Alumni News: Dom Ashby

The Tenants were all sitting on the back veranda this afternoon, trying to stay cool in all the heat and humidity, and young Miss Queener was just beginning her description of the Multidisciplinary Studies Ball last weekend, which was fancy dress, with the guests asked to come as various fields of study, when a telegram arrived from an old friend of the Tenants, Dom Ashby (M.A. 2001).

It seems to be quite the summer for Dom since he announced that he has an article,"Uchi/Soto in Japan: A Global Turn," that has just come out in Rhetoric Society Quarterly. You can find the link to access it here. Even better, Dom said that he'll be defending his dissertation in July and receiving his Ph.D. in Composition and Rhetoric from the English Department at Miami University of Ohio, where, this coming year, he'll be a Visiting Assistant Professor in Composition. The Tenants heartily congratulate him on both accomplishments.

Breaking Jane Austen News

Since we seem to be on an Austen kick this summer, the Tenants were excited to learn that Jane Austen may be on the new 10 pound note in England. While Elizabeth Bennett would probably find this vulgar, we're sure Lydia would thoroughly approve.

A Day in the Life of Jane Austen

Who among us wishes they could experience life through Jane Austen’s eyes for just one day? Thanks to What Jane Saw, a website by Professor Janine Barchas (The University of Texas at Austin), now we can. The website is an interactive “walk” through a retrospective of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s works at the British Institution at Pall Mall, London; according to What Jane Saw, Austen visited the retrospective on May 24, 1813. 

Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827), British Institution, Pall Mall, 1808. Aquatint on paper. "Pub. 1st April 1808, at R. Ackermann's Repository of Arts." From What Jane Saw.

Aside from being just plain cool, this website is a fabulous resource for those among us interested in British Romanticism, museum culture, and/or Austen and Reynolds specifically. Make sure you “walk” back to the South Room (West Side) to take in Reynolds’s Portrait of Dr. Charles Burney, Frances Burney’s father. Enjoy! 

Doctoral Student Publications 2012-2013 (and forthcoming)

The Tenants are not quite sure how they find the time to do it, but, when they weren't presenting at conferences, a number of the doctoral students also managed to publish essays in academic journals and edited collections this past year or to have their work accepted for future publication. We suspect that they're skipping their naps, but the results seem to justify it.

Not counting reviews and encyclopedia entries, here is this year's tally:

Sreya Chatterjee:

 “Begetting Wayward Sons: Naxalite Insurgency and Revolutionary Motherhood in Mahasweta Devi’s Mother of 1084”. Critique of Naxalism: Poststructuralist Perspectives. Ed. Pradip Basu (Routledge, India). Forthcoming.  

“Gender and Literature of the Underground: Examining Naxalite Women’s Literary Representation”. Radical Left Movements in the Indian Sub-Continent. Ed. Pradip Basu. (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press). Forthcoming.   

“Beyond Barriers: Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Transnational Feminist Solidarity”. Modern Social Thinkers. Ed. Pradip Basu. (Kolkata: Setu Prakashani, 2012).

Jim Greene:

“Ethan Allen and Daniel Shays:  Contrasting Models of Political Representation in the Early Republic.” Early American Literature 48.1 (2013):  125-51.

“Military Service and Racial Subjectivity in the War Narratives of James Roberts and Isaac Hubbell.” Forthcoming essay in edited collection, Warring for America, 1803-1818. Eds. Fredrika Teute, Nicole Eustace, and Robert Parkinson. University of North Carolina Press.

Kayla McKinney:

“’In that Bony Light:’ The Museum Economy in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend.” Victorian Review. Forthcoming, 2014.

Susan Lantz:

“Take Your Parents to Work Day.” CUPA-HR News. October 18, 2012. http://www.cupahr.org/news/item.aspx?id=9476

Courtney Novosat:

“Outside Dupin’s Closet of Reason:  (Homo)sexual Repression and Racialized Terror in Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue.’” Poe Studies: History, Theory, Interpretation 45.1 (2012): 78-106.
 

Kwabena Opoku-Agyemang:

Rituals of Distrust: Illicit Affairs and Metaphors of Transport in Ama Ata Aidoo’s “Two Sisters” and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Birdsong,” Research in African Literatures 44.3. (2013) Forthcoming in autumn.

Katherine Richards:

“Her mind had the happy art:" The Creation of Alternative Space and Performance in Ann

Radcliffe's Romance of the Forest. Forthcoming in SLI: Studies in Literary Imagination.47.2

(Fall 2014).

 

Erin Johns Speese:

“Aren’t We Guilty Too?: The Censorship of D.H. Lawrence in the Ivory Tower.”  Rhizomes.  Forthcoming.

“‘Our feelings become impressed with the grandeur of Omnipotence’: Mary Somerville’s Feminine Scientific Sublime.”  Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism.  Forthcoming.

