OUTSTANDING STUDENTS!

Nancy Bunker (PhD 2003), Assistant Professor at Macon State University, won the Albert W. Fields Award for “Feminine and Fashionable: Regendering the Iconologies of Mary Frith’s ‘Notorious Reputation,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 31.2 (Winter 2005). 

Melody Charles (TURC ’08) completed a year-long course of study on Modern British Literature at Oxford University. 

Cristina Dascalu (PhD 2006) has received a contract to publish her dissertation, The Literature of Exile and Imaginary Homelands in Salman Rushdie, Bharati Mukherjee, and V.S. Naipaul by Cambria Press.

Graduating senior, Amanda Lewis, was the 2006 recipient of the Chair’s Prize.  

Pauline Newton (PhD 2002) had her revised dissertation published by Ashgate; and has won a Fulbright-Hays Award. 

Sophomore, Eveyln Noell, won the 2006 Zimmerman Prize for an essay on Milton. 

Eunyoung Oh (PhD 2004) had her book, D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing: Colonialism in His Travel Writings and “Leadership” Novels,  accepted for publication by Routledge as part of their Outstanding Dissertation Series in February 2005.  Oh also won the essay prize of the D.H. Lawrence Society of Korea for an article translated from her dissertation. 

PhD students Matt Perry, Lisa Riggs, and Elizabeth Thompson are in TU’s first cohort of Bellwether Fellows, a new dissertation-year award that frees them from teaching to write. 

 Ben Robertson (PhD 2003), Assistant Professor of English at Troy University, Alabama, has his three-volume edition of The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald due to appear from  Pickering and Chatto, London, in September 2007.  Professor Robertson received two consecutive summer fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C., to work on the Inchbald manuscripts.  Also, he was appointed Bibliographer of the Keats-Shelley Journal in 2005.

 Kara Ryan-Johnson (PhD 2006) received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for the summer of 2007 and has been appointed Assistant Professor of English at TCC South Campus.  

Elizabeth Thompson received an American Association of University Women Dissertation Fellowship, a nationally competitive award.

 Allison Weeter (MA 03) has been accepted into the doctoral program at the University of Durham, U.K. 

Geoffrey Wright (PhD 2007) has been appointed to a tenure-track Assistant-Professorship at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama.
                                                                                                         

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EVENTS

Cristina Dascalu (PhD 2006) will take part in an Author Book Signing for "Imaginary Homelands of Writers in Exile" Tuesday, July 8, at 7:00 pm at Barnes & Noble at 41st and Yale in Tulsa.

After a successful first conference in the spring of 2006, the TU English graduate students hosted the Second Annual University of Tulsa English Graduate Student Conference on March 30^th and 31^st, 2007.  This year’s conference topic was “Intertextuality: Conversations Between the Sheets.”  The conference planning committee was comprised of Karen Dutoi, Sara Beam, James Bachman, and Erin Gore-Wilson.  Gina Berend, Matt Huculak, Courtney Spohn-Larkins, and Eric Titterud provided invaluable help, as well as many other graduate student volunteers and faculty members.  Dr. Claudia Nogueira of the University of Tulsa and Dr. Michael Gamer of the University of Pennsylvania were the opening and keynote speakers, respectively, and presenters included a number of University of Tulsa students and visiting students from across the United States and the United Kingdom.

 On February 22-24, 2007 the University of Tulsa hosted “Across and Between Eighteenth Centuries,” the annual conference of the South-Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, organized by Laura Stevens. Daniel K. Richter, Professor of History and the Richard S. Dunn Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, delivered the plenary address, “Native Americans and the Seven Years War.” In a plenary panel commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the journal Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, three scholars of women’s writing and gender studies, Maram Epstein from the University of Oregon, Carla Mulford from Pennsylvania State University, and Susan Staves from Brandeis University, spoke on “Women Authors and Gender Study: Past, Present, and Future.” The conference also featured a performance by the chamber music group Trio Tulsa, comprised of Maureen O’Boyle, Diane Bucchianeri, and Anna Norberg, and an exhibit at the University of Tulsa’s Special Collections titled “’Each Work of Wit’: Reading and Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century.”

Novelist and scholar Michiel Heyns joined the English Department for Spring Semester 2007 as Darcy O’Brien Professor, teaching two creative writing courses and addressing the McFarlin Fellows.

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DEPARTMENT & FACULTY NEWS 

Kate Adams was just awarded The University of Tulsa Outstanding Teacher Award for 2007.  She was also awarded an Oklahoma Humanities Council Research Scholar Award for research on the regionalist writing of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, part of a larger study of race and spatial representation tentatively entitled "Racial Locations: Geography, Culture and Place in Black American Writing."  Her book, Owning Up: Privacy, Property, and Belonging in U.S. Women's Life Writing, 1840-1890, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2008. Prof. Adams joins Profs. Engle, Kestner, Laird, Latham, and Watson as departmental winners of the Outstanding Teacher Award. 

