UIUC Department of English Blog

Critical Theory Reader

2012-01-25T13:29:00.000-08:00

I was happy, earlier today, to see a copy of Robert Dale Parker's newly-printed collection Critical Theory: A Reader for Literary and Cultural Studies (Oxford University Press). Looks like a great collection (including, among a great wealth of exemplary theoretical writing, an essay by the great Susan Koshy). This is a book intended for classroom use in theory classes, and so it is possibly a companion to Parker's How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies (OUP, second edition in July 2011).

Here is the book description, pasted in as is my wont: "A wide-ranging and refreshingly up-to-date anthology of primary readings, Critical Theory: A Reader for Literary and Cultural Studies, edited by Robert Dale Parker, presents a provocative mix of contemporary and classic essays in critical theory.

From the foundational ideas of Marx and Freud to key writings by Fanon and Foucault, the essays in this collection represent the most influential ideas in modern critical thought and in the contemporary interpretation of literature and culture.

Ideal as a stand-alone reader or as a companion to a critical theory survey--including How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies, also by Robert Dale Parker--this collection of seminal readings invites students to join in the ongoing debates and controversies of critical discussion, reading, writing, and interpretation.

DISTINCTIVE FEATURES
* Provides a comprehensive selection of key works that speak to students' needs and interests without overwhelming them with too many selections
* Offers clear, brief, and engaging headnotes at the beginning of each selection that place the essay in context (i.e., what the essay responds to or what responds to it) and elucidate its key arguments
* Includes key pieces from cultural studies critics not always well known in literary studies, including selections on youth culture by Dick Hebdige, Angela McRobbie, and Tricia Rose
* Provides a glossary of critical terms, giving students a quick and reliable in-text resource
* Covers a variety of theoretical schools--from New Criticism, Structuralism, and Deconstruction to Feminism, Queer Studies, and Postcolonial and Race Studies--weaving connections among chapters to show how these different movements respond to and build on each other
* Organizes selections by theoretical school, unfolding chronologically and matching the organization of Parker's popular How to Interpret Literature
* Features "see also" recommendations that connect different essays and critical movements from across the volume."

Congrats, Bob! I find I can hardly keep up with your pace of publication these days.

9L! 9L!

2012-01-17T11:48:00.000-08:00

Here, in all its sparkly, slightly Andy Kauffamnesque glory, is the cover of the latest issue of Ninth Letter. I saw the editor, Jodee Stanley, earlier today hauling a big batch of them packaged for mailing, so if you are a far-flung subscriber you should be getting your copy relatively shortly. If you are not a subscriber, now's your chance! After all, how can you say no that face up there on the cover?

You can find more information on the new issue at the Ninth Letter website, here. Get 'em while they're hot!

Greetings from Seattle

2012-01-05T08:39:00.000-08:00

I have been remiss of late about updating this site, largely because of a wave of end-of-semester administrative work and then holiday-season travel. But I'm writing now to wish all of you the best of good fortune in 2012!

As I write this, I am sitting in a hotel room in downtown Seattle, where the annual conference of the Modern Language Association (MLA) is being held this year. Our department is conducting two Assistant Professor searches this year, and (as is customary for English departments) that means interviewing candidates at MLA. I'll be sitting in on one set of interviews for much of the next three days. These are long days, but I'm very excited that we have the opportunity to hire. When I think of the impact our new hires can have--on the scholarship in their respective fields and on the intellectual lives of generations of future students--it seems very momentous indeed. These are important days, in other words, not just for a good 2012 but for the long-term future of our department.

In the meantime, let me take this moment to thank everyone--students, faculty, staff-members, alums--for your contributions to a successful 2011 for the department. And, again, happy new year!

Linky goodness

2011-12-16T11:08:00.000-08:00

I'm writing today to share three links to interesting websites featuring English Department faculty members. The sites couldn't be more different, I think you'll agree. But variety is the spice of life, and in a terrific, comprehensive English department like ours there are always all kinds of things going on!

First up is an interview with Audrey Petty about her family's history and her own engagement with the project of the Southern Foodways Alliance. I personally find the cultural history of foodways utterly fascinating and it is a dream of mine someday to participate in the academic side of the Sourthern Foodways Alliance's work. So I guess what I'm saying is that I'd recommend reading this interview and then looking up all of Audrey's other published foodways-related pieces and reading them too! You can find the interview here.

Proceeding in alphabetical order, the next link is to an online article published at openDemocracy.net by Michael Rothberg. The piece offers an analysis of recent neo-Nazi extremism in Germany, placing it within the context of that country's competing discourses around immigration and the value of multiculturalism. The article, well worth reading, can be found here.

And last but not least, Alex Shakar. You didn't really think there would be a blog post here without him, did you? The widely read online literary journal The Millions is running a series called "The Year in Reading," in which various luminaries of the literary world are invited to share what they read and loved in 2011. Alex's is here.

Enjoy!

Writing Program Certificate of Excellence (and more Alex Shakar)

2011-12-09T13:16:00.000-08:00

I'm very pleased to be able to announce here that our undergraduate rhetoric program has this year been awarded a certificate of excellence by The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC).

Here is the text of the press release issued by CCCC:

"The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), an association within the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), has awarded a 2011-2012 CCCC Writing Program Certificate of Excellence to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Undergraduate Rhetoric Program.

Established in 2004, this award honors up to 20 writing programs a year. To be eligible for this award, programs must be able to demonstrate that the program imaginatively addresses the needs and opportunities of its students, instructors, institution, and locale; the program offers exemplary ongoing professional development for faculty of all ranks, including adjunct/contingent faculty; the program treats contingent faculty respectfully, humanely, and professionally; the program uses current best practices in the field; the program administrator (chair, director, coordinator, etc.) has academic credentials in writing; the program uses effective, ongoing assessment; the program uses effective placement procedures; class size is appropriate; and that the program models diversity and/or serves diverse communities.

The Selection Committee for the 2011-2012 Writing Program Certificate of Excellence noted that the University of Illinois has an innovative e-text reader with on-going professional development and also has a program that is well-integrated institutionally.

CCCC supports and promotes the teaching and study of college composition and communication by sponsoring meetings and publishing scholarly materials for the exchange of knowledge about composition, composition pedagogy, and rhetoric; supporting a wide range of research on composition, communication, and rhetoric; working to enhance the conditions for learning and teaching college composition and to promote professional development; and acting as an advocate for language and literacy education nationally and internationally.

At the 2012 CCCC Annual Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Undergraduate Rhetoric Program will be publicly announced as a recipient of the CCCC Writing Program Certificate of Excellence on March 23, 2012."

Congratulations are in order for Catherine Prendergast, who directs the program, and for Richard Nardi and other members of the program's staff.

***

In other news...and stop me if you've heard this one before...

Alex Shakar's novel Luminarium has just been listed by The Washington Post as one of the notable works of fiction for 2011.

The blurb accompanying the listing describes the book as being "something like an adult version of “Sophie’s World” for readers clicking between “Mortal Kombat” and Immanuel Kant, Shakar’s metaphysical novel explores different facets of belief and the manipulation of consciousness."

Hrm. Not sure I'd have put it like that. But I certainly concur with the evaluation that Luminarium is one of the year's best novels!

Mock interviews

2011-12-04T13:06:00.000-08:00

This past Thursday, we held our annual evening of mock interviews for new and recent PhDs who are on the academic job market. Mock-a-palooza, shall we call it?

For those not in the know, the vast majority of English departments looking to hire new faculty members do so via a process that involves, as a penultimate stage, a 30-45 minute interview with a faculty search committee in December or early January. These interviews are--and I speak from experience here--somewhat terrifying. So much rides on them, and success or failure in them has only a tangential relationship to one's real ability to thrive as a faculty member. It is one thing to teach well and quite another to be able to speak glibly about teaching when asked unexpected questions by potential future colleagues; it is one thing to be a brilliant research scholar and another to be able to chat about your scholarship in a clear, thoughtful way in some hotel room somewhere while amped up on adrenaline.

Because the job interview is not really like what most of us do most of the time, even very well-trained scholar-teachers need to prepare themselves in advance. And since there are some predictable aspects of the interview process, we--like many departments--try to help our students prepare by staging role-played mock interviews. It is a very useful kind of practice.

I mention this here, though, because I always think of the evening of the mock interviews as an example of our department at its very best. Faculty participate out of a real commitment to the well-being of our graduate students, and I have never failed to be impressed by the colleagues I am paired up with or by the graduate students (in all sub-fields) whose work I learn about in this odd, stylized interaction. Almost half of our faculty participate in any given year, and that means reading candidate materials, coming up with interview-style questions, and then participating in several different mock interviews over the span of several hours late on a Thursday evening. Teams of two are located throughout the English building and job seekers go from room to appointed room. Each of them has a couple of mock interviews so that they can compare feedback, and because so many department members are in and around the building the whole thing winds up having a semi-festive feel to it.

As we head into the interviewing season, I want to wish all of this year's job-seeing grad students the best of luck. You are among the smartest and best-prepared scholars and teachers on the job market and any department that hires one of ours will be extremely well-served. I hope you take that knowledge, and the confidence it should impart, with you into your real interviews.

Also, I'd like to thank our Director of Graduate Studies, Tony Pollock, and our Placement Officer, Vicki Mahaffey, for all the work they do arranging this event and generally helping our job-seeking graduate students prepare themselves. Above all, and on behalf of the graduate students and the department, I'd like to thank all of the many, many faculty members who volunteered to participate in these interviews at what is of course a very busy time of year. I'm pleased and proud to have such terrific colleagues.

Amy Rumsey

2011-11-28T09:00:00.000-08:00

Now that we're all back in Urbana-Champaign after a nice and much-needed Thanksgiving break, I thought I should update this blog.

The most recent piece of good news around here is that Amy Rumsey--who helps keep the main English Department office humming and who helps me with all manner of administrative tasks on a daily basis--has been awarded an LAS Staff award in recognition of her good work. These staff awards are highly competitive (there are more than 200 staff members in LAS, after all), and so winning one is a real honor.

I couldn't be more pleased since (in keeping with the seasonal theme) Amy's help is one of the things I regularly give thanks for. Since word went out a few days ago about this award, there has been a steady stream of faculty and grad students congratulating Amy. I've enjoyed hearing that, both because I share the sentiment and because the friendly exchanges I've heard exemplify the the generally upbeat and cheerful tone in our main office that Amy herself has done so much to cultivate.

So let me chime in here, too: thanks, Amy, for everything you do to help me and on behalf of everyone else in the department. And congratulations!

Kevin T. Early Memorial Scholarship winners

2011-11-17T13:21:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite parts of the seasonal business conducted in English is the process of awarding the annual Kevin T. Early Memorial Scholarship. This award is given each year to recognize and a talented Freshman poet, with the added purpose of helping to encourage talented young writers to continue pursuing their craft. What a wonderful thing that is. The award, established by William and Donna Early, honors the memory of their son, Kevin T. Early, who was himself a talented, dedicated, and award-winning young poet.

To apply, students submit a packet of their poems, which are then judged by faculty experts who do not see any identifying information and have only the quality of the poems themselves to go on. This year, as always, we received a lot of stellar application packets. In fact, our faculty judge wrote to me asking if we couldn't offer this scholarship to two winners this year since there seemed to be two exceptionally strong applicants who each deserved the award. As it happens, for this year, we were able to do just that.

I've now had the chance to meet with each of the scholarship winners, and I'm even more pleased with the decision our judge arrived at. They are both confident, interesting writers, they are both smart and engaging, and each of them has a clear-headed sense of what the craft of writing can be for.

I am very pleased, therefore, to congratulate Alli Gattari and Matt Stillwaugh as this year's winners of the Kevin T. Early Memorial Scholarship.

In case he reads this, I'd also like the thank William Early again for the enormous generosity of spirit that lies behind this particular award. And my deepest thanks, on behalf of our students, to all the other donors who made contributions to this fund this year in tribute to Donna Early as well as in memory of her son.

Best books of 2011!

2011-11-08T09:32:00.000-08:00

As we inch our way towards December, we enter the season for 'best book of the year' lists. The leaves have changed color, so it must be time for the lists.

These types of lists are typically for fiction and trade non-fiction, so they don't tend to recognize university press books of the kind I and many of my colleagues publish. But I'm going to be following these more closely this year than I sometimes do, because I think Alex Shakar's novel Luminarium is contender to wind up on any and all lists of the best novels of the year.

And sure enough, here's one: Publishers Weekly has just issued its lists of best books of 2011, and Luminarium is one of the novels honored!

**********

And speaking of Publishers Weekly, they also recently ran this strong, starred review of Janice Harrington's The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing Home, describing the poems as
"pellucid, scary, morally resonant."

LAS awards!

2011-11-07T13:21:00.000-08:00

I could have posted this, I suppose, at almost any time during the preceding semester. But better late than never! Two faculty members in English have been awarded very prestigious and competitive awards by the college of Liberal Arts and Sciences this year.

First up, J. B. Capino was named a Helen Corley Petit Scholar for 2011-12. This is an honor given annually to exceptionally successful newly-tenured faculty members in the college of Liberal Arts and Sciences in recognition of superior achievement in research, teaching, and service.

And Siobhan Somerville was named one of this year's Conrad Humanities Scholars. The Conrad Humanities Scholar program is still a relatively new honor, one made possible by the extraordinary generosity of Arlys Streitmatter Conrad. It provides recognition and research support for outstanding humanities scholars in the college if Liberal Arts and Sciences over a five year period.

These are richly deserved awards for two brilliant, dedicated, and hard-working faculty members. I am very proud to have them as colleagues. Congratulations!

More luminaries

2011-10-26T12:35:00.000-07:00

The University of Illinois's outstanding American Indian Studies Program is holding a reading and reception this coming Friday to recognize and celebrate faculty book publications during this last year.

The event will be held on Friday, October 28, from 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm at the Authors Corner on the 2nd floor, Illini Union Bookstore.

The books being celebrated are:

Jodi A. Byrd's The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minnesota)

Vicente M. Diaz's Repositioning the Missionary: Rewriting the Histories of Colonialism, Native Catholicism, and Indigeneity in Guam (Hawaii)

Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert's Education beyond the Mesas: Hopi Students at Sherman Institute, 1902-1929 (Nebraska)

Robert Dale Parker's Changing Is Not Vanishing: A Collection of American Indian Poetry to 1930 (Pennsylvania).

Light refreshments will be served, and the event is Free and Open to All.

***

Readers of this blog will already be familiar with Byrd's book and with Parker's, since they each have faculty appointments in English, too. So I've posted here about their books before. They, along with LeAnne Howe and Robert Warrior (the Director of AIS), form what may be the strongest faculty cohort in American Indian Literary Studies in the country.

While we're at it, here's a link that further substantiates what I'm saying about our strength in American Indian Literary Studies. It is from the Maynard Institute, which celebrates Native American Heritage Month with profiles of, well, luminaries, including LeAnne Howe.

Local luminaries (and Luminarium)

2011-10-03T11:34:00.000-07:00

For those of you who live in or around the Champaign Urbana area and have read with interest some of my posts in this space about Alex Shakar's novel Luminarium, this week is your chance to meet him and to hear him give a reading from it.

This coming Wednesday, October 5, at 4:30, Shakar will give a reading at the Authors Corner on the second floor of the Illini Union bookstore (on the corner of Wright St. and Daniel St., right across from the English building).

And later this month, Janice Harrington will reads from her terrific new book The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing Home. That event is scheduled for Wednesday, October 26, also at 4:30 pm and also in the Illini Union Bookstore.

As it happens, I've had the pleasure of hearing both of them present their work before, and you could not ask for two more captivating presenters (though their styles are in fact quite different). So come hear them both--you'll be very glad you did!

New Directions

2011-09-27T10:55:00.000-07:00

One of the more exciting developments here of late has been the fact that our own Feisal Mohamed was awarded a Mellon New Directions Fellowship. The goal of these highly-competitive awards is to foster serious, well-informed, and innovative interdisciplinary humanities scholarship.