Valerie Surrett:

“’Always better, less rude, to talk about things that were the same’: The Necessity of Otherness to a Functioning Public Sphere.” Journal of Contemporary Thought No. 36 (2012): 139-57.

Jeff Yeager:

“The Social Mind: John Elof Boodin’s Influence on John Steinbeck’s Phalanx Fiction: 1935-1942.”  The Steinbeck Review 10.1 (Spring 2013). Forthcoming.

“How This World is Given to Lying!”: Orson Welles’s Deconstruction of Traditional Historiographies in Chimes at Midnight.  Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference 4 (2013): 80-94.

May Graduate Student Graduates (in May)

The Official List of May Graduates:

 

M.A.

Alexander, Whitney

MA PWE

Petts, Ashleigh

Schussler, Christine

Swisher, Jillian

Wardell, Eric

 MFA

Atkinson, Melissa

Bishop, James

Pan, Connie

Stout, Andrea

Stricker, Shane

Thomas, Rebecca

PhD

Dennis, Phillip (Scott)

Green, Amy

Greene, James

Johns-Speese, Erin

Commencement, for those who missed it

This past Sunday marked WVU's 144 Commencement and several of your beloved professors (Harms, Sweet, Weihman, Ballentine, Gouge, Farina, Almasy, Brady, Beach, and yours truly) were there to hood the grads and shake hands with the undergrads. If you haven't watched the official video, you really should: it's very sweet. Plus, right around :26 some English faculty are, momentarily, captured on screen during the Eberly grad ceremony. Look for us in that big group in the center of the stage. We're at the far right, in the second row.

And here's a pic from the undergrad ceremony, which really isn't as interminable as you might imagine. This year's event clocked in at just under two hours. Pretty impressive.

Congratulations to all our graduates. And remember to keep in touch---and fill out those exit surveys!

Doctoral Student Presentations 2012-2013 (and looking ahead to 2013-2014)

Always ready to read a paper to you..... From left to right: Ms. Bebell, Ms. Smorul, Dr. Greene, Ms. Queener. Not pictured but visually represented by her paper: Ms. Pershing.

The Tenants are still trying to get things in order after the chaos of Finals. Just today, we discovered a huge pile of doctoral student conference presentations from the past year that were under Mark's dressing table where, apparently, he was using them as a footrest. They've now been organized and archived, as follows (with apologies for the variations in the structure of the entries....we could have normalized them, but it's spring, and we're feeling lazy, and, anyway, it's not the 18th Century). We're not so lazy that we won't correct errors, though, if someone points them out.

Andrea Bebell:

 “Little Ladies Locate the Pacific: U.S. Imperialism in Mary Krout's Alice's Visit to the Hawaiian Islands,” American Comparative Literature Association. Toronto, ON, Canada; 4-7 April 2013.

Dominique Bruno:

“Sympathy with Leprosy and Judgment with Necro-Poetics: Swinburne’s “The Leper” and the Dramatic Monologue”

Presented at “Forms and Fashions:” The Fiftieth Anniversary Conference for The Journal of Victorian Poetry: Morgantown, West Virginia (April 20, 2013)

 “Laboring or Active for the Capitol? Hannah Arendt, the Active Life and the Bildungsroman in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games” Presented at "Pippi to Ripley: The Female Figure in Science Fiction and Fantasy": Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York (May 3, 2013)

Mike Buso:

§  “‘No Summer For This Woman’: The Debt of Deborah in Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills,” Midwest Modern Language Association: Women in Literature Panel, November 2012

§  “ ‘Feared and Hated’: Rethinking the X-Men as Homosexual Metaphor,” College of Wooster Global Queerness Conference, October 2012

Sreya Chatterjee:

2013 “Creating Transnational ‘borderlands’ through Literature: A Comparative Study of the fiction of Eilis Ni Dhuibhne and Mahasweta Devi”. Proposal accepted for the National Women’s Studies Association Annual Conference. Cincinnati, Ohio. November.

2012 “Public Cinema and the ‘Media-ted’ Revolution: Corruption, Resistance, and the Contemporary Public Sphere in Rang de Basanti [Paint me Yellow]”. 41st Annual Conference on South Asia, Center for South Asia, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA. October.

Ryan Fletcher:

“’Where Our Sins Lie Unatoned’: Violence, Family, and Redemption in Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska and the Works of Flannery O’Connor.” RMMLA, Boulder, CO: October 12, 2012.

