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Publicity Announcements
May
2007-May 2008
Awards
Associate Professor and Incoming Chair of the English
Department Stephen Barber was a finalist
for this year’s Excellence in Teaching Award
Assistant
Professor Peter Covino was the recipient of the 2007 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, for his
poetry collection, Cut Off the Ears of Winter (2005), published by New Issues. The PEN/Joyce
Osterweil Award for Poetry is described as
a $5,000 prize given in odd-numbered years and that recognizes the high
literary character of the published work to date of a new and emerging American
poet of any age and the promise of further literary achievement. Past winners
have been Nick Flynn, Richard Matthews, Dana Levin, and Yerra Sugarman. 2007
judges were April Bernard, Elaine Equi,
and John Yau. The presentation of the 2007 PEN Literary Awards was held in New
York on the evening of Monday, May 21 at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln
Center. From the judges’ citation: “Images of real and symbolic violence
ricochet and reflect off each other in this elegant and disturbing collection.
The poems chronicle, among other things, a history of childhood abuse and its
after effects, but in a larger sense, they also explore through the lens of
myth, art, religion, and popular culture, the underlying and often
unacknowledged brutality beneath even mundane events. Covino's voice is
urgent…witty, sophisticated, erudite, and street-wise. How can we not pay
attention?” In February 2008, Covino was a Finalist for the Paterson
Poetry Prize, an honor for which he gave a
reading at the Hamilton Club in Paterson, New Jersey.
English PhD candidates John Hodgkins and George Steele were both awarded the very competitive URI
Graduate Dissertation Fellowship for the 2008-09 academic year, John for his dissertation
titled “The Drift: Rethinking the Dynamics of Adaptation” and George for his
dissertation titled “Auditory Subjectification: Marxism, Affect, and Film
Music.”
Assistant Professor Jennifer Jones won a $1200.00 grant from the URI Center for the Humanities and a $500.00 grant from the URI Alumni
Center to present a paper at a
supernumerary NASSR (North American Society for the Study of Romanticism)
conference in Bologna, Italy entitled "Transnational Identities /
Reimagining Communities." Jones also won a Junior Scholar Fellowship award from the Center
for the Humanities, which she will utilize
in the spring of 2009. It consists of a course release to facilitate research;
she plans to use it to work on the introduction and a chapter of her book
manuscript, entitled Virtual Romanticism, which she has been invited to
submit for consideration to Johns Hopkins University Press by the acquisitions
editor. Jennifer Jones was
nominated for the URI Teaching Excellence Award (2008); this was Jones’ second nomination for this
award.
Assistant
Professor Martha Elena Rojas was awarded a URI Council for Research Career Enhancement Award to continue work on her manuscript-in-progress, Diplomatic Letters: Innovating the new United States. The award enabled weeks of
research at the Library Company of Philadelphia, the New York Public
Library, and the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Assistant Professor Travis D. Williams received grants from the URI Council for
Research, the URI Center for the Humanities, and the Hope and Heritage Fund to support archival research at the British
Library in London and the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh in June and July 2007. Professor Williams works on
the interrelationships of literary and mathematical discourses in Renaissance
Britain and Europe.
Professor Karen Stein was awarded the 2007 Woman of the Year, from the Rhode Island Commission on
Women
Professor Dorothy Donnelly was awarded the 2008 Woman of the Year, Rhode Island Commission on Women.
A full account follows:
KINGSTON, R.I.—April 25,
2008—Dorothy F. Donnelly, professor of English at the University of Rhode
Island, has been named the 2008 Woman of the Year by URI’s Association for
Professional and Academic Women. A reception and award ceremony to honor
Donnelly for her ongoing commitment to equity and advancement of women will be
held on Thursday, May 1, from 3 to 5 p.m. at the University Club, 95 Upper
College Road, Kingston.
Throughout
Donnelly’s 25-year teaching career at URI, she has made a lasting impact.
Donnelly has served as chair of the English Department and chair of the URI
Faculty Senate. She has led the effort on behalf of the American Association of
University Professors (AAUP) to organize and assist part-time faculty.
Recently, Donnelly proposed a Faculty Development Program for the College of
Arts and Sciences. The work on this project involved meeting with various
faculty groups throughout the college and reviewing national literature dealing
with purpose, function and design of faculty development programs. The proposal
was approved and implemented by the Dean’s Office.
Although
Donnelly is an English professor, she has been involved with the Women’s
Studies program on campus as well. In her capacity as English Department
chairperson she worked on a proposal for a tenure-track joint appointment with
the URI Women’s Studies program. The proposal resulted in the first
tenure-track appointment between Women’s Studies and another academic
department at URI. In 2005, Donnelly established the Dorothy F. Donnelly
Endowment Scholarship Fund with her own contribution of $25,000. Income from
the endowment is used to fund scholarships for undergraduate students who chose
to major or minor in Women’s Studies.
Dr.
Donnelly is a past recipient of the URI Excellence in Teaching Award. She
received the University of Rhode Island 2005 Outstanding Outreach Award for her
work as co-founder, with the Rhode Island District Court, of the Rhode Island
Chapter of the nationally recognized Changing Lives Through Literature Program.
The major goal of the program is to attempt to redirect the lives of criminal
offenders through reading literature with a message of self-esteem and
self-understanding. Donnelly was also the recipient of the Dorcas Place
Community Partner Award in 2007 in recognition of her work with and support of
the Dorcas Place Adult and Family Learning Center, which provides educational
opportunities for low-income Rhode Islanders.
Donnelly
has also authored numerous articles, publishing in the major journals in her
field on such diverse writers as Plato’s Republic and Dante’s De Monarchia. Her most recent book, Patterns of Order and Utopia, was published in 1999. Her current projects include
a biography of Emma Murdock Van Deventer, a late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century novelist.
