Newsletter

April 16, 2007

Features

Center for Humanities, Arts, and Technosciences (CHATS) and Institute on Critical Climate Change (ICCC) Create Unique Opportunities for English Department to Engage in International, Multidisciplinary Scholarship

THE CENTER FOR HUMANITIES, ARTS AND TECHNOSCIENCE (CHATS), co-founded by Department members Tom Cohen and Mary Valentis, was designed to promote exchange between the sciences and the humanities and to serve as a forum providing  the University at Albany and the wider community with a model of intellectual and aesthetic innovation and outreach. Officially designated as a graduate research center in 2004, CHATS is a member of the Imagining America consortium and the Duke Collaboratory.

As a part of the University at Albany's College of Arts and Sciences, CHATS  launched two major public humanities projects in 2006 and inaugurated a collaborative research INSTITUTE ON CRITICAL CLIMATE CHANGE IN THE HUMANITIES (ICCC). Meanwhile, Encounter Albany Architecture, designed as a yearlong focus on Albany's Modern Movement, was realized as a collaborative venture with Historic Albany Foundation, The Albany Institute of History and Art, and the New York State Chapter of DOCOMOMO, modern art preservationists. Architectural tours, lectures, classes, student competitions, planning studios, and a book, Albany Architects (Mount Ida Press) , are some of the programs promoting visual literacy on and off campus. The Graham Foundation of Chicago awarded a grant to the Center for its work on visual culture and the environment, and TechKnlowledgies: New Imaginaries in the Humanities, Arts, and Techno Sciences has just been published, which features the essays, technology plays, art, and installations produced by Center.

The ICCC – a SUNY collaboration between the University at Albany and University at Buffalo, co-directed by Tom Cohen and Henry Sussman, and initiated under CHATS – began a planned series of conferences, publications, and events addressing the coming 21st century mutations in critical thought across the disciplines. The ICCC presented its opening symposium on March 23-24. Mary Valentis and Mike Hill, Chair of English, coordinated the event, which included participants from a number of departments in the College of Arts and Sciences. Examining the new temporalities associated with a culture of the image and space today, the international symposium was entitled: Chronopolitics and Visual Culture: The Temporal Politics of the Image and Architectural Spaces. It featured keynote addresses by Eduardo Cadava (Princeton), Joan Copjec (UB SUNY), David Lung (Hong Kong), and Tom Cohen along with two special panels that explored chronopolitics in architecture, film, theater, new media, and art.

This spring, CHATS and the recently inaugurated Institute on Critical Climate Change in the Humanities won a Critical Exchange Grant from the Imagining America consortium.

During the Fall 2006 semester, in collaboration with the Albany Academies and the Albany Institute for History and Art, CHATS produced Why Melville Matters Now, a transdisciplinary celebration of Herman Melville that included an Academic symposium, art installation, an exhibit of Frank Stella's The Waves, and a city-wide 24-hour marathon reading of Moby Dick. 

Collaborating with the Provost's Office and the VP for Finance, CHATS has submitted a major grant application to the Campus Heritage grant program of the Getty Foundation to participate in an educational program that will promote the campus as an architectural tourist destination and will design curricula in visual culture and the built environment. The Center is also working to facilitate next fall's China theme semester and the following year's focus on scarcity and environmental challenges. 

The Center is also in the planning stages with the Provost's Office, the Albany Institute for History and Art, the Albany Symphony, Cap Rep, and the Academies to produce a major symposium on the James family, both Henry and William, whose roots are grounded in Albany.

Lastly, this year the Dean of the College appointed faculty advisors to serve as CHATS board members. They include: Professors Tom Cohen, Eszter Scalazar, Tony DeBlasi, Joel Berkowitz, and Rachel Dressler. The Dean's community advisory board members, Phoebe Bender and Robert Herman, serve as affiliate board members and advisors. 

Other upcoming events include two major conferences from the ICCC, one in spring 2008 at the University at Albany campus followed by another in fall 2009 at the University at Buffalo. Both conferences, in conjunction with the recent Chronopolitics Symposium, will culminate in a volume of collected essays. As was the case with the Chronopolitics Symposium, the upcoming conferences will include a diverse range of worldwide scholars including such disciplines as English, Theatre, Geography and Planning, Architecture, Art and Art History, as well as independent artists, architects, contractors and community organizations. The ICCC is also planning, in collaboration with the English Department, a conference for the Fall titled "Biomutation and the Ecologies of War," and a symposium in China with American and Chinese scholars for 2008.

Q and A with First Year Faculty Member, Ineke Murakami

Ineke Murakami (Ph. D. in English Literature, Notre Dame) joined the University at Albany English Department faculty as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2006. She holds an M. A. in English Literature (Notre Dame) and an M. A. in Creative Writing (Illinois at Chicago). She has published two articles and two book reviews, all forthcoming in 2007, and brings editorial experience from her work on the journals Shakespeare Survey and Religion and Literature. She has taught four courses at Albany, including an upper level undergraduate course and a graduate course this spring on allegory in early English texts.

The following interview was conducted over a series of e-mail exchanges Between Dan Gremmler and Ineke:

Dan: So, Ineke, you’re just about through your first year at UAlbany. What are your impressions thus far?

Ineke: This seems like an exciting time to be here. . . lots of growth, new possibilities. I certainly couldn’t ask for a better group of people—students, colleagues, and administrative staff, alike. Not one person complained when I put a gargoyle on my door. I’m happy to be here.

Dan: Any surprises? 

Ineke: After teaching class one evening I actually got lost in the tunnels.  How does one become lost in a square?

Dan: It’s weird.  On the outside, the podium is very symmetrical, but beneath this stoic concrete façade, there be monsters.  I don’t suppose you’ve been inside the new University Hall building yet?  I usually park in front of it, and I have this sneaking suspicion that someone’s spying on me behind those mirrored windows.

