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Slideshow

Faculty News

Camp Image of Switzerland
The Alps across Lake Geneva from the shores of Lausanne, Switzerland.

Cynthia Turner Camp gave a keynote presentation on devotion to northern English saints in Books of Hours at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, in March 2019. This presentation grew in part out of her research into Books of Hours that she's been undertaking with students in her medieval manuscript courses. In addition to compelling conversation and intriguing presentations, the conference featured the most dramatic landscape you could ask for. She also has a new essay collection, co-edited by Emily Kelley of Saginaw Valley State University, entitled Saints as Intercessors between the Wealthy and the Divine: Art and Hagiography among the Medieval Merchant Classes (Routledge, 2019). 

 

 

 

Davis Award
Elizabeth Davis (second from right) with her fellow Service-Learning Excellence Award Winners and Office of Service-Learning Associate Director Paul Matthews (far right).

 

Elizabeth Davis was the recipient of a Service-Learning Excellence in Teaching Award in Spring 2019. The Service-Learning Teaching Excellence Award recognizes UGA faculty for excellence in developing, implementing, and sustaining academic service-learning opportunities for UGA students in domestic and/or international settings. Davis has partnered with the Archway Partnership for multiple community engagement projects in her Writing for Web and Writing and Community courses over the years. Students in those courses have worked with communities across Georgia to develop websites, promote tourism and economic development along state highway 15 (Traditions Highway), and document the efforts of rural communities in the state to preserve their history while working to thrive in the 21st century.

 

Roxanne Eberle hosted Soniah Kamal, the author of Unmarriageable, in this semester’s section of English 4505: Jane Austen. After spending the class period discussing her rewriting of Pride and Prejudice with undergraduates, Soniah Kamal and Dr. Eberle engaged in a public question and answer session prior to a book signing at Avid Books on Prince Avenue.

Eberle Kamal
Soniah Kamal with Dr. Eberle and English 4505: Jane Austen, Spring 2019

Lindsey Harding was selected to be a 2019 Online Learning Fellow to develop an online version of ENGL 4837: Digital Storytelling. In collaboration with Elizabeth Davis and Sara Steger, Lindsey coordinated an undergraduate writing retreat in October 2018 supported by a grant from the Parents Leadership Council. In March 2019, Lindsey presented a work-in-progress with Elizabeth Davis during the Research Network Forum, as well as a workshop session at the 2019 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Annual Convention held in Pittsburgh, PA. This May, she presented with Joshua King at the Regional CCCC Summer Conference.

Lowe Woolson
Dr. Lowe receiving the Woolson Award

 

John Wharton Lowe recently presented talks at four conferences:  “Prophecy and Perversion: From Woolson’s Oklawaha to Disneyworld” at the  Constance Fenimore Woolson Conference, Winter Park, Florida, April, 2019; “Underground Manuscripts: Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality in the Unpublished San Francisco Novels of Ernest J. Gaines” at the MELUS Conference, Cincinnati, March, 2019; “Must the Black Writer Crusade? The Civil Rights Movement in the Life and Fiction of Ernest J.Gaines” at the Southern American Studies Association Conference, Atlanta, March, 2019; and  “The Beauty Parlor as Comic Cauldron in “Petrified Man” and Steel Magnolias at the  Eudora Welty Conference in Charleston, February, 2019. John recently published an article, “How Northern Mexico Became South Texas (and Southern Too): The Reconstruction Saga of Caballero" in  MELUS 43, 4 (2018): 235-259. At the Woolson Conference in Florida, John was presented with the Sharon Dean Award for his recent monograph, Calypso Magnolia:  The Crosscurrents of Caribbean and Southern Literature. 

Barbara McCaskill wrote “Jo's Invisible Sisters” for the upcoming Forum, “Little Women at 150,” in Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 36.1 (2019).  She is serving a three-year term on Legacy's editorial board.  With graduate student Sidonia Serafini (PhD English), she blogged for The Readex Report about their use of digitized newspapers to conduct research on the anti-lynching activist and educator Rev. Peter Thomas Stanford (c. 1858-1909).  Their edition of his writings in Canada, England, and the US is forthcoming in June 2020 (UGA Press). The Hutchins Center for African and African American Research of Harvard University has invited Dr. McCaskill to present the prestigious Alain LeRoy Locke Series next year.  Locke was the first African American Rhodes Scholar and a seminal figure of the Harlem Renaissance. The series brings a distinguished scholar to present three consecutive lectures on themes of African American culture and history. 