Yvonne Hammond:

Mid-West Modern Language Association, November 2012

Paper Presented: Extending Credit: Gender and Social Recognition

Paper Presented: Behind Cell Doors: Prison Rape in U.S. Culture

Southwest Popular Culture Association, February 2013

Paper Presented: Myth-taken Identities: Gender, Sex and Power in Snow White

James Holsinger: 

“Managing Uncomfortable Sessions in the Writing Center.” Mid-Atlantic Writing Centers Association (MAWCA). California, PA. April 2013. With Dr. Nathalie Singh-Corcoran, Alexis Smith, Amanda Clark, and Rebecca Doverspike. 

“Troubling Trans-Atlanticism: Dramatic Publications and Closet Drama in Late Eighteenth-Century America.” American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR). Nashville, TN. November 2012.

“‘For the Benefit of the Orphans and Widows of Soldiers’: Performance, Payment, and Early American Theatrical Advertisements.”  Midwest Modern Language Association (MMLA). Cincinnati, OH. November 2012.

Sharon Kelly:

“The Queer Orientalism of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.”  Queer Studies Conference, Asheville, NC 4/5/13

“Battlestar Galactica and the Madwoman in the Attic: The Interruption of the Apparition.” 

International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, Orlando, FL 3/23/13

Susan Lantz:

“Millennials – Made in America” Keynote speech for the WPWV/Chapter ACRL (Association of College and Research Libraries) Fall Meeting. November 2012. 

Kayla McKinney:

“Frontier Conflicts: Endless Exploration and Gender Limits in World of Warcraft.” Gaming Cultures across Three Continents. Bangor University, Bangor Wales. May 8, 2013.

“The Healing Road: Journeys through Grief in In Memoriam and Neil Peart’s Ghost Rider.” Victorian Poetry Journal Conference: Forms and Fashions. April 18, 2013. West Virginia University. 

“Being a Little More Victorian: Nineteenth Century Mentoring Models and the Modern Composition Classroom.” West Virginia Association of College English Teachers at Potomac State College, Keyser, West Virginia. December, 2012.

Courtney Novosat:  

“(Re)Imagining Nation: Radical Reform and Women’s Utopian Fiction of Nineteenth-Century America,” NeMLA, 2013, Boston, MA

Kwabena Opoku-Agyemang:

“'That Kind of Nonsense': Reverse Migration and the Paradox of Societal Expectation in Ayi Kwei Armah’s Fragments." African Studies Association (ASA), Baltimore, MD. November 21-24, 2013.

"The Game Changing WoW Effect: Binaries and Agency in World of Warcraft's Academic Research." Computer Gaming Across Cultures: Perspectives from Three Continents, Bangor University, Wales, UK, May 8, 2013

Aaron Percich:
 

“Rereading, Writing, and Terror: Frank Harris’ Transatlantic Bombs.” Modern Language Association, Chicago, Illinois (January 9-12, 2014)

“Irish Mouths, English Tea(pot)s, French Eyes: Poe’s Irish Oral(ident)ity.” American Literature Association, Boston, Massachusetts (May 23-26, 2013)

“Secrets, Shadows, and the Sea: Cross-Constructive Selfhood in Woolf’s The Voyage Out and Conrad’s The Shadow Line.” Modern Language Association, Boston, Massachusetts (January 3-6, 2013)

Teresa Pershing:

“Private v. Public Selves: On Tweeting, Teaching, and Being a Graduate Student.” Modern Language Association Conference. Chicago, IL; 9-12 January 2014.

"Displacing Rationality: Positioning Sensibility and Errancy in Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman," American Comparative Literature Association. Toronto, ON, Canada; 4-7 April 2013.

Jess Queener:  

“Sentiment vs. Sensation; Dickens vs. Gaskell”: RSVP Austin, TX, Sep. 2012

Katherine Richards:

“Showing the 'avatar': Representations of Powerful Femininity in Louisa Stuart Costello's Memoirs of Eminent Englishwomen.” East Central/American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies (EC/ASECS)Baltimore, MD; November 1-3, 2012

 Dibs Roy:  

“My Project is Sexy and You Better Know It”—The Reterritorialization of Online Gaming by

Ivy League Institutions at Computer Gaming Across Cultures: Perspectives from Three Continents, Bangor University, Wales, UK, May 2013. 

Reassessing the Nuclear Public Sphere: Nuclear Counterpublics and Deabstracting the ‘Secret’ Bomb through Nucliteracy at MIT8-Media in Transition International Conference, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, May 2013.  

“Leave the men where they lay, they'll never see another day”: Retributive Femininity and the Gendered Apocalypse in Joss Whedon’s Firefly” at the Eaton Science Fiction Conference, University of California, Riverside, April 2013.  

“Snakes and Ladders”: Effectively Handing Tutor-Student Interaction in Writing Centers at Mid-Atlantic Writing Centers Associations Conference (MAWCA), California University of Pennsylvania, April 2013.  

