Ninth Letter: roostery goodness!

Here's something to crow about.

Pictured to your left is the latest issue of Ninth Letter, the literary magazine that we produce in conjunction with the good people over at UIUC's School of Art + Design.  It is stuffed, as always, with the best in new writing, for which we can thank the general editor, Jodee Stanley, and Creative Writing faculty Janice Harrington, Philip Graham, and Mike Madonick, who all worked on this issue as genre-specific lead editors.



You can find more information on this particular issue here.  Don't you think it would be better, though, to just go ahead and order a copy?  You can do that here.  Alternatively, if you are feeling like a patron of the arts today (or if you happen to be a billionaire philanthropist superhero*), then you might want to click directly through to this page, where you can make a gift to support Ninth Letter.



*Note: I am neither linking to a picture of Tony Stark nor or to a picture of Bruce Wayne, despite our department's close personal connection with the latter. 

Convocation and...Ted Underwood.

We held our annual departmental convocation this past Saturday--lovely, as always, and my last one as department head!  The weather cooperated, too, so we were all able to mingle on the quad in brisk sunshine after the ceremony was over.

Congratulations to all of our graduating students (including the new PhDs)!  I should get some pictures to post in a couple of weeks and then I'll have put up another post here, including the text of the remarks offered by distinguished departmental alum Darrell Nance.

In the meantime, the University's News Bureau today posted a really nice story today about Ted Underwood, whose innovative, computer-aided analyses of large sets of literary texts have been attracting a lot of scholarly attention recently.  As the article points out, Underwood's successes of late have included both scholarly publications (which are not unusual in a strong English department like ours) and grants (which are rarer for us): Underwood's recent findings "will be included in his book, 'Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies', to be published this summer by Stanford University Press." And he has also recently been awarded "an $85,000 Digital Innovation fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and a $57,000 digital humanities startup grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which he is using to expand his research to 470,000 volumes."

Anyway, I strongly urge you to click through above (or here) to read the article in it entirety.  Also, it features a nice photo of the article's subject!

Lindsey Rose Russell wins RSA award!

Lindsay Rose Russell, who joined our faculty as an Assistant Professor in August, has just been honored by the Rhetoric Society of America with this year's Rhetoric Society of America Dissertation Award, recognizing it as the best of last year's doctoral dissertations in the field of rhetoric and rhetorical studies.

Here is a lovely paragraph about Russell and the award, pasted in from the RSA's own webpage:

The committee awards the 2013 Rhetoric Society of America Dissertation Award to Lindsay Rose Russell for “Women in the English Language Dictionary” (University of Washington, co-chairs Anis Bawarshi and Colette Moore). This ambitious project, vast in historical scope and rich in historiographical significance, examines women’s participation in the English language dictionary from the early modern period to the present. Committee members variously described it as an “elegant study with astounding historical depth…fascinating and timely, impeccably researched, well theorized, and…beautifully written.” Dr. Russell does not merely recover women’s participation in the history of the dictionary; she asks us to rethink how we conceptualize dictionaries as a rhetorical genre, calling particular attention to both their historical gendering as well as a longstanding but heretofore hidden history of women’s rhetorical critique, from contributions as readers, writers, and patrons of the emerging dictionary genre in the early modern period to contemporary feminist dictionary projects. Applying both feminist and genre theory to a careful archival recovery project, and displaying a deep knowledge of English language history, “Women in the English Language Dictionary” makes a significant contribution to rhetorical studies. 

The Rhetoric Society of America is a large and significant scholarly association, a member of the American Council of Learned Societies, and an organization whose membership spans the whole multi-disciplinary gamut of rhetorical studies.  To win an award like this is therefore a really significant honor.

Congratulations, Lindsay!    

Fulbrights

I am pleased to announce here that two faculty members from English have received Fulbright awards for the coming academic year.

