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Program News: Spring 1999
- Joyce Abunaw: "Women's Historical Presence and Literary Resistance: The Poetry of Micere Githae Mugo," in Morocco on 3/10/99-3/13/99 at the 25th African Literature Association.
- Victoria Alexander: "Polonius and Poland, A Coincidence?" will be published in English Language Notes this June.
- Lopa Basu presented a paper at the British commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies Conference in Statesboro, Georgia on 3/26/99-3/27/99. The title of the paper was "The Postcolonial Migrant Intellectual."
- Robert Burr's article, "Wallace Stevens: Gaining the Light," appears in the Spring 1999 Issue of the Wallace Stevens Journal.
- Professor Mary Ann Caws: This year I lectured in Melbourne, Australia, on "Mallarme in Bloomsbury," and on "The Erotics of the Surrealist Look," in October, and in Manchester, England, also in October, on "Triangular Translation" and at the MLA in San Francisco on "Beckett Translating," at the Mallarme Millennium conference here on "Mallarme's Modes" and at the St. Louis Art Museum in April on "Expressionism and Modernism", and at the Univ. of St. Louis on "Proust and his Painters," "The Surrealist Look," "From Mallarme to Modernism" and on "Bloomsbury and France: Art and Friends," the title of the book, co-authored with Sarah Bird Wright, appearing with Oxford in the USA and England in time for the Tate exhibition of Bloomsbury Art in November. And, next fall, on "Not just Vermeer's Mummy" in Bloomington. My Modernist Manifestos is forthcoming with Nebraska, my Surrealist Painters and Poets with MIT, and my "Mallarme" in Prose with New Directions.
- Jeffrey Couchman has written the book and lyrics for a new musical "Battleship Potemkin." based on the film by Sergei Eisenstein. A concert performance of the musical, with a cast of 40 from the Hartt School of Music, was presented at St. Peter's Church in New York City on January 30, 1999.
- Alumnus Peter deCataldo writes: I am presenting a paper at an upcoming conference in Mystic, CT (June 17-19) on "Melville and the Sea," and my topic is "The Sea and the Black/Africanist Presence in Melville."
Additionally, I have written multiple entries that have been selected to appear in the forthcoming Encyclopedia of American Literature of the Sea and Great Lakes (Prof. Jill Gidmark, University of Minnesota, General Editor). While the exact publication date for the encyclopedia has not been settled upon, it is likely to be late this year or early Spring, 2000.
- Duncan Dobbelman: This academic year I have had translations published in Harper's, Grand Street, and Conjunctions. I also presented a paper at the Translation:Priorities, Theory, Practice conference in Hoboken in November. Other translations have been published on The Transcendental Friend, a web site of poetry and poetics, and a compact disc with sound experiments involving a translation of mine was recently issued by Immanent Audio. All my translations have been from the Dutch, though only two of the three people I've been working on are Dutch: Cees Nooteboom and Louis Couperus. Paul Van Ostaijen is (or rather was) Belgian.
- Robert Dowling delivered or will deliver the following papers this year:
"'The Greatest Lessons of Nature': Walt Whitman, The B'hoys and G'hals of the Bowery, and the Cultural Transformation of a New York Boulevard," The Many Cultures of Walt Whitman Conference, Rutgers University, Camden, October 1998.
"Stephen Crane and the Transformation of the Bowery," Central New York Conference on Language and Literature, SUNY College at Cortland, October 1998.
"Witnessing the Theater of the Slums: Walt Whitman, Stephen Crane, and Henry James on the Bowery," CUNY Graduate Center English Student Association Conference, March 1999.
- Ira Dworkin presented a paper entitled "'Narrative Terrorism': Mohammad Ali ibn Said and Early African American Narrative" at the 1999 MELUS (Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literature in the US) Conference in Nashville on March 20, 1999.