“I
am surprised but extremely pleased to have been selected as the 2008 APAW Woman
of the Year,” Donnelly said. “It is an honor to join the earlier recipients who
have earned this distinguished recognition.”
The
association works to ensure equal recognition and advancement of professional
and academic women. The association provides opportunities for URI women to
meet and work together across departmental, college, and divisional lines. Annually,
APAW recognizes a URI woman for her efforts to advance this mission. Candidates
are evaluated on the basis of their active work for equity for professional and
academic women at URI and the extent they exceed the requirement of their
position in the University. “ The Association of Academic and Professional
Women makes a significant contribution to the culture and professional
environment at URI through its ongoing series of activities in support of women
faculty and staff at URI,” Donnelly said.
Anyone
with questions regarding the reception and award ceremony for Dr. Donnelly can
contact Lauren at laurena@uri.edu or call
874-5277.
Graduate student Claire E.
Reynolds received the Multicultural
Center's 2008 Diversity Award for Graduate Student Excellence in Service and
Leadership. The
purpose of the awards is to develop campus community by honoring and promoting
initiatives that advance institutional equity and inclusiveness. Reynolds was
honored for her teaching, research, and advocacy to integrate multiculturalism
into the mainstream canon of American literature. Her dissertation explores
race, class, and gender in the works of marginalized American women authors
during times of national crisis. "My research champions these authors and
the people about whom they wrote, and challenges us to keep listening for all
of the voices—no matter how silent or how different from us—that make up our
culture." She presented her work in the Promising Scholars
Symposium during URI Diversity Week 2005
and 2006. In 2007, she was the Director for URI's first annual Graduate
Student Conference, "Identities:
Individual, Cultural, and National." She was an advisory member of the
planning committee and a presenter at the 2008 Conference.
Professor Jean Walton’s sabbatical project received a URI Center
for the Humanities Faculty Sabbatical Research Fellowship of $2000. In addition, Professor Walton was short-listed for
a National Humanities Center Fellowship at Duke for 2008-09. During Walton’s upcoming one-year sabbatical
leave she will be working on her interdisciplinary project The Modern
Peristaltic Subject: Bodies, Systems, Flows, a book-length study of
partly autonomic, partly cognitive bodily processes of ingestion, digestion,
and excretion within larger social, economic, and disciplinary structures.
Focusing on the modern period of the early 20th century, the project engages
with existing philosophical, psychoanalytic, and aesthetic investigations into
the bodily experience of time in modernity, of affective states, of gender and
labor, and of an ethics of self-care in relation to regulatory imperatives. It
recasts the question of what "thinks" within us, apart from our
conscious cognitive activity, in terms of how we are viscerally trained and
managed, and how we negotiate regulatory interventions into our very
intestines.
Associate Professor Naomi
Mandel was a Finalist for a
Fellowship at the Virginia Institute for the Humanities for her book project Visions of Violence,
Ethical Work.
Professor John Leo co-authored “URI Rich Media Screening Room Project," a proposal to enhance and upgrade
Independence 304, and was awarded a grant of $59,580 by the Champlin
Foundations. This intensely used classroom serves approximately 600 students
each term. From the Executive Summary of the proposal: "The room’s small
scale and its multiple technologies helped deliver significant learning
experiences about world visual cultures, whose critical and analytical
importance was enhanced by the personal interactions among students, faculty,
speakers and visitors. This proposal restores the SR’s state-of-the art
capacity with vital current technology and equipment upgrades. Without these
the perceptual and aesthetic experiences of media are neither fully realized
nor open to critical study (e.g. full color saturation, greater audio
quality)….These instructional improvements are crucial in the context of
international visual and technological “literacies” and “competencies” now
defining the educational and commercial cores of filmmaking, digital media,
television and other media production.
Interim Chair Alain-Philippe
Durand was the
distinguished recipient of the French
Republic’s Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques in 2007. Durand was also a finalist for the Inspire
Integrity Award of the National Society of Collegiate Scholars (NSCS). The winner and runner-ups will be announced at the
end of May 2008. Durand is among the 15 finalists nationwide: http://www.nscs.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=526&Itemid=1164)
Creative Writing: Poetry
Publications
Talvi Ansel has 2
poems (“Unsettled Weather I” & “Unsettled Weather II”) forthcoming in The
Grove Review; “Their First Houses Were Bark-Roofed Caves” was published
in balancing the tides, and “Forest” in Barrow
Street. Selections from “Afterwards:
Caliban” from her 1st book are included in the anthology All That
Mighty Heart: London Poems (Univ. of
Virginia Press).
New poems by Peter Covino have recently appeared and/are forthcoming in Gulf
Coast, Italian Americana, The
Journal of Italian Translation; and a
prose-poem, about 90s pop singer Taylor Dayne, in the new anthology on Divas due from University of Wisconsin Press in
the Fall 2008. In April 2008 an anthology of New European Poets, was published by Graywolf Press, which
includes nine translations by Peter Covino. Covino was also one of the regional
editors for the Italian section.
Instructor Shari Alvanas was a finalist in Finishing
Line Press’ New Women’s Voices Chapbook Contest. Her poetry chapbook, Fade
In, is available at finishinglinepress.com and amazon.com.
Presentations
In the Spring of 2008, Peter
Covino was invited to give several
readings, lectures and poetry workshops at SUNY Binghamton; Dean College in MA; and Southern Connecticut State
University in New Haven.
Creative Writing: Creative Nonfiction
Publications, Interviews,
Reviews, Book Tours, Invited Talks
Graduate Student Allison N. Petro’s personal essay “The Stairs Less Traveled” appeared
in Balancing the Tides: A Newport Journal in Summer 2007.