Here is the stated objective of the fellowship program, pasted in from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation website:

Serious interdisciplinary research often requires established scholar-teachers to pursue formal substantive and methodological training in addition to the PhD. New Directions Fellowships assist faculty members in the humanities, broadly understood to include the arts, history, languages, area studies, and zones of such fields as anthropology and geography that bridge the humanities and social sciences, who seek to acquire systematic training outside their own areas of special interest. The program is intended to enable strong scholars in the humanities to work on problems that interest them most, at an appropriately advanced level of sophistication. In addition to facilitating the work of individual faculty members, these awards should benefit humanistic scholarship more generally by encouraging the highest standards in cross-disciplinary research.

The university and the recipient's department should understand that New Directions Fellowships are primarily for advanced training in pursuit of a specific research agenda. Unlike other fellowship awards, this program does not aim to facilitate short-term outcomes, such as completion of a book. Rather, New Directions Fellowships are meant to be viewed as longer-term investments in scholars' intellectual range and productivity.

Mohamed is using this award to study law this year and next, with the ultimate goal of mastering the legal matters pertaining to his ongoing interest in the controversial nature of religious toleration.

Those of you who have already seen his recent book, Milton and the Post-Secular Present, will understand how legal study marks an appropriate new direction for Mohamed's scholarly concerns. Mohamed is a trained specialist, above all, in seventeenth-century literature and the poetry and prose of John Milton. But Milton was in his own right a sophisticated social and political thinker whose complex and sometimes conflicted writings on liberty (understood in a variety of contexts) continue to be relevant in our own era. Mohamed--committed above all to the idea that rigorous humanistic scholarship should yield insight about politics, civics, and ethics--has never been shy about carrying his historical and literary expertise into the arenas of of current debate. And in addition to his peer-reviewed scholarship, he regularly writes about current events from the perspective of a scholar, in venues such as Dissent and the New York Times. Because conflicts about religious liberty and toleration so frequently imply knotty issues of law, legal study is an apt new direction for Mohamed's multi-faceted, ongoing, scholarly research.

In addition to being a great opportunity for Feisal, this award reflects very well on the University of Illinois and on our department: Mellon-funded research opportunities are highly competitive.

I probably should have reported on this several months ago. I was not sure, when I first learned about the award, when the announcement would be made public, and then other items of good news seem to have crowded in upon me. Still, this is a very big deal, and I'm happy now to be able to offer public congratulations here to go with the private congratulations I offered Feisal earlier. Belatedly, then: congratulations!

Incomplete List for Spring 2011

2011-09-15T14:43:00.000-07:00

It is time once again for me to congratulate the many grad students, instructors, lecturers, and professors in our department whose student evaluation scores for Spring 2011 have landed them on our Center For Teaching Excellence's latest List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by their Students.

For those who are not familiar with these lists, they are based solely on student evaluation numbers. Each semester's list used to be called the Incomplete List (because not all classes on campus each semester have student evaluation reports), and of course anyone who cares about pedagogy knows that student evaluations are only one of many ways to evaluate effective teaching. So the list is also incomplete in that the data it is based on is incomplete as a way to assess teaching.

Still, the big block of names from English that appear on this list each semester is a direct reflection of the fact that many, many, many of our students feel exceptionally well-served by their classes. That is obviously a Good Thing. And each semester's list makes manifest the remarkable depth of teaching we have in our department: there are relatively new graduate students on this list as well as highly-distinguished senior faculty members, and people are here for teaching everything from 100-level writing classes as well as 500-level graduate. The list runs the gamut from A (Alderfer) to Z (Zink). And remember, many of the people listed here actually show up for more than one class.

Another thing I like about the periodic publication of Incomplete Lists is that each one offers the chance to recognize a bunch of teachers who have worked hard and had considerable classroom success. Strong teaching is key to who we are and what we do, so I like having the opportunity to praise it!

And so, without further ado, here are the instructors from English who appear on the so-called Incomplete List for classes they taught in Spring 2011.

Sarah Alderfer, Iryce Baron, Ben Bascom, Manisha Basu, Rebeccah Bechtold, Heather Blain, Lauren Marshall Bowen, T. J. Boynton, Sarah Cassinelli, Cody Caudill, Debojoy Chanda, Ezra Claverie, Jill Hamilton Clements, Dan Colson, Bethany Cooper, Mary Rose Cottingham, Leslie Crowell, Steve Davenport, Sarah Dennis, Norah Dick, Carrie Dickison, Lindsey Drager, Dennis Dullea, Patrick Fadely, Jill Fitzgerald, Kimberly Fonzo, Naida Garcia-Crespo, Shawn Gilmore, Philip Graham, Catharine Gray, Sarah Gray, John Griswold, Joe Grohens, Baron Haber, Andrew Hall, Jim Hansen, Gail Hapke, Ashley Hetrick, Marilyn Holguin, Ann Hubert, Sean Karns, David Kay, Brigit Kelly, Mary Lindsey, Melissa Littlefield, Trish Loughran, Mike Madonick, Vicki Mahaffey, Bob Markley, Julie McCormick, Patrick McGrath, Heather McLeer, Erin McQuiston, John Moore, Dave Morris, Justine Murison, Esther Nadolski, Tim Newcomb, Andrea Olinger, Curtis Perry, Julie Price, Paul Prior, Thierry Ramais, Franklin Ridgway, Jenica Roberts, Michael Rothberg, Vane Rouillon, John Rubins, Julia Saville, Spencer Schaffner, E. Jordon Sellers, Siobhan Somerville, Carol Spindel, Andrea Stevens, Eric Tanyavutti, Jessica Thom, Crystal Thomas, Kate Vieira, Elyse Vigiletti, Jonathan Vincent, Jason Vredenburg, Kathryn Walkiewicz, Daniel Wong, Elaine Wood, Amanda Zink.

Congratulations one and all on an important job well done.

The further adventures of Alex Shakar

2011-09-12T10:33:00.000-07:00

Alex Shakar's novel Luminarium received a nice, positive review in the New York Times last week: "At times," the reviewer opines, Luminarium "reads like a Christopher Nolan or Wachowski brothers movie as scripted by Don DeLillo."

The book has also been written up in the AV Club, the Seattle Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Washington Post.

The Post review (which, to my delight, compares Shakar's novel to Richard Powers's terrific recent novel Generosity) opens with perhaps the best line a writer could ever dream of receiving in a review: "Days after finishing Alex Shakar’s Luminarium, I’m still stumbling around the house in a mixture of wonder and awe." So, dear reader, the moral of the story is simple: read Luminarium, but do not then try to operate heavy machinery.

*****UPDATE*****

And now see also this nice review in the LA Times.

The Transit of Empire

2011-09-06T07:39:00.000-07:00

The advance copies of Jodi Byrd's new book The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism have arrived! The book is published by the University of Minnesota Press, as part of an important book series called "First Peoples: New Directions in Indigenous Studies."

Last week, I wrote here about the recognition given to Robert Warrior and LeAnne Howe in the context of NAISA's prizes for the "Most Influential Books in Native American and Indigenous Studies of the First Decade of the Twenty-First Century." And now Byrd--who teaches in English and in American Indian Studies--adds to our strength and visibility in this field with a book that is likely to be enormously influential during the century's second decade.

Here is a book description, pasted in from the press' website: "In 1761 and again in 1769, European scientists raced around the world to observe the transit of Venus, a rare astronomical event in which the planet Venus passes in front of the sun. In The Transit of Empire, Jodi A. Byrd explores how indigeneity functions as transit, a trajectory of movement that serves as precedent within U.S. imperial history. Byrd argues that contemporary U.S. empire expands itself through a transferable “Indianness” that facilitates acquisitions of lands, territories, and resources.

Examining an array of literary texts, historical moments, and pending legislations—from the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma’s vote in 2007 to expel Cherokee Freedmen to the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization bill—Byrd demonstrates that inclusion into the multicultural cosmopole does not end colonialism as it is purported to do. Rather, that inclusion is the very site of the colonization that feeds U.S. empire.

Byrd contends that the colonization of American Indian and indigenous nations is the necessary ground from which to reimagine a future where the losses of indigenous peoples are not only visible and, in turn, grieveable, but where indigenous peoples have agency to transform life on their own lands and on their own terms."

Congratulations, Jodi!

Poets and trustees

2011-09-02T10:18:00.000-07:00

Two of our award-winning undergraduate poets--Rachel Mejak and Dan Klen--will read from their poetry at the University of Illinois Board of Trustees meeting on September 9. Mejak and Klen were selected to read because of their successes in the Spring Undergraduate Creative Writing Contests on campus. The readings will take place in open session, beginning at approximately 1:30 p.m. All are welcome to attend, if room permits.

NAISA's Most Influential Books

2011-09-02T09:03:00.000-07:00

At an awards ceremony held at its most recent annual conference, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) awarded prizes to the "ten most influential books in Native American and Indigenous Studies of the first decade of the twenty-first century." I am delighted--but not at all surprised--to note that two of our faculty members appear on this impressive list.

*One of these most-influential books is Robert Warrior's 2005 book The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction (University of Minnesota Press). Robert has an appointment in English, and he is also Director of our superb American Indian Studies program.

Here, pasted in, is the book description: "Much literary scholarship has been devoted to the flowering of Native American fiction and poetry in the mid-twentieth century. Yet, Robert Warrior argues, nonfiction has been the primary form used by American Indians in developing a relationship with the written word, one that reaches back much further in Native history and culture.

Focusing on autobiographical writings and critical essays, as well as communally authored and political documents, The People and the Word explores how the Native tradition of nonfiction has both encompassed and dissected Native experiences. Warrior begins by tracing a history of American Indian writing from the eighteenth century to the late twentieth century, then considers four particular moments: Pequot intellectual William Apess’s autobiographical writings from the 1820s and 1830s; the Osage Constitution of 1881; narratives from American Indian student experiences, including accounts of boarding school in the late 1880s; and modern Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday’s essay “The Man Made of Words,” penned during the politically charged 1970s. Warrior’s discussion of Apess’s work looks unflinchingly at his unconventional life and death; he recognizes resistance to assimilation in the products of the student print shop at the Santee Normal Training School; and in the Osage Constitution, as well as in Momaday’s writing, Warrior sees reflections of their turbulent times as well as guidance for our own.

Taking a cue from Momaday’s essay, which gives voice to an imaginary female ancestor, Ko-Sahn, Warrior applies both critical skills and literary imagination to the texts. In doing so, The People and the Word provides a rich foundation for Native intellectuals’ critical work, deeply entwined with their unique experiences."

*Also way up on the list (and remember, these are the most influential books of a decade) is the collectively-authored 2008 book Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective, published by the University of Oklahoma Press. This book features Robert Warrior and LeAnne Howe, who is a Professor in English as well as in American Indian Studies. This semester, LeAnne is also serving as Director of our Creative Writing program.

Here, once again, is a pasted-in book descriotion: "This collectively authored volume celebrates a group of Native critics performing community in a lively, rigorous, sometimes contentious dialogue that challenges the aesthetics of individual literary representation. Janice Acoose infuses a Cree reading of Canadian Cree literature with a creative turn to Cree language; Lisa Brooks looks at eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Native writers and discovers little-known networks among them; Tol Foster argues for a regional approach to Native studies that can include unlikely subjects such as Will Rogers; LeAnne Howe creates a fictional character, Embarrassed Grief, whose problematic authenticity opens up literary debates; Daniel Heath Justice takes on two prominent critics who see mixed-blood identities differently than he does in relation to kinship; Phillip Carroll Morgan uncovers written Choctaw literary criticism from the 1830s on the subject of oral performance; Kimberly Roppolo advocates an intertribal rhetoric that can form a linguistic foundation for criticism. Cheryl Suzack situates feminist theories within Native culture with an eye to applying them to subjugated groups across Indian Country; Christopher B. Teuton organizes Native literary criticism into three modes based on community awareness; Sean Teuton opens up new sites for literary performance inside prisons with Native inmates; Robert Warrior wants literary analysis to consider the challenges of eroticism; Craig S. Womack introduces the book by historicizing book-length Native-authored criticism published between 1986 and 1997, and he concludes the volume with an essay on theorizing experience.

Reasoning Together proposes nothing less than a paradigm shift in American Indian literary criticism, closing the gap between theory and activism by situating Native literature in real-life experiences and tribal histories."

This well-deserved recognition for Robert and LeAnne further underscores what a remarkable group of scholars we have in the area of American Indian literary studies. In addition to Robert and LeAnne, there is Jodi Byrd, whose terrific forthcoming book I will soon have occasion to highlight in this space, and Robert Dale Parker, whose publications in this area I have had occasion to kvell about in the not-too-distant past. If there is a stronger faculty in this area anywhere, I'd like to see it!

The Hands of Strangers

2011-08-29T09:24:00.001-07:00

Though the publication date is supposedly October, I happen to know that advance copies of Janice Harrington's new book, The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing Home have arrived. That's because I've just finished reading it, and it is terrific--sometimes quite harrowing, always thoughtful, plain-spoken but formal and artful, moving, and even in places playful.

The book is published by BOA Editions, an interesting and successful not-for-profit publishing house dedicated (as their mission statement says) to fostering "readership and appreciation of contemporary literature. By identifying, cultivating, and publishing both new and established poets and selecting authors of unique literary talent, BOA brings high quality literature to the public." The Hands of Strangers is being published as part of their "American Poets Continuum Series," a prestigious publication series which has in the past published Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning volumes as well as the works of a great many prominent poets (including our own Brigit Pegeen Kelly).

Here is a description of the book, pasted in from the BOA Editions website:

"Janice N. Harrington's debut collection, Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone, won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize Contest and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Now she returns with a tightly focused collection that never veers away from its subject matter: the inner-workings of a nursing home.

The Hands of Strangers portrays the tensions and moments of grace between aged nursing home residents and their healthcare workers. What does it mean to be a nurses’ aide in a nursing home, the lowest of the low, the typically-female worker who provides physical care for the devalued bodies of the elderly? What is it to live one’s remaining life on a county ward as an indigent elder? The poems show women in motion: they lift bodies, push wheelchairs, give treatments, and perform the myriad tasks of caretaking. The poems show aides as anonymous figures laboring under routines, time clocks, and a distant medical hierarchy. They tell also tell the stories of how the nursing home industry reshapes lives, bodies, and identities of both aides and the aged.

Janice N. Harrington's first job was working as a nurses’ aide while still in high school in the seventies. She says, 'Like many of the 'girls' I worked with, I was young and inexperienced in a workplace that demanded empathy, skill, and compassion for the needs and stories of the elderly. I worked my way through college as a nurses’ aide. I wrote The Hands of Strangers because I cannot forget the 'girls' I worked with or the 'residents' under my care. I haven’t forgotten what I saw, heard, felt, or learned. Human stories hide behind the walls, the national statistics, and the isolations of institutionalized aging. I wanted to share some of those stories.'"

Congratulations, Janice!

Introducing our new assistant professors

2011-08-23T08:36:00.000-07:00

Classes began here this week, and there is always something energizing about the start of a new semester. The campus--somewhat sleepy-feeling in the summer--seems bustling and even frenzied by contrast. Everyone is full or purpose, busy figuring things out, not yet settled into routines.

In keeping with this seasonal spirit of renewal, I'd like to introduce here the two new Assistant Professors who have joined our department this Fall.

*Manisha Basu joins our ranks this year as an Assistant Professor in the area of postcolonial literatures and theory.

Dr. Basu specializes in Anglophone Indian and African fiction. Her work is sophisticated and theoretically informed, and her research takes up the ways that postcolonial discourse (in India and in English-language fiction by Indian writers abroad) is being renegotiated as Hindu nationalism comes into contact with pressures and rewards associated with neoliberal globalization. She is also working on a comparative project examining the literary reverberations of religious/ethnic partition in India/Pakistan and post-civil-war Nigeria.

Because Dr. Basu has been a Visiting faculty member for the past few years, she already has a very impressive teaching record at UIUC. In addition to being exceptionally versatile (she has taught introductory theory classes required by our majors, classes in post-colonial Anglophone literatures, and classes in African fiction that we cross-list with the Center for African Studies), she has been highly effective by all measures (including my own personal observation). Basu has, for instance, been on the Center for Teaching Excellence's student evaluation based List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by their Students for every semester she has taught here.

*We are also now joined by Andrew Gaedtke, an Assistant Professor specializing in modern and contemporary British literature.