“Transforming Nonplaces to Places: Gaining Agency from Trauma in Partition Rehabilitation Camps” at the American Comparative Literature Association Conference (ACLA), Toronto, Canada, April 2013.  

“Being Maria: Apocalyptic Modernism and Regendering the Messiah in Metropolis” at the Popular Culture and American Culture Association Conference (PCA/ACA), at Washington, D.C., March 2013.

{Ed: Not surprisingly, he collapsed from exhaustion on May 20th near the statue of Hypnos, the Roman god of Conference Presentations, on the south side of Colson Hall's French Garden.}

Kate Smorul:

“’A Very Human Song’: The Aesthetics of Performance in Angelina Weld Grimké and Gwendolyn Bennett,” Comparative Drama Conference, April 2013

Erin Johns Speese:

 

“Mater Sacer: Addie as Sublime Object in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.”  Panel: Modernist Aesthetics and the Spectacle of Violence.  Modernist Studies Association Conference 14: Modernism and Spectacle.  Las Vegas, NV.  19 October 2012.
 

Valerie Surrett:

“’Before We Went to Sameness’: Dehumanizing Public Spaces in Lois Lowry’s The Giver.” 66th Annual RMMLA Convention. Boulder, CO. 11 October 2012.

Jeff Yeager:  

“Waiting for Lefty: Re-Reading In Dubious Battle through Clifford Odets’s Drama.”  The International Steinbeck Conference, San Jose, CA.  May 2, 2013.
 

“’All the Horses Share a Common Soul’: Myth, Identity, and Deep Ecology in Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses and John Steinbeck’s To a God Unknown.  All the Pretty Horses: the Cormac McCarthy Society’s 20^th Anniversary Conference.  Berea, KY.  March 7, 2013.
 

Phil Zapkin:
 

“The Hollow Plantain Stem: Shame, Masculinity, and the Stability of Empire in Death and the King’s Horseman.” Comparative Drama Conference. Stevenson University, Baltimore, MD. (April 2013). 

“Transcendent Silence: Christ’s Silence as Traumatic Encounter with the Real in The York Mystery Plays.” (anti)Foundations: An Interdisciplinary Conference. Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA. (March 2013).  

“‘What I Want to Be’: Performative Shaming and the Maintenance of Empire in Cloud Nine.” Global Queerness: Sexuality, Citizenship, and Human Rights in the 21^st Century. College of Wooster, Wooster, OH. (October 2012). 

Summer Seminar in Literary and Cultural Studies

The Department of English and the

Eberly College of Arts & Sciences present 
 

“Imagining Romantic Emotion”

a public lecture by

Richard C. Sha

Professor of Literature at American University

 

   

Thursday, June 6, 2013

7:30 p.m.

130 Colson Hall

Free and Open to the Public

Reception to Follow 

This lecture opens the 2013 WVU Summer Seminar in Literary and Cultural Studies, “Romantic Science and the Romantic Imagination,” which Professor Sha will lead from June 6-9.  The public is invited to the lecture; other seminar events require registration.  The seminar is sponsored by the Department of English and the Eberly College of Arts & Sciences. For additional information, contact the Department of English at 304-293-3107 or visit http://english.wvu.edu/centers-projects/summer-seminar.

                       

Richard C. Sha is Professor of Literature at American University in Washington, D.C. His publications include Romanticism and the Emotions, co-edited with Joel Faflak (Cambridge, forthcoming); Perverse Romanticism: Aesthetics and Sexuality in Britain, 1750-1830 (Johns Hopkins, 2009); and The Visual and Verbal Sketch in British Romanticism (Penn, 1998).

Dr. Justus Gets A Job

We managed to pry those telegrams out from under the stable boy, and we're glad we did. The first one notified us that Jeremy Justus (PhD 2012) has been offered, and has accepted, a tenure-track job at the University of Pittsburgh--Johnstown.

The Tenants are planning on having champagne with dinner tonight in celebration.

Mike Buso is Famous, Part II

Colson Hall after Finals, Spring 2013 (artist's conception)

As is always the case with the end of the semester, the world has been too much with us recently, and grading and Starbucks have certainly laid waste our powers. In short, the Tenants have been a bit harried, Colson Hall is a mess, and we are way behind on reporting the latest news. Just yesterday, Mary Ann found a large stack of postcards stuffed carelessly in a lozenge box in her summer sitting room (the small one), and the missing sheaf of unopened telegrams, it turned out, was being used as a sort of booster seat by the stable boy at the dining table in the Servants' Hall.

To begin catching you up:

Mike Buso has been awarded The Winifred South Knutti Graduate Scholarship in Women's Studies for 2013-2014 for his work in LGBT and Gender Studies and his General Awesomeness. The Tenants would like to think that the scholarship is accompanied by a small statuette (a "Winnie") with a very densely engraved plaque.

Congratulations to Mike!