News

Fall 2011

Faculty Updates

Renée Fox (Ph.D., Princeton 2010) has joined the faculty of the English Department as an assistant professor. She specializes in nineteenth-century British and Irish literature, with particular interests in the Gothic, mid-to-late Victorian literature and culture, poetry, and contemporary Irish literature. Dr. Fox is the co-editor of an exhibition catalogue, The Cracked Lookingglass: Highlights from the Leonard L. Milberg Collection of Irish Prose, which accompanied an exhibition of 18th- to 21st-century Irish prose at the Princeton University library, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the New Hibernia Review and Victorian Poetry. She has been the recipient of an Ahmanson-Getty Fellowship from UCLA’s William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, as well as fellowships from the Josephine de Kármán Foundation and the Mrs. Giles M. Whiting Foundation. Dr. Fox’s current book project is entitled Necromantic Victorians: Reanimation, History, and Literary Innovation

We are currently searching for an associate or full professor in Caribbean Studies and a tenure-track assistant professor in creative writing (poetry).

On August 22, 2011, Eugene Clasby delivered a paper, “Deguileville and Chaucer: Beyond ABC,” at the international conference, “The Allegory of Guillaume de Deguileville,” in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Pamela Hammons published a profile on the life and writing of Katherine Austen for The Literary Encyclopedia (www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=13003).

Patrick McCarthy published “Mr. Duffy’s Case of Conscience,” a review of James Joyce’s Painful Case by Coílín Owens, Irish Literary Supplement 31:1 (Fall 2011): 7, and he delivered a conference paper, “Naming and Not Naming in ‘Eveline,’” at the North American James Joyce Conference in Pasadena in June 2011. He has also recently evaluated book manuscripts for Palgrave Macmillan, Syracuse U Press, and Edinburgh U Press, and articles for the James Joyce Quarterly and Science-Fiction Studies.

Brenna Munro published “Henriette Gunkel. The Cultural Politics of Female Sexuality in South Africa,” in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 13:3 (2011): 512-514.

Joel Nickels delivered two papers, “Claude McKay’s Climates of Self-Government” at the Modernist Studies Association Conference in Buffalo and “From Spontaneity to Self-Government: Imagining Self-Organization in the Twentieth-Century and Beyond” at the Marxist Literary Group Institute on Culture and Society at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

In addition to reviewing new works by Evan Fallenberg, Jules Feiffer, and Meir Shalev, Ranen Omer-Sherman published a book chapter, “The Kibbutz and the Disenchanted: Representations in the work of Batya Gur, Savyon Liebrecht and Avraham Balaban,” in Michal Palgi and Shulamit Reinharz, eds., One Hundred Years of Kibbutz Life: A Century of Ideas, the Arts, and Reinvention (Transaction Publications, 2011), 139-157. 

John Paul Russo and Robert Casillo coauthored The Italian in Modernity, published by University of Toronto Press. Dr. Russo chaired a workshop and delivered a paper titled “Camerino in Mid-August” from a work in progress at the American Italian Historical Association Conference in Tampa in October, and he co-chaired a two-part workshop and delivered a paper titled “The Cultural Politics of Lucia Perillo” at the Associazione Italiana di Studi Nord Americani Conference in Trento, Italy in October.

Patricia Saunders published “What is the ‘Popular’ in Caribbean Popular Culture: Notes Towards a Response,” in The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature, (London: Routledge, 2011): 534-543, and “Buyers Beware, ‘Hoodwinking’ on the Rise: Epistemologies of Consumption in Terry McMillan’s Caribbean,” in Sex and the Citizen: Interrogating the Circum/Caribbean, (University of Virginia Press, 2011): 21-36. Dr. Saunders also delivered two conference papers, “Who’s on Top?: Politics and Sex in Dany Laferrière’s Dining with the Dictator,” at the 30th Annual West Indian Literature Conference, The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad (October 13-15, 2011), and “Digital Diasporas: Publishing in Caribbean Studies Journals,” at the 36th Annual Caribbean Studies Conference, Curaçao, Netherlands (May 30-June 3, 2011). She was also invited to give a talk, “Lady Saw: Performing Sexual Politics at Home and Abroad” to the African & African Diaspora Studies Program as part of the Boston College New Directions Lecture Series, Boston, MA (October 26, 2011).