Ineke: Perhaps you’re being a bit paranoid, Dan.  After all, with the Panoptic—uhm, bell tower overseeing all activity on the podium what more surveillance is necessary?  Now, I’m going to have to ask you to hand over that tape recorder.

Dan: The bell tower - of course!  So, you joined the UAlbany faculty as a Renaissance scholar.  The word “Renaissance” often conjures pictures of Shakespeare writing a five act tragedy or some Italian humanists reviving classical literature. . .

Ineke: Hmmm, “reviving” or resuscitating?!  I sense a polite question coming on about the relevance of picking over the remains of a dead world. But what happens if we add the following to our Renaissance picture conjuring? An explosion in overseas trade, bloody religious wars, intensified competition with foreign powers; a terrifying plague; new technology that expands public access to knowledge and self-expression in unprecedented ways; educational reform, waves of downsizing in which heads literally roll, and celebrity poets whose street-fighting lands them in jail (only to escape capital punishment on a legal technicality: the ability to read Latin).  Differences—yes, but so many fascinating similarities to our own world that to dig into that “past” is to unearth not corpses but the living roots of attitudes and conventions that continue to trouble and intrigue us today. 

Dan: Indeed, t here seems to be more interest than ever in period studies generally and the Renaissance in particular, partly because of popular fiction, such as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.  Maybe you could put it in a better academic context for us?  Do you find these preconceptions helpful or misleading in the classroom?

Ineke: I welcome just about anything that gets people interested in the period (and with the Da Vinci Code we’re also reminded of our important links to late Antiquity and the Middle Ages).  At the same time, I would hope we approach the Renaissance not with nostalgia, but with a keen sense of its otherness—an otherness that nevertheless continues to speak to us. The Renaissance was not a renaissance for everyone, and the issues of class, race, sexuality and gender that early modern thinkers struggled to resolve continue to occupy our North American society. As students pursue their interests, historical inconsistencies and inaccuracies can be ironed out, but cultural material that fails to capture our imagination gets tossed out, or worse, becomes a relic. We don’t need anymore idols; we do need to let ourselves explore what went on in this formative period--to deconstruct it, interrogate it, and wonder about its ramifications. Fiction is one way of doing this.

Dan: Right then.  Onto the Double Jeopardy round: I was more than a little jealous when I read the description of undergraduate courses you taught last semester and will be offering next fall.  It’s not every class that traverses territory from “The Slaughter of Innocents,” to Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Jonson to Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, all as part of a course on “a/moral” plays.  How did that series of intersections come about?

Ineke: All of the texts we looked at in that course were precursors to, versions of, or reactions to a dramatic form called the “morality play.” As your list of topics suggests, this genre was a lot juicier than is commonly believed.  With its clash of law and ethics, violence and more subtle forms of coercion, with its social criticism, blatant disclaimers, and gallows humor, the morality play was an early Law and Order.

Dan: Or Battlestar Galactica! Ahem. And next fall, you’re teaching a course on Shakespeare with the tantalizing title, “Shakescenes.”  What does that mean?

Ineke: The title “Shakescenes” plays on the catty pun writer Robert Greene once fired off in the direction of a sixteenth-century contemporary--a rising star of a young playwright who supposedly fancied himself “the onely Shake-scene in a countrie.”  Beyond that, I chose the title to underscore the student performance component of the course, which aims to put Shakespeare on its feet, so to speak.  Given my interest in performance studies and performance pedagogy, using student performance to ground an exploration of a selection of Shakespearean plays is a natural choice. The other “scenes” we’ll be examining in the course come from Shakespeare’s England: its theatres, courts and markets, its collective expressions of belief and fear, scenes of generic assertion and other conditions that contributed to the production of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre.

Dan: That reminds me, you also have an M. A. in Creative Writing.  How does that experience at the more or less creative end of the modern arts spectrum impact your scholarship or vice versa?

Ineke: Well, I’ve heard it makes my scholarly writing a bit. . . uhm colorful, and it definitely makes me one of those creative writers who puts a lot of conscious effort into research.  Otherwise, I find the demands of scholarship to be very similar to those of creative work. Both types of writing are demanding, frustrating, and deeply satisfying; both give me a reason to haunt the stacks, think about issues that matter, and talk to friends, real and imaginary.

Dan: Final Jeopardy: what else have you been up to this year? 

Ineke: Chipping away at a book about those morality plays we discussed, writing reviews on related books, writing grant proposals, etc. In the fall, I attended a conference in Toronto at which I had the odd pleasure of watching a male scholar, rather well-regarded in my field, perform my edition of a section of Titus Andronicus in a female role.

Dan: Yes. Although I suppose Elizabethan audiences wouldn't have found that fact nearly as entertaining as we do. Any other projects in the works or that you’d like to put in the works?

Ineke: Beyond my own work, I’m excited about some of the opportunities I have to support others’ scholarly and creative endeavors this spring.  I’ll be moderating a panel for the Undergraduate research conference on “Revenge, Sex and Satire: Language and Society in the British Literary Tradition,” and another for the EGSO conference on “Class and Hegemony.”  From the abstracts I’ve seen, both conferences promise to be smart and provocative.  It was also great fun to serve as a panelist recently for one of the Theatre Department’s graduate productions—a remarkable, multimedia version of Julius Caesar.  Rumor has it their next project is a morality play. I’m SO there.

Dan: Sounds great!  Well thanks for taking the time to chat with me, and be careful if you happen by that University Hall.  People behind mirrored windows are not to be trusted.

Editorial note: University Hall is actually one of a number of new and unique architectural structures on the UAlbany campus (pictured at right). The building was featured in the recent Architure at Albany Semester, sponsored by CHATS (see feature article above for more information). Stop in and say hello. There's nothing to fear - unless, of course, you don't cast a reflection.

