John Funchion organized a special session on “Affected Pasts: History, Feeling, and Aesthetics in the Nineteenth Century” for the Modern Language Association in Philadelphia in December, 2009.
Thomas Goodmann published a review of Nicolette Zeeman’s “Piers Plowman” and the Medieval Discourse of Desire in Speculum (July 2009). In October, he delivered “Of Time and the River: the Mississippi and the Medieval Panorama” as a keynote speaker at the International Conference on Medievalism. He has recently been named to a second three-year term as Director of Conference Planning on the Executive Council of the Medieval Academy’s Committee on Centers and Regional Associations.
“Polluted Palaces: Gender, Sexuality, and Property in Lucy Hutchinson’s ‘Elegies,’” by Pamela Hammons, originally published in the journal Women’s Writing, has been reprinted in Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700, volume 5 (Anne Clifford and Lucy Hutchinson), edited by Mihoko Suzuki. She will present “Same-Sex Love and Affection in English Renaissance Women’s Manuscript Gift Verse” at the MLA in Philadelphia.
David Luis-Brown recently published "An 1848 for the Americas: the Black Atlantic, 'El negro mártir,' and Cuban Exile Anticolonialism" in American Literary History (fall 2009) and a review essay, “Transition or Self-Determination? Decolonizing U.S. Foreign Policy on Cuba” in CLIO (summer 2009). He served as chair and commentator for the session "Reframing American Studies: Hemispheric Citizenship and Transnational Affiliation in the Americas" at the American Studies Association conference in Washington D.C. in November and presented "Travel Narratives and Comparative Slaveries" at the Latin American Association International Congress in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in June. In April, Luis-Brown delivered a lecture at Harvard University entitled "An 1848 for the Americas," and led a workshop on his work-in-progress on representations of poor whites and guajiros in the slave societies of Cuba and the United States.
At the North American James Joyce Conference in Buffalo, June 2009, Patrick McCarthy delivered “Stuart Gilbert and the Revolution of the Word.” He also moderated the panel “Mexico, Liverpool, Vancouver” at the Malcolm Lowry Centenary Conference, held at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, July 2009.
Joel Nickels delivered a talk entitled "Rising from Nowhere: Modernist Poetry and the Politics of Spontaneity" at the Modernist Studies Association Conference in Montreal.
Ranen Omer-Sherman published “Masters, Slaves, and the Implacable Deity of the Wilderness in Simone Zelitch’s Moses in Sinai” in Subverting Scriptures: Critical Reflections on the Use of the Bible, ed. Beth Hawkins Benedix (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). His recent conference papers include: “Yehuda Amichai: the Poetics/Politics of the Heavenly and Earthly Jerusalem” at the Western/Mountain Jewish Studies Association conference at the Center for Judaic Studies, University of Denver, April 2009; “Distance and Proximity between Arabs and Jews in A.B. Yehoshua’sThe Liberated Bride,” at the Association for Israel Studies Annual Conference, Sapir College, Beersheva, June 2009; and “A.B. Yehoshua’s Levantine Jews and Arabs” at the “Melville and the Mediterranean” conference, École Biblique, Jerusalem, June 2009.
John Paul Russo co-organized two workshop sessions on Italian American Culture for the Associazione Italiana di Studi Nord-Americani (AISNA) Conference in Turin in September; he organized and chaired a workshop, "Italian Americana Presents Its Authors" for the American Italian Historical Association (AIHA) Conference in Baton Rouge in October. In a roundtable at the latter, he spoke on "Teaching Italian American Religious Culture in Don DeLillo"; in another session he presented a paper entitled "Bevagna" from a work in progress entitled "Nostalgia: Wanderings in Italy." His reviews of The Collected Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales of Giuseppe Pitre, trans. Jack Zipes and Joseph Russo, and of Salvatore J. LaGumina's The Humble and the Heroic: Wartime Italian Americans appeared in Italian Americana in summer 2009.
Jeffrey Shoulson delivered an invited lecture, “Purity and Admixtion: Jews, Alchemy, and Early Modernity” at the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University, October 2009.
The Rule of Women in Early Modern Europe, a collection of new essays co-edited by Mihoko Suzuki and Anne J. Cruz, Professor of Spanish, was published by University of Illinois Press. Suzuki also published a collection of essays on Anne Clifford and Lucy Hutchinson as volume 5 of Ashgate Critical Essays in Women Writers in England, 1550-1700. She will present two papers at MLA: “Beyond Lucan: The Politics of Translating Sophoclean Tragedy” for the Division on 17th-Century English Literature, and “Women’s History of the Fronde, High and Low: The Memoirs of Madame de Motteville and Madame de la Guette” for the Division on 17th-Century French Literature.