Jeffrey Shoulson gave a paper, “Converting the Bible in Early Modern England,” at the Ohio State conference on “The King James Bible and its Cultural Aftermath” in May 2011.  

Mihoko Suzuki was appointed to the advisory committee for PMLA and elected to the executive council of the Sixteenth-Century Studies Society. She accepted an invitation to join the editorial board of the Medieval and Renaissance Literary Studies book series at Duquesne University Press. This fall, she has been in residence at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC on a fellowship to work on her book project, “Antigone’s Example: Gender and the Politics of Civil War in Early Modern England and France.”

Tim Watson guest edited a special issue (vol. 40, no. 1) of the journal Clio: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History on “Atlantic Narratives,” published in May 2011, featuring essays by Ian Baucom, Anna Brickhouse, Christopher Iannini, José Jouve-Martín, Bianca Premo, and Lisa Voigt. His introductory essay is entitled “Historical Form and Geographical Place in Atlantic Narratives.” In June 2011, Dr. Watson delivered a keynote address at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of the New Literatures in English in Hannover, Germany entitled, “Postcolonial Studies and Atlantic Studies: Interdisciplinary Reflections on Slavery and Empire.” In October 2011, he was an invited participant at the symposium “Early Caribbean Literary History,” the inaugural conference of the Early Caribbean Society in Paynes Bay, Barbados, where he delivered a paper (jointly with Candace Ward of Florida State University) on “Early Creole Novels in English to 1850.”

Graduate Students and Alumni

Jessica Damián was promoted to associate professor of English at Georgia Gwinnett College and was one of three University System of Georgia faculty members selected to receive the 2012 University System of Georgia Board of Regents’ Teaching Excellence Award. In addition, she was awarded the 2010-2011 Georgia Gwinnett College Outstanding Teaching Award. 

The Benstock Dissertation Prize for 2010 was awarded to Allison Johnson for “‘Virtue’s Friends’: The Politics of Friendship in Early Modern English Women’s Writing.” Lara Cahill-Booth received Honorable Mention for “Theatre of Arts: Caribbean Intertextuality and the Muse of Place.” 

Izabela Zieba received the Mary K. Parker Prize for the best essay of 2010-2011 for “The Hunger-Artists of Jewish America: The Body as a Target of Social Predicament in the Works of Paul Auster and Charles Reznikoff.”

Marta Fernandez Campa gave papers at two conferences this summer: “‘Eres quien eres, Sirena Selena’: Mourning as Critical Discourse in Mayra Santos Febres’ Sirena
Selena
” at the Caribbean Studies Association 36th Annual Conference in Curaçao, and “New Archives of Memory in the Poetry of Dorothea Smartt and Roshini Kempadoo’s Photography” at the 6th International Conference of Caribbean Women’s Writing: Comparative Critical Conversations, Goldsmiths University, London.

Lauren Riccelli delivered a paper this summer at the Southern Writers/Southern Writing conference at the U of Mississippi: “‘Boll Weevil’s Come and Gone’: Intersections of Southern Space and Female Identity in Jean Toomer’s Cane.”

Stephanie Selvick presented a paper, “Positive Bleeding,” in July at the “Toward Trans/national Scholarly and Activist Kinships” conference in Madrid, Spain.

Katrina Smith published an article, “The Body as Testament: The Case of Mary Prince,” in the “Anti/Slavery and Colonial Aesthetics” edition of Sargasso, a peer-reviewed journal of literature, language, and culture.

Amanda Thibodeau’s article, “Alien Bodies and a Queer Future: Sexual Revision in Octavia E. Butler’s ‘Bloodchild’ and James Tiptree Jr.’s ‘With Delicate Mad Hands,’” is forthcoming in Science Fiction Studies.

Josune Urbistondo published “Tuning in to the Role of Music in The Dragon Can’t Dance and The Harder They Come,” Caribbean Literature, Language, and Culture, eds. Dorsía Smith, Tatiana Tatigrova, and Suzanna Engman. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. 67-87.