We are delighted to announce a new faculty appointment. Chantel Acevedo will be joining the creative writing program as an associate professor specializing in fiction in Fall 2015. We are also pleased to announce that Frank Palmeri was awarded an NEH Summer Stipend for summer 2015 to complete a chapter of his book, Satire and the Public Sphere: Narrative, Caricature, and Radical Politics in Nineteenth-Century England.
Congratulations are also due to Tim Watson, who developed and initiated the UGrow program (Graduate Opportunities at Work), with the support of the College of Arts & Sciences and the Graduate School, to help provide non-teaching professional experience for humanities PhD students. In August 2015, the first cohort of six graduate student UGrow fellows (one from English, two from Modern Languages and Literatures, one from History, one from Philosophy, and one from International Studies) will begin yearlong placements in units on campus ranging from the Cuban Heritage Collection and Special Collections in the UM Libraries to the Center for Computational Science and the Advancement Office of the College of Arts & Sciences. Details about the program, including profiles of the first cohort of fellows, can be found here: www.as.miami.edu/ugrow.
In January, John Funchion presented a paper for the 19th/Early-20th-Century American Literature Division at the Modern Language Association conference entitled, “Action Fiction: The Radical Novel and the Aesthetics of Direct Democracy.” By invitation, he also answered questions this past April via Skype about his forthcoming book, Novel Nostalgias, posed to him by undergraduate and postgraduates students in the University of Manchester’s “Occupy Everything” seminar. And in May he presented a paper, “Reactionary Insurgencies: the U.S. Revolution in the Southern Partisan Imagination,” at the annual meeting of the American Literature Association.
Tassie Gwilliam published the entry on “Masquerade” for The Encyclopedia of British Literature 1660-1789edited by Gary Day and Jack Lynch (Wiley-Blackwell), which came out in February of this year.
In November, Pamela Hammons gave a BookTalk on her recent edition for The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series, Book M: A London Widow’s Life Writings (Iter and CRRS, 2013), for the Center for the Humanities at Books & Books in Coral Gables, Florida. She was also selected to give a presentation, “Temporal, Formal, Material, and Aesthetic Gaps: Modernizing an Early Modern London Widow’s Manuscript Verse,” at the 10th Annual Marco Manuscript Workshop hosted by the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, February 2015. In addition, Dr. Hammons published a review of Forms of Engagement: Women, Poetry, and Culture 1640-1680 by Elizabeth Scott-Baumann in Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal (Spring 2015).
April Mann was a co-investigator in a group that was awarded a “SEEDS You Choose Leadership Award” grant to present workshops entitled “Clear and Concise Writing for Scientists.” She also presented a paper titled “Who is the ‘You’ in YouTube? Addressing Audience in a Multimedia, Multilingual Writing Center Tutorial” at the 2015 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in Tampa.
In January 2015 the Ottawa Citizen published an interview with Patrick McCarthy about his co-edited In Ballast to the White Sea: A Scholarly Edition (University of Ottawa Press, 2014; also available online: http://ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/books/lowrys-lost-book-published-at-last). McCarthy also published “Before and After the Volcano: Malcolm Lowry’s In Ballast to the White Sea and Its Afterlife,” in The FirministNo. 4 (October 2014). The article is based on a paper he presented in June 2014 at the British Association for Modernist Studies conference at King’s College, London. In October he was a featured speaker at the annual Lowry Lounge, sponsored by The Bluecoat, an arts center in Liverpool. In June 2014 he also presented a paper, “(Don) Juan’s Byronic Allusions in Finnegans Wake III.2,” at the 24th International James Joyce Symposium, University of Utrecht (Netherlands).
Brenna Munro published “Queer Self-Fashioning in South Africa,” a review of Graeme Reid’s How To Be A Real Gay: Gay Identities in Small-Town South Africa for GLQ Spring 2015; she was also a presenter and participant at “Figuring the Queer in African Literature and Culture,” a workshop on the forthcoming “Queer Africa” issue of Research in African Literatures, Princeton, December 2014.
Joel Nickels was organizer and Chair of the panel "Poetry and the Limits of Negativity" at the Modern Language Association Conference, Vancouver, Spring 2015, and presented a paper there, "T.S. Eliot's Negativity and the Limits of Imaginary Internationalism.” He was invited to present two lectures this Spring, "Melvin Tolson's Nonstate Poetics," for the ELH Colloquium at Johns Hopkins, and "Nonstate Space and Prefigurative Poetics,” for the High Literature Seminar at Stockholm University.
