English News - Fall 2007

Events

The English Department is delighted to welcome three new faculty members. Helen Choi and Douglas Pfeiffer have joined us this semester, and Ayesha Ramachandran will join us in Fall 2008 after a year in residence with the Society of Fellows at Harvard University.

Helen Choi joins us from UCLA, where she completed a year as a postdoctoral lecturer after earning her PhD in English in 2006. Her teaching and research interests include 20th Century American literature, race and ethnicity, modernism, and critical theory. Her current book project is a revision of her dissertation, "Vox Pop Modernism," a study of the intersection between modernist literature and the emergent mass media of the 1930s.

Douglas Pfeiffer received his PhD from Columbia University in 2005. He comes to Stony Brook after serving as an Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. This year he's teaching classes in fiction before the novel, Renaissance poetry, Shakespeare, and humanism.  He's  working on a book that examines the Renaissance rise of literary biography, including the key roles played by the notion of authorial intention.  

Ayesha Ramachandran earned her PhD in English from Yale University; her fellowship at Harvard University is one of the most prestigious postdoctoral awards in the country. Her dissertation, "World Making in Early Modern Europe: Global Imaginations from Montaigne to Milton," traces the development of "the world" as a new category in early modern literature and culture.

The additions of Professors Choi, Pfeiffer and Ramachandran help to build core strengths in the department in American and Early Modern studies.

DEPARTMENTAL CV (Spring /Summer 2007)

Michael Boecherer defended his dissertation, "Staging the Supernatural," in August; he also took a tenure track position as Assistant Professor at Suffolk County Community College in that same month. 

Emily Churilla’s first peer-reviewed article, “’Time in a Bottle’:  Temporal Discontinuity in Narratives of Diaspora,” appeared in the March edition of Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture.  In February she presented “Caryl Phillips, (Re)Memory, and Melancholic Spaces” at the 19th Annual Stony Brook Graduate Conference, and in April she presented both “Re/writing Home: History, Performance, and Memory in Caryl Phillips’ The Atlantic Sound” at the College English Association’s 38th Annual Conference in New Orleans, “Empathy and Ethics” and “Imagining Origins, Re/membering Origins:  Performance and the Irrecoverable Past” at the SUNY Stony Brook Latin American and Caribbean Studies Conference, “Dialogues and Borders.”  In June, Emily attended the week-long Caribbean Literary Studies & Small Axe Conference at the University of Miami, “Archaeologies of Black Memory” on a full fellowship. 

Virginia Costello presented a paper titled, "Bernard Shaw Meets Emma Goldman chez Frank Harris (August 1928)" at the International Shaw Society Symposium, Niagra-on-the-lake, Ontario, Canada The Shaw Festival.   The Shaw Festival and the International Shaw Society awarded her a Ronald Bryden Scholarship and ISS Hampton/Husse y Travel Grant. 

Susan Crane presented a paper, “Rhetoric, Aldhelm’s Enigmata and the Exeter Riddles,” at the Fourty-second International Congress on Medieval Studies, held at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo in May 2007.

Paul Devlin published an essay, "Albert Murray at 90", in the spring issue of The Antioch Review. He also published an essay "Elegy for the Tie Clip" on Slate.com (5/29/07). He also just completed 12 articles for "African American National Biography" (Oxford UP).

Rachel Ellis has a forthcoming essay in The International Journal of the Arts in Society:
"Re-drafting Scripted Identities through Visual Irony: An Economic Narrative of Art in Puerto Rico," which will be published in September 2007. This article emerged from an essay presented this February at The International Symposium of the Arts in Society (held at NYU).

Les Hunter received a 2007 National Foundation for Jewish Culture New Play Development Grant for his play "To the Orchard."

