Department News (Fall 2006)

Faculty Updates

We are pleased to welcome four new faculty members who all contribute to the department’s strength in postcolonial and transnational studies. Tim Watson, who works on nineteenth-century British literature, postcolonial fiction, and transatlantic studies, joined us in January from Princeton, where he was assistant professor. His book, Caribbean Cultures and British Fictions in the Nineteenth Century, will be published by Cambridge University Press. Walter K. Lew, a poet who also works in Asian American literature, multimedia performance, and Korean film and literature, joins our Creative Writing Program this fall from having taught most recently at Mills College. He has authored and edited a number of volumes, including Treadwinds: Poems and Intermedia Texts (2002) and Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry (1995). David Luis-Brown, whose scholarship centers on issues of race and imperialism in U.S. and Latin American literature and culture, was most recently an assistant professor at Lafayette College. His book, Waves of Decolonization: Discourses of Race and Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico, and the U.S. is under contract with Duke University Press. Brenna Munro, a specialist in queer theory and African Anglophone, Caribbean, and contemporary British literature, earned her Ph.D. from Virginia and was a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at Williams College. She is working on a book, Queer Constitutions: Postcolonial Sexualities in Modern South African Writing.  

We also welcome Visiting Distinguished Scholar Susanne Woods, who was most recently Provost and Professor of English at Wheaton College. Her edition of The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer (OUP, 1993) made the work of this important seventeenth-century poet available to scholars and students of early modern women writers. She is the author of Lanyer: An English Renaissance Poet (OUP, 1999) and is working on a new book, Freedom and Tyranny in Spenser and Milton.

Two members of our creative writing faculty have recently published books. Manette Ansay’s novel Blue Water was published by William Morrow in April. Evelina Galang’s One Tribe, winner of the AWP Prize in the Novel, was published by New Issues Press in March. She has been invited to read for the Filipino American Centennial Commemoration, sponsored by the Smithonian Asian Pacific American Program, in December.

Ranen Omer-Sherman’s Israel in Exile: Jewish Writing and the Desert was published in March by University of Illinois Press. He was editor of a special issue on Jewish Orientalism of the journal Shofar (Winter 2006); “Yehuda Amichai’s Exilic Jerusalem” is forthcoming in the winter 2006 issue of Prooftexts. In September, he lectured on “The Question of Justice: Between Desert & Homeland in the Ancient/Contemporary Jewish Literary Imagination” for the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Chair lecture series at Bucknell University.

Frank Palmeri was a fellow during May at the Yale Center for British Art to research nineteenth-century political caricature. His edited collection of essays, Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth-Century British Culture: Representation, Hybridity, Ethics will be published by Ashgate in November. He will present a paper on conjectural history and early anthropology at the North American Conference on British Studies and another on ethnography and the European Bildungsroman at MLA.

Mihoko Suzuki’s coedited collection, Diversifying the Discourse: The Florence Howe Award for Feminist Scholarship, 1990-2004, will be published in November by the Modern Language Association. Also appearing in November are her two edited volumes on the publications by and about Mary Carleton and Elizabeth Cellier, scandalous celebrities in seventeenth-century London, from Ashgate, and an article in The Literary Career and Legacy of Elizabeth Cary, 1612-80,  ed. Heather Wolfe (Palgrave Macmillan) on Cary's political thought. She will give two papers at the MLA: one on “Antigone’s example,” gender and the politics of civil war, and another on the transcultural turn in the contemporary Japanese novel.

Graduate Students and Alumni of the Ph.D. Program

Ali Erritouni (Ph.D., 2004), published “Contradictions and Alternatives in Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah” in Journal of Modern Literature 29.2 (Winter 2006): 50-74. His article on Nadine Gordimer will be published in Research in African Literatures 37.4 (Fall 2006): 68-84. An assistant professor of English at Kent State, East Liverpool, Ali's project on Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was funded by a summer research award. He is presenting a paper on Somali Novelist Nuruddin Farah’s Links at the Utopian Studies Conference in Colorado Springs in October.

Richard Fantina’s edited collection, Straight Writ Queer: Non-normative Expressions of Heterosexuality and Literature was published this fall by McFarland. Richard has previously published Ernest Hemingway: Machismo and Masochism (Palgrave Macmillan 2005). In June he presented “Brett Ashley as Seductress and Aficionada in The Sun Also Rises” at “Hemingway in Andalusia,” 12th International Hemingway Conference in Malaga and Ronda, Spain. He is currently completing a Ph.D. dissertation on Victorian novelist Charles Reade’s sensational realism.