Professor Mary Cappello’s book, Awkward: A Detour appeared from Bellevue Literary Press in June 2007,
during which time Cappello carried out a book tour with novelist, film scholar, and essayist, James
Morrison (The Lost Girl). Morrison and Cappello gave readings on
both coasts at Dutton Brentwood Books in Los Angeles; at Lattitude 33, Laguna
Beach; in Philadelphia, PA, at Giovanni’s Room and at Robin’s Bookstore; in New
York City’s GLBT Center; in Rhode Island at the Brown University Bookstore,
and at the URI Summer Writers Conference; and in Portland, Maine, at Books,
Etc., where they were hosted royally by URI Ph.D. alum, Ted Williams. In the Fall of 2007, Cappello gave readings and
presentations based on Awkward at the Mid-Manhattan Library for their Author @ the Library Series; at the Calandra
Institute in their Writers Read Series; and
at the Cornelia Street Café,
NYC, for their Italian/American Writers series.
Awkward appeared on
the Los Angeles Times Bestseller list in June, and has been reviewed in such places
as Publisher’s Weekly, Susan
Salter Reynold’s “Discoveries” column for the Los Angles Times, Lambda Book Report, and The Womens Review of Books. It was an Elliott Bay Books nonfiction pick of the month for June, and has been
featured in on-line review forums such as Philadelphia Stories. In March, Cappello was interviewed by telephone by
students in English Professor Patrick Madden’s Advanced Creative Writing class
at Brigham Young University. Answers to each of the student’s 15 questions will
appear at www.quotidiana.com,
a forum for discussing the history of the essay and its contemporary
practitioners. Graduate students at Hamline University where Awkward was taught this semester in a seminar on “The Lyric
Essay” also posed questions to Cappello, the answers to which appear on her new
IADP Blog space, under the heading, “Immigration is at its Center, But is it a
Lyric Essay? A Letter”: http://www.i-italy.org/bloggers/cicchetti
In February, Cappello was interviewed by Celest Quinn about Awkward on NPR Affiliate, WILL’s “Afternoon Magazine”: http://www.will.uiuc.edu/media/aftmag080227.mp3
Other interviews and articles around AWKWARD appeared in The
Newport Mercury (entitled, “Gap Analysis” with
Lisa Utman Randall), the South County Independent (Doug Norris), and, thanks to URI’s Jan Wenzel, in Quadangles and across the world wide web. Cappello’s work and
words were cited in Associated Press reporter Jennifer Peltz’s article on the
Bellevue Literary Press, “New York City’s Bellevue Hospital
Makes Move from Medicine to Manuscripts” that
appeared in dozens of newspapers in the US and Canada including The
Washington Post in
August. Consortium Books, BLP’s distributor
and the distributor of books from over 90 independent publishers around the
world, announced in 2008 that Awkward was one of their five most popular titles at the MLA (Modern Language Association) Bookfair this year.
The first chapter of Mary Cappello’s recently completed mss, Called Back: A
Breast Cancer Memoir has been accepted for publication at The Georgia Review
In November of 2007, Mary
Cappello presented new work at the Nonfiction
NOW conference sponsored by the University
of Iowa’s program in Creative Writing.
Cappello read on a panel titled “Bodies. Spaces. Memories.” with Barrie Jean Borich
(panel chair), David Shields, Paul Lisicky, and Suzanne Paola. A recording of
the panel will appear on the Nonfiction Now website sometime this year. In
February 2008, Cappello read in the URI English Department’s Read/Write Series.
She also delivered a talk entitled “Why I Can’t Write a ‘Straight
Essay’: or, I Could Write a Straight Essay, but I’d Be Faking It” at the national writers conference, AWP, held this year in New York City on a panel titled,
“We Will Be Citizens: Lesbian Memoir” with fellow writers Catherine Reid,
Barrie Jean Borich, Amy Hoffman, Lori Soderlind and Gretchen Legler, Panel
Chair.
In March, 2008, Cappello’s nonfiction and that of B.Amore,
Louise DeSalvo, Edvige Giunta, and Josephine Hedin was the subject of a
day-long symposium held at SUNY/Stonybrook, “The Ethnic I/Eye: Memoir and
Italian American Culture.” Each writer
gave an hour long reading/presentation and at key junctures throughout the day
appeared as a panel to offer a mini-seminar on the state of the art of memoir.
American Literary and
Cultural Studies
Publications
Assistant Professor Mathew Cordova Frankel's essay, "Tattoo Art: The Composition of Text,
Voice, and Race in Moby-Dick," will appear in the
forthcoming edition of ESQ: A Journal of the American Rennaissance (Volume 53, Number 2).
Karen Stein’s Reading,
Learning, Teaching Toni Morrison is under contract with Peter Lang.
Mary Cappello’s essay, “‘For Anyone Interested in Learning What Makes Us Human,’”on Gunther von
Hagens’ bodyworlds exhibits, is forthcoming in an issue of Salmagundi.
Cappello has
received a contract from The New Press for SWALLOW: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Aspiration,
and Extraction in the Age of Chevalier Jackson, a book that she conceived and began writing while
on Sabbatical in 2007. This nonfiction book, part psychobiography, part
cultural history, part philosophical meditation, emerges out of a collection of
“foreign bodies” currently housed in Philadelphia’s Mutter Museum: nearly 2000
swallowed or aspirated “things” that pioneering laryngologist Chevalier Jackson
extracted nonsurgically from the air and foodways of people in the early 20th century and that he also saved and framed. A
contribution to histories of the marvelous and the curious, Swallow will bring Jackson’s incomparable contributions to
the history of medicine to light while simultaneously restoring the narratives,
lives, and longings that haunt Jackson’s collection.