Angela Pneuman’s Home Remedies: An Interview with the Author

by Kelly O. Secovnie

Angela Pneuman, a third-year PhD. student, has recently seen the publication of her short story collection Home Remedies (Harcourt, January 2007).  Pneuman was raised in Kentucky, where she earned her B.A. at Ashbury College.  She went on to earn her M.F.A. from Indiana University and later served as a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She comes to Albany as a Presidential Fellow. 

The publisher describes Pneuman’s first book as follows: “Tonsillectomies should not be attempted at home, cucumbers make lousy stand-ins, and golf clubs can be hazardous to a mother’s health. Love and faith are treacherous negotiations. Mercy and malice go hand in hand. In Home Remedies Angela Pneuman renders these unsettling truths, small and large, with blazing insight, dark humor, and a compelling cast of characters, all of whom hail from Kentucky. A deeply affecting debut, Home Remedies marks the beginning of a distinguished literary career.”

The collection has received a number of positive reviews from several distinguished authors and publications.  Lorrie Moore, author of Birds of America, writes: “These amazing stories have an inviting surface and a complex core that is in bitter conversation with it. They possess intelligence and grace of every sort. Angela Pneuman must surely be one of the most gifted young writers around.”  Malena Watrous of the San Francisco Chronicle writes, “Pneuman [. . .] offers a clear-eyed view of the role religion plays in the lives of her characters.  But her real subject is the complexity of female relationships, the ways that women depend on each other in a world where men often make themselves scarce.”  The reviewer from Esquire magazine writes: “[T]hough these excellent stories are not gentle, recognizing the truths in them is somewhat comforting, if not occasionally disturbing.  Just like going home for Thanksgiving.”  And, O The Oprah Magazine reviewed the collection, opining “With her dark sense of humor and almost eerie apprehension of what people are too clenched to say, Pneuman is a stunning new talent to watch.”  In the wake of the many positive reviews received, Pneuman recently completed a book tour with readings throughout Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, New Orleans, New York, San Francisco and the Napa Valley.  Her book was also recently listed as a top ten best-seller in San Francisco.

What is the significance of the title Home Remedies?

“Home Remedies” resonates with the milieu of these stories—rural Kentucky—as well as something about their content—they’re mostly about home and family—and, too, the title plays with much discussed effort of narrative to fix and resolve, to “remedy,” that in the best cases thwarts itself if you read closely enough. It’s the title of the first story.

How have these stories come together for you?  What was the process of creating a collection out of so many of your previously-published stories, and how did it feel to see them all together in one place?

These fit together, for me, as variations on a theme, or small set of themes. To see them all in once place made me aware of my writerly habits, my default strategies. It was very illuminating. I had many more stories that I didn’t include in the collection, and the process of inclusion and exclusion made me think more about what a collection is, or does, or should do.

Malena Watrous, writer for the San Francisco Chronicle has compared you to Flannery O’Connor.  Do you agree with the comparison, and in what way does Home Remedies reflect the aesthetic offered by a writer like O’Connor?

Well, it’s a flattering comparison. She’s just an incredible writer, and often misread, I think. She is a merciless observer, which works interestingly against the way her stories are structured around the shape of grace. I sometimes think of her as the great hater, and I’m attracted to the kind of loathing she creates on the page, because you can’t loathe like that without profound commitment to the object. And she writes about small things, I guess, what some people call domestic things, and of course rural southern culture, which is the space I’m working in. A politics of intimacy and discomfort between people.

She is strange and impossible to reconcile, which is how every writer would probably like to be perceived—though there’s nothing worse than a writer who’s attempting to be strange and impossible to reconcile!

How has your experience as a writer of fiction been influenced by your academic pursuits and vice versa?

I’m a different reader because of the critical work. I think I’m more aware of what’s playing upon my intuition, of how intuition is formed and the forces that allow it to operate, perpetuate. Still, with the stories and the novel I need to be in a place where I don’t understand too much about what I’m doing—otherwise the writing unfolds like a treatise. Basically I like to try to understand the way ideologies operate, how they inform the ways people read—and then I prefer to suffer from temporary amnesia, so that everything I feel like I know and believe can push its way to the surface in its own way, a way that hopefully surprises and educates me.

I understand that you have a contract with Harcourt to publish a novel as well.  When can we look for it?

New Hires

The English Department conducted two searches for three positions (early American, 19th & 20th century American, and British/American literature). The searches exceeded all expectations, and the department wound up with four new hires for the upcoming school year: one modern British and American literature position; two 19th and 20th century Americanists; and one early American scholar. We extend a warm thank you to the respective search committees and the College of Arts and Sciences for allowing us to add the additional line. Let's be sure to welcome our new faculty members to the UAlbany community!

Here is a list of new faculty members with a brief summary of their degrees and areas of interest. Be sure to stop by and say hello next fall!

Paul Stasi accepted the British/American position and will officially begin life at UAlbany in fall 2007. He will teach a section of ENG 210 - Introduction to English Studies; and ENG 372 - an upper level section on Transnational Literature.

Paul received his Ph. D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley in December 2006. The title of his dissertation was Cosmopolitan Primitivism: Modernism, Imperalism and the Historical Sense. He is currently a Visiting Professor at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL. He has taught courses in tracing the historical antecedents, development, and supersession of modernism, as well as seminars exploring the generic diversity of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writing. He is also currently an Advisory Editor for Kritikos: Journal of Postmodern cultural sound, text, and image. He has been an editor since July 2005. His teaching interests are Twentieth-Century British and American Poetry and Prose; Anglophone literature; Harlem Renaissance, Theory (Marxist, aesthetic, postcolonial); Film (70's American cinems, silent film).

The modern (19th century to present) Americanist search delivered two excellent nominees, both of whom accepted positions for fall 2007:

Kevin Bell is currently an Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL.. He earned his Ph. D. in Comparative Literature from New York University in 2000. His fields of research are Trans-Atlantic Literary Modernisms; Twentieth and Twenty-First Century African-American Literature and Culture; Critical Theory/Continental Philosophy/Africana Existential Philosophy.