Hermione de Almeida’s book, Indian Renaissance:  British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India, co-authored with George H. Gilpin, appeared in 2006.  The book received grants from the Paul Mellon Foundation, London, and the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, in support of its 240 illustrations.  The publisher was Ashgate/Lund Humphries, London.  Early reviews describe the book as “an original and very welcome addition to the literature on the art and aesthetics” of Britain, and one that “contributes significantly to the increasing debate over British art’s relation to imperial history” (Geoff Quilley, National Maritime Museum, UK); as “cultural history of verve…a massive advance into the understanding of British art, culture, ‘orientalism,’ and empire” (Carl Woodring, Columbia University); as “lavishly and intelligently illustrated, [which] persuasively argues that images of India were crucial to late 18^th and early 19^th century Europe, and to Romanticism itself” (J. Paul Hunter, University of Virginia).  She guest edited a special issue of Studies in Romanticism on science, literature, and art in 2004, which included her essay, “Romanticism and the Triumph of Life Science.” She is currently guest editing a special issue of Studies in Romanticism on “Byron, Scotland, and the Scots” to be published in 2007.

Lars Engle had an article, "Oedipal Marlowe, Mimetic Middleton," accepted by Modern Philology and another, "Being Literary in the Wrong Way, Place, and Time: J. M. Coetzee's Youth," by English Studies in Africa.  His essay "William Empson and the Sonnets" was published in December 2007 in The Blackwell Companion to Shakespeare's Sonnets, and his article "Sovereign Cruelty in Montaigne and King Lear" came out in November in The Shakespearean International Yearbook 6.  He published book reviews in Modern Philology, Shakespeare Quarterly, and Shakespeare Studies, presented papers at the Blackfriars Conference in Virginia in October 2006, at MLA 2006 in Philadelphia, and at the Shakespeare Association of America conference in San Diego in April 2007, and gave an invited lecture to the University of Kansas seminar on Philosophy and Literature in August 2006.  His opinion as a Justice of the Shakespeare Moot Court at McGill University appeared on the web at http://www.mcgill.ca/shakespearemoot/trials/judges05-06/ in fall 2006.  He continues to serve on the Shakespeare Division executive committee of the MLA, and was appointed to the executive committee of the Board of Trustees of the Oklahoma Humanities Council.  He was elected a Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America in the spring 2006 and served as chair of the program committee for the 2008 SAA conference.  Locally, he chaired the English Department.

George Gilpin’s book, Indian Renaissance:  British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India, co-authored with Hermione de Almeida, appeared in 2006.  The book received grants from the Paul Mellon Foundation, London, and the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, in support of its 240 illustrations.  The publisher was Ashgate/Lund Humphries, London.  Early reviews describe the book as “an original and very welcome addition to the literature on the art and aesthetics” of Britain, and one that “contributes significantly to the increasing debate over British art’s relation to imperial history” (Geoff Quilley, National Maritime Museum, UK); as “cultural history of verve…a massive advance into the understanding of British art, culture, ‘orientalism,’ and empire” (Carl Woodring, Columbia University); as “lavishly and intelligently illustrated, [which] persuasively argues that images of India were crucial to late 18^th and early 19^th century Europe, and to Romanticism itself” (J. Paul Hunter, University of Virginia). His essay, “William Blake and the World’s Body of Science,” appeared in a special issue of Studies in Romanticism on science, literature, and art in 2004.

David Goldstein published “Recipes for Living: Martha Stewart and the New American Subject” in Ordinary Lifestyles: Popular Media, Consumption and Taste Cultures (London: Open University Press, 2005).  He was awarded a second Faculty Research Grant from the University, as well as a research grant from the Oklahoma Humanities Council, to continue work on his monograph, Digestion and Originality in Early Modern England.  His entry “Food and Drink” is forthcoming in the Greenwood Shakespeare Encyclopedia, his article “Shakespeare and Food” is forthcoming from Blackwell Publishing Online, and he has book reviews forthcoming in Renaissance and Reformation and Shakespeare Bulletin.  He delivered a paper on Anne Bradstreet at the North American Conference on British Studies and gave an invited lecture at the UCLA Shakespeare Symposium.  He also spoke to the annual luncheon of the Shakespeare Society of Tulsa.  On the creative front, he completed a book-length collection of poems, The Muses’ Birdcage, in fall 2006; it was listed as a finalist for the Action Books December Prize.  He published two poems in Alice Blue Review and three poems in Dusie, had poems accepted in Jubilat and Epoch, and published a poetry chapbook, Been Raw Diction, with Dusie Press in 2006.  He recently received an Oklahoma Humanities Council grant for his research on early modern cookbooks and invited to participate in an online chapbook project with Dusie, due out in June 2007.  He participated in a reading at the Associated Writing Programs conference in Austin, TX.  Locally, he co-taught a master class with the poet Charles Martin at the annual Nimrod Literary Awards Conference, and joined Nimrod’s editorial board.  Wa-KOW, the Tulsa artist collective he co-founded last year, had work accepted in the online journal Action, Yes, and exhibited at a local art space in May. 

