We are delighted to announce two new faculty appointments. Jessica Rosenberg will join the Department of English in Fall 2015 as an assistant professor specializing in early modern literature. She has been awarded the prestigious University of Southern California Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar in the Humanities fellowship, affiliated with the Department of English, where she will be in residence for the next academic year. Amina Gautier will join the creative writing program as an assistant professor in Fall 2014, specializing in fiction writing. We are also pleased to announce that Evelina Galang and David Ikard were both promoted to full professor, and that Dr. Ikard will be directing the Africana Studies Program from Spring 2015, and Donette Francis will be directing the American Studies Program from Fall 2014.
Several faculty members have received grants and awards in the last six months. At the MLA this year, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, which Mihoko Suzuki coedits with Anne J. Cruz (Modern Languages and Literatures) and Mary Lindemann (History), was awarded the Council of Editors of Learned Journals Voyager Prize for excellence in journals covering the period 1500-1800. Brenna Munro’s book South Africa and the Dream of Love to Come won Honorable Mention for the MLA GL/Q Caucus Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize, and Renee Fox has been awarded a Provost’s Research Award.
Jaswinder Bolina published multiple poems: “Love Song of the Assimilated” in Guernica, November 2013; “The Last National” in A Ritual to Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford (Woodley Press), January 2014; “Guernica” in Connotation Press: a Poetry Congeries, February 2014; “Second Variation on a Theme by César Vallejo” in Southeast Review, April 2014; and “Variation on a Theme by César Vallejo” in Another Chicago Magazine, April 2014. Professor Bolina also published two essays, “Writing Like a White Guy” in Language: A Reader for Writers, Oxford University Press, December 2013, and “The Devil’s in the Diction: on Richard Smith” in Pleiades, March 2014.
Dr. Fox gave an invited lecture at SUNY Buffalo in November called “Yeats, the Museum, and the Revival of History,” a paper at the Southern Regional ACIS conference in February called “The Irish Gothic Library,” and was an invited participant in the Frankenstein Bicentennial Workshop at Arizona State University in April.
Dr. Francis published a book review of UM graduate’s Shara McCullum’s This Strange Land for Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, 46:1 (2013), and gave multiple talks: in November 2013, she presented “Intimacy, Independence and the Longue Duree of Caribbean Structural Adjustment” at the American Studies Association, Washington DC, and “Letters from Panama: Rethinking Caribbean Masculinity and Migration” at the International Conference on Caribbean Literature at the University of Panama; in January, she spoke on "The Intimate Archives of Independence” at the MLA, and “The Novel 1960s: Form and Sensibilities in Caribbean Literary Culture” as a former Humanities Fellow at UM; and in March she presented “A Kingston Intellectual: Andrew Salkey’s Inter-American and Transatlantic Worlds” at the American Comparative Literature Association, New York University. In addition, she organized a “Locating Caribbean Studies” symposium with CLAS, which brought three scholars working on the anglophone, hispanophone and francophone Caribbean to campus.
John Funchion published “Critical Oversights: the Aesthetics and Politics of Reading The Bostonians,” in The Henry James Review 34.3 (2013), and participated in a conference seminar, “Counterpublic Formations in 19th Century America,” at the Biennial Meeting of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists in March 2014.
In December, Pamela Hammons published an edited volume, Book M: A London Widow's Life Writings by Katherine Austen, for The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series, Vol. 26. (Iter, Inc. and the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2013, http://crrs.ca/publications/ov26/). In March, she gave a conference paper, "Scripting Upward Mobility in Seventeenth-Century London: Katherine Austen's Aspirational Life Writings in Book M," at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, New York, NY. Dr. Hammons also served as a peer reviewer for the journal, SEL: Studies in English Literature.
Patrick A. McCarthy's article “Zamyatin and the Nightmare of Technology,” originally published in Science-Fiction Studies (July 1984), has been reprinted with a new afterword in Vintage Visions: Essays on Early Science Fiction, ed. Arthur B. Evans (Wesleyan University Press, 2014).
