News about publications, lectures, and awards from English faculty.
James Cihlar, adjunct lecturer and poet, published the chapbook A Conversation with My Imaginary Daughter (Bloom).
Charlie Baxter sold his new book, There's Something I Want You to Do, to Pantheon/Vintage. The book is a kind of decalogue, with five stories about virtues (Bravery, Loyalty, Chastity, Charity, and Forbearance) and five about vices (Lust, Sloth, Avarice, Gluttony, and Vanity).
Lois Cucullu conducted research in June on E. M. Forster and Christopher Isherwood at the Harry Ransom Humanities Center at the University of Texas, with the support of an Imagine Award. Her essay "Stirring the Greenwood": Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man and the American Maurice" will be published in a collection next fall edited by Jim Berg and Chris Freeman entitled The American Isherwood by the University of Minnesota Press. Another essay, "Fashioning the Modern Woman's Sexual Turn From Salomé to Ulysses, 1892-1922," appeared this fall in The Wilde Archive edited by Joseph Bristow for the University of Toronto Press.
Maria Damon published "Between Friendship Network and Literary Movement: Flarf as a Poetics of Sociability" for Among Friends: Engendering the Social Site of Poetry, edited by Anne Dewey and Libbie Rifkin (University of Iowa Press). She published, with Rachel Blau Duplessis, "Desiring Visual Texts: A Collage and Embroidery Dialogue" in Jacket2, which will also feature her article "Poetic Isolation and Collective Clumsiness: An Antonymic Exploration (N.B. There is no antonym for 'poetry')." With Adeena Karasick, she published "INTERTEXTILE: TEXT IN EXILE: Shmata Mash-Up, A Jewette for Two Voices" in Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory 15:1. Her book with mIEKAL aND and Camille Bacos, The End (Xerox Sutra Editions, 2011), appeared in print in 2013. Damon reviewed the following books: Alan Sondheim's Writing Under: Selections from the Internet Text for EBR: Electronic Book Review; Michael Hames-Garçía's Identity Complex: Making the Case for Multiplicity and David Vázquez's Triangulations: Narrative Strategies for Navigating Latino Identity for Western Literature Review 47:4; and Lew Welch's Ring of Bone: Collected Poems for Rain Taxi Review of Books (autumn 2012). Damon published the following creative works: (with Michelle Greenblatt) the poems "Seas Upon Seas" and "Aqua Centauri" in Altered Scale #4 (September 2013); "The Millay Sisters Learn to Talk Dirty: for the Millay Colony for the Arts" in EDNA (September 2013) and in The Dark Would: Anthology of Language Art, Vol. II, pdf edition (2013); "Asemic Kill City" in The New Post-literate: A Gallery of Asemic Writing (August 25, 2013); (with Michelle Greenblatt) poems "Salt-script" and "Atomic Jetsam" in Counterexample Poetics: Assemblage of Experimental Artistry; woven visual poem "Pass(i)ons à Travers" in The Volta (September 2013); Fifteen Textile Visual Poems in Big Bridge 17 (summer 2013); "After Man Ray" in dusie (June 18, 2013); "Rock Action! for Scott Asheton of the Stooges" in Similar Peaks; "Rock and Roll Reverse" in Truck Magazine (April 6, 2013); the visual poems (with captions) "Red Swirl," "Scarf," and "The Ceramic Age" in LIT 3:23 (winter 2013), for which she also designed and created the cover art; "Red Swirl," reading of poem with music (Alan Sondheim and Azure Carter on string instruments), at http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/Maria.mp3; the visual poem "Backfire" in Color Treasury 003 (winter 2013); and, with mIEKAL aND and Camille Bacos, an excerpt from The End in Barzakh (winter 2012-13). Her visual poem "Respect: For Selma Damon" was reprinted in KINDERGARDE: Avant-Garde Poems, Plays, Stories, & Songs for Children, edited by Dana Teen Lomax (Small Press Traffic/Black Radish Books, 2013).
Ed Griffin (Emeritus) is on the editorial board of a new online journal out of the U of M: The Journal of Opinions, Ideas, and Essays. The board of editors invites submissions from any member of the University community, past or present. You may view the inaugural issue here, where you will find representative articles, instructions to authors, and contact information. Griffin's article in the inaugural issue is called "Jim's Secrets: What Mark Twain Knew but Huck Finn Didn't." This winter, Griffin is giving a course for OLLI (the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute) called "Reading the Short Stories of Flannery O'Connor."
David Haley has a chapter in the new collection of essays on Sheridan, Impresario. In "The Literary Origins of Sir Lucius O'Trigger," Haley lays out his discovery that Sheridan's stage Irishman descends not from braggarts like Pistol and Jonson's Bobadil, but is lifted from Davenant's News from Plymouth (1635). For that play, Davenant created the frightening Sir Furious Inland--an English type of "wode man" or Spenserian "salvage man" whose unbridled rage makes him more formidable than a merely comical Miles Gloriosus.
