Chantel Acevedo’s essay, "Vena Cava," appeared in The Miami Rail in April: http://miamirail.org/spring-2017/vena-cava/. She served as one of three judges for the PEN Faulkner Awards this year.
Jaswinder Bolina published five poems and one essay: “Supremacy,” The Miami Rail, April 2017; “Political Poem,” “In Memory of My Vices,” Interim, February 2017; “Jessie Mitchell’s Father,” The Golden Shovel Anthology: A Tribute to Gwendolyn Brooks, February 2017; “Partisan Poem,” “Washington B.C.,” The Rumpus, January 2017; “Pornograph with Americana,” “Ekphrastic Poem,” “We Bystander,” OmniVerse, December 2016; “Courting the Jihadi,” “Story in a White Diction,” Colorado Review, November 2016; “Power, Politics, and the Political Poem,” Evening Will Come, April 2017.
Eugene Clasby’s study and translation of Guillame de Deguileville’s Le Pèlerinage de l’âme (The Pilgrimage of the Soul) was publishedby Medieval and Renaissance Text and Studies in March of 2017. This is the second volume of Deguileville’s trilogy of dream allegories that was widely circulated—in over a hundred manuscripts—in the Middle Ages (second only to Dante’s Divina Comedia.)
Kathryn Freeman published A Guide to the Cosmology of William Blake (Routledge, 2017). She received a Provost Research Award for 2017-18.
John Funchion presented “Radical Correspondences: Transatlantic Writing against the Law” at the European Early American Studies Association, Université Paris 7-Diderot and Université Paris-3 Sorbonne Nouvelle in December 2016. He presented “Indigenous Warfare and Partisan Fantasies” at the Biennial Meeting of the Society of Early Americanists in Tulsa, Oklahoma in March 2017. For the third year in a row, he also discussed via Skype a chapter from his book Novel Nostalgias with students at the University of Manchester in the UK: “Left Nostalgia,” English Department Seminar on “Occupy Everything,” University of Manchester. April 2017. In addition, he served as a reviewer for the dissertation fellowships awarded by the American Council of Learned Socieities.
Amina Gautier received the International Latino Book Award for Now We Will Be Happy and the 21st Century Award from the Chicago Library Foundation for The Loss of All Lost Things at ceremonies in September and October. She attended the Ragdale Foundation residency and was a Brown Foundation Fellow at the Dora Maar House in Menerbes, France in October and November, respectively. Her short story collection The Loss of All Lost Things received a Silver Medal Independent (“IPPY”) Book Publishers Award, and was named Finalist for two IndieFab Awards, the Paterson Prize in Fiction and the John Gardner Award. Her short stories “Before” and “Discotheque of Negroes” appeared in Quarterly West and The Southwest Review, respectively and she received three Pushcart nominations for her stories “Before,” “Disturbance,” and “Thankful Chinese.” Her story “Clytemnestra” was a Finalist for the New Millennium Writing Awards and her story “Love Me Through a Hurricane” was a Finalist for the Cutbank Literary Award. Gautier published four book reviews in Fiction Advocate and The Rumpus, and three short essays in the Chicago Public Library Blog, the Chicago Tribune, and the Story Prize Blog, respectively. She was featured in Brooklyn Magazine, Hair Trigger, and Necessary Fictionand interviewed on The Mixed Experience Podcast with Heidi Durrow as well as three episodes of The Family Meeting WCPT-AM. She gave readings at Amherst Books, Argenta Reading Series, the Arkansas Literary Festival, East City Bookshop, Le Maison Dora Maar, Pete’s Candy Store, River Styx Reading Series, and Salisbury University. She gave presentations at Artsanctuary, the Chicago Writers Conference, St. Louis Public Library—Julia Davis Branch, University of Miami Eaton Residential College Scholars Program, and Washington University in St. Louis. She presented two papers at the AWP conference in Washington DC, served as a Visiting Writer at the Vermont Studio Center, where she gave a craft talk and a reading, served as a Mentor in the AWP Writer to Writer Mentor Program for Fall 2016, and judged the The Ohio State University Jacobson Short Story Award. Gautier was awarded residencies from CAMAC in Marnay-Sur-Seine, France, the Chateau de Lavigny in Lausanne, Switzerland, The Betsy Hotel, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She was named a 2017-2018 Fellow at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France.
Thomas Goodmann contributed to a roundtable on "Piers Plowman and Langland Studies: Where Are We Now?” at the recent International Congress on Medieval Studies. With Heather Blatt of FIU he is planning the 2019 meeting of the International Piers Plowman Society at UM. Tom is the current president of TEAMS: Teaching Association for Medieval Studies, and has recently been named the next executive director of the New Chaucer Society, whose administrative home will move to UM in July 2018.
