News about publications, lectures, and awards from English faculty.
Congratulations to English faculty who won 2014 Imagine Fund faculty awards supporting innovative research in arts, humanities, and design at the University of Minnesota: Dan Philippon, for "Ideal Meals: Ecology, Morality, and Pleasure in the Sustainable Food Movement"; Paula Rabinowitz, for "Lineages of the Literary Left: Essays in Honor of Alan M. Wald"; Jani Scandura, for "Proximity: A Case Study"; Katherine Scheil, for "The Shakespeare Circle and Anne Hathaway Shakespeare"; and John Wright, for "The Worlds of James McCune Smith: Science, Race Elevation, and the Brotherhood of Chess."
Elaine Auyoung has been named an Institute for Advanced Study Fellow for fall 2014. Fellows work intensively on their own research and creative projects and meet regularly to discuss their work and exchange ideas at the IAS offices. Auyoung's project is entitled "Missing Fiction: The Feeling of Realism."
Timothy Brennan was named the Samuel Russell Chair in the Humanities for the College of Liberal Arts for a three-year period, 2014-17 (more here). Brennan publishes Borrowed Light: Vico, Hegel, and the Colonies with Stanford University Press in March. He has been awarded Sabbatical Leave with Supplement for the calendar year 2015. He gave a keynote presentation at the annual convention of the South Asian Literatures Association convention on January 9 in Chicago titled "Future Interrupted: The Subjunctive Nationalism of M. N. Roy." SALA also awarded Brennan a Special Recognition for Outstanding Contributions to South Asian Studies.
Michael Dennis Browne was honored with the Graven Award on its 25th Anniversary Celebration February 18, at Wartburg College in Iowa. The Graven Award is presented annually to a person "whose life is nurtured and guided by a strong sense of Christian calling and who is making a significant contribution to community, church and society." It is named for the late Judge Henry N. and Helen Graven, natives of Greene, Iowa, whose lives reflected those same commitments.
Genevieve Escure retired this spring after 40 years of service to the Department of English.
Ray Gonzalez will make his fourth appearance in the Best American Poetry anthology series, this time with the poem "One El Paso, Two El Paso," selected for the 2014 iteration to be published in September by Simon and Schuster. His artwork appears in the current online issue of Caliban. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Anti, Transit, 5 Trope, Malpais Review, The Soft Machinist, and New Border Writing (Texas A&M University Press).
Ellen Messer-Davidow will present a paper on the economics of higher education titled "Speculating on Humanities Futures" at the annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association in New York from March 20-23. She was also invited to serve on the Advisory Board of the Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity (Oxford UP). Board members will redesign it for a second edition, reading/vetting current and new essays.
Paula Rabinowitz publishes the third in her Habits of Being series, co-edited with Cristina Giorcelli, in May with University of Minnesota Press. Fashioning the Nineteenth Century shows how certain items of apparel acquired the status of fashion and how fashion shifted from the realm of the elites into the emerging middle and working classes--and back.
Andrew Scheil is co-investigator for a CLA proposal which was awarded $600,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as start-up grant to develop the conceptual and programmatic foundations for a new Consortium for the Study of the Premodern World. The consortium will create a new confederation of the many existing premodern studies constituencies at the University and establish a new synergistic mission to promote integrated, multidisciplinary research and teaching in global premodern studies. The consortium will also pioneer a new approach to graduate education by working to combine graduate training in established humanities and social sciences disciplines with an integrated, multidisciplinary graduate program in global premodern studies.
Katherine Scheil has been named Scholar of the College for 2014-17 (more here.) She was also awarded a Single Semester Research Leave for Fall 2014 to complete her book on the afterlife of Anne Hathaway Shakespeare. She published part of the book in the journal Critical Survey in 2013 and will present work from the book at the Shakespeare Association of American conference in April 2014 and at the International Shakespeare Conference in Stratford, UK, in August 2014. She received NEH funding to attend a collaborative research conference at the Folger Shakespeare Library on "Shakespeare and the Problem of Biography" in April 2014.
Julie Schumacher's essay "The Gristmill of Praise" was published by The Chronicle of Higher Education. She published a short story in Epoch magazine.
Madelon Sprengnether's new memoir, Great River Road: Memoir and Memory, will be published by New Rivers Press in the fall of 2014.