- Carolyn Ferrell has won the $5000 QPB (Quality Paper Back--Part of Book of the Month Club) award for New Fiction, 1998. Carolyn's story "Proper Library" (originally published in Ploughshares and included in her collection "Don't Erase Me," is included in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike (Houghton Mifflin Company).
- Alumna Cheryl J. Fish is the co-editor of A Stranger In The Village-Two Centuries of African-American Travel Writing. She is also an assistant professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College.
- Matthew Gold is one of the General Editors of Workplace: the Journal for Academic Labor. He delivered the following papers this year:
"Urban Pioneer: Lydia Maria Child's Letters from New York and the Movement of American Realism," Central New York Conference on Language and Literature, SUNY-Cortland, October 18-20, 1998.
"Pictures of Whitman," delivered at the "Cultures of Walt Whitman" Conference, Rutgers-Camden, October 22-23, 1998.
"The Expert Hand and the Obedient Heart: Dr. Vittoz, T.S. Eliot, and the Therapeutic Possibilities of the Waste Land," delivered at the ESA Student Conference, "Witnessing Pain and Terror," CUNY-Graduate Center, March 19, 1999.
- Matthew Goldie presented a paper in the Medieval Study on March 12, 1999 titled "The Patriotic Labor of Hoccleve's and Lydgate's Furstenspiegel."
- Josh Gosciak presented a paper at The Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean's -- (IRADAC) -- first annual "Works in Progress on the African Diaspora: An Interdisciplinary Conference" at Baruch College on November 6, 1998. The title was "Rape as a Metaphor in the Works of Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Claude McKay, and Edwidge Danticat." The papers are to be published by IRADAC sometime this year.
- Erin Henricksen presented a paper titled "Ester Sowernam, the Book of Esther, and Marriage." She attended the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies Conference in Newport, Rhode Island on 11/19/98-11/22/98.
- Ann Hoff presented "A Whole Box of Dreams: A Critical History of the Letters of Olive Schreiner," in a panel on the ethics of editing at the 10th International Interdisciplinary Conference of the Society for Textual Scholarship in New York City, April 14-17, 1999.
- Robert Kaplan is a graduate student representative on the CLAGS Board from 1/99-6/01/99.
- Mark Kelley reports that he'll be publishing in the Minnesota Review and co-editing a Milton volume with Professor Joseph Wittriech (in which he has an essay). He'll also be attending and presenting at four conferences this year. In addition, he's been kept very busy in his position as President of the Graduate Student Caucus of the MLA.
- James King presented "A War of Words: Charles Chesnutt, Gail Hamilton, and the Genteel" at the 10th International Interdisciplinary Conference of the Society for Textual Scholarship in New York City, April 14-17, 1999. His paper was part of a panel on publishing and reception. He also gave a paper in Muenster, Germany at a conference on 3/18/99-3/21/99 at the Collegium for African American Research.
- On a panel called "Queering the Geographies of American Fiction," chaired by Robert Dowling, Linda Camarasana will present "The Erotic Geographies of Djuna Barnes's Nightwood," Robin Hackett will present "Fictions of Sapphic Primitivism: Willa Cather's Sapphira and the Slave Girl," and Robert Kaplan will present "Sexual Geographies: Billy Budd, Textual Revision, and the Homoerotic Eden" at the American Literature Association Convention in Baltimore (5/27-5/30/99).
- Walter Holland (alumnus): An essay entitled "The Calamus Root: A Study of American Gay Poetry Since World War II" published in Gay and Lesbian Literature Since World War II: History and Memory, edited by Sonja L. Jones, Ph.D. of Allegheny College. New York: The Haworth Press, Inc. 1998. It was co-published simultaneously as Journal of Homosexuality, Volume 34, Numbers 3/4 1998. The essay was based on my dissertation which received the Paul Monette Award from C.U.N.Y. in 1998. A second essay , "In the Body's Ghetto" will appear in A Sea of Stories: The Shaping Power of Narrative in Gay and Lesbian Cultures which is forthcoming from The Haworth Press.
