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PhD Candidates
Eric Brownell successfully defended his dissertation "Gothic Heroines and Cultural Trauma in 20th Century Literature and Film," as directed by Dr. Lois Cucullu, December 5.Seonna Kim presented a paper titled, "Camptown Biopolitics and Camptown Women's Activism in An Ilsun's Mudflat," at the 2014 annual Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) Conference.
Andrew Marzoni reviewed Jáchym Topol's Nightwork in Music & Literature (July 17, 2014). He was awarded travel grants from GAPSA, the Department of English, and the Modern Language Association to travel to the 2015 MLA Convention in Vancouver in January.
Caitlin McHugh was accepted to and participated in the Folger Weekend Workshop "Performing Restoration Shakespeare." Her participation was supported by grants from the Newberry Renaissance Consortium and GAPSA. Her essay, "'Thou hast it now': One-on-Ones and the Online Community of Punchdrunk's Sleep No More," is forthcoming in the book collection Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare, edited by Christy Desmet, Jim Casey, and Natalie Loper. She was accepted into the seminar "The Post-Shakespearean Seventeenth Century" at the Shakespeare Association of America meeting in April 2015 and was awarded an SAA Graduate Student Travel Grant to participate.
Katie Robison published an article in The Chaucer Review (49:2) entitled "'Thou wolt make...thyn hed to ake': A Post-Chaucerian Treatment for Madness in Christine de Pizan's Chemin de long estude."
Anne Marie Spidahl was awarded a Digital Humanities Summer Institute fellowship and a fellowship with the HASTAC (Humanities, Art, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory) Scholars Program. She published the essay "On Twitter and Gramsci" in The Destroyer Magazine as well as short stories in Noö Journal and Your Impossible Voice.
Amanda Taylor was awarded a $5,000 Thesis Research Grant from the Graduate School to work at the Royal Armouries in the UK as well as the universities in Bologna and Padua and with the Estense collection in Modena, Italy. The article "'Use alone': Usefulness and Revision in George Herbert's The Temple" published in 2013 in George Herbert Journal was positively reviewed in the 2014 Oxford Journals' The Year's Work in English Studies, a qualitative narrative bibliographic review of scholarly work. "It's More Than Just Talk: Patterns of CEO Impromptu Communication" with Anett Grant has been accepted and is forthcoming from Business and Professional Communication Quarterly. She was accepted to present "Does the Armor Make the 'mayd Martiall'?: The Texture of Armor in Spenser's Faerie Queene" in the Spenser at Kalamazoo's "Sing Arms and the Author" session of the International Congress on Medieval Studies (May 2015).
PhD Alumnae/i
Lynette Reini-Grandell (PhD 1992; MA 1990) published her first collection of poetry, Approaching the Gate, with Holy Cow! Press.In Memoriam:
Virginia McDavid (BA 1946; MA 1948; PhD 1956) passed away November 6 in Colorado Springs, Colorado, after a long illness. She was 88. Professor of English Emerita at Chicago State University, she was an expert on gender differences in speech, a contributor to many dictionaries, and a consultant on usage and synonyms for The Random House Dictionary of the English Language. According to her obituary, Dr. McDavid was the Minneapolis-born daughter of a fireman on the Soo line and a school teacher. She often related that women in the mid-1940s had two career choices--nursing or teaching--and she had no interest in nursing. A class on American English taught by Harold B. Allen introduced her to field work for the nascent Linguistic Atlas of the North-Central States, and she went on to research and co-author numerous articles on dialect and usage, many with her husband Raven, including pioneering research on African American and female speech. In 2008 Virginia McDavid established the Virginia Glenn McDavid English Fellowship, in honor of the graduate fellowship which allowed her to focus on finishing coursework more than 50 years ago (you can contribute to the fellowship here). The Department of English remains grateful for McDavid's generosity, which will support graduate students far into the future.Share your announcements, awards, and news.
