PRINT PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION

Honor Roll »

FACULTY NEWS

 

John Belton spent the past year on a Guggenheim Fellowship presenting papers from his book project on digital filmmaking. He lectured at the Nice Observatory, the University of Zurich, Cologne University, Bochum University, Bauhaus University, the University of Hamburg, and the Free University of Berlin.

Matthew S. Buckley published “Tragedy Walks the Streets”: The French Revolution in the Making of Modern Drama and was promoted to associate professor of English with tenure in spring 2007.

Abena P. A. Busia served as acting director of the Rutgers Center for African Studies during the 2006-07 academic year.

Marianne DeKoven published an article on contemporary feminist criticism in PMLA and co-edited, with Hillary Chute, a special issue on graphic narratives for Mfs: Modern Fiction Studies.

Elin Diamond delivered a paper on J. L. Austin and Zora Neale Hurston at the University of Texas at Austin in April 2006. She participated in the plenary panel on performance and temporality at the American Society of Theater Research meeting in November. She recently published work on Caryl Churchill in The Blackwell Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama, on Adrienne Kennedy, Freud, and Brecht in Twentieth Century American Drama, and on Hurston and Brecht in Against Theatre: Creative Destructions on the Modernist Stage. She sits on the executive committee of the MLA’s drama division.

Brad Evans published an essay on Franz Boas and the Harlem Renaissance in Central Sites, Peripheral Visions: Cultural and Institutional Crossings. This April, he gave an invited lecture on ephemera and the little magazines of the 1890s for an ELH colloquium at Johns Hopkins University. He is an advisory member of the Modernist Journals Project, an online resource for early twentieth century periodical literature.

Kate Flint received the 2007 Board of Trustees Award for Excellence in Research and will be a fellow at the National Humanities Center next year. She gave an invited lecture last October on photography and the sublime at Temple University’s Center for the Humanities, and delivered the keynote lecture entitled “Seeing Italy” at the Dickens, Victorian Culture, and Italy conference in Genoa in June 2007. She has written an essay for The Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins on Collins and disability. She will deliver the English department’s Opening Lecture this September, drawing upon her book, The Transatlantic Indian, 1785-1930, due out from Princeton University Press in 2008.

Sandy Flitterman-Lewis recently published work on the French film Army of Shadows in Cineaste, on feminism and media studies in Camera Obscura, and on feminist film theory in 1895.

William H. Galperin published an article on Jane Austen in ELH. He will direct the Center for Cultural Analysis next year.

Christopher P. Iannini gave an invited lecture at the College of William and Mary’s Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture in March 2006 and another for Brown University’s Americanist lecture series in October.

Gregory S. Jackson published an article on Charles Sheldon’s novel In His Steps in PMLA and organized a conference on aesthetics in American literary history for the Huntington Library in May 2007.

Colin Jager published The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era and was promoted to associate professor of English with tenure in spring 2007. He also published articles on secularism and romanticism in Public Culture and on the poetics of dissent in Theory & Event.

Ann Jurecic published articles on autism and writing instruction in College English and Literature and Medicine. A fellow at the Rutgers Institute for Research on Women, she delivered the keynote lecture at this spring’s New Jersey Writing Alliance conference, was recently appointed for a three-year term to the board of the journal Pedagogy, and serves as the book review editor for Literature and Medicine.

Stacy S. Klein won the 2005 International Society of Anglo-Saxonists publication prize for her article on Cynewulf’s Elene in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies.

Jonathan Brody Kramnick has an article on empiricism, cognitive science, and the novel forthcoming in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation.

John Kucich published Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class. He is organizing a conference on master narratives to be held at Rutgers in March 2008, which will feature plenary lectures by Nancy Armstrong, Catherine Hull, Suvir Kaul, and Dror Wahrman.

John A. McClure received the 2006 Warren I. Susman Award for Excellence in Teaching. His book, Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison, is forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press.

Meredith L. McGill organized a symposium on the poetry of Sterling Brown for the Center for Cultural Analysis in March 2007; it featured papers by Joanne Gabbin, Robert O’Meally, James Smethurst, and Robert Stepto, as well as by Rutgers faculty Brent Edwards, Brad Evans, Evie Shockley, and Cheryl A. Wall.

Michael McKeon published a review essay on recent scholarship in the long eighteenth century in SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. Last year, he was invited to discuss his book The Secret History of Domesticity at Carleton University, the University of Toronto, the University of Lyon, and the Sorbonne.