I will give the keynote address at the first annual Provincetown Poetry Festival on April 17, 1999. The lecture is entitled "After 30 Years: The Effects of Stonewall on Gay Poetry." I will also participate in a creative conversation with poet, Alan Dugan.
I had poems appear in Barrow Street literary magazine and Bay Windows. A piece on long-term gay male relationships will also appear this June in When Love Lasts Forever, edited by Merle James Yost for The Pilgrim Press. A poem is slated for the upcoming anthology Blood and Tears by Painted Leaf Press, spring 1999. Short fiction is also to possibly appear in several anthologies planned for next fall and winter.
Of course old news--book of poetry A Journal of the Plague Years: Poems 1979-1992, Magic City Press, 1992 and a novel, The March , Masquerade Books, October 1997; both are listed on Barnes and Noble on-line--The March is on Amazon.com--poetry book soon to follow.
- David Humphries:
Presentations:
"(Sub)merging Identities in Robert Lowell's "Words for Hart Crane.' " March 20, 1998 at "Confronting Extremes," a conference planned and hosted by the graduate students of the CUNY Graduate Center's English Program.
Publications:
1) Co-writer of a chapter in a forthcoming book: "Writing Writing Lives: The Collaborative Production of a Composition Text in a Large First-Year Writing Program." Sara Garnes, David Humphries, Vic Mortimer, Jennifer Phegley, and Kathleen R. Wallace. In (Re)Visioning Composition Textbooks. Eds. Fred Gale and Xin Gale. SUNY Press, 1999.
2) A forthcoming journal article (to be published in April) written with a lot of help from Prof. Richardson: "A New Kind of Meditation: Wallace Stevens' "The Plain Sense of Things." The Wallace Stevens Journal, Spring, 1999.
3) A forthcoming poem: "Another Street." The Literary Review (Fairleigh Dickinson University) Winter, 1999.
- In March, Geoffrey Jacques delivered "The 'Magical' Douglass in Ellison's Invisible Man," at the annual meeting of the Consortium for African American Research in Munster, Germany. His publications this year include "The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords," (a review of a documentary film by Stanley Nelson) in Cineaste 24:1, and three poems in Callaloo 22:1 ("Saturday Night Fish Fry," "Bangs & Whimpers," and "Just for a Thrill"). His second collection of poems, Suspended Knowledge (Easthampton, MA: Adastra) was published last year.
- Heather Julien received a $3800 grant from the University of Louisville to go to England for a month to do research on The Victorian Headmistress, the subject of her dissertation.
- Alumnus Bert Kimmelman, who teaches at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, has published a new book, The "Winter Mind": William Bronk and American Letters.
- Audrey Maurer presented a paper in Manila in December at the International Women's Congress held as part of the commemoration of the Centennial of the Philippines. The title of the paper was "Pieces of Colored Glass: American Women Imprisoned by the Japanese in World War II." It was especially fitting to present the paper in the Philippines, since it was there that the women had been interned.
- Mark McBeth published a poem In My Absence in the Global City Review. Mark's original masks were recently featured in the windows of Escada and in the pages of The New York Times.
- Jennifer McMahon: "Benevolent Assimilation: A Study of American Literature and Its Uses in the Philippines." Paper delivered at the American Culture Association / Popular Culture Association Conference, April 1, 1999.
"'Stars Replaced by Skull and Crossbones:' Mark Twain at the Fin de Siecle." Paper to be delivered at the Northeast MLA Conference, April 16-17, 1999.
- Magaret Nelson: "My happiest news to report is that Robert Creeley invited me to go with him to the University of Arizona next fall for a reading/colloquium--it's a 'millennium' event, meaning that for each occasion in the series they invite a 'senior poet,' and ask that poet to bring along someone who gives him or her 'hope for the future of poetry in the millennium.' Needless to say, I am excited and honored." Maggie also gave a poetry reading on November 22, 1998 at the CCS Reading Series.