Dr. Munro published “Nelson, Winnie, and the Politics of Gender” in The Cambridge Companion to Nelson Mandela, edited by Rita Barnard (Cambridge University Press, January 2014), and a review of Lucy Valerie Graham’s State of Peril: Race and Rape in South African Literature in Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, 14:4 (2013). She presented a paper, “Cruel Jokes,” at The Comic Mask: Theorizing Satire, Humor, and Laughter in South African Culture Seminar for the American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting, New York University, March 2014, gave an invited talk on “Gender on the Progressive Agenda” at Ladyfest Miami in April 2014, and an introductory talk at the “Thinking Queer Activism Transnationally” symposium that she co-organized with Gema Perez-Sanchez (Modern Languages and Literatures) and Pamela Geller (Anthropology) at the University of Miami in April 2014.
Ranen Omer-Sherman presented several papers: “‘The desert wrote the Jew, and the Jew reads himself in the desert’: Wanderers and Textuality in Hareven, Jabès, Zelitch” at a symposium on “The Figural Jew” at the Center for Jewish Studies, University of Minnesota, April 2014; “Toward an Israeli Multiculturalism” at the University of Louisville, February 2014; “Atallah Mansour’s In a New Light: Palestinian Memory in a Kibbutz Novel” at the Historical Justice and Memory: Questions of Rights and Accountability in Contemporary Society Conference held at Columbia University, December 2013. He also introduced and led an audience Q &A following the screening of the documentary film One Day After Peace at the Philadelphia Jewish Film Festival, November 2013. He published two reviews, on David Grossman’s novel Falling Out of Time in the Forward, and on Yael Feldman’s Glory and Agony: Isaac’s Sacrifice and National Narrative in the journal Religion & Literature.
Frank Palmeri gave an invited presentation on “Bernard Mandeville and the Shaping of Conjectural History” at “A Vain Eutopia Seated in the Brain,” a conference on the tricentenary of the publication of Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, held at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, November 2013. He also delivered a paper at the annual MLA convention in January in Chicago, “The Return of Satire in the Late Nineteenth Century.” For the English Department Colloquium in March, he presented “Displacing Satire: Image and Text in Late Nineteenth-Century England.”
John Paul Russo wrote two reviews for Italian Americana of which he is co-editor
and book review editor: Writing Poetry to Save Your Life: How to Find the Courage to
Tell Your Stories by Maria Mazziotti Gillan, 32.1 (2014), and Surfaces: A History
by Joseph A. Amato, 32.1 (2014). He chaired a panel on literary geography,
at the Conference on Mapping the Imagination, University of Salerno, March, 2104.
He continues to be co-managing editor of RSA: Rivista di Studi Americani.
Patricia Saunders presented “ ‘Fashan Ova Style’: Reconstructing Race, or Performing its Excess?” at the American Comparative Literature Association Conference, New York University, March 2014, and “ ‘Fashion Ova Style’: Caribbean Contemporary Art Refocused” for the Caribbean: Crossroads of the World Symposium: Transnational Histories at the Perez Art Museum of Miami, April 2014.
Mihoko Suzuki was invited to present “Hutchinson’s Animals” at the Lucy Hutchinson Conference held at Oxford in November 2013. At the MLA in January 2014, she contributed "The Restoration in/and the 17th Century; Or, Why the 17th Centuy Did Not End at 1660" to a roundtable on "Periodization in Early Modern English Literature," cosponsored by the Divisions on 17th-Century English Literature and English Renaissance Literature. At the Renaissance Society of America meetings held in March, Professor Suzuki presented “Animals and the Political in Cavendish and Hutchinson.”
Tim Watson published an essay, “Postcolonial Studies and Atlantic Studies: Interdisciplinary Reflections on Slavery and Empire,” in the collection Postcolonial Studies Across the Disciplines: ASNEL Papers 18, edited by Jana Gohrisch and Ellen Grünkemeier (Rodopi, 2013).
Visiting Professor R. Zamora Linmark presented a paper onFilipino writer and activist Carlos Bulosan at the Association for Asian American Studies conference, April 2014.