Martha Otis organized and led a conference panel, "A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Desire," at the Hands-on Literary Festival in December 2015: an excerpt from her novel Apollonia in Estrus was short-listed for the Graywolf Prize at the Disquiet Summer Literary Seminars in Lisbon; and she was selected for the Can Serrat Artist Residency near Barcelona for this summer.
John Paul Russo completed his 25th year as Book Review Editor of Italian Americana; in the winter issue (33.1) he published reviews of Harry Eyres, Horace and Me: Life Lessons from an Ancient Poet (2013) and of Barbara Alfano, The Mirage of America in Contemporary Italian Literature and Film. In March, he chaired a session at the conference on Medicine and Poetry, from the Greeks to the Enlightenment, held at the University of Miami and sponsored by the Department of Classics, the Center for the Humanities, and the College of Arts and Sciences.
Patricia Saunders published “Lost In Translation?: Gender, Power and Taste in Dany Laferrière’s Le goût des jeunes filles”in Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, Spring 2015. She was also invited as the interlocutor for a“Conversation with Jamaican Artist Leasho Johnson” at the Caribbean Queer Visualities Symposium at Yale University in November 2014.
Mihoko Suzuki gave a paper for the London Women’s Studies Group, 1558-1837, “Women Writers of the French Revolution and the ‘English Connection,'” at the University of London in November. At the MLA in Vancouver, she was invited to present at the Council of the Journal of Learned Editors roundtable, “Journal Editing 101” on the peer-review and editorial process. She also chaired a session for the Division on Seventeenth-Century English Literature, on “English Civil Wars in/and the Restoration.” At the Renaissance Society of America meetings in Berlin, she chaired a roundtable she organized, “Women’s Political Writing in Early Modern England: The Way Forth.” In March and April, she gave two invited keynotes: for a graduate student conference on early modern studies at Wayne State University; and for the conference, “Literature and Crisis" at FIU, sponsored by the Department of Modern Languages. Finally, she served as a judge for the CELJ Voyager Award, for journals covering the period 1400-1800.
Dr. Watson also gave two invited presentations, one at Columbia University in November 2014 as part of a symposium celebrating the 25th anniversary of the publication of Gauri Viswanathan’s book Masks of Conquest, and one at Rice University in April 2015 as part of a symposium to conclude the yearlong Rice Seminar on “Exchanges and Temporalities: Enlightenment, Romanticism, Victorianism.”
GRADUATE STUDENTS AND ALUMNI
Jonquil Bailey presented a paper entitled “Arrivals and Departures in U.S. Multi-Ethnic Literatures” at the 2015 MELUS Conference at the University of Georgia in April.
Alisa Bé won a Graduate School award for Outstanding Teaching.
Sarah Cash presented “Living Bones: Harmonic Resonance and Disruption in Toni Morrison’s Beloved at the 2015 MELUS Conference at the University of Georgia in April.
Cecilia Fernandez’s Leaving Little Havana: A Memoir of Miami's Cuban Ghetto was nominated in three categories for the International Latin Book Awards: best inspirational nonfiction book, best autobiography and best nonfiction book. The winners will be announced in June.
Andrew Gothard published a review of the Cambridge Edition of Lord Jim, edited by J.H. Stape and Ernest W. Sullivan, in Joseph Conrad Today, edited by Mark Larabee and Lissa Schneider-Rebozo. He also presented a paper, “That Thing on the Shelf: Book as Object in Early Twentieth Century Irish Working Class Novels” at the American Conference for Irish Studies National Meeting in March.
Allison Harris presented “‘Know It and Go On Out the Yard’: A Theory of Intersubjective Abjection” at the 2015 MELUS Conference at the University of Georgia in April. She also presented “‘Some Violation that Lies At the Center of My Art’: Yolanda Garcia's Backward Glance in Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents” at the 2nd Biennial Latin@ Literary Theory and Criticism Conference in April 2015 at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, NYC.
Lauren Riccelli presented “Let's Talk About Sex?: Sexualization and the Female Body in the Contemporary Music Video” at the Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture Association Conference in Baltimore in November and “Mississippi Burns at Night: Queer Childhood in Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms” at the Fun With Dick and Jane: Gender and Childhood Conference at Notre Dame in December 2014.
Brad Rittenhouse was selected as a UGrow Fellow for 2015-16.