Dr. Gaedtke's research uses an archive of psychoanalytic case studies to uncover structuring idea about technologically-inflected paranoia that also loom large in modernist and postmodern novels. It studies, therefore, the cultural impact of technological innovation on the experience of subjectivity and, in doing so, offers a new framework for understanding the exploration of mental states and identity in experimental modernist and postmodern fiction.

Gaedtke's deep knowledge of leading-edge cognitive and psychoanalytic theory complements (without replicating) the expertise of our other faculty in British modernism and dovetails nicely with research agendas being carried out in cognitive/literary/cultural studies by faculty in other areas of the department (such as, for instance, Melissa Littlefield). Gaedtke, who received his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, comes to us with considerable teaching experience, too. Like Dr. Basu, he promises to be a versatile contributor to our curriculum, teaching a variety of courses in his subject area at all levels.

I am delighted to welcome Drs. Basu and Gaedtke aboard!

Milton and the Post-Secular Present

2011-08-18T12:35:00.000-07:00

Feisal Mohamed informs me that he has just received, from Stanford University Press, the advance copies of his new book Milton and the Post-Secular Present: Ethics, Politics, Terrorism.

Here is the book description, pasted in from the Stanford University Press website:

"Our post-secular present, argues Feisal Mohamed, has much to learn from our pre-secular past. Through a consideration of poet and polemicist John Milton, this book explores current post-secularity, an emerging category that it seeks to clarify and critique. It examines ethical and political engagement grounded in belief, with particular reference to the thought of Alain Badiou, Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, and Gayatri C. Spivak. Taken to an extreme, such engagement produces the cult of the suicide bomber. But the suicide bomber has also served as a convenient bogey for those wishing to distract us from the violence in Western and Christian traditions and for those who would dismiss too easily the vigorous iconoclasm that belief can produce. More than any other poet, Milton alerts us to both anti-humane and liberationist aspects of belief and shows us relevant dynamics of language by which such commitment finds expression."

Mohamed also maintains a blog associated with the Huffington Post, where he has put a brief excerpt from the book. You can find the excerpt by clicking here, or you can click here to find the homepage of the blog itself.

Congratulations, Feisal!

The Changing of the Guard

2011-08-16T11:49:00.000-07:00

August 16 is the start date for academic-year appointments here. And that goes, too, for internal administrative positions of the variety filled by faculty members. Today, therefore, marks the changing of the guard. Rob Barrett has been Associate Head of the department since August 16 of 2008 (which is also when my own term as Dept Head began). And, as of today, the department's new Associate Head is Spencer Schaffner.

Today also marks day one of LeAnne Howe's stint as Director of Creative Writing, a post filled last Spring by Alex Shakar and last Fall by Audrey Petty.

English professors, as scholars and even as teachers, typically thrive on single-minded intellectual focus, and so we tend to find administrative work (with its many, sometimes-jostling, simultaneous demands) a bit discombobulating. But people take administrative positions on because they are good colleagues and responsible departmental citizens, and because they acknowledge having a stake in the bigger picture, too (as we all inevitably do): in the well-being of the department and its members, and in the importance of the work we all share.

You can probably tell, if you are reading between the lines, that I have close, personal familiarity with the discombobulation to which I refer above, and I am correspondingly grateful to my colleagues who are willing to accept challenging departmental administrative posts.

I'd like, therefore, to use this space to thank Audrey, Alex, LeAnne, and Spencer for their willingness to work on all our behalves. At the risk of sounding sappy or maudlin, I feel honored to be your colleague (and the same, of course, goes for all of the other departmental officers whose terms are ongoing).

I'd also like to thank Rob Barrett, in particular, for three years of dedicated work in the next office over. He has been a confidante and a sounding-board to me, and he has helped us as a department weather more staffing crises than I care to recall. His (almost!) unshakeable good-spirits have meant a great deal to me and, I know, to the staff in English 208. After all, what other Associate Head would have allowed me to post a picture to the blog of him dressed as Silenus? Seriously, though, Rob has been a superb associate head--patient, meticulous, organized, on top of things--and it has been my privilege work with him.

Shakar's in Vogue

2011-08-14T08:08:00.000-07:00

It is not every day that somebody from English gets a write-up in Vogue. But it is this day! Here is a link to a short write-up of late summer novels that features Alex Shakar's Luminarium.

Funny, my own scholarly books on early modern British politics and literature have so far escaped the notice of Vogue's editors for some reason. Seriously, though, I'm looking forward to tracking this novel's progress in the coming months. You can bet I'll be posting here about the further adventures of Alex Shakar in the months to come, as Luminarum gets taken up and reviewed across the country and around the world.

ISAS book prize

2011-08-07T11:35:00.000-07:00

Just a few days ago, at the annual conference of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists (ISAS), Renée Trilling's book The Aesthetics of Nostalgia: Historical Representation in Old English Verse was awarded the ISAS prize for best first book.

This prize is awarded every other year, so the pool of nominees actually represents a couple of years worth of scholarship. Winning it is a very nice honor both for Renée and for our department.

Book prizes prizes such as this one--those given out by scholarly organizations like the ISAS, in other words--mean a great deal because they represent the evaluative judgment of the precisely the scholarly community best equipped to judge the merits and contribution of a given work. This award says that Trilling's book is deemed by experts in Anglo-Saxon literature and culture to make an unusually valuable scholarly contribution, and also that Trilling herself is a scholar to be reckoned with in her chosen field of Anglo-Saxon studies.

Congratulations, Renée!

What Does Fiction Know?

2011-08-03T08:25:00.000-07:00

Just a short post today, with a link to a new piece by Richard Powers. The essay, which I link to at the bottom of this post, has recently been published in Places, an interesting online online journal which describes itself as follows:

"Founded 28 years ago by architecture faculty at MIT and Berkeley, Places is an interdisciplinary journal of contemporary architecture, landscape and urbanism, with particular emphasis on the public realm as physical place and social ideal. Places is a 501(c)3 organization, published by the Design History Foundation and supported by a consortium of U.S. universities as well as organizational and individual sponsors."

The Powers piece is on Berlin, on the relationship between fiction and experience, and--of course!--about much more. Check it out here: "What Does Fiction Know?"

Promotion and Tenure

2011-07-28T10:28:00.000-07:00

It is almost August, which means that we're heading into the last weeks of summer. The pace is picking up noticeably in the main departmental office, and before too long we'll be up to our necks in the business of the Fall 2011 semester.

As we hurtle headlong towards another semester, I'd like to pause here to acknowledge and congratulate the five faculty members in our department who were promoted and granted tenure as the result of a year-long review process that was concluded at the end of last Spring. When the Fall term begins, in just a few short weeks, each of these distinguished scholar-teachers will officially hold the title of Associate Professor of English.

Five is an unusually large number of people to have come up for promotion and tenure in a given year, even for a comprehensive department like ours. In our case, these promotions can be seen as an echo-effect of a significant generational turnover among the faculty that took place, roughly, between 2003 and 2008. We did a lot of fantastic hiring 5-10 years ago, in other words, and what we are seeing now is that once-junior faculty members are becoming scholarly powerhouses, leaders in their respective fields. As a result, we are quickly ceasing to be the conspicuously young department I joined (as an old fogy!) in 2006, and we are becoming increasingly a department dominated by energetic, accomplished mid-career scholars. I see the past year's promotions (and those of the year before, and the ones I hope to see in the remaining two years of my term in the head's office) not only as occasions to celebrate the achievements of my impressive and deserving colleagues, but also as part of an important watershed moment for the department as a whole.

I say all this by way of context, to explain what it means to me to be able to post this here. But ultimately the achievements that matter are those of our newly-minted Associate Professors. So without further ado, here they are (in alphabetical order):

*Anustup Basu, who specializes in film and theory, works on subjects relating to the intersection of contemporary nationalism and the globalization of information and entertainment. His book Bollywood in the Age of New Media: The Geo-Televisual Aesthetic was published by the University of Edinburgh Press in 2010. Basu is also himself an active film-maker, having been Executive Producer, for example, for the award-winning 2008 film Herbert.

*Jose B. Capino is a scholar of film and theater. His current and recent scholarly work engages post-colonial theory and globalization by examining cross-cultural fantasies and projections in US and Philippine cinema. His book, Dream factories of a Former Colony: American Fantasies, Philippine Cinema, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2010.

*Eleanor Courtemanche is an expert in Victorian literature and culture whose work emphasizes in particular the relationships between novelistic fiction and economic theory. Courtemanche's book, The 'Invisible Hand' and British Fiction, 1818-1860: Adam Smith, Political Economy, and the Genre of Realism was published in 2011, by Palgrave, as part of their "Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture" book series.

*Hina Nazar specializes in what might be called the intellectual history of the British novel in the 18th and 19th centuries. Even more broadly, her work reads the early history of the novel in order to recast a tradition of moral philosophy that begins with the Enlightenment and remains enshrined in the praxis of contemporary critical theory. Nazar's book, Enlightened Sentiments: Judgment and Autonomy in the Age of Sensibility, is currently in production and will be published by Fordham University Press during the upcoming academic year.

*Spencer Schaffner, a member of our outstanding writing-studies faculty, studies the shaping role that writing practices and technologies play in the production of knowledge and our experiences of the world. His book Binocular Vision: The Politics of Representation in Birdwatching Filed Guides, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press just a few weeks ago (which means, dear reader, that you can find a fuller account just by scrolling down a bit).

Congratulations, one and all!

Luminarium

2011-07-14T07:33:00.001-07:00

I may be jumping the gun here--since I'm actually not sure whether or not Alex Shakar has received the advance copies of his new novel Luminarium or not--but I happen to have visual proof that copies are stacked up and ready to ship. Here, in all their solid, hard-bound splendor, are copies of the book, sitting in the offices of Soho Press, the book's publisher:

I've pre-ordered a copy and can't wait to get my paws on it. I read this book in a penultimate draft, in my capacity as department head, a year or so ago. I expected to be reading it as work--that is, I was expecting to maintain the kind of evaluative distance I keep when reading works of schoalrship. Instead, I found myself reading it for pure pleasure before long. In the end, even though I was reading it in a clumsily-bound typescript, I would up thinking it was one of the best novels I had read all year. The book went through another round of revisions after that, so I expect the version I read bound later this summer to be even better. Hence my excitement.

I fully expect this book to be A Big Deal. Earlier this summer, I posted here about a starred, pre-publication review in Publishers Weekly. Here is bit from another starred, early review, this time from Booklist:

"In his long-awaited second novel after the razor-sharp The Savage Girl (2001), Shakar takes measure of our post-9/11 existential confusion in a technology-avid but sciencephobic, ‘ever-complexifying world.’ A radiantly imaginative social critic, Shakar is also a knowledgeable and intrepid explorer of metaphysical and neurological mysteries. With beguiling characters trapped in ludicrous and revelatory predicaments, this is a cosmic, incisively funny kaleidoscopic tale of loss, chaos, and yearning."

I've pasted that in from the Soho Press page dedicated to the book, where you can place an order, read an excerpt, and see other blurbs and a plot synopsis.

Here, also pasted in, is the synopsis, though I have to say that I really don't think plot summary does this particular novel justice at all. It leaves out everything that makes this novel great: the quality of the prose, the pacing, the shifts in tone between earnest and cynical, the quality of observation and description, and so on. Anyway, here goes:

"Synopsis:

Fred Brounian and his twin brother, George, were once co-CEOs of a New York City software company devoted to the creation of utopian virtual worlds. Now, in 2006, as two wars rage and the fifth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, George is in a coma, control of the company has been wrenched away by a military contracting conglomerate, and Fred is broke. Near despair, he’s led by an attractive woman, Mira, to a neurological study promising “peak” experiences and a newfound spiritual outlook on life. As the study progresses, lines between subject and experimenter blur, and reality becomes increasingly porous. Meanwhile, Fred finds himself caught up in what seems at first a cruel prank: a series of bizarre emails and texts that purport to be from his comatose brother.

Moving between the research hospitals of Manhattan, the streets of a meticulously planned Florida city, the neighborhoods of Brooklyn and the uncanny, immersive worlds of urban disaster simulation; threading through military listserv geek-speak, Hindu cosmology, the maxims of outmoded self-help books and the latest neuro-scientific breakthroughs, Luminarium is a brilliant exploration of the way we live now, a novel that’s as much about the role technology and spirituality play in shaping our reality as it is about the undying bond between brothers, and the redemptive possibilities of love."

Binocular Vision

2011-07-06T12:05:00.001-07:00

I have not laid eyes on the physical book yet--faculty scatter over the summer and it is harder than normal for me to keep abreast of every development--but it appears that Spencer Schaffner's book Binocular Vision: The Politics of Representation in Birdwatching Field Guides has just been printed by The University of Massachusetts Press.

Since UMass Press has strengths in environmental studies as well as in the field of book history, I think you'll agree that they are highly appropriate publishers for Schaffner's work. Here is the book description, pasted in here from the press's website:

"From meadows to marshlands, seashores to suburbs, field guides help us identify many of the things we find outdoors: plants, insects, mammals, birds. In these texts, nature is typically represented, both in words and images, as ordered, clean, and untouched by human technology and development. This preoccupation with species identification, however, has produced an increasingly narrow view of nature, a “binocular vision,” that separates the study of individual elements from a range of larger, interconnected environmental issues. In this book, Spencer Schaffner reconsiders this approach to nature study by focusing on how birds are presented in field guides.

Starting with popular books from the late nineteenth century and moving ultimately to the electronic guides of the current day, Binocular Vision contextualizes birdwatching field guides historically, culturally, and in terms of a wide range of important environmental issues. Schaffner questions the assumptions found in field guides to tease out their ideological workings. He argues that the sanitized world represented in these guides misleads readers by omitting industrial landscapes and so-called nuisance birds, leaving users of the guides disconnected from environmental degradation and its impact on bird populations.

By putting field guides into direct conversation with concerns about species conservation, environmental management, the human alteration of the environment, and the problem of toxic pollution, Binocular Vision is a field guide to field guides that takes a novel perspective on how we think about and interact with the world around us."

Congrats, Spencer (wherever you are)!

I linked to Spencer's standard departmental profile above, but those seeking a more in-depth Schaffner experience should also visit the web-space he maintains. Quite a lot there to see, if you poke around...

Lynn Hartmann's convocation address

2011-06-30T08:40:00.000-07:00

A month or so ago, I posted in this space about our 2011 convocation ceremony. There are now a few pictures posted too, if you want to click back and refresh your memory.

What I am posting here is the full text of the remarks offered to the class of 2011 by our convocation speaker, Dr. Lynn Hartmann. Dr. Hartmann was an LAS Distinguished Alumni Award winner in 2009, and anyone who wants to read more about her remarkable work can do so by clicking through to the LAS News write-up of that award here.

We're in the process, right now, of putting together our departmental newsletter, and some excerpts of this address will be printed there. But for anyone interested in the full shebang, I thought we could run it in full here.

Those who were present at the Convocation in May will recall that Dr. Hartmann had slides, and there are a few places in the address below that refer to images that I do not at present have. If I get them, I'll add them later.

Anyway, here goes...

---------------------------------------------

English Department Convocation
University of Illinois
Lynn C. Hartmann, M.D.
May 14, 2011

Good afternoon. Let me begin by extending heartfelt congratulations to all graduates, upon your once-in-a-lifetime accomplishment being celebrated today. I am a medical oncologist and cancer researcher and, very proud to say, a graduate of this very department. In my remarks this afternoon, I would like to share with you the nature of my work, my journey from literature to medicine, and some thoughts for your futures.