Heidi Hutner has forthcoming essay entitled, "Ecofeminism, Motherhood, and the Post-Apocalyptic Utopia in Into the Forest and Parable of the Sower,” Barbara Cook ed. Women, Writing, Nature (Lexington/Roman University Press, 2007).  She presented two articles at ASLE in South Carolina entitled,  "Cancer and the Mothering Body" and "Ecofeminism and the Personal Narrative."  She gave two talks at Stony Brook this year--at the Humanities Institute on "Ecofeminism and Into the Forest and Parable of the Sower" and  for the Environmental Club entitled, "Ecofeminism: An Introduction."

E. Ann Kaplan, on Research Assignment in Spring 2007, presented papers in California, Mexico and Rome. Her invited lecture “Archives, Affects and Colonialism: Imag(in)ing Cross-Cultural Encounters in Werner Herzog’s Where the Green Ants Dream,” was given at UC Irvine in February; her paper “Risks and Pleasures of Transnational Collaboration," given in April, was part of a collaborative seminar Kaplan helped organize at the American Comparative Literature Association Conference, in Puebla, Mexico; finally, Kaplan was invited to give three lectures at the University of Rome Tre on May 25, 2007, namely “Archives, Affects and Cinema, ” “Affects and Colonialism/Postcolonialism: Herzog, Denis, Dardenne Brothers, ” and “Global Trauma, Empathy and Images of Catastrophe.”  Kaplan’s essay on global trauma has been accepted for publication in Spring 2008 in the journal Consumption, Markets, Culture, and her article “Politics, Psyche and Feminine Time,” is in press in the anthology Feminist Time Against Nation Time, eds. Victoria Hesford and Lisa Diedrich, being published by Lexington Books. Kaplan also co-edited with Susan Scheckel an HISB "Occasional Papers" volume, Boundaries of Affect, that is currently in press.

Peter Manning presented versions of a talk, "'In a dream you are never eighty': the problem of late Wordsworth," at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa, the Department of English at the University of Iowa, and at Western Michigan University. He also refereed essays for Studies in English Literature and Modern Language Quarterly, and served as the textual inspector for the final volume of the Cornell Wordsworth, The Excursion, for the MLA Committee on Scholarly Editions.

Celia Marshik presented a paper entitled "Wearable History: Virginia Woolf and the Modernist Mackintosh" at the 17th Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf held in Oxford, Ohio in June 2007.

Adrienne Munich gave a lecture in March at the Columbia University Film Seminar,   in March entitled "Architecture and Abjection in Nicole Garcia's _Place Vendome_ " [with circonflex over the "o"].  She has accepted the position of Interim Chair of Women's Studies for the 2007-2008 academic year.

Lauren Neefe presented a paper, "Choosing the Front of the Bus: Power, Risk, and Identity in the Writing Classroom” at the 2007 Conference on College Composition and Communication, in New York City, March 21–24, 2007.

Andrew Newman had an essay, "The Walam Olum and Indigenous Apocrypha," accepted for publication in American Literary History. He presented two papers, "Punic Bargains and Native Histories" (in March at The Netherlandish Seventeenth Century and its Afterlives at Duke University) and "Early Americanist Grammatologies" (in June at the Joint Conference of the Society of Early Americanists and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg, VA). He also spent two weeks at the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania through a short-term Andrew W. Mellon fellowship from the LCP. He presented a prospectus of his book project, "The Indian Walk and the Paper Trail," at an LCP colloquium.

Craig Stormont published the following articles:  "Charles Olson: The Political Ego Condemned" in Flashpoint: A Multidisciplinary Journal in the Arts and Politics, Spring 2007, Web Issue 9 and "Nature and 'Human Universe': The Trail of Human Error" in Charles Olson: A Poet's Prose, a book to be in print in October by Cambridge Scholars Press. He is also listed in the cast of Polis is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place, a documentary concerning poet Charles Olson for which he was interviewed:

In August, Bente Videbaek presented a paper, "Feste and Lear's Fool: Different Genre, Same Function" at the Wooden O Symposium, Cedar City, Utah.