If you are reading this, you probably know what Fulbrights are, but just in case you do not the wikipedia essay on the program and its history is here.  The program has been funding international scholarly exchange since the 1940s and is dedicated to the sensible proposal that scholarly exchange and intercultural understanding enriches everyone involved.  Fulbright awardees teach and conduct research abroad, so receiving such a grant is typically the start of an adventure!

Bruce Michelson, as of January 2014, will be Fulbright Professor of American Literature for a term at the University of Antwerp.

...and Zohreh Sullivan (Professor Emerita) will be a Fulbright Scholar for 2013-14 at the University of Jordan, where she will also be working on a project dealing with the ways that contemporary Arab writers think through problems of location, dislocation, and historical loss.

Congratulations!

IPRH humanities awards etc.

IPRH, the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, has announced the winners of its 2012-13 prizes for Research in the Humanities.  These prizes, awarded annually, honor excellence in humanities research by faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students at UIUC.  And since we have a deep pool of talent across the humanities here, winning one (or even receiving an honorable mention) is a nice feather in one's cap.  

As you can see, if you click though the link above, two of the three prizes awarded to faculty and grad students  have been awarded to member of our department, and two of the three recipients of honorable mentions are also from our department.  

Andrew Gaedtke is our faculty honoree, for the essay "Cognitive Investigations: The Problems of Qualia and Style in the Contemporary Neuronovel,” which was published in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 45.2 (Duke University Press, 2012).

Michael Rothberg (who some of you will remember from this blog post), received and honorable mention for his essay "Progress, Progression, Procession: William Kentridge and the Narratology of Transitional Justice,” which was published in Narrative 20.1 (January 2012): 1-24.

Our graduate student honoree is Kathryn Walkiewicz, and Ben Bascom received an honorable mention. These awards are about Walkiewicz and Bascom, both of whom I know personally to be exceptionally talented scholars, but it may also be worth mentioning here that both wrote their prize-winning essays in the context of dissertation research supervised by Trish Loughran, to whom the campus just awarded recognition for graduate teaching earlier this week.

The journal Narrative, in which Rothberg's aforementioned essay was printed, is published by the International Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN).  I mention this because Rothberg has also just received an award from the ISSN honoring the essay for being the best of the year's publications in Narrative.  This award will be conferred in June at the ISSN conference in Manchester, and announced in the ISSN newsletter as well as in Narrative itself. 

The IPRH awards, meanwhile, will be conferred and recognized at an award ceremony held next Wednesday, which I hope to be able to attend!

Congrats to all, and thanks as always to the IPRH for all it does to recognize and foster humanities scholarship on our campus.

English Student Council Colloquium

This afternoon, in EB 108, the English Student Council is holding its Spring Colloquium featuring student Writing, Research, and Critical Analysis.  If you are in the area, come on down!  There will be a reception from 4:00-4:30 and then four student presentations beginning at 4:30.  I will probably have some photos of the event to post after the fact.

Shakespeare's birthday and a return to blogging

This has, I think, been the longest I have ever gone without updating the blog since its inception.  The problem has not been that there is nothing going on--there is ALWAYS plenty going on--the problem has simply been that there have not been enough hours in the day for me to be able to write.  This short post is being composed in a brief window of time before I head off to a faculty meeting (my last as dept Head!), which will be followed by a student-run celebration of Shakespeare's birthday, and then in turn by a campus level Celebration of Teaching Excellence event at which Trish Loughran will be honored.  Whew!

Actually, the English Student Council is holding its Shakespeare's birthday celebration in the English Building later this afternoon, and the Rare Book and Manuscript Library is holding their own Shakespeare's Birthday event at the same time!  Apparently, Shakespeare really loved cake.  We are, however, leaving "Talk Like Shakespeare Day" to the great metropolis up north, at least as far as I know.  Verily.  Shakespeare may or may not have been born on the 23rd, actually: he was baptized, we know, on the 26th.  But custom prevails, and we treat the 23rd as the official birthday.  Shakespeare did die on April 23, 1616, but that may not be quite as festive.

Anyway, this is just my way of re-entering the blog: look for more regular updates from me in the future.