English Department News and Events

Comings & Goings

We are pleased to welcome two new Assistant Professors to the Department:

Ayesha Ramachandran is now teaching at Stony Brook after spending 2007-08 with the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. Professor Ramachandran received her PhD in Renaissance Studies from Yale University in 2008; she has a large breadth of interests within the early modern period; her current work is on reimagining the world in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Also, Jeffrey Santa Ana has arrived from Dartmouth University, where he taught as an Assistant Professor. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2003, and his diverse teaching and research interests include Asian American literature and culture, and theories of race, gender, sexuality and emotion.

Stony Brook English has also had two retirements. We gratefully acknowledge the tremendous contributions of Bruce Bashford and Helen Cooper to the Department and to the University.

CONGRATULATIONS TO...

Susan Scheckel, recipient of the President's and the Chancellor's Awards for Excellence in Faculty Service;

Heidi Hutner, Recipient of the 2008 Women's Studies Award for Excellence in Feminist Scholarship and Teaching;

Celia Marshik and Benedict Robinson, who were each awarded tenure and promoted to Associate Professor in 2007-08;

Roger Rosenblatt, for his appointment as Distinguished Professor

...AND TO

Susan Crane, who as of Fall 2008 is an Assistant Professor teaching composition and the history and structure of the English language at Newman University in Wichita, Kansas. Joaquín Martínez Pizarro was her faculty advisor at Stony Brook for her dissertation on medieval riddles titled "Describing the World: Aldhelm’s Enigmata and the Exeter Riddles as Examples of Early Medieval Ekphrasis." She graduated in August 2006.

Timothy Johns, the new Assistant Professor of World Literature at Murray State University in Kentucky. Professor Johns' dissertation examined the discourse of labor in South African literature and film. His dissertation chair was Adrienne Munich; Milind Wakankar was also on his committee. He graduated from Stony Brook in 2005.

Gretchen Woertendyke, the new Assistant Professor of Early American Literature at the University of South Carolina. Professor Woertendyke graduated from Stony Brook in 2007; her dissertation, "Specters of Haiti: Race, Fear, and the American Gothic, 1789-1855," establishes colonial contest in Saint-Domingue as central to the development of the early American novel. It was written under the direction of Susan Scheckel and Eric Haralson.

DEPARTMENTAL CV (Spring-Summer 2008)

Alumni Spotlight

Devoney Looser (PhD 1993), Associate Professor of English at The University of Missouri-Columbia, has published Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750-1850, with John's Hopkins University Press. This study "explores the later lives and late-life writings of more than two dozen British women authors active during the long eighteenth-century." Professor Looser's previous book, British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1850 (Johns Hopkins, 2000) was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title.

Faculty

Heidi Hutner has had "Motherhood and Environmentalism" (co-authored with Jesse Curran) and "Motherhood and Ecofeminism" accepted for publication in The Encyclopedia of Mothering, ed. Andrea O'Reilly, Golson Books, forthcoming 2009.

Ann Kaplan published four articles: “Global Trauma and Public Feelings: Viewing Images of Catastrophe.” Consumption, Markets, Culture 11:1 (March 2008) 3-24; “Psyche, Politics and Feminine Time in Meckler’s Sister My Sister and Parmar’s Memsahib Rita” in Lisa Dietrich and Victoria Hesford, eds. Feminine Time Against Nation Time (Lanham, M.D: Lexington Books, 2008) 59-80; “A History of Gender Theory in Cinema Studies” in Screening Genders. Eds. Krin Gabbard and William Luhr (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2008) 15-28; and "Affective Memory, Female Subjectivity and Cinematic Technique in Hu Mei's Army Nurse (1985) and Xu Jinglei's Letter from an Unknown Woman (2004). In Labrys 13: Etudes Feministes/Estudos Feministas January/June 2008. She also presented "Affect, Technique and Witnessing in Select North American Cinema" at the American Comparative Literature Association in Long Beach, California, in April, and "Affective Memory, Female Subjectivity and Cinematic Technique in Hu Mei's Army Nurse (1985) and Xu Jinglei's Letter from an Unknown Woman (2004) at the Conference on Gender and Chinese Cinema, Nanjing University, China, in June.

Celia Marshik gave a paper, “Thinking Back Through Copyright: Freedom and Fair Use in Virginia Woolf’s Nonfiction,” at the Eighteenth Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf in Denver, CO, in June.

Andrew Newman gave an invited presentation, "Early American Grammatology," at the Early American Mediascapes symposium at Duke University in February, and a paper, “‘[T]hey had not understood it was to be done that way’: Colonial Land Transactions, Interpretation, and Equivocation,” at Prophetstown Revisited, An Early Native American Studies Summit, at Purdue University in April.

Ayesha Ramachandran presented a paper, "The Materials of Mourning: Poems on Funerary Placards in Seventeenth-Century England" at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Chicago in April.

Bente Videbaek presented a paper on "HAMLET and the Spectacular" at the Medieval-Renaissance-Baroque conference at the University of Miami in February.

Graduate Students

Jesse Curran presented two papers in Spring 2008: '"We Aren't the Only Creatures, or the Most Likely to Succeed: Joy Harjo's Reconciliation with Lyric Subjectivity" at the Northeast MLA convention in Buffalo and "This Flexible Fluid: Carole Maso and the Poetics of Pregnancy" at a conference supported by the Association for Research on Mothering, "Performing Feminist Motherhood: Outlaw Mothers in Music, Media, Arts and Cultural Expression" in Manhattan.

Paul Devlin gave an invited presentation "Albert Murray and Visual Art" at Albert Murray: A Symposium at Auburn University in January. In April he presented a paper "Wilson, Bergson, Deleuze: Duration and Memory in 'Gem of the Ocean' and 'Radio Golf'" at August Wilson: The Second Half of the Cycle, and at Twentieth Century Literature and the Weight of History, a graduate student conference at Columbia University. Paul also published a review of "Negro With a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey" in The New York Times Book Review on April 21. His review of Arnold Rampersad's "Ralph Ellison: A Biography" appears in the Summer 2008 issue of The Antioch Review. Paul also has a photo credit in Sidney Offit's new book Friends, Writers, and Other Countrymen (St. Martin's, July 2008).

Rachel Ellis spoke at The Program in Latin American Studies' annual conference at Johns Hopkins University in April. The paper delivered was entitled, "Bolaño's Inasethetic Risks: Death, Interested Art, Poetic Impunity and Fascism in 'By Night in Chile" and addressed, among other themes of the conference, the impossible yet necessary borders of nations, the strange subjectivities of citizens and other nation-dwellers, and the movements of poetic 'influence'.

Les Hunter had "Becoming Romantic: Women's Sexual Encounters with the Other in Mourning Becomes Electra and Machinal" accepted to the journal The Comparative Drama Conference Series: Text and Presentation, 2008 (McFarland & Company, Inc.). The journal is set to publish in the spring of 2009.

In April Rachel Walsh presented "'Not Grace, Then, But at Least the Body': The Ethics of Facing the
Neighbor in J.M. Coetzee's Age of Iron" at the Northeast Modern Language Association Conference in Buffalo, NY. Her essay "Marriage in Henry James" appears in Henry James: A Critical Companion, eds. Eric Haralson and Kendall Johnson, Clearmark Books, 2008

English News - Fall 2008

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