First, let me extend greetings from Minnesota, land of 14,000+ lakes, where we enjoy over 90,000 miles of shoreline -- more than California, Hawaii and Florida combined. Here we see a beautiful picture of the Minnesota state bird, a parent loon carrying two chicks on its back -- an example of an avian minivan. Here is a photo of the upper stories of our Plummer building, built in the 1920s and the most recognized architectural landmark of the Mayo Clinic, located in Rochester, Minnesota. Its upper floors house our medical library and one of the largest carillons in the United States. In this slide you see the larger campus of Mayo and, in the spirit of full disclosure, another slide of our campus on a cold winter day. And last, after a night on call, one could come out to find their vehicle completely encased in ice. Far more work than the average car-starting service can provide. The question that I am asked most frequently is, “How did it happen that the Mayo Clinic is located in rural Minnesota?” and the most important answer to that question is demonstrated on this slide -- revealing the aftermath of a devastating tornado that struck Rochester in 1883 and destroyed half of the town. (This story illustrates how initial tragedy can bear fruit.) In 1883, the closest hospital was located approximately 80 miles away. Another key element in the story of Mayo is shown in this photo of Dr. William Worrall Mayo, an immigrant from England who settled in southeastern Minnesota, originally to examine volunteers for the Civil War. Pictured with him are his two sons, William J. and Charles, who would graduate from medical school in the 1880s. Following medical school, they brought their surgical skills back to Rochester, as well as the latest thinking on sterile technique and other new approaches, such that Mayo would grow into one of the largest centers for medical teaching and research in the world. A vital element in the beginning of the Mayo Clinic came from the local convent of the Sisters of Saint Frances, a group of teaching nuns. Immediately after the devastating tornado, they came forward to help care for the injured. Following this experience, the leader of the convent, Mother Alfred Moes, came forward and said to Dr. Mayo, “We need a hospital here in Rochester.” And his response is informally recorded as something like “You can’t be serious, we are in the middle of nowhere.” But Mother Alfred was not deterred and came back to say “If we build a hospital, will you staff it?” He agreed, and that in fact is what the sisters did, with the founding of St. Marys Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota in 1889. This hospital became the cornerstone for the physical plant of what is now the Mayo Clinic.

Now I would like to describe for you my work, which can be divided into cancer care -- namely the care of patients with cancer -- and cancer research. Numerous forces drew me to the field of cancer care, or oncology. On an intellectual level, a malignancy can affect virtually any system of the body and these challenges drew me. Moreover, as you will see in a moment, molecular understanding of the driving processes of cancer opens up very specific new treatment avenues. But I would say that the largest draw for me into cancer care was on an emotional level. Namely, here was an opportunity to participate in, and contribute to, the care of people who are facing their own mortality and moving forward with their lives. Facing our mortality is not something that Americans like to do. We are the people “who can do it” as the World War II poster of the woman with the prominent biceps demonstrates. We prefer to read "Intimations of Immortality." But there are certain diagnoses, and cancer is one of them, that force an individual to face the reality that they are mortal. What follows after such a diagnosis is where we see the mettle of a person. The emotional fortitude that I have witnessed, the generosity of spirit, goes beyond my ability to describe -- but has inspired me on a daily basis.

In cancer research, I work in breast and ovarian cancer. What you see on the slide before you is a field of breast cancer cells, large and aggressive with a red stain picking up the perimeters of these cells, their external membranes, which are blanketed with a novel cancer-associated receptor called HER-2/neu. This particular receptor is not found on normal cells. It is sending a continuous growth signal into the nucleus of these cells directing them to divide and grow -- an obvious growth advantage in a neighborhood of otherwise normal cells that wait for rare growth signals from their environment. While the presence of this novel receptor provides a growth advantage for these tumor cells, it also provides a molecular target that neighboring normal cells do not have. This in turn allows us to design a very specific treatment targeting this receptor, which would kill the abnormal cells but spare the surrounding normal tissue. This type of molecular targeted therapy is the wave of the future for cancer therapy and we are already seeing success with it in breast cancer and in other malignancies.

Now, let me address the issue of how a person would find their way from being an English major to a career in medicine. First, I’d like to consider the qualities that are required to read great literature -- and these are my observations. I would list concentration and curiosity among them -- being curious about a character and what they are going to do in a particular, stressful situation. Perception is required, figuring out the subtext. A reader of great literature has to appreciate humanity, our strengths and our foibles, and probably most importantly, possess the ability to synthesize all of this, to put it together.

What qualities are needed to practice medicine? Concentration, curiosity, perception -- what’s really going on. A doctor better like people, so appreciation or love of humanity. All importantly, the ability to synthesize all of this for oneself and then communicate those conclusions. Now, I realize that there is a vast body of factual knowledge that underlies the world of English literature and a very different body of knowledge, laws and rules that underlie medicine, but those respective bodies of knowledge can be learned, memorized. The qualities that we have been speaking about cannot easily be learned -- the ability to perceive, the ability to synthesize.

I have taken the liberty of polling some other English majors, more newly minted than I, for their thoughts on their training. From my niece Kristen, a graduate in English from Butler University two years ago: “Another key skill that I see as universal to all job opportunities and functions is the ability to communicate. Every piece of literature I experienced in school was essentially a study in communication skills. How well does an essayist argue his side of an issue; does an author convince a reader to identify with a protagonist; is a novelist able to keep the reader engaged in a plot line? The literature that is studied in schools today has endured because the author successfully communicated a purpose. In my department at Cision, projects succeed and fail based on whether the project manager is able to successfully communicate a purpose, requirements and intended outcome.” Then from my colleague, Sean, English major from Cornell and Mayo Clinic surgeon: “In high school I really struggled with writing. I was very good at science and math in particular, but I couldn't write. I worked hard at it, the only way to learn to write is to write, and came to love it. At Cornell there is no premed major, which was very fortunate. I always knew I would be a physician, but if I didn't get into med school, I would have probably been an English teacher. I even came to love reading and writing more than biology and biochemistry. My personal opinion is that those two skills [reading and writing] are so critical for personal and career development that everyone should be required to have a dual major in English.” And very recently, featured in the sports section of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, was Josh Fisher, English major, now law student, who is trying to help Dodgers fans make sense of what is happening to their team at www.DodgerDivorce.com. Note that there have been over 75,000 visitors to this website and the LA Times calls it a must-read site. Mr. Fisher says, “The practical skill that has served me well . . . is an ability to manage information and use information as currency . . . knowing when to use it, when not to use it.”

Regarding English majors and medicine, what Professor Perry doesn’t know is that my acceptance of the invitation to address you was fueled by my desire to recruit more English majors into medicine. To support this, I have very specific, non-fiction examples to demonstrate this need. Here are several quotes taken from actual medical notes demonstrating my point:

“The patient lives at home with his mother, father and pet turtle, who is presently enrolled in day care three times a week.”

“On the second day the knee was better and on the third day it had completely disappeared.”

“The patient’s gait is normal. I am able to stand on her toes.”

“The patient had pain when she saw me for several months in November.”

“She is careful when talking about her husband and her gag reflex is normal.”

“The pain is exacerbated by prolonged activities at work which include trimming hedges, taking short steps behind a lawn mower, lifting and bending, and having sex.”*

As you can see from these medical notes, we need good writers in medicine.

In closing, let me make several points. First, you already possess very important qualities. Second, you have a strong support system, or you would not be here today. Importantly, don’t focus on what you think you cannot do. Now I realize that this is a double negative. How would an artist make this point? For this, let’s look at one of my favorite books, Ann Lamott’s Bird by Bird, with the subtitle “Some Instructions on Writing and Life.” The book is filled with great “instructions” on how to approach a major task. What she describes as the single greatest obstacle to one’s success in approaching a major task is listening to a non-stop internal radio station “KFKD” that continually relates our mistakes, what we don’t do well, how impossible the task will be, etc. Lamott provides sympathetic but smart ideas for turning down that noise.

So, remember that you already possess very important qualities, you have a strong support system, don’t focus on what you think you cannot do, and choose well. Blessings to you all.

*Source: Ann Farrell, Mayo Clinic reference librarian

Ninth Letter 8.1

2011-06-20T13:39:00.000-07:00

I received my copy of the new issues of Ninth Letter today. As many of you know, Ninth Letter is the award-winning literary magazine that our creative writing program produces in conjunction with Art and Design. As always, I'm struck both by the quality of the writing and by the kind of reading that its ever-evolving form and design encourages. I wind up reading each issue like an explorer, not from front to back.

This volume comes in three segments, a arresting pictorial section (featuring, on most pages, cryptic numbers), an insert with words and music (!), and a separately bound volume containing poems, stories and non-fiction pieces. The image to the left here is the third and first of these segments. I'm beginning to think that the cryptic numbers refer to page numbers in the third of these and that they are in this way illustrations as well as an interpretive puzzle. If so, this may be a spoiler. But in any event, I record my interpretive process here because it illustrates the kind of reading that the magazine elicits.

If you click through to the Ninth Letter site, you'll find a blog there too (O brave new world, that has such blogs in't!). And there are a few samples of the writing in the journal that you might want to check out. Or you could just go ahead and subscribe now and see for yourself if my theory about the correlation between words and pictures seems correct.

Happy Bloomsday!

2011-06-16T08:44:00.000-07:00

Today, June 16, is Bloomsday, the day upon which the action of James Joyce's epoch-making novel Ulysses takes place. That means that all over the English-speaking world people will be reading aloud from the book, enjoying gorgonzola sandwiches, and generally commemorating Joyce, the novel, and Ireland.

Those on campus here today can join the festivities at our Rare Book and Manuscript Library. I'm pasting in the event announcement here, but you should also click through the link above for information on other exhibitions and events.

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BLOOMSDAY
A Collaboration of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library
and the
Literatures & Languages Library

June 16, 2011 3pm-5pm

A Festival of Joycean Revelry:
Musics, Speaks, Drinks and Eeks

Rare Book & Manuscript Library ‖ Room 346 University Library ‖1408 West Gregory Drive ‖ Urbana Illinois

Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons,
steelyringing Imperthnthn thnthnthn. Chips, picking chips off rocky
thumbnail, chips. Horrid! And gold flushed more. A husky fifenote blew. Blew. Blue bloom is on the. Goldpinnacled
hair. A jumping rose on satiny breast of satin, rose of Castile. Trilling, trilling: Idolores. Peep! Who’s in the... peepofgold? Tink cried to bronze in
pity. And a call, pure, long and throbbing. Longindying call. Decoy. Soft word. But look: the bright stars fade. Notes chirruping answer. O rose! Castile. The morn is breaking. Jingle jingle jaunted
jingling. Coin rang. Clock clacked. Avowal. Sonnez. I could. Rebound of garter. Not leave thee. Smack. La cloche! Thigh smack. Avowal. rm. Sweetheart, goodbye! Jingle. Bloo. Boomed crashing chords. When love absorbs. War! War! The tympanum. A
sail! A veil awave upon the waves. Lost. Throstle fluted. All is lost now. Horn. Hawhorn. When first he saw. Alas! Full tup. Full throb. Warbling. Ah, lure! Alluring. Martha! Come! Clapclap. Clipclap. Clappyclap. Goodgod henev erheard inall. Deaf bald Pat brought pad knife took up. A moonlit nightcall: far,
far. I feel so sad. P. S. So lonely blooming.Listen! The spiked and winding cold seahorn. Have you the? Each, and for other, plash and silent roar. Pearls: when she. Liszt’s rhapsodies. Hissss. You don’t? Did not: no, no: believe: Lidlyd. With a cock with a carra. Black. Deepsounding. Do, Ben, do. Wait while you wait. Hee hee. Wait while you hee. But wait! Low in
OOMSDAYBLOOMSDAYBLOOMS

New Emeriti

2011-06-10T09:34:00.000-07:00

Two long-standing members of our faculty opted to retire at the end of this past Spring semester. Neither of them wanted much fanfare--no parties, no speeches--but each of them will definitely be missed around here.

I hope they will forgive me for the fanfare represented by this post!

***

First up is Leon Chai, who joined our faculty as an Assistant Professor in 1984.

Professor Chai is the author of four well-regarded books on literature and philosophy from the Enlightenment through the post-Romantic era. The most recent of these—entitled Romantic Theory: Forms of Reflexivity in the Revolutionary Era—was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2006. This amounts, in volume and quality, to a publication record of the first order in a field where two or three well-regarded single-author books is the normal benchmark of achievement for a highly-successful scholarly career.

But, as anyone who knows him would certainly agree, this toting up of scholarly achievements leaves out most of what has been most distinctive about Chai's remarkable, twenty-eight year career in our department: his unique (and thus irreplaceable) polymathic virtuosity and his total commitment to intellectual pursuits. Chai has taught twenty-two different classes here at Illinois—everything from a 100-level introduction to Poetry on up—and many of our very best undergraduate students, impressed by his care with texts and by his philosophical seriousness, have sought him out and tyaken every class he offered during their time as majors. Where most professors are content to teach within some narrow band of specialization for their entire careers, Chai has always seemed ready to take on anything, anywhere, from the 18th century through the present. In recent years he has been a valuable mentor for junior faculty in both British and American literature of the 18th and 19th centuries, and (because our advising office wanted more classes on contemporary fiction) he recently taught a very successful undergraduate class on the novels of Don DiLillo. Now, that's range! Always a very well-regarded undergraduate teacher, Chai has also over the years served on many, many graduate committees, and again his polymathic interests have also made him an especially versatile contributor to our graduate program's mentoring work.

Professor Chai has always been motivated more by intellectual and scholarly curiosity than by careerism or more reputational aspects of faculty status. He is retiring, as I understand it, in order to follow his own intellectual interests and pleasures full-time. What this means, of course, is that there will be more path-breaking books in the future: he is assuredly planning to continue pursuing his research agenda after retirement.

***

Our other newly-minted Professor Emerita is Alice Deck, who first joined our faculty as an Assistant Professor in 1983 and was, until 2002, jointly appointed in the Department of English and the African American Studies Program.

Professor Deck has been, for many years, a leader working to further our campus's excellence in the field of African American literary studies. This during a period of time in which diversity was not always a top campus priority and in which numbers of African American faculty were often considerably smaller across campus than they are now. This has never been easy work, but it has been extremely important to our campus.

Professor Deck has taught African American literature to generations of students, and her efforts to encourage interest in African and African American literatures are reflected in the many conferences she has helped to organize in conjunction with African American studies and the Center for African Studies over the years. For instance, in 1985-86 she organized a conference on Zora Neale Hurston, in 1991 she helped put together a symposium on African life writing, in 1994 she helped to organize a conference on reconstructing the cultural meaning of Africa, and in 2000 she organized an interdisciplinary conference on women in Africa and the African diaspora. In recent years she has organized informal departmental readings on the birthdays of Langston Hughes and Toni Morrison each year that have been well attended by current and former students. Professor Deck has undertaken these outreach tasks in the spirit of an educator, and her contributions in this regard have been most welcome and will be missed.

Professor Deck plans to pursue this outreach agenda after retirement by ramping up her efforts as a publishing scholar. Most immediately, she is working on a book that will be called "Against the Tyrannies of Silence: Black Women's Autobiography in Africa and America," and her first order of business after retirement will be to complete this work. She also has plans, she tells me, for future work on Toni Morrison and on the Mammy figure in US popular culture.

***

At the risk of sounding too much like Jimmy Stewart: it is quite humbling, especially for a scholar like me who has moved around a bit, to consider the sustained impact that Professors Chai and Deck have had upon generations of students and colleagues at the University of Illinois. Careers like theirs mean so much, cumulatively, for the university and the local community alike. I am pleased that they are both planning to remain active as scholars, not least because it means that we'll have the chance to run into them from time to time in the library! If you do happen to see either of them there, please join me in offering thanks, congratulations, and best wishes.

Early review of Luminarium

2011-05-31T14:59:00.000-07:00

Sometime later this summer, Soho Press will publish Alex Shakar's new novel, Luminarium. I read this in its penultimate draft and really loved it, and so I'm eagerly waiting to read it in its final form. You may be sure, dear reader, that I will post about it as soon as it arrives in print.

In the meantime, I'm happy to see that strong reviews are already coming in (which is funny to me, actually, because with literary critical books of the kind I write it can take a year or more after publication to get reviewed).

Anyway, I'm pasting here, in its entirety, a review of Luminarium that recently appeared a few weeks ago in Publishers Weekly. You can also click through the hyperlink to read it in its natural online habitat.