Mary
Cappello’s essay, “Mikhail Epstein: An
Introduction” appeared in Russian and English, in Mikhail Epstein, AmeRussia:
Selected Essays,
Moscow: Serebrianye niti, 2007
Professor John Leo continues to be on the advisory and editorial board of The
Americanist, an
interdisciplinary journal published by the American Studies Center, University
of Warsaw, PL. He was most recently appointed to the editorial advisory board
of the European Journal of American Studies.
Martha
Rojas has been invited to deliver a public lecture entitled "American Imprints: Franklin's
Emblems for the New United States" on Monday, May 12,
6:30pm at the Providence Public Library,
150 Empire Street, Barnard Room. This lecture is part of the traveling
exhibition entitled Benjamin
Franklin: In Search of a Better World, which is a
collaboration between the National Endowment for the Humanities, the
American Library Association, and the Benjamin Franklin Tercentenary. This exhibition is based on a major exhibition of
the same name displayed at the National Constitution Center, Philadelphia, from
December 2005 - April 2006, which is now touring the United States and Europe,
and hosted at only two spots in New England, including here in Providence.
Over
the past year, Rojas has presented work from her larger project, Diplomatic
Letters: Innovating the new United States, on numerous occasions. Last summer, she
gave a talk entitled "Authenticated Copies: On Form, Trinkets and
Belonging," at Jay-fest: In
Celebration of Jay Fliegelman at Stanford University. She also presented from her work at
the 2007 Modern Language Association Annual Convention in Chicago. Additionally, she
was invited to give a public lecture on diplomatic gifts to accompany the
exhibition Fragile Diplomacy: Meissen Porcelain for European Courts at The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the
Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture in
New York City. That lecture entitled, "Jeffersonian Presents and
Counter-presents," was profiled in the spring issue of The
InterDependent, the quarterly
magazine of the United Nations Association of the United States.
University, SUNY. Naomi
Mandel organized the panel, "Extreme
Contemporary, Contemporary Extreme" at the Louisville Conference
on Literature and Culture After 1900, February 2008, and delivered a paper, "Extremely Loud and Incredibly
Illuminated" at this same conference. In May, 2008, Mandel presented, "Being
Nomadic with the Truth: J.S. Foer's Postmodern Parables" at The International Conference on Narrative in Austin, Texas.
On March 18th, 2008, The Department of
Anglo-American Literature at the University of Catania, Sicily, hosted Professors Jean Walton and Mary Cappello for
a day-long series of presentations and discussion of their work and the work of
Graduate Students in U of Catania’s program. Jean Walton delivered a talk titled "Jane's
Voice: Acting, Activism and Acrimony during the Vietnam War." Growing out of Professor Walton's course on American
cinema and culture of the 1970s, the talk explored the function of Jane Fonda's
voice as the locus of cinematic fantasy, political agency, governmental
surveillance, and post-war antipathy during the 1970s. Students and faculty had
screened and studied the films that Walton discussed in advance of her
presentation. Mary Cappello delivered
a talk entitled, “Improper Documents,” on the idea of documents that resist
their placement, that refuse to be filed or properly catalogued, and how such
texts can become the basis for a radical nonfiction practice or documentary
aesthetic. Later in the day, Professors Walton and Cappello gave a joint methodological
talk on their respective interdisciplinary
research projects: Walton described her book-in-progress on peristaltic
processes in the early 20th century, and Cappello discussed her work on
Chevalier Jackson’s “foreign body” collection in Philadelphia’s Mutter Museum.
Graduate student Stefanie Head presented a paper entitled ‘Domestic Mysteries: Autonomy and
Citizenship in Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer’ at
the May 2007 meeting of the American Literature Association in Boston.
John Leo also will
present a paper on film and the Cold War, “Cinematic Frontiers and
Gendered Territories: Commies, Cowboys and Queers Revisited, 1963-1989,” at the American Studies Association Annual Meeting,
“Back to the Crossroads: Integrative American Studies in Theory and Practice,”
October 16-19, Albuquerque, NM.
Rebecca Fine Romanow (PhD 2006) will be delivering a paper, “Turtles Can Fly:
Invasion, Influence and Inevitability Along the
Frontier,” at the annual convention of the American Studies Convention in October
2008. The paper examines the ways in which Bahman Ghobadi’s 2004 film Turtles
Can Fly (Lakposhtha parvaz mikonand) confronts the disruption of military and geographic frontiers, often
porous, contested, and ill-defined, and the destabilization of the metaphorical
conflicts themselves along dis- and misplaced frontiers: the permeation of
American culture and economic structures that have always already crossed the
border, conflating the spatial and temporal, the geographic and the historical,
the cultural and the militaristic.
Assistant Professor Stephanie Dunson presented at the New England American
Studies Association Conference at Brown
University in November, 2007. Her paper "Propriety and
Perversion: Minstrel Sheet Music and Female Desire" explored minstrel sheet music, not as
evocation of minstrel hall performance but rather as
intelligence into1840s parlor culture; correctly situated as components of a
domestic medium, the cover illustrations, lyrics, and musical notation of
minstrel sheet music reveal how misrepresentations of black identity
were positioned at complex intersections of popular culture,
national identity, public and private space, and consumerism. Dunson offered an
analysis of lyrics, melodies, and musical arrangements to show the evolution of
1840s minstrel sheet music—a progression that exposes a
developing reciprocal relationship between the refined
aesthetics of the parlor and the playful antics of blackface performance. Most
notably, she demonstrated how the logic Eric Lott employs in exposing blackface
performance as a medium driven by white male sexuality and
racial desire finds a gendered equivalent in the images of
minstrel sheet music covers designed for white middle-class women.