Richard E. Miller delivered the keynote lecture entitled “Worlds End and Worlds Begin: The Future of the Humanities in Our Apocalyptic Age” at Clemson University’s Celebration of the Humanities conference in February 2007. This July, he will deliver keynote lectures at the Literacies of Hope conference in Beijing and at the Renewals: Refiguring University English in the Twenty-first Century conference at the Royal Holloway, University of London.

Barry V. Qualls was named the New Jersey Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.

Evie Shockley published the poetry collection a half-red sea. She participated in a symposium on poetry and the law at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s College of Law in February 2006. Awarded fellowships by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and by the American Council of Learned Societies, she will continue work on a book project on aesthetics and formal innovation in African American poetry next year. Her essay on Kincaid’s Lucy and Brontë’s Villette appeared in Jamaica Kincaid’s Caribbean Double Crossings.

Jonah Siegel was elected president of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association in 2006. Last October, he gave an invited lecture on the Brownings and Italy for the Browning Society.

Cheryl A. Wall was named Board of Governors Professor of English in December 2006. This April, she was awarded a Rutgers University Human Dignity Award for her commitment to promoting the value and importance of diversity at Rutgers and in society. She delivered keynote lectures for black history month at Lafayette College and for a James Baldwin conference at the Queen Mary, University of London, in June 2007.

Carolyn Williams organized the International Walter Pater Society conference at Rutgers last July. She directed the session on the genre of public lectures for the English Institute last October and organized the panel on theorist autobiographers at the MLA convention. This past spring, she organized, with graduate student Sarah Kennedy, the Dickens Project conference at Rutgers. She is overseeing the creation of Writers House in Murray Hall.

Edlie L. Wong recently published work on Julia Collins’ novel The Curse of Caste in the African American Review, on Doris Salcedo’s art installation in The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory, and Visual Culture, and on Nellie Bly in American Literary Geographies: Spatial Practice and Cultural Production.

 

RETIREMENT NEWS

Carol H. Smith retired from Rutgers University this past spring after more than three decades of teaching and service. A specialist in modernism and women’s writing, Professor Smith is the author of
T. S. Eliot’s Dramatic Theory and Practice. A key figure at Douglass College, she served as chair of that campus’s English department from 1974 to 1979, as acting dean of the college in 1985, and as the director of the Institute for Research on Women from 1986 to 1992. More recently she served as the director of the Graduate Program of Literatures in English from 1998 to 2001. Professor Smith says she will remain active as a scholar and teacher after her retirement. She has a new article on Eliot forthcoming in A Companion to T. S. Eliot due out by Blackwell Publishing in 2008, and she will continue to teach courses for the English department as a professor emerita for the next three years. Rutgers English is delighted to have Professor Smith stay on in this capacity.

 

DEPARTURES

Brent Hayes Edwards, a specialist in African American and African diaspora literature, will join the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Marc Manganaro has been appointed Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Gonzaga University.

Paula McDowell, a specialist in eighteenth-century women’s writing, will join the Department of English at New York University.

María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, a specialist in Latino studies, will join the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University.

Mary Sheridan-Rabideau will join the faculty at the University of Wyoming as an associate professor of English with tenure.

Michael Warner will join the Department of English at Yale University.

 

IN MEMORIAM

James Guetti passed away at the age of 69 on January 11, 2007 at the Leverett, Massachusetts home he shared with his wife Laura. Professor Guetti taught at Rutgers from 1964 until his retirement in 2000. He is the author of several academic books—The Limits of Metaphor: A Study of Melville, Conrad, and Faulkner, Word-Music: The Aesthetic Aspect of Narrative Fiction, and Wittgenstein and the Grammar of Literary Experience—as well as the novel Action and the memoir Silver Kings.

Nicholas Howe, who taught as an assistant professor of English at Rutgers from 1978 to 1985, died of complications from leukemia on September 27, 2006 in Oakland, California. He was 53. After leaving Rutgers, Professor Howe went to teach at the University of Oklahoma, the Ohio State University, and the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England, Home and Homelessness in the Medieval and Renaissance World, and the autobiographical travelogue Across an Inland Sea: Writing in Place from Buffalo to Berlin.

 

© 2007 Future Traditions Magazine
A Publication for Alumni and Friends of Rutgers English
All rights reserved.

Department of English | Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.