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Luminarium Alex Shakar. Soho, $25 (448p) ISBN 978-1-56947-975-9

Shakar follows up his well-received The Savage Girl with this penetrating look at the uneasy intersection of technology and spirituality. As the five-year anniversary of 9/11 looms, 30-something New Yorker Fred Brounian struggles with the impending death of his hospitalized twin brother, George; the unscrupulous buyout of his Second Life–like company; and the scientific experiments he undergoes that are designed to induce spiritual insight. While Fred's coming-to-terms with George's situation makes for traditional drama, Shakar's blend of the business of cyberspace and the science of enlightenment distinguishes the novel as original and intrepid: Urth Inc., Fred and George's company, is essentially swallowed by megacorporation Armation, which intends to use Urth's technology to build virtual training environments for the military. Meanwhile, Fred is an emotionally vulnerable guinea pig in Mira Egghart's neurological experiments to create a "spiritual odyssey, encoded as easily as a few songs on an iPod." As George nears his end, Fred falls for Mira, learns to meditate, and pursues the perpetrator of a vast cyberscheme threatening to undo both him and Urth. Shakar's prose is sharp and hilarious, engendering the reader's faith in the novel's philosophical ambitions. Part Philip K. Dick, part Jonathan Franzen, this radiant work leads you from the unreal to the real so convincingly that you begin to let go of the distinction.

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Well all right then. Add that to your amazon wish list for later!

Convocation 2011

2011-05-23T08:12:00.000-07:00

I'll post some pictures later--when I get them from the photographers--but I thought I might post here about our annual convocation ceremony, held this year on May 14th at Foellinger Auditorium. [Added on 6/20: a couple of pictures!]

As always, I love these ceremonies: faculty looking slightly goofy in robes, but happy nonetheless to see their students; students, also in robes, full of well-earned pride; and families--often multiple generations--celebrating accomplishments, too. Corny as it may be to say so, this is for me one of the moments that puts everything in perspective: it puts a cap (a mortarboard?) on the academic year and reminds me what all of the teaching we do is ultimately about.

I'd like to congratulate this year's graduates here, and to honor the undergraduate students who earned departmental honors (distinction or high distinction) as listed in the ceremony's program: Gabriela Asrow, Julia Bassewitz, Kathleen Blair, Justine Chan, Elizabeth Cohon, Danielle DeFranco, Erin Dittmer, Simon Fields, Marcos Hernandez, Lauren Hise, Shannon Jilek, Kathleen Kinsella, Josette Lorig, Lisa Malvin, Kendra Muntz, Quinn Myers, Valerie O'Brien, Jaqueline Patton, Andrew Rockway, Brenda Rodriguez, Adam Sadik, Amelia Wallrich. I'm singling these students out here not only because they have achieved distinction (though they have--only about 10% of our 2011 graduates appear on this list!), but because they have undertaken and completed a thesis project. This means that they have taken it upon themselves to do original research in some field of English studies. I can still remember from my own undergraduate days (in the 80s!) what that felt like: the challenge of adopting for the first time a new disposition towards knowledge, moving from classwork (where a professor sets the parameters of study) into a project where I was supposed to set the terms of engagement. This takes nerve, and the completion of a first such project really is something to celebrate.

Our convocation speaker this year was Dr. Lynn Hartmann, a 1970 graduate of our department and now a Professor of Oncology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester Minnesota. I had met Dr. Hartmann a few years ago, when she returned to our campus as a recipient of a Distinguished Alumni Award from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and I was struck at that time by the way she spoke about connections between the humane curiosity about life that is fed by a humanities-based liberal arts degree and her subsequent engagement with the lives and life experiences of her patients. You can get a sense of what I mean by reading a short biographical sketch she wrote up and published a few years back in the Journal of the American Medical Association called "The Octogenarian's Plan". So I was delighted that she agreed to speak to the class of 2011, and I thought she was wonderful.

We did not have the crisp, sunny day we hoped for, but the rain held off and we were able to mingle on the quad after the ceremony. This is one of my favorite parts of the event, actually, because I get to congratulate graduates and their proud families, to pose for pictures with students I've worked with, and generally to bask in the reflected warmth of everyone's good feelings. This last part of the event tends also to be a chance to meet the families of PhD students I've worked with who are preparing to leave town and take up new positions--and this year there were three PhDs in my own area who were there with their families and who are all now preparing to take up new jobs on the east coast.

Congratulations to all of our newly minted alums, and best of luck with whatever comes next!

Placement

2011-05-09T08:12:00.000-07:00

For reasons that are not at all difficult to suss out, the academic job market has been unusually tight for the past few years: public institutions are impacted by state budgetary crises, and even some of the richest privates have faced reductions when their endowments have declined in value. This year seemed to be a bit better--I have not seen comprehensive statistics yet, but my impression is that this year's market, in English at least, saw a real uptick in the number of jobs advertised. But it is still a tough market to crack, in part because there is a lot of pent up demand after a couple of especially lean years. We ran a search this year, for instance, and had more than 350 applicants for one position, which means that there are a lot of qualified people out there applying for academic jobs.

In light of all this, I am very pleased with the success our PhDs have had on the market this year. To date, we have placed 17 people, including (at last count) 12 in tenure track positions and another 3-4 in the kind of prestigious and/or multi-year postdoctoral/visiting positions that can be a stepping stone to a good tenure track job down the line. Most of the credit for this, obviously, goes to our terrific grad students. Some of it goes, too, to Vicki Mahaffey, who was our placement officer this past year, and to Tony Pollock, the director of our grad program, who helps out with placement in myriad ways. In fact, I think our whole faculty should take some credit for the success of our grad students, since almost all of us will have taught some of the students who are moving on to pastures new in some capacity, and since many of us also participated in mock interviews and other events designed to help prepare grad students for the rigors of the job market. I know I'm not alone in feeling that every placement is a team victory.

I'd also like to think that this robust placement number reflects something of a sea-change in the academic marketplace since my own graduate student days (I got my PhD in 1993), with more and more departments looking to hire people who already have substantial track records of teaching and scholarship. It is almost always the case that PhDs from top public institutions like the University of Illinois graduate with more hands-on experience designing and teaching their own classes than do their counterparts at private institutions, and our students often have pre-doctoral publication records that also stack up well against anybody. So when somebody hires one of our students, what they are getting, in effect, is a sure thing: somebody who has already shown that they can do all aspects of the job.

Next Fall, former PhDs from our department will take up new tenure track positions at the following universities and colleges: Juniata College, Michigan State University, North Georgia College & State University, Penn State University-Erie, Quinnipiac University, Rider University, Syracuse University, University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, University of Oregon, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, and Virginia Commonwealth University. It makes me proud to know, as I do, that every one of these institutions will be very happy with the hires they've made.

The 'Invisible Hand' and British Fiction, 1818-1860

2011-05-02T08:28:00.000-07:00

I am delighted to announce here the publication of Eleanor Courtemanche's new book, The 'Invisible Hand and British Fiction, 1818-1860: Adam Smith, Political Economy, and the Genre of Realism. Actually, the book been in print in Great Britain since April 12, but I learned this morning that Professor Courtemanche's advance copies have now arrived in the mail. This is my cue to post. Because, like I always say, nothing can be real until it arrives in central Illinois.

Published as part of Palgrave's impressive "Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture" series, The Invisible Hand and British Fiction argues that 19th-century realist novels, with their large-canvas portraiture of individuals within complex social systems, represent the best and most sophisticated response we have to the baffling experience of living in a world of global capitalism. This is a historical argument, about fiction and economic theory in the 19th century, but one that also makes 19th-century fiction speak to experiences that are our own. I admire this book for its powerful argument, but also for its lively and accessible prose. I think it has the potential, therefore, to be of interest to readers beyond its main, obvious audience of scholarly specialists: if only the invisible hand of the marketplace could somehow bring it to a wider audience's attention!

Here is the book description, pasted in from the press' website: "Some economic ideas are too interesting to be left to economists. This book argues that Adam Smith's metaphor of the 'invisible hand' – in which selfish economic actions are mysteriously transformed into aggregate social benefits in a capitalist economy – implies an entire spatial and temporal system in which the morality of any particular action can only be understood in the context of society as a whole. The 'Invisible Hand' and British Fiction argues that while political economists focused only on the optimistic outcomes of capitalist moral activity, Smith's model of ironic morality also influenced the work of novelists including Austen, Dickens, Martineau, Thackeray, Gaskell, and Eliot. Their realist novels represent the reconciliation between individual ignorance and systemic overview as much less stable than the economic synthesis, using omniscient narrative voices, multiple perspectives, and humor to depict a wide variety of possible outcomes. Smith shares with the realists a vision of modern society that is structured around a fragile trust in the benefits of unintended consequences."

Congratulations, Eleanor!

Administrative Professionals Day

2011-04-27T15:57:00.000-07:00

Administrative Professionals Day falls each year on the Wednesday of the last week in April. So: today! As is the custom, I had a nice lunch with the staff who work with me on a daily basis in EB 208.

Despite the clunky title and corporate pedigree, this is a day I'm really happy to celebrate. Because--as every single one of the 150-200 people who teach in the English department in a given year can attest--we have a great staff in our department. I work most closely with the main office staff, Becky Moss, Amy Rumsey, and Deb Stauffer, and I hope I've made it clear to them, over and over and over again, how much I appreciate their help with everything always. And I mean everything. Always. I don't know if they read this blog, but I kind of hope they stumble upon it... And of course this is not to slight the great contributions made by staff in other departmental offices, who also do an incredible job helping to manage the leviathan that is our department.

This whole week is administrative professionals week, in fact, so if you are in the English Building and read this, go and say thanks!

3rd annual Undergraduate Research Colloquium

2011-04-20T08:19:00.000-07:00

Last night I had the distinct pleasure of attending the third annual departmental undergraduate research colloquium, which was held, this time, at Authors Corner in the Illini Union Bookstore. This is an event that is dear to my heart, and that has been slightly different from year to year. Last year, for instance, the event featured several students presenting creative work--stories and poems. This year, presenters were advanced literature students presenting original research related to honors or independent study projects.

This year's event also had a distinctly different feel because of its setting: in the IUB, with a fancy-looking, free-standing podium, instead of in a charmingly-dilapidated classroom in the English Building. The podium, the fact that famous visiting writers present in the same space, and the fact that everyone had to leave the familiar confines of the English Building all combined to made the event feel a bit more formal than it otherwise might have, I thought. This was a Good Thing, actually, because presenting work as an expert to an audience consisting of fellow-students and faculty is in fact pretty different from what students typically experience in a classroom. The venue made it feel like a special event, and that is exactly as it should be.

Our presenters (Adam Sadik, Shannon Jilek, Kate Kinsella, Brenda L. Rodriguez, and Kirsten Mendoza) were great. And you couldn't help but be struck by the range of their intellectual engagements. Papers were given on Virginia Woolf, on Diana Abu-Jaber's novel Crescent (which I am now planning to read), on gendered conceptions of creativity in Joyce and Faulkner, on constructions of race in Jacobean court literature, and on gender roles in Chicana feminist literature. This variety, of course, is indicative of what is great about a large, comprehensive department like ours--there are so many kinds of instruction available, so many interesting scholarly approaches on offer at any one time, that any curious student can find something to match his or her interests.

One of my favorite moments of the evening came when, during the Q&A session after the presentations, a student asked the panelists if they thought the experience of conducting real, original research had been worth it. They all thought it was, and urged other English majors to seek out similar opportunities, and Adam in particular enthused about how much fun it can be to get past the intimidation factor of reading secondary scholarship and about how the experience of becoming and expert changes your disposition toward reading and knowledge for the better. This is a really important point, and it certainly gets at the heart of what I want our majors to get from their studies. Adam, though, was also much funnier than I'm being, and I have an image to prove it. Here is a photograph of the other panelists reacting to him at what I think was this very moment:

This is one of those times where I'm proud to be part of our department--of our students and of the teachers that have helped to pique their curiosity and to guide their work. I'd also like to say thanks here (and congrats) to the student presenters, and thanks too to Adrienne Pickett, Lori Newcomb, and members of the English Student Leadership Council for organizing the event.

The Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

2011-04-15T10:52:00.001-07:00

Justine Murison came by my office this morning with an advance copy of her new book, The Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Hot off the presses! And so beautiful!

The book is published by Cambridge University Press as part of a very distinguished series: Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture. Here is the book description, pasted in from the CUP website:

"For much of the nineteenth century, the nervous system was a medical mystery, inspiring scientific studies and exciting great public interest. Because of this widespread fascination, the nerves came to explain the means by which mind and body related to each other. By the 1830s, the nervous system helped Americans express the consequences on the body, and for society, of major historical changes. Literary writers, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe, used the nerves as a metaphor to re-imagine the role of the self amidst political, social and religious tumults, including debates about slavery and the revivals of the Second Great Awakening. Representing the 'romance' of the nervous system and its cultural impact thoughtfully and, at times, critically, the fictional experiments of this century helped construct and explore a neurological vision of the body and mind. Murison explains the impact of neurological medicine on nineteenth-century literature and culture."

Great news for a rainy Friday. Congratulations, Justine!

Kevin T. Early Memorial Scholarship

2011-04-08T09:54:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week I met with Yarah Kudaimi, the winner of this year's Kevin T. Early Memorial Scholarship. This award, given in honor of Kevin T. Early, who was a promising young poet, goes annually to recognize the best poetry submitted by a U of I Freshman. Submissions (a total of 38 this year) are judged anonymously by members of our creative writing faculty.

It is a treat for me to be able to speak with each year's winner, because good, young poets are pretty much guaranteed to be thoughtful, interesting people. Ms. Kudaimi, who has not yet declared a major, is certainly no exception to this rule. She reads Arabic, for example, and when I asked her what poets she liked to read she mentioned Charles Simic right away. How many Freshman have a favorite contemporary poet, I wonder? Is this some new trend?

Ms. Kudaimi also struck me as very self-possessed: in addition to telling me who she liked to read, she asked me who I enjoy reading (I told her, for those keeping score at home, that I liked Christopher Marlowe, James Wright, and Wallace Stevens). The faculty judge of this contest praised Kudaimi's poems for their "clear voice, compelling detail," and "sense of lived experience." Also for their concision, their avoidance of abstraction, and their "well-shaped" lines. Very Impressive, all around. So: congratulations!

The Lying Brain: Lie Detection in Science and Science Fiction

2011-04-03T10:54:00.000-07:00

It has been a couple of weeks since I've posted here, and I want to apologize for that. I do try to keep this updated pretty regularly, and the department certainly provides me with ample material. First we had Spring Break and then I came down with a cold, and between those two things I have been swimming upstream trying to catch up. That said, I think you'll agree that I'm returning with a bang.

***

I am very pleased to announce here the arrival of the first advanced copies of Melissa Littlefield's new book The Lying Brain: Lie Detection in Science and Science Fiction, which has just been printed by the University of Michigan Press. I have a copy of this book with me right now, and it looks beautiful!

Here is the book description, pasted in the press's website:

"Real and imagined machines, including mental microscopes, thought translators, and polygraphs, have long promised to detect deception in human beings. Now, via fMRI and EEG, neuroscientists seem to have found what scientists, lawyers, and law enforcement officials have sought for over a century: foolproof lie detection. But are these new lie detection technologies any different from their predecessors? The Lying Brain is the first book to explore the cultural history of an array of lie detection technologies: their ideological assumptions, the scientific and fictional literatures that create and market them, and the literacies required for their interpretation.

By examining a rich archive of materials about lie detection—from science to science fiction—The Lying Brain demonstrates the interconnections of science, literature, and popular culture in the development and dissemination of deception detection in the American cultural imagination. As Melissa Littlefield demonstrates, neuroscience is not building a more accurate lie detector; it is simply recycling centuries-old ideologies about deception and its detection."

Littlefield--who also has an appointment in the Department of Kinesiology and Community Health--here uses the analytical tools associated with literary and cultural analysis in order to examine how scientific thinking around the fantasy of lie detection gets shaped and disseminated within various scientific and popular discourses. This work puts Littlefield at the leading edge of an emergent field of humanistic inquiry that I would characterize as a real departmental strength: Literature and Science. It is especially appropriate for us to be strong in this area, too, given the longstanding tradition of excellence in science and engineering fields here at The University of Illinois.

Congratulations, Melissa!

Next of Kin wins NACCS book award!

2011-03-16T12:22:00.000-07:00

I am very, very, very pleased to be able to announce here that Ricky Rodriguez's book Next of Kin: The Family in Chicano/a Cultural Politics has won the 2011 National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Book Award.

This, dear reader, is a Big Deal. If you think about it, to win a book award given out by a major scholarly organization like the NACCS is about as clear-cut an indicator of academic distinction in a given field as one can imagine.