Annie Schmalstig presented a paper, “Circular Logic: Interpreting Integral Accidents in Ian McEwan’s Solar” at the Literature and Crisis Conference at Florida International University in April.
Bryant Scott gave a paper, “Naming the Wolf: Confronting Symbolic Transference and Structural Racism in Jesmyn Ward's The Men We Reaped” at the Caribbean Studies Association Conference in New Orleans, May 25-29. His essay "Literary Lampoons: The Cartoonist Ambitions of a Great American Writer" was mentioned by the John Updike Society, and spotlighted on the East Carolina University Library special collections website. He also became co-convener of the interdisciplinary Cultural Studies Reading Group at the Center of the Humanities.
Spencer Tricker received a University of Miami summer research fellowship to carry out archival research in Manila.
Chioma Urama won the Fred Shaw Fiction Prize for an excerpt from her novel in progress, The Complex.
Fall 2014
Faculty
Between May and October 2014, four faculty members published books; Kathy Freeman’s British Women Writers and the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1785-1835, published by Ashgate, came out in October; Amina Gautier’s short story collection Now We Will Be Happy, which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, was published by University of Nebraska Press in September; and Jaswinder Bolina published a digital chapbook, The Tallest Building in America, with Floating Wolf Quarterly Press, in June. Patrick A. McCarthyco-edited In Ballast to the White Sea: A Scholarly Edition (University of Ottawa Press, 2014). The volume, prepared in collaboration with Chris Ackerley (University of Otago, New Zealand), makes available for the first time a “lost” novel by Malcolm Lowry (1909-1957), best known as the author of Under the Volcano (1947). No previous edition was attempted because Lowry’s typescript, which until 1997 was believed to have been the only typescript, was destroyed in a fire in 1944. In addition to editing the text from manuscripts now housed at the Division of Manuscripts and Archives, New York Public Library, McCarthy wrote the introduction and textual notes while Ackerley contributed over 1500 annotations.
Dr. Bolina also published an essay, “An Invisible Hand: On Francis Jammes” in Francis Jammes: On the Life and Work of a Modern Master (Pleiades Press, Unsung Masters Series, August 2014), and three poems, “Letter to a Drone Pilot,” “Self-portrait as a Gene Sequence,” and “Texting the Beloved,” in Witness.
Donette Francis presented “Andrew Salkey’s Promiscuous Archives of Independence” at the Caribbean Studies Association Conference in Merida, Mexico, in May 2014.
In late spring and summer, Dr. Gautier completed a Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship and held a Hawthornden International Fellowship at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland. Her short story “Muneca” was published in Southwest Review, the fourth oldest literary journal in the US; her short story “Disturbance” was Runner-Up for the Midwest Fiction contest and was accepted for publication and is forthcoming in Laurel Review. She received a writing residency at The Betsy Hotel, and also received a merit-based scholarship to attend an upcoming writing residency at Vermont Studio Center. She spoke at Rock Valley College, and was a featured writer for the Ibis Reading Series. She chaired a panel at Printer’s Row, interviewing historian Barbara Ransby on her new book Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson. Her article “The Creole Episode” was published in the essay collection Whitman Noir (University of Iowa Press, editors Ivy Wilson and Ed Folsom). She published short craft essays in Glimmer Train, Large-Hearted Boy, The Nervous Breakdown, and Storyville. Finally, her novella-in-progress “Resistance” was a finalist for the William Faulkner Words and Music Competition.
Tom Goodmann published “Why Not Teach Langland?” in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching, Spring 2014, “Riding a Straight Line Between The Wild One and Wild Hogs” in the International Journal of Motorcycle Studies Spring 2014, and “Leudast’s Passio and Sacred Violence in Gregory of Tours” in ROMARD: Research on Medieval and Renaissance Drama, Spring 2014. He also presented “Twenty-four Ways of Looking at Langland” at the 49th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, in May, where he also organized three sessions; and he presented “Arts and Crafts and Women’s Work” for a roundtable session, “What We Remember to Forget: Medievalism’s Aporiae” at the 29th Annual Conference on Medievalism, Georgia Institute of Technology, in October. In July, he presided at “The House of Fame as Hermeneutic Sound Garden,” one of four sessions on “The Ways We Read Now” he co-organized with Peter Travis (Dartmouth) for the Biennial Congress of the New Chaucer Society, held at the University of Iceland. He was recently elected to a three-year term on the executive board of the International Piers Plowman Society, and has been elected vice president of TEAMS: The Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages.
