Faculty Notes for May/June

LINDSEY ANDREWS

In May, Lindsey Andrews gave an invited lecture titled “Horizontal and Hysterical, or, The University Is Killing Me” in the departments of English and Women’s Studies at Grinnell College. The talk, about novelist Gayl Jones, is part of Andrews’ new book project on the history of (medical) hysteria, black women’s writing, and the contemporary university.

CHRIS ANSON

On May 15, Chris Anson spoke at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, on the transfer of discourse processes across contexts.

He gave a presentation on “Lexical Choices in Peer and Instructor Response: A Report of First-Year Composition and STEM Courses” at the European Association for Teaching Academic Writing, University of London Royal Holloway, on June 19.

On June 23, he received the YRC Rhetorician of the Year Award at the Young Rhetoricians Conference on College Composition and Rhetoric in Monterey, California.

Sheryl Cornett’s memoir/nature essay “Vernal Equinox” was published in Art House America on May 5.

Daun Daemon’s winning poem “I Hear Her Voice Calling” has been published in The Best of Kindness 2017: Poetry of Kindness (available through Amazon) and can be read on the Origami Poems Project Kindness Contest web page.

Paul Fyfe completed the course “The History of European and American Papermaking” at Rare Book School at the University of Virginia.

On June 9, Marsha Gordon gave a talk on “Researching Sam Fuller: Archival Collections, Connections, and Reconstructions” at the EYE Film Museum in Amsterdam.

Gordon presented her monthly Movies on the Radio show about “Best + Worst Movie Remakes” on May 31 and about “Superhero Movies” on June 21.

Paul Isom’s op-ed piece “To learn from the past, keep its monuments” was published in The New & Observer on June 1.

On May 18 and 19, Hans Kellner spoke at the Writing as Historical Practice – a History and Theory Workshop, held at Vanderbilt University.

In May, Jim Knowles organized and chaired a roundtable session on “Piers Plowman and Langland Studies: Where Are We Now?” at the International Congress for Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan. 

On July 30, Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar, along with Christopher Howell, will read at Diesel Books in Oakland, CA.

Bill Lawrence ‘s first novel, The Punk and the Professor, was published on May 1.

Lawrence read at Loyola University on May 4.

His first local reading will take place at Quail Ridge Books on July 31.

Two of his poems are forthcoming in the next issue of Straight Forward Poetry, and four poems will be published next month by Vending Machine Press.  

This month, Leila May presented a paper on the significance of mirror imagery in nineteenth-century literature at the North American, British, and Australasian Victorian Studies Association in Florence, Italy.

On June 26, Jeff Mielke and graduate student Frankie Pennington (with Steve Parker of the Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics) presented a poster entitled “A Comparison of Lip Positions for /ɨ/ and /ɯ/ in Bora” at Acoustics ’17 in Boston.

On June 28, Jeff Mielke along with graduate students Bridget Smith and Michael J. Fox presented a poster on “Implications of Covert Articulatory Variation for Several Phonetic Variables in Raleigh, North Carolina English” at Acoustics ’17 in Boston.

Juliana Nfah-Abbenyi successfully concluded her tenure as the 42nd president of the African Literature Association (April 9, 2016–June 17, 2017) at the ALA’s 43rd Annual conference, held at Yale University. She chaired two keynote addresses given by the scholar Simon Gikandi and the writer Boubacar Boris Diop, and chaired two special sessions: “Remembering Buchi Emecheta” and “Remembering Richard Priebe.” She also presented at a special session on “Remembering Bole Butake” and presented a paper titled “An Open Letter To . . ..”

Beryl Cox Pittman co-developed and co-led a “train the trainer” event at the University of Tampere in Finland from May 15–19 for universities from Hungary, Greece, Italy, Spain, and Finland. These activities partially fulfill an Erasmus grant (Network of Multidisciplinary Ideation and Business Model Generation Program) relating to entrepreneurship education in the EU.

On May 24, Bridget Smith presented a poster on “Covert Articulatory Variation and Possible Phonological Implications” at the 2017 NCSU Postdoctoral Research Symposium. The poster was selected as the Notable Poster for the College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

In April, Tim Stinson was a keynote speaker at the annual MUSE Publishers’ Meeting held in Baltimore.

In May, he gave an invited lecture at the Royal Library in Copenhagen and led a discussion with faculty at the Arnamagnæan Institute at the University of Copenhagen.

He was also an invited presenter at the LVCAS 360º workshop held at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

John N. Wall delivered a paper entitled “The Contested Pliability of Sacred Space in St Paul’s Cathedral and Paul’s Churchyard in Early Modern London” as part of the Conference on Space, Place, and Image in Early Modern English Literature, held at the University of Lausanne, May 11–13. 

Rebecca Walsh has been elected Program Chair of the Modernist Studies Association and will join the board in that capacity (2017-2020).

Her book The Geopoetics of Modernism was recently reviewed in Literature and History (26.1, 2017) and in Social & Cultural Geography (18.4, June 2017).