Patrica Chu is currently an Assistant Professor at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. She teaches moderism, nineteenth and twentieth century American literature including African American and Asian American literature, and race and gender theory. She also recently taught a film class, Anime, that examines Japanese animation aesthetics and themes, its production/media and circulation. She earned her Ph. D. (English Language and Literature) from University of Chicago in 1997.

James Lilley accepted the early Americanist position. He is currently completing his Ph. D. in English from Princeton, Princeton, NJ. His dissertation title is: Common Things: Transatlantic Romance and the Aesthetics of Belonging 1764-1840.  His research traces the genealogy of modern forms of belonging by exploring how the singular is collected into the common in various cultural and political discourses. His teaching interests include: American and British literature, 1740-1860; Transatlantic, Genre, and Film Studies; 18th and 19th century intellectual history; and contempory literary and political theory.

In other hiring news, based on a faculty vote, consultation with the departmental officers and program heads, as well as preliminary conversations with the College of Arts and Sciences, the English Department has requested three Assistant Professor lines for 2007-08: creative writing (preferably poetry); 18/19th c. British (preferably poetry); and rhetoric and composition.

Creative writing (fiction) has been put on the table as a first area of consideration for hiring in 2008-09.

Now if only the prospects for colonizing office space in the Humanities building were so certain....

SUNY Council on Writing's 2007 Conference Hosted by Department Professors, Colleagues, and Graduate Students

On April 20-21 the University at Albany hosted the 2007 Conference of
the SUNY Council on Writing. The theme, Writing in an Age of Assessment, was explored in twelve panels, two workshops and two roundtables, and included a Featured Session moderated by Pat Belanoff (Stony Brook), chair of the SUNY Writing Discipline Committee (the committee charged with creating the SUNY-wide General Education Writing Assessment Review). The University welcome was delivered by Bill Roberson, Director of ITLAL, and the keynote address was given by Peter Elbow, (UMass Amherst, emeritus) best known for Writing without Teachers (Oxford UP,1973), and recent recipient of the Exemplar Award from CCCC. The plenary was given by Anne Herrington (also UMass Amherst) winner of the NCTE's 2002 David H. Russell Award for Persons in Process: Four Stories of Writing and Personal Development in College (NCTE, 2000). UAlbany faculty presenters included Laura Wilder, Bob Yagelski and Craig Hancock, and UAlbany grad student presenters included Lucas Hardy, Jon Coller (who had a very busy weekend...), Silvia Chung and Robyn Long. UAlbany English alumni presenters included Derek Owens (St. Johns University), Victoria Tischio (West Chester University), Jennifer Mitchell (SUNY Potsdam), and Alex Reid (SUNY Cortland). The conference organizers would like to thank UUP, the Provost's Office, the Capital District Writing Project, the English Department and the Writing Center for their support, and to thank the grad students who stepped up to moderate panels - Anne Jung, Iuliu Ratiu, Lucas Hardy (who also had a very busy weekend...) and Joshua Bartlett. The conference organizers are also indebted to the Writing Center tutors and staff, who "personed" the registration desk and acted as hosts, and to Liz Lauenstein and Dan Gremmler for their expertise.  Finally, the conference committee would like to recognize our "Field Generals," Karen Williams and Kelly Ann Fitzpatrick, whose hard work, flawless organizational skills and good sense made hosting this conference seem effortless. 

Announcements

Faculty News

Judith Barlow

Judith Barlow has received a Fulbright Senior Specialists grant to lecture at the University of Sofia, Bulgaria, this summer.

Richard Barney

Rick Barney was Visiting Scholar, Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, University College London, in September-October, 2006.  He has also presented the following papers: “Sublime Animations: Anamorphism and Anne Finch’s Verse,” Conference on “Vital Matters: Border of the Animate,” Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, May 2006; “The Strange Eyes of Edmund Burke: Anatomy, Sublimity, Subjectivity,” Consortium for Culture and Medicine, Syracuse University, November 2006; “Spleen Matters, or, Medical Science, Melancholy, and the Objects of Sublime Poetry,” MLA Convention, Philadelphia, December 2006; “What ‘Culture’ Can and Can’t Do for You,” and “A Postcard Snapshot of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation,” Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies Conference, Chicago, February 2007; and “Splenetic Physiology and the Sublime Imagination,” and “The Strange ‘Things’ of Early Modern Medicine,” American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference, Atlanta, March 2007.

Thomas Bass

Thomas Bass was busy organizing a Spring 2007 lecture series for the Journalism Program. Called “Scientists & Journalists: Dialogues for the Twenty-First Century,” the series paired scientists and journalists for discussions intended to explore important subjects in the news. The series was sponsored by a $25,000 grant from the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation, with additional support from the New York State Writers Institute.

The first speaker in the series was NPR science correspondent Richard Harris, talking about “Nanotech, What Is It Anyway?” Respondents to his talk were College Of Nanoscale Science and Engineering administrators and professors Michael Fancher and Robert Geer.

Dan Shapley, Environment Editor/New Media Editor at the Poughkeepsie Journal, led a public workshop and seminar on environmental writing. Other events were organized around the appearance on campus of Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change—the book featured in this year’s campus reading project.

John Allen Paulos, author of Innumeracy and A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, spoke about “Numbers in the News: Using Them and Abusing Them.” Respondent to his talk was Bob Port, Senior Editor/Investigations at the Albany Times Union.

Laurie Garrett, Pulitzer-prize-winning author of The Coming Plague and Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Public Health, lectured on “Covering the Collapse of Public Health: A Journalist Reports from the Front.” Respondent to her talk was Dale Morse, Director of the Office of Science and Public Health in the New York State Department of Health.

