Charles Baxter's new book, There's Something I Want You to Do, due from Pantheon in February, has received three starred reviews--from Library Journal, Kirkus, and Publishers Weekly. The story "Charity," which first appeared in McSweeney's, was included in the Best American Short Stories 2014 anthology, edited by Jennifer Egan.
Timothy Brennan is giving a keynote presentation in Bologna, Italy, at the annual meeting of the Italian Association of Comparative Literature: "A Literary Politics without People," December 17, 2014. He spoke about his work at the University of Ghent (Belgium) on December 11 and 12, reading from his books Wars of Positions: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right and Borrowed Light: Vico, Hegel and the Colonies. He also gave a Plenary Lecture at the UK Arts and Humanities Council Project on "World Authorship," University of Lancaster (UK), November 27, 2014: "A Confusion of Categories: Literary Authority in the Age of the General Author." He was asked to contribute to a Key Words entry on the term "philology" for American Comparative Literature Association's Ten-Year Report on the State of the Discipline, published March 3, 2014. In November, his essay "Subaltern Stakes" appeared in New Left Review 89 (September-October 2014), and his essay "The Free Impersonality of Bourgeois Spirit," appeared in Biography 37:1 (Winter 2014) in a special issue dedicated to Life Writing & Corporate Personhood. This fall, an essay was translated into Italian: "Edward Said e György Lukács: un apprendistato nell'"epoca dell'imperialismo," in Edward W. Said. Letteratura, umanesimo e critica del potere, edited and translated by Marco Gato (Transeuropaedizioni, 2014). Another essay titled "The Case Against Irony" appeared in the Crafts of World Literature special issue of The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 49, edited by Ben Etherington and Jarad Zimbler (Fall, 2014). In October, Brennan was named to the International Advisory Board of Ariel: A Review of International English Literature.
Michael Dennis Browne has written a "Credo," with music by Timothy Takach, that will be included in the February 15 Downtown Churches Biennial Choral Festival at Central Lutheran. Performances of his oratorio with Stephen Paulus, To Be Certain of the Dawn, are scheduled for Corvallis, OR (January), San Diego, CA (April), and Salem, OR (April). He gave an eulogy for his longtime collaborator Paulus at the composer's memorial service November 8.
Maria Damon (Emerita) has a chapbook, XXX, coming out from Nou-Zot books early 2015. She has a chapter, "Beat Poetry and the San Francisco Renaissance," in The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Poetry, out in January 2015. "Little Tokens" is included in Strange Material: Storytelling through Textiles, edited by Leanne Prain (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2014). She's published several visual poems.
M. J. Fitzgerald was asked by The Best American Poetry blog to post for the week October 20-25, publishing an essay in five installments.
Ray Gonzalez's work is included in the newly released Best American Poetry 2014 (Scribners) and in Poems of the American South, edited by David Biespiel, the latest anthology in the Everyman's Library Pocket Poets series. His artwork is featured in the current issue of Map Points. Poems and essays also appear in the new issues of Caliban, The Drunken Boat, Terrain, The Hair Splitter, and in Puerto del Sol's 50th Anniversary issue.
Edward Griffin (Emeritus) will be teaching a winter-session course (January 21-February 25) for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Minnesota on the topic of "Hawthorne: The Great Stories." In October he was guest speaker on Benjamin Franklin to a class at Macalester College and moderated a session on "Berryman's Music and the Language of Suffering" at the University of Minnesota conference, "John Berryman at 100." He also contributed an entry, "Charles Chauncy," to The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment.
Patricia Hampl's current book, The Art of the Wasted Day, has been sold to Viking Penguin for publication in 2016.