Dunson also
presented at the American Studies Association National Conference in
Philadelphia, PA October, 2007. Her paper "Jim Along
Josey's All De Kick": Transatlantic Negotiations of the Black Body in
Nineteenth-Century Sheet Music” explored
how in the late 1830s, the initial popularity of blackface performance was
marked by bawdy routines and raunchy songs played to rowdy audiences of working
class men in northern cities; in America, association with the medium was
something no proper lady would venture and few upright gentleman would acknowledge.
Surprisingly, within ten years, minstrel sheet music was commonplace in even
the most genteel parlors, purchased and played predominantly by refined young
ladies. In this presentation, Dunson explored how the British sheet music
industry aided
minstrelsy's transition from rowdy dance hall spectacle to
refined home entertainment in the late 1830s and early 1840s America. To do
this, she offered an analysis of four early print versions of the popular
minstrel song "Jim Along Josey" to explore how music publishers first
in Britain then in America policed and adjusted minstrel images and themes,
making them less threatening and more meaningful to parlor players in general
and women in particular. Subtle at first but ultimately more grotesque, the
images demonstrate the evolving and fluid nature not only of the blackface
phenomenon but also of presumptions about race embedded in minstrel material.
Ultimately her presentation demonstrated how the varied
depictions of blackface minstrels on sheet music covers reveal a Transatlantic
debate in print on the "problem" and potency of the black body.
Dunson was invited
to present her paper "A Brief History of the Blackface
Tradition" at a Symposium on African Americans and Early Mass Media at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in October 2007. This presentation offered a survey of the black image
popularized through sheet music covers in the decades before the age of Tin Pan
Alley. Moving from early covers featuring the blackface pantomime popularized by
white performers in antebellum America to the broad caricature of black bodies
made ubiquitous in sheet music illustration in the years after the Civil War,
Dunson’s paper explored the broad measure of the types and stereotypes that
informed and even dictated evolving racial ideologies of nineteenth-century
America. Her analysis was intended to highlight the portability, adaptability,
and impact of print music media in not just forming but also calcifying
national conceptions of race. Ultimately, she demonstrated how sheet music came
to influence American attitudes about black identity throughout the second half
of the nineteenth century—attitudes early black performers were forced to
counter and adapt in order to forge their own unique position the American mass
culture of the early modern era. The content of this presentation forms the
basis of the opening chapter of a collection of essays from the symposium to be
published by the University of North Carolina Press.
Karen Stein gave a
talk in September for the URI Hillel entitled, "Elizabeth Cady
Stanton and The Women's Bible." In March, Stein gave a talk at the Westerly Library entitled "Prudence
Crandall, Connecticut's State Heroine."
Renaissance Studies
Presentations, National
and International
Assistant Professor Travis D. Williams delivered a paper entitled “Mathematical Enargeia:
The Rhetoric of Early Modern Mathematical Notation” at the conference
“Varieties of Cultural History” hosted by the University of Aberdeen, in July 2007. Williams also delivered a paper
entitled “Mathematical Tales: The Failure of Narrative in Early Modern
Arithmetic” at the conference of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts held in Portland, Maine in November 2007.
British Romanticism
Publications
Jennifer Jones is currently guest editing a special issue of the journal Romantic
Circles Pedagogy Commons (General
Editor Laura Mandell, Miami University, Ohio). The issue is called "The
Sublime and the Scene of Education," and will include essays from such renowned scholars as Frances Ferguson (Johns
Hopkins), Ian Balfour (U. Toronto), Deborah Elise White (Emory), Forest Pyle
(U. Oregon), Christopher Braider (U. Colorado), and Paul Hamilton (U. London).
The issue is scheduled to appear in late October 2008.
Conferences,
International
Jennifer Jones will give a presentation entitled "Grasping
a Rhythm: Meditations on Kant, Deleuze, and Wordsworth" at the annual NASSR conference to be held in Toronto
in late August, 2009. Jones has also been asked to Chair the session
entitled "Metrical Diversity" at
this conference.
Victorian
Studies
Presentations and Panels Organized
Assistant Professor Carolyn
Betensky gave a paper titled “Object
Relations and the Victorian Social-Problem Novel” at the Association
for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society Conference at Rutgers University in November. She also co-organized (with Susan Hiner, of Vassar College) a two-day
panel at the American
Comparative Literature Association conference in Long Beach, California, in April; the panel, on the topic
"Revisiting Historicism," also featured her paper "The Problem
with Getting it Right,” a discussion of the limitations of historicist
methodology for the study of Victorian literature.
Queer Modernisms
Presentations
Stephen Barber gave
two conference papers in November of 2007. The first, “International
Queer Modernism,” he presented at Modernist
Studies Association 9: Geographies of Visual and Literary Culture Conference,
sponsored by California State University and University of Southern California,
Long Beach, CA. The second, “States of Emergency: Woolf, History, and the
Novel,” he presented at Theories of the
Novel Now Conference, at Brown University (Biltmore), Providence,
RI. The second conference paper has been solicited and submitted for
publication in NOVEL: A FORUM ON FICTION.
Postcolonial Literature
and Culture
Publications
Rebecca Fine Romanow's (PhD 2006) essay "But...Can the Subaltern Speak?" was
re-published by invitation by Subaltern Studies in April, 2008.
Romanow has also
been invited to join the Editorial Board of Subaltern Cinema, a peer-reviewed journal to be
launched by the Subaltern Studies Group in September, 2008.
Presentations
On March 7, graduate student Stefanie Head presented a paper entitled ‘Colonial Visions,
Postimperial Eyes: Description & Narrative in V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma
of Arrival’ at NYU’s ‘Postcolonialism and the Hit of the Real’ Conference.
Contemporary Literature
and Culture
Publications
Associate Professor Ryan
Trimm’s essay "Carving Up Value: The
Tragicomic Thatcher Years in Jonathan Coe" has been accepted for
publication in the collection Thatcher and After.
