spotlight
4 English Faculty Received COVID-19 Innovative Teaching Award
Feb. 18, 2021—The Office of the Dean recognized more than 50 A&S faculty members for their exemplary instruction during the fall 2020 term. Faculty were nominated by their peers and their students for (among many things) creative teaching using multiple technologies, teaching on timely and topical issues, innovative teaching in special contexts, and ultimately keeping students engaged...
Jessie Hock Releases First Book
Feb. 8, 2021—Assistant Professor of English Jessie Hock releases The Erotics of Materialism: Lucretius and Early Modern Poetics In The Erotics of Materialism, Jessie Hock maps the intersection of poetry and natural philosophy in the early modern reception of Lucretius and his De rerum natura. Subtly revising an ancient atomist tradition that condemned poetry as frivolous, Lucretius asserted a...
New Publication by Anthony Reed: Soundworks
Jan. 20, 2021—Associate Professor of English Anthony Reed Releases Soundsworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production (Refiguring American Music) In Soundworks Anthony Reed argues that studying sound requires conceiving it as process and as work. Since the long Black Arts era (ca. 1958–1974), intellectuals, poets, and musicians have defined black sound as radical aesthetic practice. Through their recorded collaborations...
Maria Carlos (MFA ’21) Wins TWF20-21 Poetry Contest
Jan. 20, 2021— Judge Paisley Rekdal had this to say about the winner, “A selection of poems ambitious both in scope and energy. These are poems that investigate race, class, and nostalgia via personal memories of the narrator’s family and Southern history itself. The poems push deeply into uncomfortable territory with grace, nuance, and real complexity. Wonderful.” Maria...
You Want To Read This Book!
Jan. 20, 2021—Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America by Professor Teresa Goddu A Recommendation by Chair of the Department of English and Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English Dana Nelson When we think of abolition, we often remember Harriet Beecher Stowe’s celebrated 1852 novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin: its tear-inducing scenes, like Eliza’s perilous escape across...
Lee Conell (MFA ’15) is 2020 Wallant Award recipient
Jan. 20, 2021—MFA graduate Lee Conell (MFA in Fiction/2015) has been awarded the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for her novel The Party Upstairs. The Edward Lewis Wallant Award is a national prize from the University of Hartford that recognizes an emerging author whose outstanding work shows kinship with Wallant’s writing. It is “one of the oldest and...
New Faculty Carlos A. Nugent wins American Literature’s Foerster Prize
Jan. 14, 2021—Congratulations to Carlos Alonso Nugent, winner of the 2020 Norman Foerster Prize for best essay of the year in American Literature: “Lost Archives, Lost Lands: Rereading New Mexico’s Imagined Environments”, published in volume 92, issue 2. Read the essay, freely available through the end of April, here. The prize committee offered this praise for the...
You Want To Read This Book!
Dec. 17, 2020—Postcards from the Gerund State by Professor Lorraine López A Recommendation by Professor of English Nancy Reisman If you’ve noticed that higher education is rich terrain for satire, or have pondered how educated, artistic women might navigate institutional absurdity, outmoded gender paradigms, white myopia, and bumbling racial and cultural erasures, all while reckoning with teaching...
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Dec. 1, 2020—Precarious Forms: Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas by Professor Candice Amich A Recommendation by Associate Professor of English Emily Lordi Professor Candice Amich’s new book Precarious Forms: Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas uses visceral descriptions and stunning analysis to show how contemporary artists across the Americas—in Chile, Mexico, Cuba, Guatemala, the United...
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Oct. 20, 2020—The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and resilience since the 1960s (Refiguring American Music) by Professor Emily Lordi A Recommendation by Thea J. Autry, Postdoctoral Fellow Department of English Did you know that soul music has historically found its inspiration in the black Baptist tradition? That in Beyoncé’s Lemonade is a nod to 60s...