For a debate on “God vs. Science,” featured speakers were Natalie Angier, Pulitzer-prize-winning science reporter for The New York Times, and David Sloan Wilson, Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University and author of Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion and the Nature of Society. A transcript of the debate and video-cast will be featured later this year on the Edge website
(http://www.edge.org).

Jeffrey Berman

Jeff Berman's latest book, Dying to Teach: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Learning. (SUNY Press, 2007), was released in January of this year. (click on the title to visit the publisher's page)

Professor Berman was recently featured in an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (v53.36 p.A2) titled "A Professor's Own Grief Informs a Course on Mourning in Literature" by Erik Vance. Subscribers to The Chronicle can view the article online here.

Lana Cable

Lana Cable presented “Barker’s Mahommedan” and led followup discussion during the highly acclaimed February-March 2007 New York revival by Mint Theater of Harley Granville Barker’s “The Madras House” directed by Gus Kaikkonen.  Lana’s paper will be included in Granville Barker Reclaimed, a volume of selected plays edited by Jonathan Bank.  To the literary-political essay collection Milton and Toleration, edited by Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2007), Lana contributed “Milton’s Toleration and the Secularizing Community of Conscience.”  Lana also wrote the critical “Introduction” for Milton in the Age of Fish: Essays on Authorship, Text, and Terrorism, edited by Albert Labriola and Michael Lieb (Duquesne University Press, 2006).  Favorable review of the volume by Joad Raymond appears in the February 9 issue of Times Literary Supplement.

Randall Craig

Randy Craig presented a paper, "The Rhetoric of Law and Gender: Child Custody and Married Women’s Property, Mary Wollstonecraft and Caroline Norton," at the Conference of the Association for the Study of Culture, Law, and the Humanities, held at Georgetown University. March 23-24, 2007.

Teresa Ebert

Teresa Ebert gave a lecture on "Theory and Its Tasks" at the University of Western Ontario (Canada) in January.  Her book Cultural Critique (with an attitude) will be published by the University of Illinois Press later this year. Class in Culture, of which she is co-author, will be published this summer.  A long section of a recently completed book,  Hypohumanities, will appear in Teaching Class: Knowledge, Pedagogy, Subjectivity (Routledge 2008). Another chapter of the book will appear in The Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies. She has been invited to teach seminars on "Marxist Cultural Theory and Globalization" in several universities in Taiwain in Spring 2008.

Glyne Griffith

Glyne Griffith's article, "Edward Baugh's Literary Criticism," was recently commissioned by the Journal of West Indian Literature (JWIL). It appears in JWIL Volume 15, Numbers 1 & 2 ( November 2006 ) pp. 102-109.

Mike Hill

After a nation wide search, Mike Hill accepted the position of English Department Chair full-time. He began his duties in Fall 2006 and will serve through the 2008-9 academic year.

Mike was also busy on the publication and lecture circuit. His recent publications include: "Our Leviathan, Ourselves: Global South as Tropical City on a Hill," Global South 1.1 (Spring: 2007); "Cultural Studies and its Multitude: In Search of the Global Popular," in ed. Wong Fengzhen, Cultural Studies and Western Marxism in an International Context (Wuhan: Central China Normal University Press, 2006); "Incalculable Community? The Unmaking of 'Whiteness' in the US Census 2000," (rpt. from After Whiteness), in ed. Bill Aschcroft et. al., The Post-colonial Studies Reader, 2nd. ed. (Routledge: 2006).

Recent talks include: "Anatomizing the New War Ecology," American Comparative Literature Association, Puebla, Mexico, 2007; "In 'Praise of Race War'? Hurricane Katrina, Climate Change, and the Subject of Planetary War," MELUS special session, MLA, 2006; "Division Divided: The Work of Writing in Adam Smith's Theory of Knowledge," Re-thinking Marxism, Umass Amherst, 2006; "Adam Smith and the 'Advance of Knowledge'," American Society for Eighteenth-century Studies, 2006; "Our Leviathan, Ourselves: Global South as 'Tropical City on a Hill'?" New Directions in Historical Materialism, Birkbeck College and School of Oriental and African Studies, London, 2006; "Terrible Weather: Hurricane Katrina and the 'Warfare' State," White Terror/(post)Empire, Institute of Social Psychology, London School of Economics, London England, 2006.

Judith Johnson

Judy Johnson announced her retirement after the 2006-7 academic school year. She has been a champion of poetry, fiction and women's studies at U. Albany since 1980 when she took her first Visiting Professor position here. She became an Assistant Professor a year later. She currently serves jointly as Professor of English and Women's Studies. Over the course of her tenure, she has chaired Women's Studies and served as Interim Chair of English; she has been Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies, and Director of Honors and Presidential Scholar Programs. She is also currently editor-in-chief of 13th Moon, a nationally recognized feminist literary magazine, and has executed similar duties on The Little Magazine, an electronic e-zine . Judy has mentored three generations of Albany artists, including numerous published poets, members of Albanypoets.com and even some current faculty. She plans to keep busy in "retirement" by dedicating herself to her own writing. Thanks for the memories, Judy. Be sure to drop by every so often!

Pierre Joris

Pierre Joris had a busy year. He published two book, Aljibar (bi-lingual English/French edition; PHI, 2007) and 21 Meditations on the Stations of Mansur Al-Hallaj (Anchorite Press, 2007);and a CD, Routes, Not Roots (Ta'wil Productions, 2007; with Michael Bisio on bass, Ben Chadabe on percussion, Mitch Elrod on guitar & Munir Beken on oud).

Eric Keenaghan

Eric Keenaghan has presented at several conferences in the last year, including papers at the MLA (December 2006, on Gertrude Stein and the theoretical limits of historical criticism), the American Literature Association conference (May 2006, invited as part of a roundtable for the Queer Theory and American Literatures Working Group), and the SUNY Buffalo symposium on Robert Duncan (April 2006, on rethinking queer theory and democratic theory through Duncan's antihumanism and poetics of love).