I am really happy about this on a professional level because this sort of book award is a great honor for Professor Rodriguez and--by extension--for all of us. But even more than that, I'm pleased on a personal level because (as anyone who knows Ricky would agree), this simply couldn't have happened to a kinder or more conscientious person.

The award will be announced officially at an NACCS luncheon on April 2 in Pasadena. But I'm told that we're allowed to spill the beans early, and I wanted to share this piece of good news with absolutely everyone as soon as possible.

More good news about teaching excellence in English

2011-03-14T09:02:00.000-07:00

A little over a month ago, dear reader, you will recall that I used this forum to kvell about about Catharine Gray, John Rubins, and Mary Unger, all of whom had just been awarded LAS teaching awards.

Well, now I'm happy to redouble the fanfare: all three of them have also been awarded campus-level teaching awards for excellence in undergraduate education!

With so much good news on the teaching front to report, a blogger like me needs some new adjectives and exclamations to liven things up. Otherwise we might start suffering from congratulations fatigue syndrome. So here's a little something I recently learned to say by listening to my pre-teen son and his classmates: "that's beast!"

Or, for the older set: well done, people, and congratulations!

***

Meanwhile, there is a nice story in the most recent LAS News about the Center for Writing Studies (a center with close ties to Writing Studies in English) that readers of this blog may also find interesting.

Incomplete List for Fall 2010

2011-03-07T14:01:00.001-08:00

Stop me if you've heard this one before.

Every semester, when our campus's Center for Teaching Excellence releases its "List of Faculty Ranked as Excellent by their Students" for the previous semester, I post here a list of the instructional faculty in English who show up on it. The CTE's lists are compiled on the basis of student evaluation data, and though this is only one way of measuring instructional excellence they serve as a traditional campus benchmark for effective teaching. These lists used to be called "The Incomplete List" by the CTE in acknowledgment that there are some classes for which student data may not be available. That is no longer the official name, but it is still the local lingo.

Student evaluation data tells you something, but it obviously doesn't tell you everything about an instructor. Think about it: being the most popular teacher is not necessarily the same thing as being the best at sparking thought or at getting students to advance their thinking about complex topics. Still, this has become one of my favorite posts to compile each semester. It inevitably contains graduate students, Instructors, Lecturers, and tenure-stream faculty of all ranks, and it features people who have taught Business and Technical Writing, Creative Writing, English, and Rhetoric classes. What I like about my own incomplete list, in short, is its inevitable heterogeneity, which I think of (each time I compile one) as a testimony to the depth and breadth of good teaching that goes on here each and every semester.

So, without further ado... Here are the English instructors listed on the so-called Incomplete list for Fall 2010:

Sarah Alderfer, Claire Barber, Iryce Baron, Ben Bascom, Anustup Basu, Manisha Basu, T.J. Boynton, Stephanie Brabant, Aaron Burch, Martin Camargo, J. B. Capino, Sarah Cassinelli, Cody Caudill, Alexandra Cavallaro, Debojoy Chanda, Megan Condis, Bethany Cooper, Mary Rose Cottingham, Eleanor Courtemanche, Steve Davenport, Sarah Dennis, Carrie Dickison, Lindsey Drager, Dennis Dullea, J. Patrick Fadely, Jill Fitzgerald, Sara Gelston, Shawn Gilmore, Philip Graham, Catharine Gray, Sarah Gray, John Griswold, Baron Haber, Jill Hamilton, Jim Hansen, Gail Hapke, Gail Hawisher, Ashley Hetrick, Marilyn Holguin, Ann Hubert, Terra Joseph, Melissa Larabee, Linda Larsen, Jennifer Lieberman, Mary Lindsey, Tania Lown-Hecht, Michael Madonick, Vicki Mahaffey, Kaitlin Marks-Dubbs, Julie McCormick, Erin McQuiston, David Morris, Andrew Moss, Justine Murison, Esther Nadolski, Cary Nelson, Andrea Olinger, Lisa Oliverio, Robert Dale Parker, Julie Price, Franklin Ridgway, Jenica Roberts, Ricky Rodriguez, Michael Rothberg, Vanessa Rouillon, John Rubins, Julia Saville, E. Jordan Sellers, Frank Sheets, Katherine Skwarczek, Siobhan Somerville, Crystal Thomas, Renee Trilling, Kate Vieira, Jonathan Vincent, Jason Vradenburg, Kathryn Walkiewicz, Rebecca Weber, Kyle Williams, Daniel Wong, Elaine Wood.

Congratulations, everyone, and (on behalf of our students) thanks!

Hot Links

2011-03-02T10:47:00.000-08:00

I wanted to quickly post two links here.

The first is to a news story written by our University's news bureau about Robert Dale Parker's book Changing is Not Vanishing. I posted an announcement about the book in this space a month or so ago, but I'd recommend that you take a look at this story too: in addition to an interesting account of the book's generation, it has a very handsome picture of Bob.

The second link is to the American Council of Learned Societies website, and in particular to their page announcing the Collaborative Research Fellowships awarded for 2011. There you will find an abstract of the project that our own Michael Rothberg will be working on next year along with two collaborators. Or you could just click here for abstract of the project. ACLS funding is highly competitive, so I'm proud on behalf of the department to be able to post this information here.

Women Writers of the American West, 1833-1927

2011-02-28T14:22:00.000-08:00

A new book from Nina Baym--who is, ahem, Swanlund Chair and Center for Advanced Study Professor English Emerita, and Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences--is an important event in American studies. So I'm very, very pleased to be able to post here about the arrival of Women Writers of the American West, 1833-1927, Baym's new book, which has just been printed by the University of Illinois Press. You can order if from the press by clicking the hyperlink above, or you can order it from Amazon here (though they list March 1 as the release date).

Here is the book description, pasted in from the Press' website:

"Women Writers of the American West, 1833–1927 recovers the names and works of hundreds of women who wrote about the American West during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some of them long forgotten and others better known novelists, poets, memoirists, and historians such as Willa Cather and Mary Austin Holley. Nina Baym mined literary and cultural histories, anthologies, scholarly essays, catalogs, advertisements, and online resources to debunk critical assumptions that women did not publish about the West as much as they did about other regions. Elucidating a substantial body of nearly 650 books of all kinds by more than 300 writers, Baym reveals how the authors showed women making lives for themselves in the West, how they represented the diverse region, and how they represented themselves.

Baym accounts for a wide range of genres and geographies, affirming that the literature of the West was always more than cowboy tales and dime novels. Nor did the West consist of a single landscape, as women living in the expanses of Texas saw a different world from that seen by women in gold rush California. Although many women writers of the American West accepted domestic agendas crucial to the development of families, farms, and businesses, they also found ways to be forceful agents of change, whether by taking on political positions, deriding male arrogance, or, as their voluminous published works show, speaking out when they were expected to be silent."

Congratulations, Nina!

Two events from last week.

2011-02-22T07:55:00.000-08:00

Just a quick post about two departmental events this past week, each of which highlights in a different way the vibrancy of the work that goes on here. No pictures this time, I'm sad to say.

First, last Tuesday we held our third annual Kirkpatrick Symposium. This event--which is made possible by the extraordinary generosity of Clayton and Thelma Kirkpatrick--typically features three speakers from very different areas of the department who each present work-in-progress keyed to a single core theme. This Spring's keyword was adaptation, and attendees were treated to three fascinating papers from different disciplinary perspectives that all dealt in different ways with questions pertaining to questions of cultural adaptation (the word's evolutionary meaning was not on the front burner in the talks, but was brought forward in the Q&A afterward).

I don't want to do an injustice to my colleagues by offering clunky summaries of elegant arguments, but perhaps I can offer just a taste. Anustup Basu presented a very entertaining account, complete with movie posters, of how stories from western literature and film (from Shakespeare to Tango and Cash) had to be adapted to make sense within pre-Bollywood Indian cinema. Then Kate Vieira offered a portion of an ethnographic study she is working on concerning literacy and assimilation in two groups of Portuguese-speaking immigrants in a town in Massachusetts. Finally, Janice Harrington presented some poems that she is working on that deal with the life and art of Horace Pippin, and that foregrounded questions about his adaptation and about the kinds of adaptation and accommodation involved in the process of writing poetry inspired by such a figure. All three were fascinating, and very well-received. speaking as a literary critic myself, it is really a treat to hear smart presentations presented from withing the other disciplines--in this case, Cinema Studies, Writing Studies, and Creative Writing--that we have in English here. Thanks, too, to Susan Koshy for moderating.

I was myself unable to attend the second of the events I wanted to mention here--this is a university where there are always too many events to keep up with!--but I wanted to highlight it here nevertheless because it suggests something about the liveliness of our graduate program and about graduate student/faculty interactions in our department. On Saturday, the British Modernities Group held a graduate student conference on "New 'British' Geographies." You can see the program here (and note that this event was co-sponsored by the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory).

The Kirkpatrick Symposium plays a special role in our department's seasonal round, and happens only once a year. And though there are several faculty/grad student working groups in the department, it is not every day that one of them hosts a conference like the one last weekend. But it is by no means unusual for us to have several enticing talks and panels on offer during a given week. In fact, that is pretty much the norm here, thanks to the aforementioned Unit, the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, the Trowbridge Office on American Literature (run by Gordon Hutner) and all of the myriad events run by other humanities departments on campus and other affiliated programs.

I was told, when I first visited this campus in Spring 2006, that there were always so many intellectual events on campus that nobody could even keep up. That has certainly turned out to be true, in my experience, and we wouldn't have it any other way.

English Students' Resource Week

2011-02-14T10:53:00.000-08:00

If you've been in the English Building lately you've probably seen the posters for last week's English Students' Resource Week, a series of events set up by members of the English Student Leadership Council along with Lori Newcomb and Adrienne Pickett. A great idea, really: a set of events designed to spread information about campus and departmental resources specifically of use to our majors and also to spark conversations about how to get the most out of the undergraduate English major experience.

I was fortunate enough to be able to participate in one of the events, on Wednesday afternoon. Billed as a panel session on "Faculty Advice for English Majors," this was an event at the UIUC bookstore in which a panel of 5 English faculty members (including yours truly) spoke informally with students about teaching and learning in English. What this means in practice is that we all spoke about our teaching and research lives a bit, and discussed topics about the major and the discipline raised by student questions: how should students best use office hours? What is a professor's work week like? What makes a good student paper? What is the future of the job market for English PhD's looking like? What classes do professors enjoy teaching and why? That sort of thing. If you have a Facebook account, you can see a very short snippet of the event here, just to get the flavor. The picture at the top of this post is a shot of the panelists from this event, as is this one:

If you can watch the clip, you'll see that my colleagues (J.B. Capino, Janice Harrington, Justine Murison, and Kate Vieira) were totally charming (of course!). And I thought it was especially valuable for some of our students to have the chance to hear how their teachers think and talk about their classes.

The faculty are, of course, one resource for our students. Other events highlighted other kinds of resources for students, including each other. One of the events, accordingly, was designed to give English majors a chance to share each other's advice and experience without any faculty or advising office involvement at all. There was also a session designed to bring undergrads and graduate students into dialogue, and another more purely informational session designed to let students know about pre-professional and other resources available to students on our campus.

I think the members of the English Student Leadership Council have done something really wonderful here. Not only because of all the sage and practical advise that was given and taken last week, but also, and more generally, because these events all have the potential to adjust the way all sorts of people in the department understand what it means to be part of a large department. That is: we are all resources for each other, because none of us can teach or learn in a vacuum. Thanks to the members of the ESLC, thanks to Lori and Adrienne, and thanks to everyone who participated in one or another of these events. Let's do it again sometime!

LAS Teaching Awards

2011-02-07T07:41:00.000-08:00

If you are a regular visitor to this blog, you will know that I often use this space to kvell about the excellence of our department's teaching. As I see it, we are a department committed to the idea that innovative research and superb teaching go hand in hand--that our best teachers are energized by active research agendas, that is, that engagement with smart students can be a spur to scholarship or creative activity. This, I believe, should be true for any department in a great public research university.

Anyway, this is all just preamble to announcing the latest installment of good news confirming the teaching chops of our faculty. This year, I am very pleased to say, we have had a winner in each of the three categories in which the college of Liberal Arts and Sciences gives out Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching awards. So, without further ado, I am pleased to share the following:

Catharine Gray has won an LAS Dean's Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

John Rubins has won an LAS Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching by Instructional Staff.

And Mary Unger has won an LAS Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching by Graduate Teaching Assistants.

Congratulations, all. And thanks, too, on behalf of our students!

Radio Free AWP

2011-01-31T09:25:00.000-08:00

The AWP meeting is the big, annual conference of creative writing programs. It features readings, paper sessions, hobnobbing, a large and various book exhibit, interviewing for jobs, etc. This is a big and growing deal: there are now something on the order of 500 college- and university-based creative writing programs in the country, and a correspondingly large number of faculty members and students.

For a literary scholar like myself, this is off the beaten path. I go every year to the big Modern Language Association conference--a gathering of 8,000-10,000 literary scholars in English and other languages--but I would not have known about AWP had I not become head of a department with an associated MFA program. The MLA conference gets a certain amount of press coverage each year, and I've been joking that this year there seems to be an unspoken journalistic agreement that all MLA-related stories must feature at least two faculty members from our department. This year, though, as the AWP continues to grow in importance, John Griswold--aka, Oronte Churm--is bringing the media spotlight to AWP.

He's calling it "Radio Free AWP" on his Inside Higher Ed blog, and I'll let him explain:

"Please tune in here, this Wednesday through Saturday, to click-and-listen to two-dozen free podcasts by big-time poets, writers, and editors.[...] Radio Free AWP will coincide with the annual conference of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, which supports more than '34,000 writers at over 500 member colleges & universities and 100 writers' conferences & centers.' This year the conference is in Washington, DC, home of Inside Higher Ed, and with IHE’s help I’m using this opportunity to connect writers and readers, wherever they are.

It’s true pirate radio, internet-style, with some of my literary friends and friends-of-friends generously donating their words and time for your listening pleasure. The readings and discussions range widely, from a short story recorded professionally in the studio of some guy named Ira who evidently has an interest in American lives, to a self-produced audio essay recorded on location in Africa, to what sounds like a writer who's broken into your kitchen late at night to drink your bourbon and pet your dog, and when you discover him there he tells you a crazy-funny tale about the Russian mob stealing a river."

So there you have it. Not only a way to keep up with the AWP as it happens, but a way to do so without actually sharing your bourbon. Tune in!

Robert Markley, the new W. D. & Sara E. Trowbridge Professor

2011-01-25T12:53:00.000-08:00

I'm very happy to be able to announce here that my colleague Bob Markley is—as of this past January 1--the newly appointed W. D. & Sara E. Trowbridge Professor.

This kind of named and endowed Professorship is one of the highest honors a scholar can receive, and to be appointed to a position like this at a top research university like the University of Illinois amounts to an acknowledgment that the recipient is a scholar of extraordinary talent and achievement, a recognized national and international leader in his or her field of study. Such awards also typically come with a research budget that—while perhaps modest in comparison with the kinds of research funds sometimes available to leading scientists on campus—is a tremendous boon to an ambitious research scholar in the humanities, facilitating travel, the purchase of books and equipment, and perhaps even the services of a research assistant.

So much for the general. Now on to the particular: Bob Markley.

Note: this is the part where my rhetorical objective is basically to make the person I'm writing about blush!

Professor Markley joined the faculty here, at the rank of Professor, in 2003. He was, at that time, already a well-known senior scholar in the field of 18th century British literature and culture, with two important single-author books to his credit (not to mention twelve edited and co-edited books and journal special issues, and too many articles and book-chapters for me to have the patience even to count). He brought with him, as this record suggests, an extraordinary depth and breadth of knowledge concerning 18th century literature and culture, and he had already published quite a bit in the newer sub-discipline of literature and science, too, building off of expertise developed while writing his 1993 book Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation in Newtonian England, 1660-1740 (Cornell UP).