Michael Hancher published "College English in India: The First Textbook" in Victorian Literature and Culture 42:3 (September 2014), an account of the first substantial college textbook of British literature, Selections from the British Poets, edited by D. L. Richardson (Calcutta, 1840) and prepared with the advice of Thomas Babington Macaulay. He also published an interview with Jennifer Jodell, "The Digital Humanities: What Does It Offer Today's Graduate Student?" in Grad Caucus Chronicle 21 (October 27, 2014). He organized the panel "Digital British Studies for the Long Nineteenth Century," for the meeting of the North American Conference for British Studies, Minneapolis, November 17-19, 2014; presented "Crowdsourcing British Studies" as part of that panel; assisted local arrangements for the conference; and introduced a plenary speaker. Finally, in December he publishes "Dickens's First Effusion" in Dickens Quarterly 31:4, in which he proposes that Charles Dickens's first publication (signed "C. D.") was "'Merry Christmas to You;' or, Wishes not Horses," in Athenæum, January 7, 1832.
Cal Kendall (Emeritus) published a chapter, "Bede and Islam," in Bede and the Future, edited by Peter Darby and Faith Wallis (Ashgate, 2014).
Nabil Matar gave the plenary lecture at the November London University conference "Remembering Jerusalem." His paper was on "The Cradle of Jesus and the Oratory of Mary in the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem." He will give a paper on the Arabic translation of Milton's Paradise Lost at the MLA convention in Vancouver which will be published in Prose Studies. His paper on "England and Religious Plurality: John Locke, Henry Stubbe and Islam" is forthcoming in Christianity and Religious Plurality (Society of Ecclesiastical History, 2015), and his study of "Arabic Travel Writings: from the Beginnings until 1916" is forthcoming in The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing (2015). His book, An Arab Ambassador in the Mediterranean: Muhammad ibn Othman al-Miknasi, 1789-1788, is forthcoming in March 2015 (Routledge).
Dan Philippon served as a Visiting Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Foreign Civilizations at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon in France in November and December. In November he also delivered a paper on "Alternative Agriculture and Environmentalism, 1972-1992: A Transnational Perspective," at a conference on "Transformations of the Ecology Movement" in Berlin.
Paula Rabinowitz published American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street (Princeton). The book was chosen to be an American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression pick for November. She surveyed five favorite pulp paperbacks for The Wall Street Journal and wrote about the 75th anniversary of paperbacks in the U.S. for History News Network. Rabinowitz has been selected to be the American Studies Association delegate this summer to the Japanese Association for American Studies seminar on 20th-century wars and to present new work on the national security state and what she's calling "Cold War Dads."
Andrew Scheil's second book, Babylon Under Western Eyes: A Study of Allusion and Myth, is under contract and will be published by the University of Toronto Press. He published an article, "Ælfric of Eynsham," in Oxford Handbooks Online, edited by James Simpson. He has the article "Courtly Love on Mars: E. R. Burroughs and the Medieval Lineage of Planetary Romance" forthcoming in an essay collection titled Medieval Science Fiction, edited by Carl Kears and James Paz, King College London Medieval Studies Series (Boydell and Brewer). He joined the Advisory Board of The Journal of English and Germanic Philology. He is finishing up his three-year term as Director of the Center for Medieval Studies.
Katherine Scheil gave a public lecture on Shakespeare Clubs in America at the Farnsworth Art Gallery in Rockland, Maine, in October, in honor of the 100th anniversary of the Rockland Shakespeare Club. Earlier this year she was interviewed by William Grimes of The New York Times for a story on the continuing popularity of Shakespeare in America. She recently served as the external examiner for a PhD dissertation at Brunel University in London on the history of reading Shakespeare, combined with a new initiative for contemporary Shakespeare clubs.
Julie Schumacher's short story "Spin" appeared in Epoch magazine in November; her short story "At the Executioner's Table" will appear in The American Prospect in winter 2015.
Madelon Sprengnether has two books forthcoming in spring of 2015. Great River Road: Memoir and Memory will be published by New Rivers Press, and Near Solstice: Prose Poems will be published by Holy Cow! Press. She wrote an article for The Star Tribune titled "The Power of Telling, and Writing, of Sexual Assault."
Kim Todd's op-ed "A New Rallying Cry for the Big Game: Save the Mascot!" recently ran in Grist.
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