Faculty Notes for April 2019

BELLE BOGGS

Belle Boggs’s novel, The Gulf, received starred reviews from Booklist and Shelf Awareness, as well as reviews in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Ploughshares, and BOMB. The Gulf was also listed as a “hot debut, humor” in Entertainment Weekly. Boggs was interviewed on WUNC’s The State of Things, in the News & Observer, and in Adroit Journal, and Masters Review. 

Boggs published essays in Literary Hub (“Why Don’t More Writers Become Public School Teachers?”) and in the Paris Review online (“The Joys of Breaking and Entering“), and presented on a panel (“Writing Writers: Novels about Struggling Artists”) at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.

Paul Broyles presented “Manuscript–Multitext: Digital Approaches to Seeing Scribal Texts” at the International Piers Plowman Society conference in Miami on April 5.

PAUL BROYLES, JIM KNOWLES, and TIM STINSON

Paul Broyles, Jim Knowles, and Tim Stinson co-led a workshop on the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive at the International Piers Plowman Society conference in Miami, April 4–7.

Remington Review published Daun Daemon’s poem “A Prayer for a Good Day in the Beauty Shop, 1975,” an abecedarian, in the Spring 2019 issue.

PAUL FYFE

Paul Fyfe was the annual Sigma Tau Delta speaker at Western Illinois University, where he gave a talk titled “From the Telegraph to the Internet: How Information Lost Its Body.”

Marsha Gordon co-organized the “Bastard Film Encounter IV,” which took place for the first time April 25–27 in Baltimore, MD. She also presented an excerpt from a 1932 I.P. Pavlov film, Functions of the Brain.

Gordon discussed tearjerkers on her monthly “Movies on the Radio” show on WUNC’s The State of Things on April 17, followed by a post-screening discussion of Umbrellas of Cherbourg at the Alamo Drafthouse Film Club on April 22.  

She was a panelist at “Science in the Movies: Twisters, Tremblors, Sharknadoes,” organized by the Science Communicators of North Carolina at the NC Natural Science Museum on April 18.

On April 12, she screened her documentary, Rendered Small, at the Longwood Center for Visual Arts in Farmville, VA.

JIM KNOWLES

At the International Piers Plowman Society conference in Miami, April 4–7, Jim Knowles organized two panels on “Scribal Editing” and gave a paper called “Critical Apparatus Workout: Practicing Scales in Piers Plowman.”

DORIANNE LAUX

O, The Oprah Magazine named Dorianne Laux’s Only As the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems as one of 17 of the Best Poetry Books for National Poetry Month. 

DORIANNE LAUX and JOSEPH MILLAR

Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar will read “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” on Walt Whitman’s birthday (May 31) at the Brooklyn Public Library in the afternoon, followed by an evening reading of their own new work.  

LEILA MAY

On April 18, Leila May gave a talk on “All the Reflected Light We Cannot See: Mirror Imagery in Victorian Literature” as part of the Department of English Speakers Series.

CAROLYN MILLER

Earlier this month, Carolyn Miller gave a talk titled “What Is Technology—to Rhetoric? And Vice-Versa?” as a featured speaker at the conference “What Is Technology?” held at the University of Oregon, Portland.

JULIANA NFAH-ABBENYI

At the 2019 Ebony Harlem Awards of Excellence event hosted by the African American Cultural Center, Juliana Nfah-Abbenyi was honored with the Lawrence M. Clark Faculty Development Award “in recognition of her valuable contributions to the Black community during the 2018-2019 academic year.”

Her guest edited special issue of JALA: Journal of African Literature on “The Environments of African Literature” (Volume 13, Number 1) has just been published online with the print version currently in press.

She published Femme nue, femme noire (2003; Calixthe Beyala) in Global Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBT) History (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2019).

Her essay “Home Is Where You Mend the Roof” has been reprinted in New Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Writing by Women of African Descent (Amistad, 2019).

On March 1, Nfah-Abbenyi gave a lecture titled “Am I Anglophone?: Identity Politics and (Post)Colonial Nation-State Trauma” at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH.

She presented on “Research Collaboration Opportunities with Makerere University CHUSS Faculty” at the East Africa Summit between NC State University and East Africa Region universities, held at Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda, March 11–13.

On April 1, she discussed “Recruitment and Retention: Best Practices” at the Keeping Our Faculty VIII: Recruiting, Retaining, Advancing American Indian Faculty and Faculty of Color Conference at the University of Minnesota.

THOMAS PHILLIPS

Thomas Phillips has a new collaborative book, with Alcebiades Diniz Miguel: Interiors: Stories and Essays (Raphus Press, Zurich/São Paulo).

BERYL COX PITTMAN

On April 17, Beryl Cox Pittman presented “Confessions of an Engineer Wannabe” at the Engineers’ Council Lecture Series at NC State.

LAURA SEVERIN

Laura Severin gave a presentation on “The Perils and Rewards of Interdisciplinary Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences” at the Georgia Tech Symposium on Humanistic Perspectives in Technological Universities, April 18–19.

TIM STINSON

Tim Stinson presented “Scribes and Readers: Textual Communities and The Siege of Jerusalem” at the International Piers Plowman Society conference, held March 4–6 at the University of Miami.

CAITLIN STUCKEY

Caitlin Stuckey’s article “This World to That World: Connecting Through Transitive Language” appeared in this year’s volume of The New Ray Bradbury Review (Spring 2019), a publication of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies. 

On April 17, she presented “The Loss of Silence in Episodic Storytelling: Binge Watching and the New Narrative” at the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association National Conference in Washington, D.C.

ERIK THOMAS

Erik Thomas edited (and wrote a substantial portion of) Mexican American English: Substrate Influence and the Birth of an Ethnolect, which Cambridge University Press released in April.

JON THOMPSON

Shearsman Books published Jon Thompson’s fourth collection of poems, Notebook of Last Things.

WALT WOLFRAM

Walt Wolfram has been elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.