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Slideshow

Faculty News Spring 2022

ON EyreRoxanne Eberle can be heard On Eyre, a podcast dedicated to a chapter-by-chapter discussion of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. In the fall, she'll be teaching in England with the UGA at Oxford Program, and in the spring, she'll be in residence at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California, where she has been awarded a five-month Mayer Fellowship.

Together with fellow English Department co-author Joshua King and graduate student co-authors Anya Bonanno and Joe Powell from Anthropology and Statistics, respectively, Lindsey Harding's article “Feedback as Boundary Object: Intersections of Writing, Response, and Research” was accepted for publication in Journal of Response to Writing. A team of English Department faculty members—Lindsey Harding, Sara Steger, Elizabeth Davis, and Becky Hallman Martini—hosted two undergraduate writing retreats this year, sponsored by a grant from the Parents Leadership Council. The team was awarded another grant from the Parents Leadership Council to host two more undergraduate writing retreats next year.

Leanne HoweLeAnne Howe was a featured reader during the Piedmont University Spring 2022 Reading Series on March 31st and was honored at the University of Oklahoma on Feb. 15th for the research accessibility of the LeAnne Howe Collection at the Western History Collections. In addition, The University of Mississippi Press has published Conversations With LeAnne Howe.

This past February, Miriam Jacobson gave an invited zoom talk at Cambridge University titled "Mummy as Pharmakon in Shakespeare and Wilkins's Pericles." She has also presented a paper, "The Antiquarian Sensorium," at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Dublin in March. Both of these talks are taken from the book she is writing while on leave at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies.

Aruni Kashya hosted scholar Dr. Amrita Ghosh as part of the English Department Lecture SeriesHe was interviewed on Classic City Vibes, the Athens Library podcast, and talked about writing with the UGA Arts Lab Fellowship. Finally, Kashya was featured at Borderlines in conversation with Akshya Saxena about his new collection of poems titled There is No Good Time for Bad News. 

Sir Charles GrandisonElizabeth Kraft published two essays: “‘I See My Life in Full Review’: The Poetry of Leonard Cohen’s Dear Heather,” South Atlantic Review (2022): 141-60 and “Foes in Isolation,” Restoration 45.2 (2022): 15-28. Her co-edited edition of Samuel Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison is due out this Spring or early Summer. For the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, she served as chair of the Gottschalk Prize Committee for 2022 and has accepted a position as representative to the the American Council of Learned Societies for the term 2022-2024. In retirement, she volunteers as a member of the OLLI Curriculum Committee and teaches for that program as well.

Rhetoric and Guns

Nate Kreuter's edited collection, Rhetoric and Guns, was published by Utah State UP.

Christine Lasek-White hosted a pop-up literary magazine workshop on Feb. 10th.

Isiah Lavender III's forthcoming edited collection Conversations with Nalo Hopkinson will be available early 2023He was a guest on the Paradigm Radio Show, where he gave a two-part interview on Afrofuturism, and was a guest panelist at the Carnegie Hall Afrofurturism Festival

In March, John Wharton Lowe was a keynote speaker for the annual MELUS Conference in New Orleans.  His topic was “‘The Man Who Came Home’: Writing the Biography of Ernest  Gaines.”  Lowe also gave a paper at the conference: “Past and Present Visions of the 1929 Gastonia Textile Strike: The Contrasting Visions of Erskine Caldwell and Wiley Cash.”  Earlier, in January, he gave two papers at the MLA Convention in Washington, D.C.:  “Humor as Challenge: the Radical Postmodernism of Marc Benelli’s Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die!" and “Sex, Skin, and Sensation in the Travel Writing of Lafcadio Hearn.” In February, he signed a contract with the Library of America to edit a two volume set of Ernest Gaines’s novels and short stories. Lowe also planned and implemented two guest lectures: Professor Robert Levine of the University of Maryland presented “Impeachment: Frederick Douglass and Andrew Johnson after the Civil War” on March 17, and Professor Jay Watson of the University of Mississippi gave the ninth annual Barbara Methvin Lecture on April 15th, which Lowe funded with his Methvin Endowment.  Watson’s topic was “Fictions of Capture: William Faulkner in an Era of Fugitive Energy.” Lowe's most recent publication is "Humor as Counterpoint and Engine in the Fiction of Pietro di Donato and Mark Binelli" in Minor Minorities and Multiculturalism, ed. Dorothy Figueria. Macerata, Italy: Editioni Universitá Macerata, 2022.109-129.

Ro Martini has edited a special issue, "Vilém Flusser's Modernity," for the Journal for Cultural and Media Theory, Flusser Studies. The issue included essays by scholars from the US, England, Brazil, Italy, and Slovenia as well as his own essay "Flusser's Plantonic Philosophy," which analyzes the motif of trees in Flusser's thinking about media, modern philosophy, and the environment.

Barbara McCaskill presented invited papers at two online panels for the 2022 annual MLA Convention in January. She gave an invited talk titled “Black Women Activists in Two Movements: Ellen Craft and Caroline Stanford Sparrow” for the W. E. B. Du Bois Virtual Lecture Series, Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Harvard University, March 22. Her essay “African Americans, Africa, and the Long Watch Night for Freedom” is forthcoming later this year as Chapter 13 of The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the Civil War and Reconstruction edited by Kathleen Diffley and Coleman Hutchison (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press). She has been invited to give a presentation this sumCover mer on the Black abolitionists Ellen Craft and Ellen Garrison Jackson Clark for the 2022 NEH Institute in Concord, Massachusetts, "Transcendentalism and Social Reform: Community Engagement in the Age of Thoreau," sponsored by the Thoreau Society .

Ranging from Cervantes' Don Quixote to the late W. G. Sebald, with extended looks at novels by Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, and the phenomenon of the "Kafkaesque," Jed Rasula's latest book from Oxford University Press is Genre and Extravagance in the Novel: Lower Frequencies. "This is world-leading criticism written by a scholar at the height of his powers," concluded one reader for the press. A second reader chimed in: "This is a terrific book, written in a lucid, even conversational style that ought to be accessible to undergraduates and to other non-specialists. It will certainly be of interest to anyone working in the theory and history of the novel." One of Rasula's earlier books, Destruction Was My Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century, was featured in ARTnews as an "essential book" on Dadaism.

Nancee Reeves was named a 2022 UGA Writing Fellow and was selected as a pilot member of the Reflections on Race workshop, sponsored by Franklin College Diversity Leadership. 

Muslim women and comicsEsra Mirze Santesso moderated “Muslim Women and Comics,” sponsored by UGA's Diversity Research and Scholarship Grant program, and presented as part of the Global Georgia Initiative public events series of the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts. The speakers included Ozge Samanci of Dare to Disappoint, Leila Abdelrazaq of Baddawi, and Aliyah Khan, associate professor of English and director of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan.

Andrew Zawacki published Looking as Discourse: [from] These Late Eclipses (Strickenfield) at Cleveland Review of Books and his poetry collection "Unsun" was reviewed at Cleveland Review of Books.

Magdalena Zurawski was awarded a Fulbright grant to Poland for the upcoming academic year. During her stay she will be visiting archives and various sites in Poland as part of her research for a creative non-fiction book that recounts and examines the stories of Nazi and Soviet occupation she absorbed from her Polish elders throughout her childhood.

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