Skipping forward to the present: Markley is now a recognized leader in the field of science and literature, and he publishes, mentors graduate students, and wins competitive grants in an amazingly wide range of traditional and emergent fields within English studies. In addition to expertise on a very broad range of seventeenth- as well as eighteenth-century writers, for instance, and he has staked out territory in several burgeoning areas of critical inquiry including science studies, cultural climate history, new media studies, and digital humanities. This versatility makes him extremely valuable to the department and to faculties of other adjacent fields, as he is able to teach and mentor in such a wide range of interdisciplinary areas.

Markley’s 2005 book—Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination (Duke UP)—marked an impressive foray entirely outside the area of 18^th century studies. It treats the idea of Mars as a focal point for utopian imaginings and for the projection of ecological fears, examining texts and contexts ranging from seventeenth-century astronomical thought though modern science fiction novels and NASA mission planning. This well-received book further established Markley as a leading figure in the field of science and literature. And meanwhile, the publication of his book The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600 to 1730 (Cambridge UP, 2006) further extended Professor Markley's reputation as a leading scholar in early modern studies. Contesting the dominant paradigm of Eurocentric research in English departments, Markley's book places Asia—especially China and Japan—at the crux of an early modern global system, showing how European-based writers confronted the economic, cultural, and technological dominance of the East.

Whew!

But wait, there's more!

Professor Markley has also been editor of the journal The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation since 1982 (when I was still in high school, for crying out loud!), and between that and his editorial work on numerous essay collections and journal volumes he has helped publish the research of hundreds of other scholars along the way. He is also a very gifted and charismatic teacher in all of his many fields, a fixture for instance on the so-called Incomplete List that our Center for Teaching Excellence publishes each semester to recognize instructors who have been rated excellent by their students. Professor Markley regularly mentors a huge number of graduate students in our PhD program, and as department head I can say that he carries out his share of departmental service work with great professionalism and skill.

Obviously, I could go on and on here. So here's the short form: this is a colleague whose record of achievement is eminently worthy of the recognition it has now received. So congratulations, Bob, on this richly-deserved honor!

New 9L has arrived

2011-01-19T09:08:00.000-08:00

The Fall/Winter issue of Ninth Letter arrived in my mailbox earlier this week, replete as always with eye-catching layouts and intriguing poems and prose-pieces. I've always been interested in contemporary poetry, and so it is no surprise that I especially liked reading this issue's poetry, which is sometimes direct, sometimes resonantly oblique, and sometimes even funny. There is a complete listing of the contents of the new issue here, at the 9L website. It is also worth checking out the blog that the intrepid Ninth Letterers maintain. And if you have not yet subscribed you can do so here.

In the meantime, let me leave you with this photo of the new cover and layout. Since an insert covers up a portion of the cover, let me say this: issue 7.2 comes with a bellybutton, but without lint.

Changing is not vanishing

2011-01-04T15:45:00.000-08:00

I am delighted to ring in the new year by announcing the publication of Robert Dale Parker's important new book Changing is Not Vanishing: A Collection of American Indian Poetry to 1930 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. I have not had a chance to read it yet, but I've been waiting for this book to come out ever since I heard it was in the works. It strikes me as a really major, field-changing piece of scholarship. Here is the book description, pasted in from the U Penn Press website:

"Until now, the study of American Indian literature has tended to concentrate on contemporary writing. Although the field has grown rapidly, early works—especially poetry—remain mostly unknown and inaccessible. Changing Is Not Vanishing reinvents the early history of American Indian literature and the history of American poetry by presenting a vast but forgotten archive of American Indian poems. Through extensive archival research in small-circulation newspapers and magazines, manuscripts, pamphlets, forgotten rare books, and scrapbooks, Robert Dale Parker has uncovered the work of more than 140 early Indian poets who wrote before 1930.

Changing Is Not Vanishing includes poems by 82 writers and provides a full bibliography of all the poets Parker has identified—most of them unknown even to specialists in Indian literature. In a wide range of approaches and styles, the poems in this collection address such topics as colonialism and the federal government, land, politics, nature, love, war, Christianity, and racism. With a richly informative introduction and extensive annotation, Changing Is Not Vanishing opens the door to a treasure trove of fascinating, powerful poems that will be required reading for all scholars and readers of American poetry and American Indian literature."

This is BIG, people. It is not everyday that a scholar gets to publish a book that is absolutely guaranteed to reshape its field.

This book extends the recovery project inaugurated by Parker's 2008 book, The Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky: The Writings of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, which made available for the first time the complete oeuvre of the earliest known American Indian literary writer.

Since I expect this book to make major waves in the field of American Indian literary studies, I'd also like to take its publication as an occasion to brag for a moment about our depth in this scholarly field. With Parker, Jodi Byrd, LeAnne Howe, and Robert Warrior (who is also director of Illinois's excellent American Indian Studies Program), we absolutely have one of the very best faculties in this area in the country. So: if you are thinking about where to do graduate work in American Indian literary studies, or if you are a faculty member at some other institution and you find yourself advising somebody with an interest in this field, we should definitely be on the short list of places to apply.

Happy 2011, y'all. And congratulations, Bob, on the culmination of so much hard work.

Gail Hawisher

2010-12-21T09:06:00.000-08:00

As 2010 gives way to 2011, our numbers will be reduced by one. Professor Gail Hawisher, who has been on the faculty here since 1990, is retiring at the end of this semester. So in the new year, if you see her, you can call her Professor Emerita Gail Hawisher. On the one hand, congratulations are in order: I know Gail is looking forward to this next phase, and I bet she'll be enjoying herself quite a bit this coming semester! On the other hand, it does feel to me like a loss for the department, even though she will continue for the foreseeable future to help with the mentoring of our graduate students in Writing Studies. I guess what I'm saying is this, at the end of the day: send your congratulations to her and your condolences to me!

Gail has been a national leader in the field of Writing Studies--or rhetoric and composition as it is often called elsewhere--during a period in which that field has become increasingly important to English Departments all over the country. Our program is very highly regarded (and rightly so!), and this is due in no small part to Gail's efforts both within the institution and as a representative of it on the national scene.

Gail's work centers around computers and pedagogy, and her scholarly record is very impressive indeed: she has been involved in 10 different collaborative book projects and his author or co-author of more than 55 articles and book chapters. Additionally, her record of professional service is, frankly, awesome: for example, she has been involved in many, many program reviews, has given invited lectures and talks at universities all over the country, and has been co-editor of a major journal in the field as well as of a highly-regarded book series.

Her contributions within the institution are also important and wide-ranging. In addition to her work as Director of the Center for Writing Studies, she secured funding for and helped found the University of Illinois Writing Project, a federally funded professional development program for teachers at all levels and in all disciplines meant to encourage and support the teaching of writing. Her excellent teaching has been honored with college and campus-wide teaching awards, and at least fifteen of her former PhD students are currently employed in tenure track academic jobs.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Professor Emerita Hawisher for all of her many, many contributions to department over the years, and of course to wish her all the best in the coming years, too.

Grant getters.

2010-12-09T13:02:00.001-08:00

I am writing, dear reader, to share two quick stories about grant-funded research in English.

The first concerns Ramona Curry, who I've just learned has been awarded a pretty significant grant from the NEH that will go to support her over the next year as she labors to complete a book project entitled Trading in Cultural Spaces: How Chinese Film Came to America.

This is a very meticulously researched project that deals with cinematic cultural exchange in a manner that challenges some of the prevailing wisdom about US cinema's growing global reach and hegemony. It does so by examining (to quote from her proposal) "the trans-Pacific flow of Chinese movies into and within the U.S" via "intra-regional and community-based media circuits around the globe." "From the early 20th century," Curry argues, "such films have challenged stereotypes and forged avenues for cross-cultural exchange."

"By recovering multiple Chinese American and supporting voices, images and multicultural networks," Curry adds, Trading in Cultural Spaces "aims to refocus cinema history on its prior margins, [and] to enrich transnational and national film and social histories."

This will obviously be an important book in the field of cinema studies. The NEH funding that the project has received is given in acknowledgment of the importance of the work. Please join me in congratulating Ramona!

***

I also can't resist posting this link, to a brief account of some grant-funded research conducted recently by a team of researchers including our own Melissa Littefield. Here is the description of the project from the website I've linked to above:

"Between November 30th and December 3rd 2010, an inter-disciplinary and internationally-collaborative experimental team met at CFIN to complete an experimental study funded by the European Neuroscience and Society Network and with scanning facilities and overheads provided by the Center for Integrative Neuroscience (CFIN/MINDLab).

The purpose of the experiment was to consider whether or not there was a neurological correlation between 'deception' and 'socially-stressful truth-telling' (i.e. evaluative statements that may cause dissonance in relationships between two or more people). During deception, activity has been seen in several areas of the brain (the anterior cingulated cortex, the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex; and sometimes the insula). Truth-telling, however, has often been used as a baseline for these studies - an experimental condition for which there is little additional brain activation. The researchers hypothesized that brain areas often associated with inhibition, recall, decision making, and executive function may be similarly active during deception and and socially-stressful truth-telling. Their experimental design created a situation in which to test the outcomes of socially-stressful truth-telling.

The experiment was conducted by Melissa M. Littlefield (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Des Fitzgerald (London School of Economics and Political Science), and James Tonks (University of Exeter), with local collaborators Martin Dietz, Kasper Knudsen and Andreas Roepstorff. With scanning now complete, data analysis will begin in the new year, and results should be reported shortly thereafter."

Now, I believe I know what you are thinking, dear reader, even without scanning your brain. You're wondering why an English professor is doing this kind of experiment in the first place!

The answer is that Littlefield, who holds a joint appointment in English and in the department of Kinesiology and Community Health, writes on literature, science, and culture and in particular on the creation and circulation of the cultural fantasy that technoligically-enabled lie-detection might serve as an efficacious a forensic tool or as a way to plumb the depths of human character. This experiment, I imagine, will help frame her arguments by helping to establish a baseline concerning what actually is and is not possible in the realm of driven lie-detection via fMRI technology.

Pretty cool!

***

We are not, for the most part, a big grant-getting department. Most of the research we do is relatively inexpensive--we need a) our archives and b) time--and so we really do not need access to anything like the massive system of federal and foundation grants characteristic of the world of science research nowadays. But for this very reason--because grantsmanship is not really part of our academic culture--it is very impressive to me when our faculty do secure external funding for their work. So I want to take this opportunity to congratulate both Ramona and Melissa for their successful efforts in this regard.

Mock on, mock on...

2010-12-06T07:35:00.000-08:00

Last Thursday evening the department held its annual mock-interview extravaganza, an evening event in which PhD students seeking jobs have the opportunity to role-play the job interview with at least two different interview teams made up of the department's faculty members. This year, the event was arranged by Tony Pollock, our superb Director of Graduate Studies, who divvied faculty into teams of two and scheduled mock interviews for our job seekers.

For those who do not know, faculty hiring in English departments typically involves a high-stakes 30-40 minute interview at our national conference in which search committees ask prospective hires about their research and teaching. This is a very nerve-wracking process (I speak from personal experience) because it feels so artificial: the ability to sound poised under great pressure while talking to strangers does not necessarily correlate to any of the things that successful faculty members do on a day-to-day basis, and it feels as though you can blow years of hard work by having a single inarticulate moment in an interview. Most of these interviews follow a somewhat predictable template that includes questions about the current research project and questions about different kinds of teaching. And since there is some formula to this, it helps a great deal to have the chance to rehearse. Otherwise, by the time you figure out how to interview properly you can have wasted some valuable opportunities.

I love this event--which I privately think of as mockapalooza--for a number of reasons. For one thing, it is kind of fun to do the role-playing. For another, it is interesting for me to see what PhD students in other areas of the department are doing. If the students that the team of Perry and Courtemanche mock-interviewed this year are any indication, we have some wonderful people seeking jobs. More generally, I think this is one of the events where our department is at its very best as a community. It is heartening to see so many faculty members (almost half of the department) coming into the English Building after dinner on a chilly winter evening to help graduate students prepare.

Thanks, Tony, for your organizational work. And thanks to all of the faculty members who participated this year. Best of luck to our job-seeking PhD students--may you all have the interview experiences you deserve this January in LA!

News stories

2010-11-29T12:43:00.000-08:00

Just a quick post today, with some links to a couple of news stories of local interest.

***

The first has to do with a study of job satisfaction among pre-tenure faculty members that was recently released by the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE), a 160-member consortium based at Harvard's Graduate School of Education. As has been described recently in both The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed, the University of Illinois was identified as an institution that rates highly overall for its treatment of junior faculty members, and especially well for the way it enables junior faculty members to find a good, healthy balance between the demands of work and the maintenance of home life outside of the University. In this category, in fact, the University of Illinois was singled out as one of four institutional exemplars representing best practices among doctoral/research institutions.

This is not specific to the English department per se, but I would like to think that we do our part to contribute to campus's generally humane work environment. We hire fantastic people when we get to hire, and so there is nothing more important to the long-term well-being of our department than our ability to foster talent and to help people develop satisfying lives and careers here. What the COACHE study makes clear is that our local, departmental efforts in this regard are indeed well supported by a larger campus culture aimed at making it possible for faculty members to flourish.

***

My second news item has to do with Richard Powers, who was awarded one of this year's Liberal Arts and Sciences Alumni Awards at a lovely Alumni Association event a month or so ago. I'm linking here to the account of the event in the most recent LAS newsletter, and here to the biography of Powers associated with this story.

Nobody who lives and works around the English department needs to be reminded of how wonderful Powers is or how lucky we all are to have him as a colleague, but more far-flung readers of this blog will certainly enjoy the capsule biography of Powers and also of the three other impressive LAS alumni award winners. This is the third year running that there has been an English alum among the college's annual alumni awards, and each year I have been very honored and humbled to attend the Alumni Association event and to represent my department in the presence of such amazing and accomplished people.

English Student Leadership Council

2010-11-18T07:17:00.000-08:00

This past Tuesday, members of the English Student Leadership Council held a successful meet-and-greet event all afternoon in the atrium of the English building. To mark the event, they also had T-shirts made, such as the one pictured here on a rather dumpy middle-aged torso belonging (ahem) to the head of the English department:

Anyone who entered the building on Tuesday must have been aware of the event, because there were eye-catching posters everywhere, and this is only the latest indication of this year's ESLC's remarkable ambition and energy. We have some wonderful students in this group this year, and some wonderful leadership, too, from Adrienne Pickett and Lori Newcomb.

This group's main purpose is simply to enrich the experience of English majors, and part of what that means is trying to find ways to create departmental community for those who want it. We're a big department with many, many majors. And that means that it can be a challenge for our students who want to be part of a more tight-knit community to find each other. At the organizational meeting I attended earlier this Fall, members of this year's ESLC clearly expressed a desire to work towards community-building, and their labors are now bearing fruit. There is an ESLC Facebook page now to facilitate communication; the meet-and-greet event gave others in the department a chance to get involved; and members have organized and participated in a number of smaller-profile events designed to take advantage of the many cultural resources available on campus. Most recently, ESLC members organized a group outing to hear Dave Eggers speak in conjunction with the selection of his book Zeitoun for our "One Book, One Campus" program. And to speak with Eggers, too, as this picture demonstrates:

Here's why I love what the ESLC is doing: we provide our students with excellent classroom instruction, of course, but humanities scholarship is ultimately meant to be more than just something you master in a classroom. The kinds of thinking and learning we try to teach should ultimately be equipment for living, and anything that allows students to develop for themselves a fuller, more holistic relationship to their major or that makes it easier for them to take ownership of their own identities as intellectuals is, in my view, priceless.

Because English at Illinois is a large major in a large college on a large campus, it can all feel relatively impersonal at times. But by the same token, our size means that there are all kinds of smart people around to get to know and a huge wealth of relevant activities on campus to take advantage of. Part of the challenge of the university experience for our students has to do with finding personal interests, forging affiliations, and generally figuring out how the college experience matters for them in particular. Even though the members of ESLC might not see what they are doing in these terms--they might even dislike my avuncular tone here, for all I know--I'm grateful to them for creating a venue that will help many of our students to better negotiate this all-important challenge.

Dream Factories of a Former Colony: American Fantasies, Philippine Cinema

2010-11-11T13:44:00.000-08:00

I am very pleased to be able to announce here the publication of Jose B. Capino's new book Dream Factories of a Former Colony: American Fantasies, Philippine Cinema. I ran into J.B. earlier this afternoon, when he had just received his first copies from University of Minnesota Press. Though Amazon.com lists a publication date next week, the book has officially been printed. Congratulations, J.B.!