- Michelle Pacht gave a paper titled "Language and Religion in Things Fall Apart" at the ESA Student Conference, "Witnessing Pain and Terror," CUNY-Graduate Center, March 19, 1999.
- Leo Parascondola: Interview with Paul Lauter, "Class in the Classroom," Workplace: the Electronic Journal of the Graduate Student Caucus of the MLA 1.2 (October, 1998), http://www.workplace-gsc.com.
"Assessing Our Assessments: A Collective Questioning of What Students Need--And Get." Journal of Basic Writing 17.1 (Spring 1998): 73-95 (with co-authors Liza Bruna, Ian Marshall, Tim McCormack, Wendy Ryden, and Carl Whithaus of the English Program).
"Performing Shakespeare: Writing and Literacy on the Job," Workplace: The Electronic Journal of the Graduate Student Caucus of the MLA 1.1 (January 1998), http://www.workplace-gsc.com
Presentations:
"Strategies for Working-Class Film Study in the Writing Classroom: Nothing But a Man, Rosie the Riveter, " Working-Class Culture and Pedagogy Special Interest Group, 50th Convention of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Atlanta, Georgia, March 1999.
"Writing and Reading Race and Class," (with Ian Marshall) Working-Class Pedagogies (full-day workshop), 50th Convention of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Atlanta, Georgia, March 1999.
"'America, the Beautiful': Race, Class, and the State in the Narratives of Frederick Douglass and Hosea Hudson," 3rd International Conference of the Collegium on African American Research, University of Muenster, Germany, March, 1999.
"From Rebellion to Revolution: The Problem of Americanism in the Writing of Frederick Douglass and Hosea Hudson," 114th Convention of the Modern Language Association of America, San Francisco, California, December,1998.
"Hybrid Discourses for Hybrid Classrooms: Basic Writing as a Social Relation," 22nd Annual Conference of the CUNY Association of Writing Supervisors (CAWS), Borough of Manhattan Community College, October 1998.
"Graduate Student Caucus/MLA and Economic Justice in the Academic Workplace," Institute on Culture and Society, sponsored by the Marxist Literary Group of the Modern Language Association, University of Illinois-Chicago, June 1998.
- Elizabeth Primamore: My article, " A Don, Virginia Woolf, the Masses, and the Case of Miss Kilman," appeared in the Vol. 9 1998 edition of LIT/Literature Interpretation Theory. I am presenting a paper at this year's Woolf conference. The conference committee is interested in publishing this paper in their yearly "proceedings."
- Jenny Rich is the Acting Director of Critical Thinking for the Spring Semester at Marymount Manhattan College. She's replacing Carol Camper for one semester.
- David Richter: Last fall I gave a paper, "Generic Incoherence in the Narrative of The Concubine of Gibeah," at Genre at the Millennium: An International Conference, Colgate University and Hamilton College, Hamilton and Clinton, NY, September 1998. This spring I gave a paper: "What We Talk About When We Talk About Form" at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference, Milwaukee, WI, March 24-28, 1999.
- Denise Rodriguez: " 'This the Place I Am': Spatial Patterning and Cultural Identity in Absalom, Absalom! and Beloved" at The 27th Annual 20th Century Literature Conference, University of Louisville, February 1999.
- Wendy Ryden co-authored "Assessing Our Assessments." Journal of Basic Writing 17.1 (1998): 73-95.
Presentations:
"Interrogating the Monologue of Whiteness." paper presented at the Conference on College Composition and Communication. Atlanta, 26 March 1999. "Fear, Desire, and the De-Centered Epistolary Narrative in Humphry Clinker." paper presented at CUNY 18th Century Meeting. New York, 11 Dec.1998.
"Feminism and . . ." CUNY Women's Studies Group. Panel presenter. New York, 6 Nov. 1998.