In addition, he is in the process of conducting a four-part lecture series titled "Queer Nationalism and the Security State" at New York City's Gay and Lesbian Community Center (in Greenwich Village at Greenwich & 10th). The public series is sponsored by the CUNY's CLAGS program (the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies), and is part of its annual Seminars in the City.

In the last year, a piece of his has appeared in the Journal of Modern Literature (a review essay on 3 recent texts postcolonial literary criticism, Winter 2006). Keenaghan has been busy completing essays for forthcoming volumes, including one on Robert Duncan's last two volumes of poetry (Ground Work), and he has been invited to contribute critical articles and review essays in several prominent publications in the coming months.

And, on a final note, several of his poems have appeared in online publications in the last few months, including a recent issue of Tool and special issue of Eoagh ("Queering Language," which also includes work by prominent predecessors like Jack Spicer and Stephen Jonas, and established and younger queer poets like John Ashbery, Eileen Myles, Garret Lansing, Roberto Tejada, Jen Benka, Jennifer Coleman, Alison Cobb, Kazim Ali, and others).

Regina Klym

Regina Klym received a University Recognition Award, what follows is the text from the awards ceremony, which includes the comments from the student who nominated Regina for this award:

Regina Klym is a Secretary in the Department of English and prior to that was a Keyboard Specialist in the Department of Sociology. As a Secretary, she has duties that are almost too numerous to mention. I don’t think there is anyone in this room who does not appreciate the major role that a Secretary has in defining the tempo, organization, mood, work flow and personality of an office.

Regina was nominated by a student who said she has made a real difference in her experience here. The nominator says that “Regina goes out of her way to offer assistance even if it is on short notice. She will not allow me to leave the office if I have any questions that need to be answered. Without her assistance I would have had to spend so many additional hours accomplishing small tasks just because of my disability. I think she is a very special and welcoming person.”

So do we. We are very pleased to present a 2007 Disability Resource Center Outstanding Achievement Award to Regina Klym.

Edward Schwarzschild

Ed Schwarzschild co-edited a special issue of StoryQuarterly (#42), published in October 2006. His interview with William Kennedy was published in the October 2006 issue of The Believer (pp 77-86). He created, curated, and edited a series of Letters to Ahmadinejad, which was the lead feature for one week at www.jewcy.com/feature/ introducing_the_ahmadinejad_letters. Finally, Ed was a visiting writer at the Big Sur Writers Workshop (March 9-11) and at Washington University in St. Louis (April 13)

Charles Shepherdson

Charles Shepherdson has not been seen in the Humanities Building for the better part of a year, but he hasn't been relaxing on a beach in the Caribbean. Rather, he has spent the past year in China as part of the Fulbright Program, a Senior Specialist from 2006-11 for United States Department of State and National Science Council, and he holds the position of Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University, Republic of China.

Charles has also been busy at the presses. His latest book, Lacan and the Limits of Language, bows in May 2007 from Fordham University Press (click the title to view the publisher's information page).

Leonard Slade Jr.

Leonard Slade published a new book of poetry from SUNY Press in 2006 titled Jazz After Dinner. The collection is described as poems "of celebration and endurance," and "Leonard A. Slade Jr. addresses the human need to be connected not only to the physical 'now,' but also to the other lives and other music we pass through during our lives. Slade’s unique voice exposes the sweetness, the sorrow, and the humor of life’s celebrations and struggles, but above all is the importance of love and the reliance on God and in faith for transcendence. These are poems to help us to endure, to grow, and to triumph."

Lynne Tillman

Lynne Tilman's latest novel, American Genius, A Comedy, was published by Soft Skull Press, Brooklyn, NY in 2006. (click title to view the publisher's information page). She also published a slew of short fiction in 2006, including “Lynne Tillman” (“From the Margins”), in The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984, ed. Marvin J. Taylor, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., and Oxford, 2006, pp. 170-171; “The Shadow of Doubt,” in The Literary Review, ed. Rene Steinke, Spring 2006, Vol. 49 #3, pp. 6 - 14; “The Undiagnosed,” in Linder: Works 1976 - 2006, JRP Ringier Publishers, Europe 2006, pp. 120-5; “But There’s A Family Resemblance,” in Shoot the Family, ed. Ralph Rugoff, ICI, New York, 2006, pp. 54-61; “The First Novel,” in Bookforum, July/August/September 2006, New York, p. 37; “The Recipe,” in This Is Not Chick Lit, ed. Elizabeth Merrick, Random House, NY, 2006, pp. 298-309; “Playing Hurt,” in Conjunctions #47, Bard College, Annandale on Hudson, NY, 2006; “A Greek Story,” in Crowd, Vol 7 # 1, Fall 2006, pages 14-15 and "From Haunted Houses; excerpt from “Madame Realism,” in UP IS UP BUT SO IS DOWN: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974 - 1992, ed. Brandon Stosuy, NYU Press, 2006, pp. 257-61; 192, respectively.

In early 2007, Lynne published “The Rolling Stones, The Academy of Music,” in The Show I’ll Never Forget, ed. Sean Manning, Da Capo Press, Cambridge, MA., 2007, pp. 22-25; and "The Way We Are," in Black Warrior Review, Vol. 33 Number 2, Spring/Summer 2007, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, pp. 127 - 129.

Mary Valentis

Mary Valentis editted a new publication, TechKnowledgies: New Imaginaries in the Humanities, Arts, and TechnoSciences, with English graduate students, Tara Monastaro and Paula C. Yablonsky. The collection was published March 2007 by Cambridge Scholars Publishers (click on the title to view the publisher's information page).