Naomi Mandel and Alain-Philippe
Durand's co-edited volume Novels
of the Contemporary Extreme was the subject of a review essay titled "Local and Global
Antagonisms: Three Approaches to the Contemporary Novel" in Textual
Practice. In the
review, Mandel's essay on American Psycho was described as "rank[ing] among the best criticism of this
notorious work."
Presentations, National
and International
Karen Stein delivered a talk entitled, “Doris Lessing, Nobel Prize in Literature, 2007” in March
for the English Department’s Read/ Write series and for the Phi Beta Kappa at URI. "
Graduate student Stefanie Head presented on a panel for the American Name Society at the
2007 MLA Convention in Chicago. This paper
was entitled ‘“Hi, My Name is Tracy Espositowitz”: Proper Names and Ethnic
Identities in Stand-Up Comedy.’”
Greta Methot (adjunct instructor, English) presented her paper, In Loco Parentis:
John Hughes’ Teen Films and the “Me” Decade, at the 38th annual
Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference in San Francisco, CA (March 2008).
On November 8, Graduate Student Laurie Carlson presented a paper “I’d Rather Be a Dwarf
than a Ship: Reconfigurations in Disability Studies and Cyberspace” at the M/MLA 2007 Convention (Cleveland, OH)
Associate Professor Ryan
Trimm presented "Of Fairy Tales and
Teeth: Zadie Smith and the Metropolitan Melee" at the On Whose Terms?
Conference at Goldsmiths University in London. His paper "Metropole in the Age of Cloud and
Ghosts: Postglobal Britain in David Mitchell" has been accepted for a
panel on Mitchell at this year's MLA in San Francisco.
English as a Second Language
Publications
Graduate Student Allison N. Petro’s chapter “Finding the Institutional Logic for
Change” was published in a TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of
Other Languages) book series on language
curriculum development. Petro’s chapter focuses on the process of redesigning
the ELS Program curriculum at URI (from 2003-2006), in order to bring it more
in line with the fundamental goals of the university. A second book
chapter, entitled “Earning Respect in a
Community College Environment” will appear in June 2008 in a series on
community college ESL, also published by TESOL.
Lecturer Luz Rodriguez’s article “Reading
Club Gets ESL and Mainstream Students Together” was published in the
September 2007 issue of Essential Teacher (Volume 4, Issue 3). Essential Teacher is a TESOL publication for language teachers and
administrators in varied ESL and EFL workplaces.
Presentations
On April 5, 2008, Lecturer Luz Rodriguez presented at the 42nd Annual
TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) Convention &
Exhibit. Her presentation entitled “Effective
Teaching for Improving and Retaining Vocabulary” provided second
language (L2) educators with a theoretical and practical framework to develop
successful L2 vocabulary programs at all levels of language proficiency.
Graduate Student Allison N. Petro spoke on a panel at the TESOL Convention in April
2008. The topic was “The Internationalization of Higher Education” and the
session focused on the impact of the Bologna Process on graduate education in
Eastern and Western Europe.
Philosophy
and Literature
Publications
Naomi Mandel’s "Fiction and Fidelity: Windows on the World" is
forthcoming in Frédéric Beigbeder et ses doubles edited by interim Chair Alain Phillippe Durand, CRIN, Amsterdam: Rodopi, Mattheiu Dalle,
translator.
Presentations
Mathew Frankel delivered "A Spinozist's Art," for the panel,
"Affectus/Affectio: A Seminar in Spinoza and Deleuze," at the
American Comparative Language Association,
Long Beach, California, April 24-27, 2008 and "Naturally
Fascinating: Nature and the Aesthetic from Whitehead to Deleuze," for the panel "Fascination and the
History of Affect," at the Northeast
Modern Language Association, 39th Convention, Buffalo, April 10-13, 2008.
In April 2008, Stephen Barber presented “The Violence of Badiou’s Ethics” at the Honors Program Spring Colloquium
on Novels of the Contemporary Extreme at
URI, sponsored by the Honors Program, Department of English, French and
Francophile Studies, Comparative Literature, Center for the Humanities, and the
John Hazen White Sr. Center for Ethics and Public Service.
Naomi Mandel presented "In Fidelity: From Being Right to Being True," a public lecture sponsored by URI’s
Institute for the Humanities, April 2008.
Book Reviews
Mary
Cappello’s reviews of contemporary experimental
fiction by women, Sara Greenslit’s The Blue
of Her Body, Bhanu Kapil’s Incubation: A Space for Monsters, and
Miranda Mellis’ The Revisionist appeared in The Women’s Review of
Books, Fall 2007
Karen Stein’s review of Cynthia G. Kuhn’s Self-Fashioning
in Margaret Atwood's Fiction:
Dress, Culture and Identity appeared
in University of Toronto Quarterly 76.1
(2007) 595-59
Naomi Mandel’s review of Brian Richardson's, Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration
in Modern and Contemporary Fiction is forthcoming in Novel: A Forum on Fiction
Alain-Philippe Durand’s
review of William Jelani Cobb’s To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip
Hop Aesthetic (New York: New York UP, 2007) appeared in Choice Sept. 2007; his review of Franc
Schuerewegen’s Balzac, suite et fin (Lyon: ENS Editions, 2004) appeared in Nineteenth
Century French Studies 35.2 (2007): 486-87; and his review of Guy Tournaye’s Le Décodeur (Paris: Gallimard, 2005) appeared in The French Review 80.6 (2007): 1424-25.
Invited Speakers, Events, and Conferences
Organized/Program Building and Community Outreach
This year, Martha Rojas became the State Coordinator for Changing Lives Through Literature, an innovative alternative sentencing program that
allows university English departments and State Courts to work towards reducing recidivism and enhancing the lives of its
participants. Along with coordinating and teaching classes for the
program she is working to identify funding sources to support the program and
the faculty and court volunteers who facilitate the sessions. For this work,
Professor Rojas was also awarded a fellowship at the John Hazen White
Sr. Center for Ethics and Public Service.