"Blurring Boundaries and Diffusing Fear in the Writing Workshop." paper presented at 22nd Annual CAWS Conference, Borough of Manhattan Community College, 30 Oct. 1998.
"The Free Self and the Captive Other: The Construction of the Individual in 'The Heart of Darkness.' " Paper presented at the Joseph Conrad Society Conference (U.K.), London, 2 July 1998.
"A Call for Total Process." Paper presented at Confronting Extremes, City University Graduate School, New York, 20 March 1998.
- Michael Scharf presented a paper at the "Border Crossings" modernism conference in New Paltz, NY, and one at NEMLA.
- Catherine Sears and Elizabeth Hollow both participated in the 18th annual University of California Dickens Institute held on the UC Santa Cruz campus in August 1998. Both Elizabeth and Catherine were nominated by the Graduate School "in recognition of their strong academic records and their special interest in the 19th Century." Lectures and seminars at the Institute focused on Oliver Twist and Lewis Carroll's Alice books.
- Dan Senes: During the 1998-99 school year I presented a paper on "Hamlet" and "The Lion King" at the Northeast Popular Culture Association conference. And next month I'll be moderating that session at NVSA.
- The George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for the 1997-8 season has been awarded to Professor Alisa Solomon, author of Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theatre and Gender, published by Routledge. The award was presented at a reception in New York City on March 8, 1999.
A professor of English and Journalism at Baruch College, and professor of English and Theater at the Graduate Center, Alisa Solomon is also a Staff Writer at the Village Voice, where she writes theater criticism as well as news features on a wide range of political and cultural subjects.
The Nathan Award is administered by the Cornell University Department of English, under the terms of a trust established by George Jean Nathan (1882-1958), author and critic, who graduated from Cornell in 1904. Designed to "stimulate intelligent playgoing," the award has been given annually since 1958 for "the best piece of dramatic criticism, whether article, essay treatise, or book," published during the theatrical year. the $10,000 prize is considered one of the richest and most distinguished in the American theater.
The winner is selected by a committee consisting of the chairs of the English departments of Cornell, Princeton, and Yale universities and an expert on dramatic criticism from each department. The committee is led by Jonathan Culler, chair of Cornell's Department of English.
The committee's citation states: "Re-Dressing the Canon is a bold and lucid stud of the performance of gender in a wide range of plays, from Aristophanes to the present. It displays a thorough understanding of how meaning is communicated through theatrical performance, a solid grounding in theatrical history and dramatic criticism and a sophisticated engagement with theoretical issues in a lively and accessible style."
- Ann Tabachnikov presented "Collaboration, Communication and Education: Students Respond to Collaborative Learning Groups at the CAWS Conference (CUNY Association of Writing Supervisors) in October 1998 at Borough of Manhattan Community College and "Hollywood, Homophobia, Holocaust: Real Fiction and Me" at the English Student Association Graduate Student Conference at the Graduate Center in March 1999.
- Karen Thoens: Presentation: "Teaching Women's Studies in High School," at the National Women's Studies Association Conference, June 1998. Publication: "It, A Sexual Fantasy," a chapter in: Imagining the Worst: Stephen King and the Representations of Women. Editors :Kathleen Margaret Lant and Theresa Thompson. Westport: Greenwood P., 1998.
- Ann Wallace: "What's Love Got to Do With It? The Literary Dynamics of Desire," Graduate English Association Conference, Fordham University, February 1999; "American Cultural Studies: Theory, Practice, and Pedagogy," Comparative Literature Symposium, University of Tulsa, Tulsa, OK, February 1999; "Women and Creativity II: Women as Artists and Subjects," Women's Studies Conference, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI.
- Tiffany Werth: Will present "Mirror Sites: Constructing Communities in Cyberspace" and will co-present "Teaching Classroom or Distance Learning Courses with FirstClass Collaborative Classroom: Expanding Traditional Pedagogies," at the 15th Computers and Writing Conference in Rapid City, SD (Spring '99).