Adam Parkes has just begun a two-year term as President Elect of the D.H. Lawrence Society of North America.  He has published a new essay on Lawrence's 1920s fiction in D.H. Lawrence Studies (Korea) and has been writing other articles on Lawrence, Huxley, and Ford Madox Ford.  He has also been enjoying teaching a new class on spy fiction.  

Esra Mirze Santesso received the NEH Summer Stipend Award for her proposal, “Islam and the Graphic Novel,” to support the research of her current book manuscript-in-progress, “Muslims in the Graphic Novel.” The book project focuses on the representations of Islam and Muslims in contemporary graphic narratives (graphic novels, cartoons, web-comics) from a wide range of countries, including India, Pakistan, Turkey, Palestine, Syria, Iran, Britain, France, and the United States. The project brings literary studies together with visual arts theories in order to trace the aesthetic and political transformation of the Muslim within the graphic narrative tradition—from vilified Other to relatable comics commodity. The book demonstrates that these narratives are increasingly concerned not only with pluralizing and humanizing the Muslim figure but also with using new and innovative visual representations of this faith group to validate unofficial accounts of history written from the margins. Dr. Santesso will use her funding to support her travel over the summer. She plans to visit the archives at the University of Dundee in Scotland, which houses a major comics collection, created in collaboration with The Scottish Centre for Comics Studies (SCCS). She will also go to the University of Glasgow, the home to the National Academy of Comics.

Andrew Zawacki's fourth book in French, Sonnetssonnants, translated by Anne Portugal, has appeared from éditions joca seria. Other authors in the "collection américaine" include Frank O'Hara, Anne Waldman, Langston Hughes, Tracie Morris, Ted Berrigan, Carla Harryman, John Ashbery, and Dawn Lundy-Martin. Zawacki will launch the book in July at the international "Ecrivains en bord de mer" festival in La Baule, along with pressmates Charles Bernstein and Marcella Durand. In March, Zawacki co-directed a weeklong translation seminar at the Collège International des Traducteurs Littéraires in Arles, while in April—National Poetry Month—he continued his prose-photo project on Paris graffiti for The Poetry Foundation blog. In early June he will deliver a paper on C.S. Giscombe and the prose poem at the “between-ness of lyric” conference at the University of Lausanne.He has recently published a pair of chapbooks, Waterfall plot (Greying Ghost) and Sonnensonnets (Tammy).

Collaborative Work

Elizabeth DavisNancee Reeves, and former department Lecturer Teresa Saxton (now at the University of Dayton) published “From Page to Screen and Back Again: Archives-Centered Pedagogy in the 21st Century Writing Classroom” in a special issue of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy on teaching and research with archives. This piece discusses the courses they developed while participating in the 2017-18 cohort of the Special Collections Libraries Faculty Teaching Fellowship program. They argue that working with archival materials in writing courses allows students to remix, appropriate, and curate as part of an inquiry-based pedagogy grounded in collaborative reading and writing and attention to textual materiality.

Evangelista at Podium
Stefano Evangelista 

The Georgia Colloquium in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Literature concluded its tenth year with talks delivered by Donelle Ruwe (Professor, Northern Arizona University) and Stefano Evangelista (Professor, Oxford University). Dr. Ruwe spoke on "Mediocrity: aesthetics and music for girls in the long eighteenth century." In a talk co-sponsored by the UGA at Oxford Program, Dr. Evangelista delivered a talk on “Global Aestheticism and the Invention of Japan.” Dr. Aaron Santesso (Professor, Georgia Tech) led a workshop discussion on “The Enlightenment and ‘Fascism’.”

This past year, Write@UGA continued to support writing and writing pedagogy across campus. For a series of events on writing across the curriculum, Write@UGA welcomed Mike Palmquist to Athens in early February. At Colorado State University, Palmquist is the Associate Provost for Instructional Innovation, Professor of English, and University Distinguished Teaching Scholar. His presentations were sponsored by the Center for Teaching and Learning, Department of English, Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, Office of the Vice President for Instruction, Office of the Vice President for Research, and First-year Composition.  The Writing Intensive Program, Writing Certificate Program, and CTL's Writing Fellows Program served as administrative sponsors. Also in February, Lindsey Harding offered a workshop for faculty and graduate students across the disciplines on effective and efficient strategies for responding to student writing. This year, Write@UGA continued its collaboration with the Office of Faculty Affairs to run the Creating a Sustainable Writing Practice Program (CSWPP) for UGA faculty each semester, an initiative that includes a day-long boot camp and bi-weekly debriefings to support writing productivity. To date, CSWPP has served 88 faculty members across campus. In early May 2019, Write@UGA held its third annual writing retreat for UGA faculty, providing time, space, and refreshments so faculty can commit a full day to their writing and research projects. 

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