Martha Rojas and Mathew
Frankel continue to direct the Rumowicz
Program in Literature and the Sea which
this year brought Professor W. Jeffrey Bolster from University of New Hampshire
to deliver the Rumowicz Annual Lecture: “Landfalls and Departures:
New Sea Stories for a Historic Ocean.” Professor Bolster’s followed the presentation of awards to our undergraduate
winners of the Maritime Essay Contest.
On March 6, 2008, Lecturer Luz Rodriguez organized a Multilingual
Poetry Reading to join in the International
Women's Day celebrations at URI. With the help of
students enrolled in the English Language Studies program, attendees enjoyed
poetry readings in several different languages while following along with
English translations provided for each poem.
Lecturer Luz Rodriguez organized
and spearheaded the new “Conversation Partner Program” in the
spring semester 2008. The program aims at promoting language practice and
cultural exchange by pairing international students and scholars (non-native
speakers of English) with domestic students (native speakers) at URI. A
reporter from the Good 5 Cent Cigar attended the first informational session on 2/25/08 and his article published
on 2/26/08 can be found at: http://media.www.ramcigar.com/media/storage/paper366/news/2008/02/26/News/Professor.Starts.Group.Tries.To.Bridge.The.Language.Barrier.At.Uri-3235018.shtml.
A total of 58 students have taken part in this first program and have
expressed positive reviews of their experiences and benefits in participating.
For more information about the program and how your students can get involved,
please visit http://www.uri.edu/artsci/els/els_sprog.html
Eleven Graduate Students (Laurie Carlson, Brian Dixon,
Rob LeBlanc, Tina Bacci, Stefanie Head, Jessica Gray, Stephen Marchand, Dan
Facchinetti, Eva Jones, Jenn Brandt, and Laurie Rodrigues) produced the Second Annual
Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference on March 29 on the theme of Space, Place, and Imagination. The event, a year in planning,
represented graduate work from more than thirty institutions, seven countries,
and a variety of disciplines including English, History, Film Studies,
Textiles, Music, Environmental
Studies, and Psychology. Dr. Claire Reynolds drew on her
experience from the 2007 Conference to advise this year's committee. Professor
Josie P. Campbell, Director of
English Graduate Studies, gave
enthusiastic support and guidance with every aspect of the event. Thanks to
Professor Campbell, we had the extraordinary pleasure of hosting two dynamic
keynote speakers: author Deborah Davis spoke in the URI Club about the many aspects of a career in writing
and publishing, and ThinkFilm's Mark Urman presented a lecture in the Multicultural Center on the history and
trajectory of independent film. Both presentations were extremely
well-received. In the wake of this successful event, Stephen Marchand has
stepped forward as Director of next year's conference.
Stephen Barber and Jennifer Jones brought two eminent scholars to URI English this
year: Professor Julie A. Carlson,
from the University of California, at Santa Barbara, presented a paper entitled
"Getting Inside England's First Family of Writers" from her latest
book, England's First Family of Writers: Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Shelley (Johns Hopkins 2007) and Professor David L. Clark, from McMaster University in Toronto, presented a paper entitled
"Imagining Peace: Kant's Wartime and the Tremulous Body of
Philosophy" from his forthcoming book Bodies
and Pleasures in Late Kant (Stanford
2008). Both Drs Carlson and Clark took the opportunity to teach students as
well. Dr. Carlson was a guest professor in English 610: Romanticism and Italy,
where she taught texts by or about Mary Shelley, including her own work. Dr.
Clark held a supernumerary seminar open to graduate and Honors undergraduate
students focused on the topic of animality and post-Kantian philosophy
Naomi Mandel arranged for Professor Marco Abel (University of Nebraska), author of Violent Affect: Literature, Cinema, and
Critique After Representation (University of Nebraska Press, 2007)
to speak at URI on "Violence, Affect, Ethics: Thinking the Violence of
Ethics as the Ethics of Violence" as
part of the Violence and Ethics Public Symposium. Abel's visit to URI was
funded by URI's Center for the Humanities and the Honors Program.
Naomi Mandel and Alain-Philippe
Durand organized a Public Symposium on Violence
and Ethics (1 April 2008), hosted by the Honors
Program, Dept. of English, French and Francophone Studies, Comparative
Literature, and the John Hazen White Sr. Center for Ethics and Public Service.
Featured speakers were Stephen Barber and Galen Johnson of URI, and Marco Abel of University of Nebraska.
Naomi Mandel and Alain-Philippe Durand co-directed this year's immensely successful Honors
Program Spring Colloquium on Novels of the Contemporary Extreme. As part of this program, Mandel and Durand arranged for acclaimed British Author Chris Cleave (author of Incendiary) to spend a week at URI as Writer-in-Residence. Cleave delivered a public lectures: "Better
Make Them Laugh if You Want To Change Their Minds" and gave a reading from
his forthcoming novel Little Bee. Cleave also ran several
creative writing workshops for URI students. Cleave's Visit to URI was
sponsored by the Honors Program, the Center for the Humanities, and the College
of Arts and Sciences.
Peter Covino has
coordinated the second annual Ocean State Summer Writing Conference (for Summer 2008), featuring such luminaries as Nina
Cassian, Nick Carbó, Denise Duhamel, and Ann Hood. See http://www.uri.edu/artsci/eng/SummerWriting/08/index.html for more information about this enormously successful writing conference.
Covino and Mary Cappello also continue to coordinate
the hugely successful Read/Write Series, which hosts regular readings by
national and local creative writers. This year, Covino hosted five different
sets of writers each semester. For a full line-up of poets, fiction, and
nonfiction writers featured in this year’s series, go to the English Department
website.
