars, 2016). Anastasia Ulanowicz’s article “Remembering to Forget: Historical Trauma, Paratext, and Visual Rhetoric in M. T. Anderson’s The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing” appears in the same volume, which also features a foreword by Kenneth Kidd entitled “The Great Included.”

Rob Short’s essay “David Foster Wallace and the Postmodern Novel of Ideas” will appear in the forthcoming anthology Normal 2015: Selected Works from the Second Annual DFW Conference. He’s also the featured guest for the current episode of The Great Concavity, a biweekly podcast about Wallace, hosted by Matt Bucher and Dave Laird.