Michael Hancher published the essay "Reading and Writing the Law: Macaulay in India" in Law and Language: Current Legal Issues, Vol. 15, edited by Michael Freeman and Fiona Smith (Oxford).
Calvin Kendall (Emeritus) served as University of Minnesota Retirees Association [UMRA] President, 2011-12, and Past President, 2012-13. He received a University of Minnesota Professional Grant for Retirees in 2011-2012. Kendall delivered the paper "Bede and the Origins of Western Islamophobia," at the Center for Medieval Studies 25th Anniversary Conference, Minneapolis, November 9, 2013. His last book was published in 2010: Bede: On the Nature of Things and On Times, Translated Texts for Historians, with Faith Wallis (Liverpool University Press, 2010). He was Associate of the International Center of Medieval Art, 2008-2011.
Josephine Lee was one of three speakers, with a talk entitled "American Decorative Orientalism from the 19th into the 20th Century," at the international symposium "Orientalism at the Turn into the 20th Century: Cultural Representation and Glocal Studies," November 9, 2013, in Tokyo at Seijo University.
Nabil Matar delivered three invited papers in 2013: at Georgetown, University of Muhammad V (Rabat), and the University of Muhammad ibn Abdallah (Fez). He was one of the plenary speakers at the Ecclesiastical History Society conference in Chichester, England, in July. He also served on two NEH panels in Washington, D.C., and, with Jeanne Kilde and Erika Lee, he organized a conference on "Little Syria, NY" at Minnesota and gave the introductory paper. Matar publishes his book Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam (Columbia UP) in December. He finished his 12-year-old project, British Captives in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, 1563-1760, which will be published by Brill (Leiden) in 2014. The recipient of a University of Minnesota Imagine Award, Matar traveled to Morocco to examine the manuscripts of the traveler Muhammad ibn Uthman al-Miknasi. He prepared an introduction, abridgement, and translation of selections from the travelogues, and the proposal is under review for publication by Routledge. Matar received a Single Semester Leave Award this fall to work on his memoir of captivity in Beirut in 1986: Land of God. Interview here.
Toni McNaron (Emerita) published a spiritual memoir entitled Into the Paradox: Conservative Spirit, Feminist Politics (Hurley Publishing).
Dan Philippon received a $2,500 mini-grant from the Institute on the Environment for a proposal entitled "Illustrating Interdisciplinarity: Audubon in the 21st Century," for which he is the project lead. The grant is for a partnership with the Bell Museum and the Department of Art History to produce spring programming to accompany the Bell Museum's exhibit, "Audubon and the Art of Birds."
Peter Reed (Emeritus) published "Laughter Remembered" in Studies in American Humor (Kurt Vonnegut issues), Vol 3, #26 (2012). He also wrote "The Remarkable Art of Kurt Vonnegut," a 4000-word essay on the artwork of KV for Kurt Vonnegut Drawings, edited by Nanette Vonnegut and Scott Prior (Monacelli Press, 2014), and "Kurt Vonnegut Remembered, " a 5000-word essay for a book edited by James O'Laughlin forthcoming from University of South Carolina Press. In addition, he was a contributor and PR consultant for Kurt Vonnegut: Novels and Stories 1963 - 1973, edited by Sidney Offit (The Library of America, 2011).
Marty Roth (Emeritus) and his wife Martha are on the editorial collective of Outlook: A Progressive Canadian Jewish Magazine and regularly review books and films there. He has published two post-retirement books, what he calls intellectual ethnographies--one on memory and one on privacy. He's working on a third, tentatively entitled Trickle and Flow: the Life and Death of Water. His most recent publication was a series of pro-Palestinian advertisements that went up on the buses and rapid transit stations of Vancouver.
Andrew Scheil published "Sacred History and Old English Religious Poetry" in The Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature, 500-1150, edited by Clare Lees (Cambridge University Press). He was appointed the Director of the Center for Medieval Studies (2013-2015).
Julie Schumacher will publish her novel Dear Committee Members with Doubleday in September 2014.
Madelon Sprengnether will publish a review of Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother: A Comic with the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. Her essay "Literature and Psychoanalysis" is forthcoming in The Routledge Handbook for Psychoanalysis in the Humanities and Social Sciences (2014). She served as a discussant for a paper by Gloria Levin titled "Haunted by Absence: The Transgenerational Roots of a Mother's Projection," for the Minnesota Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and co-organized a public lecture by Professor Jeffrey Prager, UCLA, titled "The Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma: Recovering Humanity, Repairing Generations." Her memoir Great River Road: Memory, Aging and Reconciliation will be published by New Rivers Press in fall 2014.
George T. Wright (Regents Emeritus) published The Wrights of Vermont: Searching for My Father's Family (Wheatmark).
