This fall we are joined by two new Assistant Professors:
Marlene Daut (Ph.D. Notre Dame, 2008) specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century transatlantic studies with a particular focus on Haitian, French, and American literatures. Her most recent work examines the relationship between the Haitian Revolution and scientific theories of race. She has been the recipient of an Erskine A. Peters-Reid Dissertation Fellowship and a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship. An article that she co-wrote with Karen Richman (Notre Dame) recently appeared in the journal Small Axe. Her current project is entitled Science of Desire: Race and Representations of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1790-1865.
John Funchion (Ph.D. Brown, 2008) specializes in early and 19th-century American literature, history and literature, aesthetics, and transatlantic studies. He has an article forthcoming in the journal Modernist Cultures. His current project is entitled Divisible Pasts: Nostalgia and Narrative in American Literature and Culture, 1848-1900.
We are continuing our search this year for a senior scholar in Irish Literature and Culture.
Six faculty received Max Orovitz Awards in the Humanities for summer 2008: Jane Alison, “Le Corbusier and Gray: A Novel”; Brenna Munro, “Queer Constitutions: Sexuality, Literature and Imagining Democracy in South Africa”; Joel Nickels, “The Art of the Possible: Modernism and the Politics of Spontaneity”; Ranen Omer-Sherman, “Levantine Identities in Contemporary Memoir and Fiction”; Patricia Saunders, “As Far as the I/Eye Can See: Imagining Contemporary Caribbean Art and Culture”; and Tim Watson, “The Sun Also Sets: Transatlantic Culture and the End of the British Empire.”
Walter K. Lew published poems in West Coast Line (42.1) and the anthology Honolulu Stories: Two Centuries of Writing, and contributed commentary on a poem by Charles Bernstein for a broadside designed by Jeremy James Thompson for the Center for Book Arts’ Poetry Broadsides Series (NY, NY). He gave a talk in May on the political history of movietelling and its classroom use at a conference, “Tracing the Lines: Celebrating Roy Miki,” at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver). He also served as a poetry judge for the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s 11th annual literary awards.
David Luis-Brown’s first book, Waves of Decolonization: Discourses of Race and Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico and the United States, has just been published by Duke University Press. He is on junior faculty leave in residence as a visiting scholar in the English Department at Harvard University this fall, and will be a fellow at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Studies next spring.
In June, Patrick McCarthy gave a talk on “Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress” (1929) as part of a roundtable discussion at the 21st International James Joyce Symposium in Tours, France. In July, he gave an invited lecture, “Ulysses: Book of Many Errors,” at the 12th Annual Trieste Joyce School in Trieste, Italy. He also was co-leader of the Genetic Joyce workshop in Trieste.
To accompany her Composing Inquiry, Margaret Marshall has published Teachers’ Resources for Composing Inquiry: Projects, Methods and Readings for Investigation and Writing. A related website can be located at: www.as.miami.edu/composinginquiry
Joel Nickels’s article, "Anti-Egoism and Collective Life: Allegories of Agency in Wyndam Lewis' Enemy of the Stars" appeared in Criticism 48.3.
For the month of July, Ranen Omer-Sherman was invited to serve as a Coolidge Scholar at the Annual Research Colloquium of CrossCurrents: The Association for Religion and Intellectual Life in New York City.
At the International Pynchon Conference in Munich in June, Frank Palmeri presented a paper on “Plutocratic Dystopia, Anarchist Utopias in Against the Day”; he read a paper on “Malthus’s Principle: Conjectural History, Political Economy, Ethnography” at the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies conference at the University of Washington in October. He published “Ethical Animals in La Mettrie, Darwin, and de Waal,” in Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology 14.1 (Special issue on “Animals and Culture”).
Sandra Pouchet Paquet and Patricia Saunders have co-authored "Designs for Diversity: The University of Miami's Caribbean Writers Summer Institute and Caribbean Literary Studies," in Doing Diversity in Higher Education, edited by Winnifred Brown-Glaude (Rutgers, 2008).
At the University of Cassino, Cassino, Italy in May, John Paul Russo gave a lecture on the current state of the humanities.
Patricia Saunders has published “Fugitive Dreams of Diaspora: Conversations with Saidiya Hartman, Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, Vol. 6, Issue 1 (October, 2008), and “Defending the Dead, Confronting the Archive: An Interview with M. NourbeSe Philip.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism26, (June 2008): 63-79. In October, she is presenting an invited lecture, “As Far As the Eye/I Can See: Contemporary Caribbean Art and Visual Cultures,” in the Morning Lecture Series at the Miami Arts Museum. She delivered two papers at conferences in May: “On the Prospect of Combining the Aural and the Visual in 3 Canal’s Rapso Music,” at the 33rd Annual Conference of the Caribbean Studies Association, San Andres, Colombia; and “Between Blackness and Being: Uprooting Home and Nation in Elizabeth Nunez’s Beyond the Limbo Silence,” at the Eleventh Conference of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars, St. George’s University, St. George’s, Grenada. She is the recipient of a 2008-2009 Digital Library Fellowship Award from the University of Miami Libraries on Visual Art and Culture in the Caribbean Region. As a result of this fellowship, a new website on Caribbean Art and Visual culture was launched in October: scholar.library.miami.edu/caribbeanvisual
Mihoko Suzuki has been appointed the inaugural Director of the new Center for the Humanities. She is currently serving as President of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women, which includes scholars of literature, history, art history, and music.
Tim Watson has recently published Caribbean Culture and British Fiction in the Atlantic World, 1780-1870(Cambridge University Press).
