News about publications, presentations, and awards from PhD candidates and alumnae/i.
Dissertations Successfully Defended 2013-14
Laura Bozeman, "The Genteel Frontier: Westward Expansion of Womanly Refinement" (Adviser: Donald Ross, Jr.). Bozeman is an Army Lieutenant Colonel and will be teaching English at the United States Military Academy at West Point.
Christopher Flack, "Writing Conquest: Traditions of Anglo-Saxon Invasion and Resistance in the Twelfth Century" (Adviser: Andrew Scheil). Flack has accepted a position as Lecturer at the University of Minnesota.
Annemarie Lawless, "Typeace: Reading, Representation, and Literature After Theory" (Adviser: Jani Scandura). Lawless has accepted a position as Lecturer at the University of Minnesota.
Keith Mikos, "The Rise of the Small: Meaning, Metaphysics, and the Microscope" (Adviser: Scandura). Mikos has accepted a position as Lecturer at DePaul University, Illinois.
Rachel McWhorter, "Narratives of Conception: Pregnancy as Discourse in 20th/21st Century American Literature" (Adviser: Lois Cucullu). McWhorter has accepted a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor, St. Charles Community College, Missouri.
Dana Schumacher-Schmidt, "'We Build Strong Forts Against Adversity': Women's Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture" (Adviser: John Watkins). Schumacher-Schmidt has accepted a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor, Siena Heights University, Michigan.
PhD Candidate News:
Jessica Apolloni was the co-winner of the Samuel Holt Monk Prize for the Best Article by a Graduate Student, awarded for "Shylock Meets Palestine: Rethinking Shakespeare in Abdelkader Benali's Yasser," Shakespeare Bulletin, summer 2013. She received, and declined, the Center for European Studies Hella Mears Award for dissertation research. She was awarded Graduate Research Partnership Program support for summer 2014 for her project "Dialogues of Violence: Tracing Criminal Narratives from Mediterranean Shores to London Streets" with faculty project adviser Susan Noakes. She will publish an essay on Girolamo Dandini's Missione in the forthcoming Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History 1500-1900 (Brill).
Pat Baehler presented the paper "Epistolary Infrastructure and the Gendered Letter" at The Rise and Fall of the Letter Conference, Portico Library, Manchester (UK), June 2013. She presented "Epistolary Infrastructure and the Letter in Humphry Clinker" at the American Society of Eighteenth Century Studies Conference, March 2014.
Jennifer Balzer-Lovato received a department Short-Term Research Grant for spring 2014 to do research in Gilbert and Sullivan archives at D'Oyly Carte and The Savoy, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London.
Amy Bolis presented the paper "Staging Absence: Desdemona as Dramatic Device in Contemporary Adaptations of Othello" at the Blackfriars Conference, Staunton, Virginia, October 2013, and at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 2014.
Eric Brownell presented the papers "Painting, Photography, and Horror in Bernard Rose's Candyman" and "Gothic, Painting, and the Great War in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse" at the Midwest MLA Conference, November 2013.
Wesley Burdine was awarded a Graduate School Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship for 2014-15 for his dissertation "'What Was It?': Phenomenal Bodies and Temporality, 1850-1925." He received an International Thesis Research travel grant from the Graduate School, May 2014, and a Short-Term Research Grant for spring 2014, to do research at the Bibliotheque Litteraire Jacques Doucet on Henri Bergson. He presented the paper "Reading Retrocognitively: Bergson, Proust, and an Adventure" at the L'Institut Metapsychique International, Paris, May 2014.
Yuan Ding presented the paper "Performing Asian America: Solo Performance Tradition From Theater to YouTube" at the Association for Asian American Studies Annual Meeting, April 2014.
Amy Fairgrieve presented the paper "A Pause for 'Proud Sublimity': Sublime Awe as Orientation in Radcliffe's A Sicilian Romance" at the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference, Oxford (UK), January 2014.
Hyeryung Hwang was awarded Graduate Research Partnership Program support for summer 2014 for her project "Thinking beyond the Modern: Korean New Realist Cinema after Modernism" with faculty project adviser Timothy Brennan. She published a Korean translation of Joseph Hughes' Deleuze's Difference and Repetition (Seokwangsa, 2014).
Jennifer Kang was awarded an American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) Travel Grant for March 2014. She co-organized the session The Poetics of Fascism and presented the paper "Aestheticizing the Political: Choi, Jae-Seo's Essays in the Late 1930s" at the American Comparative Literature Association meeting, March 2014.
Na-Rae Kim presented the paper "Fragment Vision and Stunted Modernity: Post-Korean War Korea in Chong-Hui O's The Chinese Street" at the American Comparative Literature Association meeting, March 2014.
Katelin Krieg was awarded Graduate Research Partnership Program support for summer 2014 for her project "The Simplicity of Nature and the Nature of Simplicity: Wordsworth and the Making of Nineteenth-Century Science" with faculty project adviser Andrew Elfenbein. She presented the paper "Active Pleasures: Sherlock Holmes, Victorian Science, and Decadent Hermeneutics" at the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies Conference, Houston, March 2014.
Andrew Marzoni was awarded a Graduate School Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship for 2014-15 for his dissertation "In the American Vein." He also received a Graduate and Professional Student Association Scholar Travel Grant. He published a review of The Skin, by Curzio Malaparte, in Rain Taxi Review of Books (Online Edition: Spring 2014). His essay "Henry Miller and Deleuze's 'Strange Anglo-American Literature'" is included in the forthcoming In Understanding Deleuze, Understanding Modernism, edited by S.E. Gontarski, Paul Ardoin, and Laci Mattison (Bloomsbury, 2014). He presented the paper "Beat Literatur in Deutschland: Carl Weissner and the American Underground" at the American Comparative Literature Association meeting, March 2014.