Valerie Gramling published an essay, “'Flesche withowtyn hyde': The Removal and Transformation of Jesus' Skin in the English Cycle Passion Plays,” in Flaying in the Pre-Modern World: Practice and Representation, edited by Larissa Tracy (Boydell & Brewer, 2017). She also gave a paper, “‘For every man I rest, and no man spareth’: Performing Medieval Death on the Modern Stage,” and chaired the panel “The Actor: Training, Auditioning, and Performing” at the Comparative Drama Conference in Orlando, Florida in April 2017.
In Fall 2016, Pamela Hammons served as a reviewer of ACLS Faculty Fellowship applications. In Spring 2017, she gave a conference paper, “Enameled Rings, Jet-Rings, Joint-Rings, and Rubies: Why Women's Writing Matters to Early Modern Studies,” at the Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, Chicago, IL, and she also served as panel chair for the session, “Pushing Boundaries in Sports, Fashion, and Music,” for the Twenty-Second Biennial Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque Interdisciplinary Symposium on “Expanding Visions: Women in the Medieval and Early Modern World,” University of Miami, Coral Gables.
Joanna Johnson received the "Faculty Award for Distinguished Service" for her work with the Office of Prestigious Awards and Fellowships. She was also awarded a SEEDS "You Choose" grant to hold a symposium at the Miller School of Medicine on "Reproducibility in Science: Writing, Data, and the Growth of Knowledge" with keynote speaker Elizabeth Iorns, Ph.D., CEO, co-director and founder of the Reproducibility Initiative at the Science Exchange. Joining Dr. Johnson and Dr. Iorns were panelists John Bixby, Ph.D., Vice Provost for Research; Dushyantha T. Jayaweera, M.D., Executive Dean for Research and Research Education; and Joyce M. Slingerland, M.D., Ph.D., Associate Director for Translational Research.
Catherine Judd has published essays in the journals Victorian Literature and Culture and Irish Studies Review on Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies, and Anthony Trollope’s Castle Richmond. She has been selected as a University of Miami Humanities Center Faculty Fellow for Fall 2017-Spring 2018. She is a Faculty Exhibitor for UM’s 2017 “Faculty Showcase” conference in May 2017.
Susan L. Leary presented the paper, “Unbounded Time, Unbounded Intellect: A Teenage ‘Song of Myself’ in John Green’s Paper Towns,” at the 2017 MLA National Convention in Philadelphia, PA and the paper, “The Teachability of Thought: Intellectual Failsafes and Approaches to Correlating Abstract Material,” at the 2016 SAMLA Regional Conference in Jacksonville, FL. She published three poems: “Thinking Clearly” in Steel Toe Review, “Fraipertuis” in The Copperfield Review, and “Maid of Honor” in Verse-Virtual. She was also a finalist for the 2017 Association of Greek Letter Organizations (AGLO) Apple Polishing Award for Outstanding Faculty Member.
Mia Leonin published her third book of poems in the Spring of 2016, Chance Born (Anhinga Press). She was awarded a 2017 summer research award from the College of Arts and Sciences dean’s office to work on her project “Poetry in Conversation with the Artwork of Cuban Painters, Juana Borrero and Carmen Herrera.”
Brenna Munro published two essays: “Sexuality and Gender in the African Novel,” Oxford History of the Novel in English, Volume 11: The Novel in Africa and the Caribbean Since 1950, ed. Simon Gikandi (Oxford University Press, 2016); and “States of Emergence: Writing African Female Same-Sex Sexuality,” The Journal of Lesbian Studies, 21:2 (2016): 186-203. She gave three invited lectures this academic year: 1. “The Verbal Text (Message) and Contemporary Nigerian Writing,” at “The Verbal Text & National Literary Historiography: An Interdisciplinary Conference,” Queen Mary University of London, November 2016; 2. “Transnational Formations: Writing Nigerian Lesbians,” “Directions in Queer African Studies” conference, University of Western Ontario, October 2016; 3. “Queer Pleasures in Contemporary African Representations,” at Pleasure and the Pleasurable in Africa and the African Diaspora conference, April 13-15 2017, University of Wisconsin Madison. She was the respondent on the panel “Queer South Africa” at the annual convention of the African Studies Association in December 2016 and presented her paper “Beasts of No Nation: Queer ‘African’ Sexuality in Translation” at the same conference.
Pat McCarthy’s recent publications include “Annotating Malcolm Lowry’s In Ballast to the White Sea,” in Making Canada New: Editing, Modernism, and New Media, ed. Dean Irvine, Vanessa Lent, and Bart Vautour (University of Toronto Press, 2017), 186-203. The article was co-authored with Chris Ackerley (University of Otago, New Zealand). In addition, McCarthy reviewed Jennifer Simkins’s The Science Fiction Mythmakers: Religion, Science and Philosophy in Wells, Clarke, Dick and Herbert (McFarland, 2016) in Science Fiction Studies 44 (March 2017), 187-90.