Ph.D. candidates Lara Cahill, Sheri-Marie Harrison, and Nadia Johnson were awarded Doctoral Research Grants from the Center for Latin American Studies. Lara went to Havana in September to conduct research on the zarzuela Cecilia Valdés; Sheri-Marie traveled to Kingston, Jamaica in August to research musicality and nationalism in Jamaican popular culture; Nadia also went to Kingston for her project on constructions of masculinity in Caribbean popular culture

Perri Giovannucci’s Literature and Development in North Africa: The Modernizing Mission is forthcoming from Routledge’s Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory Series. She was awarded her Ph.D. in 2005 and is currently teaching at Wayne State University and at Macomb College in Warren, Michigan.

Andrea Shaw’s The Embodiment of Disobedience: Fat Black Women’s Unruly Political Bodies was published in October by Lexington Books. Andrea earned her Ph.D. in 2004 and is now assistant director of the Division of Humanities and assistant professor of English at Nova Southeastern University.

Alumni of the M.F.A. Program

Chantel Acevedo earned her M.F.A. in 1999 and currently teaches English at Auburn University. She is the author of Love and Ghost Letters, a novel, published by St Martin’s press (2005) and winner of the 2006 Latino Literacy Now Award and a finalist for the John Gardner Fiction prize. Acevedo’s short fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart prize and has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Cimarron Review, the Chattahoochee Review.  She has also been a Fulbright scholar in Japan and New Zealand.   

Celia Lisset Alvarez is the author of a forthcoming chapbook, Shapeshifting, to be published by Spire Press. Her poetry collection, The Stones, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2006.  She earned her M.F.A. in 1995 and teaches at St. Thomas University.

Terrence Cheng is the author of Sons of Heaven, published by William Morrow, and winner of an honorable mention from the Barnes and Noble Discover Awards.  He has also received a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Cheng earned his M.F.A. degree in 1997 and is assistant professor of English and creative writing at Lehman College, City University of New York. His second novel, Deep in the Mountains, is forthcoming from Watson-Guptill press.

“Poet in Motion” Neil de la Flor (M.F.A, 2005) was recently featured on the front page of the lifestyle section of the Miami Herald for both poetry and fashion designs, which can be seen at www.frivole.com  His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hotel Amerika, Lodestar Quarterly, Barrow Street, Scene 360, Court Green, Sentence, and elsewhere.

Garfield Ellis (M.F.A., 1995) is a two-time winner of both the Una Marson Prize for adult literature and the Canute A. Brodhurst Prize for fiction; he has also won the 1990 Heinemann/Lifestyle short story competition. Garfield is the author of three published books: Flaming Hearts, Wake Rasta, and Such As I Have. His work has appeared in several international journals, including Callaloo, Calabash, The Caribbean Writer, and Obsidian III. A fourth book, For Nothing at All was published by Macmillan Caribbean last fall.

Kristine Snodgrass’s most recent work can be seen in Coconut, Shampoo, and 2River View. A collaborative chapbook entitled Facial Geometry is forthcoming from NeO Pepper Press.  She earned her M.F.A in 2003 and teaches creative writing at Florida A&M University.

     

Spring 2006

Faculty Updates

Congratulations to Professor John Paul Russo, recipient of the Thomas N. Bonner award for 2005-06 for his latest book, The Future without a Past: The Humanities in a Technological Society. The award is given by the Wayne State University Academy of Scholars for the "best recent book in English on the theory and practices of the Liberal Arts"; "special consideration is given to studies bridging the 'two cultures' of the sciences and the humanities."

Alumni Updates

Department alumna Lissa Schneider received an honorable mention in the initial Adam Gillon Book Award competition, recently established by the Conrad Society for the best book on Conrad. This year's competition covers books on Conrad and his peers since 2001. Professor Schneider's book--a revised version of her 1998 UM dissertation--is entitled Conrad's Narratives of Difference: Not Exactly Tales for Boys (Routledge, 2003). Professor Schneider's article, "Iconography and the Feminine Ideal," drawn from the book, has been reprinted in the new Norton Critical Edition of Heart of Darkness.

Bucknell University Press will be publishing PhD program alumna Judy Broome's book, Fictive Domains: Body, Landscape, and Nostalgia, 1717-1770. The book will appear as a part of Bucknell UP's Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture series.