English Department News

2011-2012

News on Faculty

Dr. Pam Clements presented a paper, “Gentlemen of the Road:  A Fantastic History in Progress,” for the panel, “Fantastic Histories”, at the 46th International Congress on Medieval Studies, May 12-16, 2011.  At the same conference, she participated in a poster session with a presentation titled, “Playing Around with the Neomedieval,” and participated in a Round Table, “Seducing the Students through Neomedievalism.”

An article she co-wrote with Carol Robinson, “Living with Neomedievalism,” appeared in Studies in Medievalism XVIII (Defining Medievalism(s) II): 55-75. Her article, also written with Carol Robinson, “Neomedievalism Unplugged,” is forthcoming in Studies in Medievalism XXIII.  This second article is an invited response to reactions engendered by the earlier Studies in Medievalism article.  Their anthology, The Medieval in Motion, is finally going to press and will be forthcoming in Spring 2012 (Mellen).

She has published 3 poems: “Mud Season, in Wartime,” Earth’s Daughters 74 (2009): 23-24; “Autumn,” Blueline XXXI (2010): 16 and  “Festival,”  Oriel (2010).

Her essay, “Tuna in Truro,” was selected as a finalist in the Hudson Valley Writer’s Guild’s 2011 Nonfiction Contest.

Pam was elected Core Coordinator last spring, and will serve from fall 2011 to spring 2013

Dr. Jerry Dollar presented a paper this past summer on Willa Cather and Wagner (at the International Cather Seminar at Smith College). More recently he gave a paper on Montana environmental writer/activist Rick Bass (at the annual Western Literature Assoc. conference, in Missoula, MT).  Jerry also got to meet the author he was talking about (the first time that has happened). He has also (during 2011) completed chapter-length studies of Silko’s Ceremony and Louise Erdrich’s Tracks, and he continues to work on African literature (esp. Kenyan novelist Ngugi Wa’Thiango).

Dr. Mary Fitzgerald-Hoyt was on sabbatical leave for the Spring 2011 semester.  She completed an article, “Walk the Blue Fields:  Claire Keegan’s New Rural Ireland,” several pieces of creative nonfiction, and a short story.  She also served as a manuscript reader for Papers on Language and Literature  and continues to be on the editorial advisory board for The Journal of the Short Story in English.

          She has recently completed a second essay on Keegan, “The Child, the Famine, the Future:  Claire Keegan’s Foster,” which is currently under editorial consideration.

Dr. Margaret Hannay has just received two awards from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women:  The 2011 Book Award for her biography Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth; and the Josephine A. Roberts Scholarly Edition Award for The Correspondence (c. 1626-1659) of Dorothy Percy Sidney, Countess of Leicester. Edited with Noel J. Kinnamon and Michael G. Brennan. Aldershot, Hants and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. They were presented at the annual meeting of SSEMW on October 29 in Fort Worth, Texas.  The citations can be read at http://www.ssemw.org/awards11.html.

Dr. Naton Leslie's new, full-length book of poetry has been published by David Robert Books, an imprint of WordTech Communications in Cincinnati, Ohio. Small Cathedrals is a collection of blank verse sonnets on the theme of mother and children as revealed in art, literature and elsewhere.  Ten of his poems are forthcoming in: Slant [Univ. Central Arksansas, Conway, AR], James Dickey Review [Lynchburg College, Lynchburg, VA]; Ship of Fools  [U of Rio Grande, Rio Grande, OH]; Stone Canoe [Syracuse U., Syracuse, NY]; Fallen City Anthology, [Sharon PA]; Poet Lore [The Writer’s Center, Bethesada, MD and Pegasus (Boulder City, NV).  Nine poems were recently published:  “You Have the Right to the Wild” and “You Have the Right to a Full Set of Wrenches” in White Pelican Review [Lakeland, FL], “You Have the Right to Your Father’s Last Car” and “You Have the Right to the Grown-up Menu” in Illuminations [Coll. of Charleston, Charleston, SC], “You Have the Right to a Surrogate” in Cyphers [Dublin, Ireland]; “Each Bridge in Seems (Lakeland College, Sheboygan, WI); “You Have the Right to the Dead Letter Office,” in River Styx [Big River, St. Louis, MO]; “Invention of Pretzels” in Cooweescoowee [Roger State U.,Claremore, OK]; and  “From the Sumerian” in Ship of Fools  [U of Rio Grande, Rio Grande, OH]. Another poem, “Sharon, Pennsylvania, at Night” was reprinted in Bottom Dog Press Poetry Anthology: 25^th Anniversary. (Huron, OH). The poem represents Moving to Find Work, his first full-length book of poetry published by Bottom Dog in 2000. He has two essays forthcoming:  “The Culture of Guns” in Palo Alto Review and “Odd Jobs” in The Florida Review. Two were recently published: “Reverting to the Primitive” in Under the Sun, [Tennessee Technology Univ., Cookeville, TN] , and “Deebs:” in Fourth Genre [University of Michian Press, East Lansing]. He has conducted book discussions in area libraries on Ron Rash’s Serena, Ron Wallace’s Big Fish, and James Kunstler’s World Made by Hand.  He has continued to publish articles in Saratoga Living on antiques, books and other topics.

Dr. Lisa Nevárez's updated the "Latino Short Fiction" entry for Salem Press' "Critical Survey of Short Fiction," 4th edition, to be published in January 2012. She is currently working on a paper discussing vampire babies in contemporary literature; she hopes to present this at the Popular Culture Association conference in the Spring.  In the Spring semester she will offer two courses, Literary Criticism (ENGL 400) and "The Vampire" (Honors seminar, ENGL 490).

In the fall of 2010,  Dr. Rachel Stein offered a new honors seminar on the topic of  Contemporary Queer Literature Film. In April 2011,  Dr. Rachel Stein and two of her students from that class—Heather McHugh and Marcy Dwyer--presented papers/creative projects about queer identities and religion at the national queer studies conference at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.  Dr. Stein organized a panel on gender, sexuality and environmental apocalypse at the conference of the Association of the Study of Literature and Environment that met in June at the University of Indiana,  Bloomington.  She presented a paper entitled  “Environmental Eugenics in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake  and The Year of the Flood.  Over the summer she expanded this into a chapter that has been accepted for a forthcoming book on feminist eco-criticism. 

Dr. Todd Snyder will present his ethnographic research study "College is Not a Fairytale: Appalachian Students Re-Write the First-Year Experience" at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in St. Louis, Missouri  (March 2012).

Dr. Keith Wilhite presented a paper on "Unsettling Subjects: Amateur Cartography in Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies" at the Midwest Modern Language Association conference on November 5, 2011.