News about publications, lectures, and awards from English faculty.
Michael Dennis Browne, Emeritus, has a new poetry collection, The Voices, which will be published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in February. In August, he taught his annual "Believing in Writing" workshop at St John's University, Collegeville. He recently wrote a "Credo" for the composer Timothy Takach, which will premiere at a downtown choral festival in Minneapolis in February. In October, he will do a benefit performance, "All the Song," with the St. Paul Vocal Forum, at the Benedictine Center in St. Paul. On October 26, VocalEssence will present a "Made in Minnesota" concert at Orchestra Hall which includes excerpts from "North Shore," a choral work he wrote with Stephen Paluus in 1976. Also in October, Browne will be participating in the free John Berryman Conference presented by the Creative Writing Program October 24-26. "To Be Certain of the Dawn," the post-Holocaust oratorio he wrote with Stephen Paulus, was performed this spring at Nebraska Wesleyan University and at Carnegie Hall.
Lois Cucullu's essay "A Single Man and the American Maurice" will appear in The American Isherwood, published this fall by the University of Minnesota Press. She will also give a talk on Christopher Isherwood entitled "Queer Diaspora: Christopher Isherwood's Camera Aesthetics and Thirties' Berlin" at the 16th Annual Modernist Studies Conference this fall.
Ray Gonzalez published his 13th poetry collection, Soul Over Lightning, with the University of Arizona Press.
Edward Griffin, Emeritus, published a review of Philip Gould's Writing the Rebellion: Loyalists and the Literature of Politics in British America (Oxford University Press, 2013) in the summer issue of Common-Place, the electronic journal published by the American Antiquarian Society.
Josephine Lee was interviewed by Seattle Public Radio KUOW on July 18, 2014, about the checkered history of Gilbert and Sullivan's play The Mikado, which was controversially staged this summer by the Seattle Gilbert and Sullivan Society. She was also interviewed by New York's WQRX on July 21. The Mikado is the subject of Lee's last book, The Japan of Pure Invention (University of Minnesota Press, 2010). Lee was instrumental in updating the opera for a local Mu Performing Arts staging in 2013, which is referenced in a MSNBC report on the Seattle controversy.
Nabil Matar published British Captives in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, 1563-1760 (Brill, 2014). He participated in a Summer Institute, "Integrating the Mediterranean into World History," at Georgetown University August 11-15. He will be the keynote speaker at the "Remembering Jerusalem: Imagination, Memory, and the City" Conference at King's College London November 6-7.
Dan Philippon published the article "Is American Nature Writing Dead?" in The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, edited by Greg Garrard (Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 391-407. He also gave a talk, "How Mysterious is Alternative Agriculture? How Mysterious Should It Be?" as part of an August conference on "Nature, Ways of Knowing, and Moral Commitment: A Conversation on Religion, Science and the Anthropocene," sponsored by the University of Minnesota Religious Studies Program.
Paula Rabinowitz will publish American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street (Princeton University Press) in October.
Marty Roth, Emeritus, will publish his third post-retirement book, Trickle and Flow: Chapters in the History and Culture of Water, with Academica Press. He and wife Martha contunue to edit and write for Outlook: Canada's Progressive Jewish Magazine.
Katherine Scheil presented material from her book on Anne Hathaway Shakespeare at the International Shakespeare Conference in Stratford-upon-Avon in August. Her chapter on Anne Hathaway Shakespeare will be part of a new biography called The Shakespeare Circle, published by Cambridge University Press in 2016 in honor of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death. Her article on Anne Hathaway Cottages worldwide will appear in a collection on Shakespeare and commemoration, also published by Cambridge, in 2015. In October she will give a talk on the history of Shakespeare Clubs at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, in honor of the 100th anniversary of the Rockland, Maine, Shakespeare Club.
Julie Schumacher published the opinion piece "Was This Student Dangerous?" in The New York Times. Her novel Dear Committee Members was chosen by the American Booksellers Association for the September "Indie Next List" and reached #22 on The New York Times Bestselling Fiction list. Read our interview here.
Kim Todd joined the English faculty this fall as a creative writing assistant professor. A creative nonfiction writer with an interest in environmental issues, she is the author of three books: Sparrow (Reaktion Books/Animal, 2012), Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis (Harcourt, 2007), and Tinkering with Eden: A Natural History of Exotics in America (W.W. Norton 2001). She received an MFA in creative nonfiction and an MS in environmental studies, both from the University of Montana, and a BA in English from Yale. Read our interview here.
George T. Wright, Emeritus, published another memoir, Starting from Staten Island (available from Amazon), following up on The Wrights of Vermont. Writes Wright: "It starts with chapters on my Staten Island family and what it was like to grow up there, then goes on to describe my years, much interrupted, at Columbia and my U. S. Army experience during World War II in Texas, Missouri, France, and Germany."
John Wright was profiled in a lengthy feature in The Minnesota Daily, "The Wright Legacy," which covers his student and faculty civil rights activism.