Pamela Hammons gave a paper, “Material Culture and Early Modern English Women’s Poetry,” at the 12thInternational Conference on New Directions in the Humanities in Madrid, Spain on June 12, 2014.
Visiting Professor R. Zamora Linmark published multiple poems: “Birthday,” “The Helpless,” and “Unfinished Business” in Bamboo Ridge (Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge Press, 2014), “Morning Salutation for Joe Brainard” in The Common #8 (Amherst: Amherst College, 2014), “Inches” in The Best of Ladlad edited by J. Neil Garcia and Danton Remoto (Manila: Anvil Publishing, 2014), “Dear Jesus” in Contrappasso Magazine #6(Sydney and Buenos Aires: Sydney Samizdat Press, Issue, 2014),“Apres Monsieur Queneau” in Soundings East #36 (Salem State University, Fall, 2014), “The Helpless,” “War Whorse,” “Moneyball Huggers or O.B.P.,” “The Vanishing Tree of Life,” and “Midnight in Woody” in Tomas #3 (Manila: University of Santo Tomas Press, 2014), “Soon to Be Titled” in The Common’s on-line journal, March 14, 2014, “No Sign of Beckett” in Your Impossible Voice #4 (San Francisco, 2014), and “The Condescendants” in Hawaii Review #80, (Honolulu: University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2014).
Gina Maranto was named a Center for Genetics and Society Fellow for 2014-2016 (http://www.geneticsandsociety.org/article.php?id=8193) and was the recipient of a 2014-2015 Arsht Ethics Award (with undergraduates Amelia Abe and Ashley Dudek).
Dr. McCarthy’s other recent publications include “Before and After the Volcano: Malcolm Lowry’s In Ballast to the White Sea and Its Afterlife,” in The Firminist, October 2014. The article is based on a paper he presented in June at the British Association for Modernist Studies conference at King’s College, London. In October he was a featured speaker at the annual Lowry Lounge, sponsored by The Bluecoat, an arts center in Liverpool. In June he presented a paper, “(Don) Jaun’s Byronic Allusions in Finnegans Wake III.2,” at the 24th International James Joyce Symposium, University of Utrecht (Netherlands).
Roxane Pickens earned her PhD in American Studies from The College of William and Mary in May; her dissertation title is “Dark Play: Notes on Narrative Festivity, Identity, and Interactions with African Americans in the U.S. Jazz Age.”
Mihoko Suzuki published “Daughters of Coke: Women’s Legal Discourse in England, 1642-1689” in Challenging Orthodoxies: The Social and Cultural Worlds of Early Modern Women, edited by Sigrun Haude and Melinda Zook, and published by Ashgate. She presented “From the Community of Women Authors and Readers to the History of Evil Queens in the Works of Louise de Kéralio (1758-1821)” at the MARGOT Third International Conference, Women and Community in the Ancien Régime, held at Barnard College in June. At the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference in October, she gave an invited keynote for the 20th anniversary of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women,“The Literary and Historical Example—Then and Now.” Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, which she coedits, was reviewed in the October 31, 2014 Learned Journals issue of TLS (Times Literary Supplement).
Tim Watson gave an invited talk, “Obeah in the Metropole,” as part of a roundtable at the Society of Early Americanists conference, “London and the Americas, 1492-1812,” at Kingston University in London.
Graduate Students and Alumni
Marta Fernández Campa’s dissertation, “Fragmented Memories: The Archival Turn in Contemporary Caribbean Literature and Visual Culture” won this year's Bernard Benstock Dissertation Prize.
Barbara Hoffmann presented a paper, “Of Ballads and Bushrangers: Irish Political Prisoners and National Identity in the Contemporary Australian Novel,” at the American Conference for Irish Studies annual conference, University College, Dublin, in June.
Brad Rittenhouse won the 2014 Mary K. Parker Prize for his essay “'Language of Flow': Joyce's Hydropoetics,” and Allison Harris won honorable mention for her essay “'Know it, and go on out the yard': A Theory of Intersubjective Abjection in Toni Morrison's Beloved.”
Izabela Zieba presented a paper at the 25th Annual Conference of the American Literature Association in May, and published an article, “Paul Auster and Charles Reznikoff: The Hunger-Artists of Jewish America,” in the Fall 2014 issue of Shofar.