Presented "'As Most Plesent Brent Offering': John Foxe's Spectacle of Witness" at the 1999 Annual CUNY Graduate Student Conference.
- Carl Whithaus chaired a panel, "Queering the Geographies of American Fiction," of panel for The American Literature Association 10th Annual Conference, Baltimore, May 1999.
He also published or has forthcoming the following: "Wrethen in fere: Gender, Chastity, and Women's Social Positions in The Floure and the Leafe." Women and Language (forthcoming, Fall, 1999).
"Immediate Memories: (Nostalgic) Time and (Immediate) Loss in the Poetry of David Shapiro." Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature (forthcoming, Spring 1999).
"Hypertext Conceals Itself, It Announces Itself : Rhetoric and Collaborative Writing in the Electronic Classroom," Kairos: A Journal For Teachers of Writing in Webbed Environments 3.2 (1998). http://www.english.ttu.edu/kairos/3.2/response/Whithaus/whithaus.htm
Carl also presented, or is scheduled to present:
Nov. 14, 1998: "Translating Dissent: Gender and Style in Elizabeth Cary' s Reply of the Most Illustrious Cardinall Perron and History of Edward II. ; Chair, "Poems for the Millennium," edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris; and Chair, "Translations of Renaissance Literary Works. Literary Translation: Priorities, Theory, Practice," Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ.
Oct. 30, 1998: "Alternatives to External Methods of Writing Assessment." CUNY Association of Writing Supervisors, New York, NY with Graduate School students Liza Bruna and Tim McCormack.
- Robert Wilson: I gave a talk last summer to the Institute for Writing, Reading, and Civic Education at Harvard re the use of the US Constitution in the high school English classroom. I was invited back for this summer. I published an article entitled "Two Previously Unidentified Windows in St. Mary's Church, Yonkers" in the quarterly Yonkers History (Winter 1998) published by the Yonkers Historical Society.
Here are some (there were others) of the faculty, students, and alumnae/i who presented papers at the December 1998 Convention of the Modern Language Association in San Francisco:
- Richard McCoy (Faculty): "The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I and the Regicide, 350 Years Later."
- Mark Kelley (Student): "Is Our Labor Academic?"
- Ian Marshall (Student): "Is Our Labor Academic?"
- Leo Parascondola (Student): "The Red and the Black."
- Burt Kimmelman (Alumnus): "Ellipsis and Silence: The Poetry of George Oppen."
- Steve Kruger (Faculty): "Chaucer in the Classroom and the Curriculum of the 21st Century."
- Barbara Bowen (Faculty): "Changing Texts, Changing Practices."
- Meena Alexander (Faculty): "Re-membering Cultural Genes in America: Personal Narratives of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Meena Alexader."
- Page Delano (Alumna): "Ann Petrie's Contribution to American Literature" and "Iron Petticoats."
- Stacey Donahue (Alumna): "Paper Session -- Eugene O'Neill Society."
- David Ferris (Faculty): "The Aims of Lyric."
- Nancy Berke (Alumna): "Red Rags: Modernist Women and the Radical Press."
- Gay Wachman (Student): "Red Rags: Modernist Women and the Radical Press."
- Mary Ann Caws (Faculty): "Samuel Beckett and Poetry."
BIRTHS:
- Jim Broderick: Madeline Broderick, August 1998.
- Paul S. Collins: Morgan Collins, February 1999.
- Lara Kwalbrun: Raanan Meir, January 4, 1999, 7lbs 9 ounces.
- Rebecca Quinn: Conor Henderson Quinn, September 11, 1998, 8lbs 14 1/2 ounces, 21 inches.
- Matthew Gartner: Leo Merle Hassrick Gartner, December 15, 1998, 8lbs, 21 inches.
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