As the Director of the Center for Humanities, Arts and the Technosciences (CHATS), Mary's work has influenced the entire University community and beyond in one way or another. Of particular note are the continuation of the Architecture at Albany Semester; The Mellville Semster and conference, "Why Mellville Matters Now"; Chronopolitics and Visual Culture, a symposium co-sponsored by CHATS, the English Department, CAS, and the Institute on Critical Climate Change in the Humanities, a joint venture organized by Tom Cohen and Henry Sussman (U. Buffalo); and lastly, the upcoming China Theme Semster.

David Wills

David Wills was award one of only four University at Albany Excellence Awards in Research. Congratulations David!

Undergraduate News

Third Annual English Department Undergraduate Research Conference

This year's Undergraduate Research Conference is titled Open Spaces, Disputed Places: Fundamentalism and Literary Inscription of Territory, will feature a Keynote Address by Gareth Griffiths of the same title. The conference will be held on April 16 from 12-2 in Humanities 354 and continues a flurry of scholarly conferences that began in late March with the Chronopolitics Symposium and includes a joint venture between U. Albany and Syracuse, the 2007 SUNY Conference on Writing, the Annual English Graduate Student Conference, and a conference on and featuring Hélène Cixous.

Mary Valeria Haynes

Val Haynes was awarded the Michael Corso Award at the recent DSS Awards Ceremony and Luncheon. Val is about to receive her B. A. degree in English with a GPA of 3.96. She has been accepted into the Master’s degree in English with a concentration in Composition and Rhetoric. She will be graduating Phi Beta Kappa, has been on the President’s List from 2005 to the present, and the National Dean’s List from 2004 to the present.

In Val ’s earlier years, she was a successful musician; recipient of Musician Magazine Award in 1990, NY Music Award in 1991, Billboard Song Awards in 1991 and the BMI Best Alternative Pop Song of 1991. She was featured in a PBS documentary with Spike Lee and Loudon Wainwright III in 1992. Mary has worked as a freelance writer, reviewed live and recorded music for Metroland Magazine during 2000-01. More recently Mary has worked in the Political Action unit of both NYSUT and CSEA as a telephone interviewer. She has also served as the Editor and a contributor of the UAlbany Student Literary Journal and has served as a volunteer on the Writing Center Panel for the SUNY Council on Writing.

Congratulations Val!

Graduate News

Americanist Exchange Symposia with Syracuse University

On October 27, 2006, the first of two Americanist Symposia between Syracuse and UAlbany was held. The first symposium was titled Micropolitics. Two of our Americanist faculty members, Branka Arsic and Jennifer Greiman, and three of our Americanist Ph. D. students, Shari Goldberg, Michael Jonik, and Matthew Pangborn, presented their recent work at Syracuse University. Professors Arsic and Greiman delivered keynote addresses, and the graduate students spoke on panels with their Americanists peers from Syracuse. The day's activities revolved around the topic of micropolitics as an approach to nineteenth-century American literature.

On April 16, 2007, Alifair Skebe, Tara Needham, Rachel Collins, Deeanna Rohr, Mike Dwyer, and Brigitte Fielder-Montero presented papers over the course of two two-hour panels. Susan Edmunds and Patty Roylance, both Associate Professors at Syracuse University, served as respondents on the respective panels.

Richard Thorns Fellowship

Kelly Fitzpatrick and Shari Goldberg are the recipents of the 2007-08 Richard Thorns Fellowship. The competitive fellowship was established to support ABD graduate students and facilitate the successful completion of promising dissertations. Recipients of the fellowship are awarded funding in lieu of lecture lines or teaching assistantships so that they may dedicate their efforts solely to the successful completion of their dissertations. This year's Thorns Fellows are Menoukah Case, Steve Hymowech, and David Parry. Congratulations to all!

There is funding available for Summer Thorns Fellowships as well. Applications for the Thorns Summer 2007 Dissertation Fellowships are due by Monday, April 16. The materials that should be submitted include:

• The application cover sheet;
• An up-to-date curriculum vitae;
• A prospectus (approx. 10 pages) summarizing the dissertation project;
• An outline of the dissertation=s chapters (each summarized in approx. 20 words), which indicates the chapter(s) already turned in to your director and describes your goals, mutually agreed upon with your director, for working over the summer;
• A copy of one completed chapter draft; and
• A letter of support from your dissertation director, which should address the chapter outline and projected research and writing schedule.

Advising and Registration

Advising and Registration. All graduate students should be meeting this week and next with their advisor (whether the M.A. Advisor or individual faculty members), getting their advisement sheets signed (where appropriate), and meet with the respective administrator (Prof. Cable or Barney) to get their registration numbers. Ph.D. students who are past coursework may take their signed advisement sheets directly to Kelly Williams to receive registration numbers.

Job Market Meeting

Job Market Meeting. For all Ph.D. students who may be planning to go on the job market next fall, there is a required meeting at 1-3 p.m. on Monday, April 30 in HU 354. Members of the Professionalization Committee will discuss topics such as: an overview of the job market process; how to decide whether you are ready to job hunt; and what materials to prepare over the summer. This meeting can also be very useful for students who want to inform themselves about the process before they may be fully ready to enter it. For questions, contact Laura Wilder, chair of the committee.

Menoukha Case

Menoukah Case chaired a panel at NeMLA and presented a paper there. She has a book review forthcoming in Western Folkore Journal. Menoukah is a Garber award winner as well as a recipient of this year's Thorns Fellowship.

Pat Dyjak

Pat Dyjak has accepted an offer of a tenure-track position at the College of Eastern Utah. She reports that she will be teaching courses in the areas of composition, literary theory, and literature and diversity. Congratulations, Pat.

Kelly Fitzpatrick

Kelly Fitzpatrick presented a paper titled, "Gender and Classifications of Arthurian 'Literature'" at the 2007 Northeast MLA Convention. Another paper, "Shopping in/for the Middle Ages: Consumptive Practices in 'Medieval' Video Games," was accepted for Neomedievalisms: the 22nd International Conference on Medievalism, to be held at the University of Western Ontario in October 2007.