Here is the book description, pasted in from the press' website:

"Philippine cinema, the dream factory of the former U.S. colony, teems with American figures and plots. Local movies feature GIs seeking Filipina brides, cold war spies hunting down native warlords, and American-born Filipinos wandering in the parental homeland. The American landscape furnishes the settings for the triumphs and tragedies of Filipino nurses, GI babies, and migrant workers.

By tracking American fantasies in Philippine movies from the postindependence period to the present, José B. Capino offers an innovative account of cinema’s cultural work in decolonization and globalization. Capino examines how a third world nation’s daydreams both articulate empire and mobilize against it, provide imaginary maps and fables of identity for its migrant workers and diasporan subjects, pose challenges to the alibis of patriarchy and nationalism, and open paths for participating in the cultures of globality.

Through close readings of more than twenty Philippine movies, Capino demonstrates the postcolonial imagination’s vital role in generating pragmatic and utopian visions of living with empire. Illuminating an important but understudied cinema, he creates a model for understanding the image of the United States in the third world."

Mellon grant for text-mining

2010-10-29T11:18:00.000-07:00

The following is a slightly truncated version of a press release that can be found in its entirety here. It features our own Ted Underwood (as well as John Unsworth, who is an affiliate of English even though his appointment is in the Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences).

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GSLIS Dean John Unsworth, English Department faculty member Ted Underwood, and a team of fellow researchers have received a two-year grant to explore text-mining as a tool for understanding the humanities. Unsworth will serve as co-principal investigator along with Michael Welge, director of the Automated Learning Group at Illinois's National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and Stanford University Librarian Mike Keller will serve as principal investigator. Matthew Jockers, at Stanford University, will serve as Project Director.

Awarded in the amount of $761,000 by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the grant will fund use cases by participants at four universities: Dan Cohen, from the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University; Ted Underwood, from the English Department at the University of Illinois; Tanya Clement, Associate Director of Digital Cultures and Creativity at the University of Maryland; and Franco Moretti, the Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University.

Goals of the project include sharing research findings through peer-reviewed publications in print and online, as well as the further development of infrastructure for text-mining.

The main emphasis will be on developing, coordinating, and investigating research questions posed by the participating humanities scholars. Examples include exploring questions related to the evolution of literary style in the 19th-centuryAnglophone novel (Moretti), analyzing oral features of Gertrude Stein’s poetry, prose, and plays in both text and audio recordings (Clement), automated topical classification and visualization of historical documents concerning the events of 9/11 (Cohen), and understanding the impetus for changes in diction during the Romantic era (Underwood). “This is already an established research topic,” Underwood remarked, “because Romantic writers knew the language was changing, and spent a lot of time arguing about the social implications of word choice. But until recently we’ve had no way to pose the most obvious questions you’d want to ask about the topic: How did diction actually change? When? Which genres were affected first? It’s a problem that seems to cry out for analysis at a larger scale.”

Re-pumpkinification

2010-10-28T07:53:00.000-07:00

Every year, as Hallowe'en approaches, the English department staff holds a pumpkin decorating contest. In a blog post about this tradition last year, I dubbed it the Pumpkinification of English (in the interests of full disclosure, I must admit that this is an allusion to a satirical book called The Pumpkinification of Claudius probably written by the Roman playwright, politician, and philosopher Seneca, a writer I find endlessly fascinating. But I digress). Anyway, the time has come again once again for our annual re-pumkinification. The pumpkins are set out on display in the department's main office, and people who pass through are invited to vote for their favorite. This kicks off what is usually a pretty festive couple of days around here, since the children of department-members will traipse through the office in costume to trick-or-treat today and tomorrow as well.

Here are this year's contestants. I'll update in a few days when the smoke clears and the votes have been tallied.

Update, Friday late afternoon. Votes have been cast and tallied. Now, at last, the results can be revealed to a breathless public. This year's winner is...

[wait for it...]

[building suspense...]

...Deb Stauffer, for the black cat pumpkin in the center of the table! This is, as they say in the NBA, a 3-peat!

New Richard Powers story in the The New Yorker

2010-10-18T14:56:00.000-07:00

The October 18th edition of The New Yorker features a lovely, thought-provoking short story by our own Richard Powers. The story is called "To the Measures Fall," and (as the mini-abstract at The New Yorker's website has it), it centers around "an American woman’s lifelong re-readings of an obscure English novel she discovered in the Costwolds while on a junior year abroad."

That really does not do the piece justice. It is also about the mysterious and idiosyncratic way some literature happens to grab us, about the way our investments in books can be isolating as well as sustaining, about the way our reading of a book can change over time, and about the interplay between our investments in narrative and the unfurling of our own experiences as narrative.

Also, as a Shakespearean, I am contractually obligated to point out that the title of the story--which is also the title of the obscure English novel that the American woman reads--comes from near the end of As You Like It, where the old Duke tells everyone to dance and partake of the "rustic revelry" associated with the play's happy ending:

Meantime, forget this new-fall'n dignity
And fall into our rustic revelry.
Play, music! And you, brides and bridegrooms all,
With measure heap'd in joy, to the measures fall.

I'll let you, dear reader, arrive at your own conclusions as to what this allusion signifies. But in any event you should definitely go read the story. If you have a subscription you can get it online here. Otherwise, look it up!

Gallimaufry (updated, September 30)

2010-09-27T09:23:00.000-07:00

Four (no longer just three) short items today, dear reader, in lieu of a more sustained post.

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First, Philip Graham writes to tell me that a Portuguese translation of his 2009 book The Moon, Come to Earth, is now slated to be published in the near future by Editorial Presenca, which I gather is the leading Portuguese publisher of international literature in translation. Hardcore Grahamites can also find a recent, laudatory recent review of The Moon, Come to Earth online here.

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Second: I received an email press-release last week from the Tulsa City-County Library announcing that LeAnne Howe (whose current adventures as a Fulbright Scholar in Amman Jordan are chronicled here) has been named the 2011 winner of the their American Indian Author Award. You can find more information about this award--including a list of past honorees--here.

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Bruce Michelson, who is a Professor in our department as well as being Director of the Campus Honors Program, is giving a talk today (September 30) at St. Louis University in commemoration of the Mark Twain centenary (which, Michelson reminds me, is something they take very seriously in the state of Missouri). There is a nice little write-up at the SLU English webpage here.

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And last (alphabetically) but not least: Michael Rothberg, who is the author of an important recent book entitled Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, was a keynote speaker this past weekend at a conference in England on the theme of ... multidirectional memory. I paste this in from the conference program (which, at least for now, you can find online here):

"The term ‘multidirectional memory’, taken from Michael Rothberg’s 2009 book Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, suggests that memories are not linear or hierarchical, but are subject to processes of negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing.

This two-day, interdisciplinary conference aims to look at transfers between different kinds of traumatic memory, particularly those associated with, but not limited to, slavery, the Holocaust, and the colonial past."

This is a pretty unusual honor---to have an international conference inspired by your work!

Bollywood in the Age of New Media

2010-09-21T08:12:00.000-07:00

I've just learned that the first advance copies of Anustup Basu's new book have arrived. The book--Bollywood in the Age of New Media: The Geo-televisual Aesthetic--is published by Edinburgh University Press. Though this is a book grounded in Basu's deep scholarly expertise in the area if Indian cinema, it is also a a book whose implications--concerning globalization and aesthetics--should be of broader interest too. For this reason, I am here pasting in the longer book description from the Edinburgh UP website instead of the short version you find on Amazon.com:

"This study of popular Indian cinema in an age of globalisation, new media, and metropolitan Hindu fundamentalism focuses on the period from 1991 to 2004. Popular Hindi cinema took a certain spectacular turn from the early nineties as a signature 'Bollywood style' evolved in the wake of liberalization and the inauguration of a global media ecology in India. Films increasingly featured transformed bodies, fashions, life-styles, commodities, gadgets, and spaces, often in non-linear, 'window-shopping' ways, without any primary obligation to the narrative. Flows of desires, affects, and aspirations frequently crossed the bounds of stories and determined milieus. One example is the film Haqeeqat that featured poor working class protagonists, but romantic musical sequences transported them abruptly to Switzerland, with the actors now dressed in designer suits. Basu theorises this overall cinematic-cultural ecology here as an informational geo-televisual aesthetic.

This book connects this filmic geo-televisual style to an ongoing story of the uneven globalizing process in India. Basu argues that 'Bollywood' is not so much indicative of a uniquely Indian modernity coming into its own; rather it is symptomatic of a pure techno-financial modernization that comes without a political modernity. Bollywood in the Age of New Media therefore explains how the irreverent energies of the new can actually be tied to conservative Brahminical imaginations of class, caste, or gender hierarchies. Using a wide-ranging methodological approach that converses with theoretical domains of post-structuralism, post-colonialism, and film and media studies, this book presents a complex account of an India of the present caught between brave new silicon valleys and farmer suicides."

For more Basu-related news--this time of a variety that is very near to my own early-modernist heart--check out this recent story from the Times of India.

Some impressive faculty awards!

2010-09-17T08:43:00.000-07:00

This past Wednesday I had the distinct pleasure of attending a reception and ceremony in honor of this year's recipients of the prestigious University Scholar award. I went in support of my wonderful colleague, Lauren Goodlad, who was one of the honorees. This award is Big Deal on campus, as faculty in all colleges and all departments are eligible, and I am really pleased that Lauren won the award this because I know there is nobody more deserving of this kind of recognition. Hooray!

It is also wonderful for English as a department to have a new University Scholar (our first since Catherine Prendergast won the award in 2008). Michael Hogan, the new president of the University of Illinois system was there at the awards ceremony, as were all the central leaders of our campus's academic mission and the dean of our college: so in addition to honoring a very deserving faculty member, an event like this is a really great opportunity to showcase the strength of English to influential campus leaders. It may sound funny to say this, but I'm really grateful to Lauren for providing this opportunity!

While I'm on the subject of impressive faculty awards, I have a couple more to announce here as well.

Renée Trilling was named Helen Corley Petit Scholar for 2010-11, an honor given annually to exceptionally successful newly-tenured faculty members in the college of Liberal Arts and Sciences based on their outstanding work as scholars and teachers.

And, last but by no means least, Ricky Rodríguez, was named one of this year's Conrad Humanities Scholars, joining last year's recipients Michael Rothberg and Trish Loughran as English Department faculty holding this title. The Conrad Humanities Scholar program is actually a relatively new honor, one made possible very recently by the extraordinary generosity of Arlys Streitmatter Conrad.

In addition to the honor and distinction that these awards convey, each carries with it some modest research funding. Compared to our colleagues in the sciences--whose labs can cost millions of dollars to run--our research needs are relatively modest as a rule. We sometimes need to be able to travel to a library or an archive, we purchase books and computers and the like, and we sometimes find ourselves in need of a research assistant to help with projects that require the assembly of a lot of disparate information. These things are comparatively inexpensive in the grand scheme of things, but being able to afford them can make a HUGE difference in the ability of humanities professors to be able to undertake and complete ambitious work. Awards like these--which in fact make it possible to meet the kinds of modest research expenses that humanities scholars encounter--can therefore have a major impact upon a given faculty member's research career.

These are the kinds of posts that make me very proud to be head of such a superb department. Congratulations to all of our recent award winners!

Welcome, alums!

2010-09-03T07:54:00.000-07:00

Our annual newsletter was sent out last week, and as a result there seems to be a modest uptick in the daily number of visitors to this blog. I hope there a cause-and-effect relationship, in any event, since I'd like to think that I'm writing for (among others) our many, many alums out there who may be curious about what we're doing these days. The newsletter gives us a chance to highlight a few things, of course, but we are a big department and there is always a lot going on and there is just no way that the newsletter can even begin to do the place justice. So I use my own brief piece in the newsletter to invite readers to come here, to the blog, where I can at least give weekly updates about some of the many kinds of things that we do. If you have come here out of curiosity after reading about the blog in the newsletter, welcome! I'd love to hear from you, either in the comments section here or via email. Or even (gasp!) even snail mail (which is just soooo twentieth century): Curtis Perry, Department of English, University of Illinois, 608 S. Wright St., Urbana IL 61801.

There have been a couple of alums who have taken me up on my offer and made contact, though curiously enough each of them wanted to discuss a friend or former teacher rather than himself: I take this to be some kind of native Midwestern modesty--our alums are unwilling to toot their own horns, but are eager to praise their associates!

First Paul Wagenbreth--an English alum who now works for the local newspaper--emailed me earlier this week to call my attention to the considerable achievements John Callahan, who is the Morgan S. Odell Professor of Humanities at Lewis & Clark College and who holds a PhD from our department. Callahan became a friend of the writer and critic Ralph Ellison (there is a lovely video of him discussing this friendship here) and is now Ellison's literary executor. In this capacity, Callahan (and another colleague) recently published Three Days Before the Shooting, a mammoth novel compiled out of drafts and papers that Ellison worked on for decades and left unfinished when he died in 1994.

Mr. Wagenbreth wrote to pay tribute to Callahan's scholarly achievements and to his contribution to American letters, but he also testifies to the impact that a teacher can make upon the life of a student. Wagenbreth writes of Callahan, his freshman writing instructor: "he made quite an impression on me--even steered me on to an English major and whatever success you could say I've enjoyed in life." This, he adds, is "proof if any were needed that an instructor really can make a difference in students' lives."

Then, while I was thinking about Wagenbreth and Callahan, Bruce Erickson (who is our director of Programs in Professional Writing, and the guy who does the hard work of compiling our newsletter) told me that another alum had just come by wanting to tell him about the career of the poet and nature writer Reg Saner, now a professor emeritus at the University of Colorado, who is another distinguished English Department PhD.

I joined this department in 2006 after teaching for many years at another university, and as a relative newcomer (as I've said before in this space) I love to learn about the strength of the tradition we now represent and carry on. So I've been reading a great deal this week about both Callahan and Saner. And I also think it is wonderful that alums like Mr. Wagenbreth want to acknowledge their teachers because, as he says, it serves as a reminder of the importance of the role played by good teachers in people's lives.

Partly because I find that a sense of our department's legacy makes its current work feel more meaningful to me, I would love to find ways to increase our engagement with our many, many alumni. But I'll need your help, dear reader, in figuring out what forms that engagement might take. If you are an alum and you have any ideas along these lines, I would really, really love to hear from you. Even by snail mail!

Introducing Kate Vieira

2010-08-27T07:23:00.000-07:00

Today marks the end of the first week of classes. The weather still says summer, but the bustle of students and the quickened pace of everything and everyone here in the English Building most definitely says Fall. Even though I relish the extra time I have for reading, thinking, and writing over the summer, I have always found there is something energizing and exciting about the start of a new academic year. New students, a fresh syllabus, a chance to get that lesson plan just right this time, renewed acquaintance with those colleagues who may have been elsewhere over the summer, and gorgeous sunny weather with just the slightest hint of chill in the evenings; a jolt, a new challenge, a restart button for tired brains.

In keeping with the season's general spirit of academic renewal, I am very pleased to welcome and introduce the newest member of our tenure-stream faculty, Kate Vieira, who joins us as an Assistant Professor in Writing Studies. Her research deals with literacy and assimilation and, in particular, with the ways that different immigrant communities with shared languages assimilate to the United States while simultaneously competing with and assimilating to each other. Her work comes out of specific ethnographic work on the interactions between Azorean and Brazilian immigrant communities in Massachusetts, and has broad implications for the way we understand the complex interactions between linguistic and cultural assimilation and the challenges of English language literacy within an increasingly diverse and globalized US.

Vieira is, as we say in my native Boston, wicked smaht (that's "very, very smart," for those not assimilated to the distinctive dialect I grew up in). She also comes to us with a very strong record of classroom instruction and writing program administration. In addition to a wealth of experience teaching writing in a university setting, she is a seasoned ESL instructor and has a really admirable record of educational outreach work in the US and overseas.

Faculty in my department take special pride in the care with which we hire, and we have in truth an amazing record of finding and fostering exceptional scholarly talent. Well, we've done it again. Welcome, Kate. I can't wait to see what happens next.