Stephen McCulloch presented the paper "Bitter Marrow: Naught-iness in Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition" at the American Comparative Literature Association meeting, March 2014.
Caitlin McHugh received an English Department Travel Grant to do research on Shakespeare folios and prompt books at the Folger Library and the University of Pennsylvania.
David Moberly was awarded a Short-Term Research Grant for Spring 2014 to fund an assistant in Cairo to locate, copy, and send materials on translations of Shakespeare into Arabic that are not available elsewhere. He wrote two entries, "Lodowick Carlell" and "William Okeley," in the forthcoming Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History 1500-1900 (Brill). He presented the paper "'Is All Writing Social?': Collaborative Writing as a Teaching Tool" at the First-Year Writing Symposium: Space for Writing in Minneapolis, May 2014. He presented "The Taming of the Tigress: Shakespeare and Lower-class Women in 1930s Egypt" at the Shakespeare Association of America, St. Louis, Missouri, April 2014, and at Exploring the Renaissance: An International Conference, Tucson, Arizona, April 2014.
Eunha Na presented the paper "Re-imagining Transnational Subjects through Sentimentality" at the American Comparative Literature Association Conference, New York, March 2014. She presented "Rethinking Empathy in Political Theater: Korean Legibility in Twilight" at the Mid-America Theater Conference, Chicago, March 2014.
Trenton Olsen won a First Year Writing Program Outstanding Instructor Award in May 2014. He presented the paper "'Trailing Clouds of . . . Primal Sympathy': Robert Louis Stevenson's Evolutionary Wordsworth" at the Midwest Modern Language Association Conference, November, 2013. Olsen has accepted a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor, Brigham Young University-Idaho.
Michael Phillips received a Short-Term Research Grant for spring 2014 to do research on Mary Hays' 1799 novel Victim of Prejudice in the New York Public Library.
Kristina Popiel presented the paper "The Supernovic Body: Poetics of Space in Wisɫawa Szymborska's Sky" at the Poetics of Space in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Culture conference, University of Portsmouth (UK), May 2014.
Katie Robison presented the paper "Salvation through Bodily Consciousness in Langland's Piers Plowman" at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 2014.
Michael Rowe was awarded a Graduate School Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship for 2014-15 for his dissertation "Weird Ecology: The Lives of Literary Creatures, 1900-1940." He presented the paper "Time to Die: J. G. Ballard and the Vanished Universe" at the American Comparative Literature Association Conference, New York, March 2014.
Laura Scroggs was awarded Graduate Research Partnership Program support for summer 2014 for her project "Pretty Pink Purses: A Queer Phenomenology of the Handbag" with faculty project adviser Paula Rabinowitz.
Dave Seru received a 2013 "Minnesota Emerging Composer Award," a nomination-only award offered by the American Composers Forum. With it he traveled to Paris over spring break for a concert and recording session. He also was awarded an English Department Travel Grant for dissertation research in New York City.
Yon Ji Sol presented the paper "Mobility as a Female Adaptation Strategy in Moll Flanders" at the British Society for 18th-Century studies Annual Conference, Oxford (UK), January 2014.
Anne-Marie Spidahl presented the paper "Anxiety, Realism, Whiteness and Freedom" at the Thinking Its Presence: Race and Creative Writing conference, University of Montana, Missoula, April 2014.
Robert St. Lawrence presented the paper "The 95 Cent Skool: Institutional Critique, Sustainable Aesthetics" at the Midwest Modern Language Association conference, November 2013.
Amanda Taylor was awarded a Union Pacific Research Grant. She presented the paper "'Be Your Letter': Rhetoric, Bodies, and Passions in Trobairitz Tensos" at the Fortieth Sewanee Medieval Colloquium on Medieval Emotions, April 2014. She co-organized and presided over the session "Compromised Bodies in Late Medieval Italy" at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, May 2014, where she also presented "'Feeling words' and the 'mayd martial': Passions and Porous Bodies in Spenser's Faerie Queene."
Benjamin Utter was awarded a Graduate School Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship for 2014-15 for his dissertation "Saints and Heroes: Imperfection and the Self in Late Medieval English Literature." He was the co-winner of the Samuel Holt Monk Prize for the Best Article by a Graduate Student, awarded for "Gawain and Goliath: Davidic Parallels and the Problem of Penance in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Volume 44, 2013, pp. 121-155.
Bomi Yoon presented the paper "Homemaking for Transnational Adoptees in Sun Mee Chomet's How to Be a Korean Woman" at the Association for Asian American Studies Annual Meeting.
PhD Alumnae/i News:
Ariane Balizet (PhD 2007) was tenured and promoted to Associate Professor of English and Women's Studies at Texas Christian University. She also published her first book, Blood and Home in Early Modern Drama: Domestic Identity on the Renaissance Stage (Routledge, 2014).
Annemarie Lawless (PhD 2014) is part of a filmmaking project entitled The Legend of Swee' Pea which achieved its Kickstarter goal of $50,000 and was funded. The documentary, about the life of basketball player Lloyd "Swee' Pea" Daniels, features animation by a former student of Lawless', BA alumna Kelsey Kuno.
Anca Parvulescu (PhD 2006) published her second book, The Traffic in Women's Work: East European Migration and the Making of Europe, with the University of Chicago Press (2014). She is professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis.
Alan Powers (PhD 1976), author of The Worlds of Giordano Bruno, spoke at the University of Notre Dame London Global Gateway in April. Powers is also a poet and composer.
Robert Stark (PhD 2007) published a book of poems, A Middle North, with Leaky Boot Press (2014). He has a tenure-track position at the University of Exeter (UK).
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