Finally, Kelly's essay, "Commodifying the Medieval in Magic: Online" will appear in the forthcoming collection titled, The Medieval in Motion: Neomedievalism in Film, Television, Video Games and Other Electronic Media.

James Fox

James Fox accepted, on behalf of The Athenaeum International, the Graduate Student Organization's 2006-07 Event of the Year Award for his work on "Helene Cixous: Written Initials -- Ultimate Plays" An International Symposium, which was held at SUNY Albany in April of 07.

Steve Hymowech

Steve Hymowech has an essay entitled “Surfing the Novel: Recognizing Patterns of Imperial Dromocracy” in Representations of Empire, forthcoming from Cambridge Scholars Press. He is also a 2006-07 Thorns Fellow.

Shealeen Meaney

Congratulations to Shealeen Meaney, who has accepted a permanent position as Assistant Professor at Sage College.

Tara Needham

Congratulations to Tara Needham, who has been accepted to study at the School for Criticism and Theory at Cornell this coming summer.

Kelly O. Secovnie

Kelly Secovnie had a busy year, she published “Cultural Translation in Ama Ata Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost and Osonye Tess Onwueme’s The Missing Face” in the Journal of African Literature and Culture. No. 4. March 2007.

She wrote three encyclopedia articles: “Lorraine Hansberry” in the Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers [Two Volumes]. Ed. Yolanda Williams Page. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, January 2007; and “Feminism and Women's Equality Movements, African” and “Feminism and Women’s Equality Movements, United States” in Africa and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History. Eds. Richard M. Juang and Noelle Morrissette. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, October 2007.

Kelly also authored a blog for The Literature Compass website, run by Blackwell
Publishers on her experiences attending the African Literature Association Conference in Morgantown, WV, March 2007.

Finally, she presented at two conferences: “Teaching African Literature in a World Literature Context.” African Literature Association Conference. Morgantown, WV: Mar. 2007. And “Striving for Connection: African-American and West African Drama and the
Search for the One out of Many.” School of Social Welfare Diversity Multi-Disciplinary Conference. Albany, NY: May 2007.

Aidan Thompson

Aidan Thompson 's poetry was published in December 2006 by Palimpsest Press. The title of her book is So Earnest to Have a Green Point. The work is described as "a theoretical dialogue between early-twentieth century poets and visual artists. Thompson responds to the artwork itself, as well as engaging with the ideas common to both writers and visual artists." (click the book title to view the publisher's information page)

Upcoming Events

Please remember to check the English Department's Events Calendar for up to date information on upcoming conferences, symposia, lecture series, book launches, and other events associated with the department.

Undergraduate Researth Conference

Apr 16 Please save this Monday to attend the Third Annual Undergraduate Research Conference. Keynote address by Gareth Griffiths: "Open Spaces, Disputed Places: Fundamentalism and the Literary Inscription of Territory."

2007 SUNY Conference on Writing

Apr 20-21 Annual Conference of the SUNY Council on Writing: Writing in an Age of Assessment. Keynote Address by Peter Elbow.

2007 EGSO Conference

Apr 22 Annual English Graduate Student Conferece: Literature After Literature: 21st Century Re-readings with Keynote Address by Dr. Peggy Kamuf (University of Southern California), "Thinking with Literature."

Hélène Cixous Conference

Apr 23-24 Hélène Cixous: Written Initials - Ultimate Plays. The work of Hélène Cixous represents a unique experience of literary writing, in particular thanks to the extraordinary range of its elements and perspectives. "Hélène Cixous: Written Initials - Ultimate Plays" will address the full range of Cixous' work, from its putting into play of the name and life of the author to its psychoanalytical and theoretical investment, from its daring wager on behalf of the signifier to its promotion of a genuinely contemporary theatre.

Scientists and Journalists: Dialogues for the 21st Century

Apr 26 Scientists and Journalists: Dialogues for the 21st Century is a Spring 2007 lecture series sponsored by the Journalism Program. This will be the final lecture in the series. Les Roberts, professor at the Columbia University School of Public Health and author of the Lancet article on “Mortality after the 2003 Invasion of Iraq,” will talk on “Civilian Deaths in Iraq: The Gulf Between Science and Media Reporting.” Respondent: Alan Chartock, President / CEO, WAMC Northeast Public Radio.
Science Library, Standish Room, 8:00 pm

English Faculty and Graduate Student Book Launch

May 3 English Faculty & Graduate Book Launch Signing event. Susan Novotny,
owner of the Book House, will be hosting this book event. She will be ordering copies of the books to be autographed. Food and wine will be provided by the English Department. The event will be held at The Book House, Stuyvesant Plaza, at 6:00 pm.

Departmental Undergraduate Commencement Cermemony

May 19 [Saturday] English Departmental Undergraduate Commencement Ceremony.
Students should arrive by 3:15PM at the UAlbany Gym which is opposite the SEFCU arena in appropriate business attire [not regalia]. There will be no tickets, seating is unrestricted in the SEFCU Arena, where the ceremony will take place. You may invite as many family and friends as you wish. Graduating students will be presented with a personalized certificate of accomplishment in English. UAlbany Gym, students meet, 3:15PM. SEFCU Arena, family and friends, 3:25-5:00PM

"Biomutation and the Ecologies of War"

Fall 2007, the English Department and Institute on Critical Climate Change in the Humanities will co-sponsor a conference titled, "Biomutation and the Ecologies of War." Check the Events Calendar and ICCC web site for further details as they become available.

Special thank you to Tom Cohen, Mike Hill, Liz Lauenstein, Ineke Murakami, Angela Pneuman, Kelly Secovnie, and Mary Valentis for editorial support and contributions. And thank you to all who posted notice for all the wonderful activities the English Department was involved in over the passed year.