English News & Events (Archive)

SPRING 2007

Links: EJ on the Web; Professor Lindblom's faculty profile

Links: Cambridge University Press; Professor Marshik's faculty profile

We're delighted to announce that our faculty searches have resulted in three appointments. In the field of early modern literature, Douglass Pfeiffer (currently at the University of California, Irvine) and Ayesha Ramachandran (Yale University) will be joining us as Assistant Professors. Helen Choi (UCLA) will join us as an Assistant Professor in the field of multi-ethnic literature. We will post profiles to introduce these new faculty members in Fall 2007.


Thanks to participation from over 100 faculty, graduate students, and participants from across the disciplines, the 19th annual Stony Brook Graduate English Conference, held February 16 & 17 at Stony Brook Manhattan, was a great success.  The conference’s theme, “Transgressing Boundaries: Interdisciplinary Dialogues” was advanced through the range and depth of the twenty six panels that were assembled. With such diverse panels as “Black Feminism: Artistic Theory and Practice”, “Philosophy, Language, and Poetry” and “Dilemmas in Community Formation,” this year’s conference was particularly interdisciplinary.  Faculty and graduate students from Art History, English, Comparative Literature, Philosophy, Theatre Arts, and Women’s Studies participated as respondents, moderators and presenters on various panels. Presenters have been invited to post their papers on the conference web site.

This year we were fortunate to have two excellent guest speakers from the Consortium. On Friday evening, conference participants attended Ralph Bauer’s lecture, "A New World of Secrets: Occult Philosophy and Local

Lyn Di Iorio Sandin

Knowledge in the Colonial Encounters," Professor Bauer, a visiting associate professor at NYU and an Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, is a leading scholar in colonial studies whose comparative approach exemplifies the kind of interdisciplinarity this year’s conference explored.  On Saturday evening, the conference concluded with a reading by Lyn Di Iorio Sandin, of the CUNY Graduate Center.

On Saturday afternoon, conference participants attended a roundtable discussion on publication and the job market. Adrienne Munich, speaking as an editor and scholar, offered valuable insights about producing articles for journal publications. Krin Gabbard, of Comparative Literature, discussed his experience of writing a book for a more public audience, and Celia Marshik shared her experiences of transforming one’s dissertation into a book. Shannon McLachlan, an editor in the Humanities Division of Oxford University Press gave advice on how to navigate the publishing market.

Building on the hard work of previous conference committees, this year’s group of organizers worked diligently to keep the standard high for the longest-running graduate conference in the country. The committee members were: Kat Hankinson and Rachel Walsh (Co Chairs), Eileen Chanza, Emily Churilla, Rachel Ellis, Amy Falvey, Ed Garcia, Scott Reimann, Lauren Rosenblum, and Jacqueline Vigliotti.

DEPARTMENTAL CV (Fall 2006)

Michael Boecherer presented a paper, "Power in Performance: The Renaissance Stage Witch as Theatrical Agent," at the RMMLA, a symposium held in Tucson, AZ in October. He also had a short article published, “Review of A Research Guide for Undergraduate Students,” in the Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature in December.

Emily Churilla presented a paper, "(Im)possible Forgiveness: The Post-Atrocity Role of Shame in  Literature," at  "Coming to Terms" with Reconciliation - Critical Perspectives on the Practice, Politics, and Ethics of Transitional Justice, a symposium held at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in November 2006.

Paul Devlin presented a paper "'Dublin' Meanings: The United States South in Finnegans Wake" at MLA in Philadelphia, in December. This paper will be published shortly on a peer reviewed web journal of the Emory University Research Library.  He also has an essay forthcoming in the Spring issue of Antioch Review and has completed twelve entries for African American National Biography, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Patricia A. Dunn presented a paper, "The Neglected NCTE/IRA Standard: Students Writing for Their Own Purposes," at the National Conference of Teachers of English (NCTE) Conference, held in Nashville, TN, in November.

Heidi Hutner gave a paper on Ecofeminism and literature last June at the NWSA in Oakland California.

Jared Johnson presented “’That such a slave as this should wear a sword/ Who wears no honesty’: Defamation and Debasement in King Lear” at the South-Central Renaissance Conference in Texas in March. He also presented his article entitled “’Slaves of Mahomet’: Moral and Economic Discourses on Islamicized Piracy in Daborne’s A Christian Turn’d Turk” at the Southern Comparative Literature Conference in Georgia in September. Further, his review of H.R. Coursen’s Shakespeare Translated: Derivatives on Film and TV is forthcoming in Shakespeare Bulletin.

Leon Marcelo's first book, CREEPY CRAWLS, a collection of travel writings, was published on September 1st through Santa Monica Press.

Celia Marshik presented a paper, "The Modernist Mackintosh," at Out of the Archive: Modernist Studies Association 8th Annual Conference, held in Tulsa, OK, in October.

Adrienne Munich’s article “Jews and Jewels on the South African Diamond Fields”  is forthcoming in The Jew in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Culture: Between the East End and East Africa., edited by Eitan Bar-Joseph and Nadia Valman.  Palgrave Press, 2007.

Andrew Newman presented "Walking and Talking in Edgar Huntly" at The Charles Brockden Brown Society's Biennial Conference in New Orleans in October.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips had a poem, "Tonight," in the 9 October 2006 issue of The New Republic. A translated version of that poem, "Stanotte", appeared in the Spring 2007 issue of The Journal of Italian Translation.

Stephen Spector’s article “Empathy and Enmity in the Prioress’s Tale,” will appear in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales: A Casebook edited by Lee Patterson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 183-209. He also gave a talk, “Yearning for Jerusalem,” at Temple Kol Ami in  Philadelphia and Temple Israel in Riverhead as well as his talk "Evangelical Christian Support of Israel," at Stony Brook Hillel on Yom Kippur.

Bente Videbaeck presented her talk “How to Teach a Moral Lesson," at the Wooden O Conference in Cedar City Utah in 2005. This talk was published in that conference’s journal. She also gave a presentation at the same conference in 2006.

Milind Wakankar's essay "System and History in Rajwade’s Grammar for the Dnyaneswari,” is forthcoming in Partha Chatterjee and Razuiddin Aquil eds, History in the Vernacular (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007). He also presented a paper titled “The Allegory of the Anti-State in Medieval Western India,”  at the invitation of Gyan Pandey at a conference on Subaltern Citizens and their Histories, Emory University, October 13-14, 2006. The conference sought to bring together senior Americanists and South Asianists working under the inspiration of the Subaltern School.