Naomi Mandel worked with Peter Covino to
establish Read/Write Providence, a speaker series in Providence designed to
showcase the scholarship and creative work of instructors at that campus and to
build bridges between the University of Rhode Island and the community. The
series featured Jane Berard,
Michael Cirelli, and Milton Coykendall in Fall 2007; in Spring 2008 Chris
Cleave was the featured speaker.
In December 2007, Stephanie Dunson lead a workshop for the Institute for
Writing and Thinking at Bard
College entitled, "Writing and
Thinking." This workshop provided a retreat where teachers reflected on
the way they teach writing. I provided writing prompts and collaborative
activities that allowed participants to explore their values and concerns as
writers and teachers. Some work also focused on such topics as invention
strategies, coaching the writing process, and revision. Through the activities,
the participants were able to become more aware of the composing process and of
their students' struggles to acquire the ability to produce expressive, well
developed, and engaged writing.
In January of 2008, Dunson was invited to lead a workshop on Interdisciplinary Writing
at St. Paul's School in Concord, NH, entitled “Writing to Learn." This workshop emphasized important questions about
reading: how does one work illuminate another? What happens to understanding
when we use performance to illuminate non-dramatic works of literature? How
does personal writing connect the reader to a text and/or to a deeper understanding
of complex texts? What can cultural boundaries teach us about differences
between genres? Where are the roots of a persuasive argument? In leading the
workshop, Dunson presented and modeled the Institute methods for encouraging
"writing to read" (writing practices that show rather than tell
students how writing clarifies the meaning of literary texts) as a central
classroom practice. These concurrent workshops present writing strategies that
allow the reader to make both personal and intellectual connections to the
texts; support close, imaginative reading; and help students develop an
appreciation for the intersections between related but different texts.
Dunson has been
invited to lead a workshop on Writing and Critical Thinking this May at
Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, PA, entitled
"Inquiry into Essay." This
workshop will focus on the analytic essay as a finished product, emphasizing
ways to pull together fragments of good writing and information into a coherent
whole. Dunson plans to begin the workshop by defining the essay and encouraging
participants to consider how its definition changes according to the purpose
and content of the writing assignment. Then, by offering activities that allow
participants to reflect on their own writing, she will provide guidance for
them to explore the differences between the capacity for invention required for
informal essays and the knowledge of conventions required for the academic
essay. Working on their essays, participants will observe how an inquiring
habit of mind helps determine the shape of what they write.
John Leo, at the
request of the Polish-American Fulbright Commission (Warsaw) and
Russian Fulbright Office (Moscow) secured
funding, organized and ran a two-day conference for a group of US high school
teachers selected by the Fulbright-Hays Program (US Departments of State and
Education) to explore collaborative research projects with international peers.
Given the size of the “Fulbright Footprint” at URI (measured by the sizeable
number of faculty and student Fulbrighters), this outreach was sponsored in
part the Offices of URI’s President, Provost, College of Arts & Sciences as
well as individual departments and the Fulbright Association of RI. On another Fulbright note, Laszlo Sari, a scholar from Hungary, is
applying for a Fulbright to the US and to URI in particular based on his
interest in Naomi Mandel’s work
on violence.
Professional and Community Service
Graduate Student Allison N. Petro was elected to the Steering Committee of the Second
Language Writing Interest Section of TESOL for a three-year term (2008-2011.)
Mary Cappello has
been invited as a public intellectual to be a Blogger on the new I-Italy site: The
Italian American Digital Project (IADP). Cappello’s Blog, titled “Cicchetti” is described as: Marginalia, poetic
forays, "free" writing, peripheral intensities, the cicchetto as a
literary form, keeping my ears open to queer encounters of the Italian kind. In an attempt to counter logorrhea in the age of the Blog, she has founded a
group called “Cicchetti,” in which people are asked to theorize and compose a
new literary form in the spirit of the late afternoon Venetian snack, the
cicchetto. Cappello will also be carrying out interviews, mostly but not exclusively, with queer artists and
public intellectuals (interviews forthcoming this month with memoirist,
Danielle Trussoni [Falling Through the Earth]; visual artist,
Rebecca Allan [exhibit: Resident Earth];
and experimental filmmaker, Marie Martino [Strip, and Foreign Bodies]. Interviews in the works with Karl Schoonover on
Italian neo-realist cinema, and with URI Graduate Student Brett Rutherford on
Italian Opera.) I-Italy describes itself as “a network of independent
journalists and public
intellectuals determined to create an
authoritative point of encounter, information, and debate on the Internet
concerning Italy and Italian America…It will offer instruments for the creation
of bilingual project on the Web open to all.”
Mary Cappello, together with the
poet, Deidre Pope, has published to her website a guide to coping
with chemotherapy. Pope and Cappello’s
hope to provide cancer patients with all manner of hard-to-find practical
advice for dealing with the chemotherapy ordeal. Their co-authored document can
be found at: http://web.mac.com/marycappello/iWeb/Site/Chemo%20Guide.html
Appointments
Talvi Ansel was
Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Writer-in-Residence at Centre College in Danville, KY for their January CentreTerm 2008
Graduate student Claire E. Reynolds was appointed Book-Review Editor USA & Canada
for CLCweb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the scholarly online journal
published quarterly by Purdue University Press
In April 2008, Assistant Professor Travis D. Williams was elected to be the treasurer of the URI chapter
of Phi Beta Kappa.
In Fall of 2007, Stephanie Dunson sat on the Selections Advisory Board for
the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College. Dunson served on the hiring committee for the
selection of the new Associate Director of the Institute. In Fall 07-Spring 08, Stephanie Dunson was elected to
serve on the Council of the New England American Studies Association.
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