Joel Nickels gave two presentations and chaired a panel: “Literature Without Experts: C. L. R. James and Social Reproduction Narrative,” Modernist Studies Association Conference, Pasadena, Fall 2016; Organizer and Chair, “The Terrain of Social Production,”Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Conference, University of Tartu, Fall 2016; “Patrick Chamoiseau and the 2009 French Caribbean General Strike,” Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Conference, University of Tartu, Fall 2016.
Kirk Nielsen published an article, “Trump’s Cuban Conundrum” in The Progressive magazine.
Elizabeth Oldman presented two papers: “Mountains Upward Turned: Natural Weaponry in Milton’s War in Heaven” at the SAMLA Convention in Jacksonville, FL, November 2016; and “Just War through Natural Law in Milton” at the Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities Conference at Stanford Law School in Palo Alto, CA, April 2017.
In October 2016, Frank Palmeri presented a paper at the Northeast American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst on “The Persistence of Political Satire, Narrative and Graphic, 1819-32.” In March 2017, he delivered an invited paper on “Writing and Censorship in the Mid-Victorian Period” at the Columbia University International Symposium "Rethinking Authorship in East Asia and Europe.” He also published a review of “Maria Merian’s Butterflies,” an exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery, London, in Early Modern Women 11.2 (Spring 2017): 173-78.
Rachel Panton published an essay, “My Body Is a Vehicle: Narratives of Black Women Holistic Leaders on Spiritual Development, Mental Healing, and Body Nurturing,” in Black Women's Mental Health: Balancing Strength and Vulnerability, eds. Stephanie Y. Evans, Kanika Bell, and Nsenga K. Burto (SUNY Press, 2017).
Jessica Rosenberg has spent the academic year as a fellow at UM’s Center for the Humanities, and has enjoyed the time spent revising her manuscript and sharing work with other UM humanists. In October, she presented at a roundtable on “Teaching Multicultural Shakespeare” at FIU. In the spring, she was invited to give a paper at a two-day symposium on “Shakespeare’s Futures” at SUNY Stony Brook, where she spoke on “Reading Like a Pig.” She also shared work in a seminar on “Accidents and the Archive” at the annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America. She has received a Provost’s Research Award to conduct archival research in London and elsewhere over the summer.
Since our last Newsletter, John Paul Russo has given a lecture to the Harvard Club of Rome on American travel writing on Italy, with examples from his travel writing (October 2016). The lecture took place at the Palazzo Antici Mattei (James’s chilly Palazzo Roccanera in Portrait of a Lady). He reviewed Diane Raptosh’s Human Directional in the Winter 2017 issue of Italian Americana, of which he is book review editor. In April 2017 he read a paper on the politics of the late films of Federico Fellini at the American Association for Italian Studies/Canadian Society for Italian Studies, Columbus, Ohio. In May 2017 he was keynote speaker at the Anatomy Rose Ceremony, Miller School of Medicine, on the integration of the Humanities and Medicine; “by Cicero’s definition,” he said, “Medicine is one of the humanities too.”
Maureen Seaton’s chapbook, Tit, with Shelf Life, was published by Dancing Girl Press, Chicago. New solo poems appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, Saw Palm, Poets/Artists, Superstition Review, and in a tribute to Gwendolyn Brooks, The Golden Shovel Anthology, from the University of Arkansas Press. Poems co-authored with Denise Duhamel were published in Tupelo Quarterly and The American Journal of Poetry; and poems co-authored with Mia Leonin and Jaswinder Bolina appeared in South Florida Poetry Journal.
Mihoko Suzuki was on leave from UM during fall 2016 to take up the Ruth and Clarence Kennedy Professorship in Renaissance Studies at Smith College. As Kennedy Professor, she gave three public lectures and taught a senior seminar. In March 2017, Suzuki gave an invited talk, “Gender and Authorship in Early Modern England,” for the international symposium, “Rethinking Authorship in East Asia and Europe,” held at Columbia University and cosponsored by Waseda University, Tokyo.
Lindsay Thomas presented “The Length of Network Novels” at the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts annual conference in November 2016, and “Prolepsis and The Intuitionist” at the Modern Language Association annual conference in January 2017. She also gave two invited talks: “What is a ‘Critical' Digital Humanities?” at the University of Miami in January 2017, and “National Security and the Resilience of the Future” at Concordia University in April 2017. She was awarded the Science Fiction Research Association’s Pioneer award for the best critical essay-length work in science fiction studies in 2016. She also received a Provost’s Research Award and a Center for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship for 2017-18.
Tim Watson published “The Pan-Caribbean Career of John Willis Menard” in the Journal of Caribbean History 50.2 (2016): 171-88.