Grant Jenkins recently had his book manuscript, Poetic Obligation: Ethics in Experimental American Poetry since 1945, accepted for publication by the University of Iowa Press.  It is forthcoming in spring 2008.   He continues to work on his project on African American poetry, submitting an interview with Will Alexander to the literary review magazine, Rain Taxi, for publication and presenting two different papers this spring on Harryette Mullen at the University of Louisville’s Twentieth Century Conference and Lake Forest College’s &Now Literary Festival, respectively.  He earlier presented the paper, “Part 2: ‘The Space of In Between:’ Mark McMorris’s Postcolonial Ethics,” at the American Literature Association Symposium on Poetic Form in San Diego, CA, in September 2005.  His chapter “My Susan Howe, or Howe to Teach” has appeared in print in the collection, Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary, edited by Juliana Spahr and Joan Rettalack, from St. Martin’s/Palgrave Press.  Jenkins has also been productive creatively, working with a group of local artists on a multimedia project involving the city of Tulsa and keeping a poetry web log where he reviews poetry events in Tulsa and submits his own short poetry for public consideration.  He also is continuing work on two longer poetry projects, one dedicated to his maternal grandfather and the other inspired by the first English documents written in America at Jamestown. 

 Joseph Kestner gave ten presentations last year, including the keynote address, "The Dandy and St. George in Jane Austen’s Emma," at the annual conference of the Jane Austen Society of Australia in Sydney in July 2006.  He published three articles, ‘St. George and the Dandy in Jane Austen’s Emma ,’ in Sensibilities; ‘Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,’ in the Encyclopedia of Europe, ed. Thomas Carson, New York Scribner’s /Gale 2005; and ‘The Pre-Raphaelites’ in Philbrook Magazine.  He is Vice President of the Cinema Arts Foundation, Tulsa, and a member of the Oklahoma Film Commission, and he published, Sherlock's Sisters: The British Female Detective, 1864-1913, with Ashgate in November 2003.

Holly Laird moved from Editor to Executive Editor of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature in fall 2005.  She published a special issue, "The Feminist Legacy of Carolyn Heilbrun," in TSWL in fall 2005, coedited with Susan Gubar; and she coedited a second special issue, “Emotions,” with new TSWL editor, Professor Laura Stevens, in spring 2006.  Her recent articles include “The Death of the Author by Suicide” in The Fin-de-Siècle Poem, ed. Joseph Bristow (Ohio UP, 2005); “Reading ‘Virginia’s Death’: A (Post) Traumatic Narrative of Suicide” in Virginia Woolf and Trauma, ed. Suzette Henke and David Eberly (Pace UP, 2007); and “Michael Field as ‘The Author of Borgia’” in Michael Field and Their World, ed. Margaret Stetz and Cheryl Wilson (Rivendale, 2007).  Her essay “What Difference(s) Did She Make? Or, My Aunt, the Dragon” is forthcoming in the Spring 2007 Silver Jubilee Issue of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, celebrating the journal’s twenty-fifth year of publication.  She was invited in Spring 2007 to join the advisory board of the Centre for Research into Gender in Culture and Society at Swansea University, the only one of its kind in Wales, established in 2003.  She was reappointed for a second term as a member of the Advisory Council of Princeton's Program in the Study of Women and Gender.

Sean Latham recently published three articles: "The Rise of Periodical Studies" (co-authored with Robert Scholes) in PMLA; "The Art of Scandal: The Namesless Shamelessness of Ulysses" in Scandalous Fictions: The Twentieth-Century Novel in the Public Sphere (Palgrave, 2007); and "An Impossible Resignation: William Faulkner and the Colonial Imagination" in Blackwell's Companion to William Faulkner.  In October, Latham chaired the eighth annual meeting of the Modernist Studies Association, an event which brought over 500 interdisciplinary scholars to Tulsa, and co-curated (with Matt Huculak) an exhibition entitled New Art for the New Age.  Currently, he serves as President-elect of the Modernist Studies Association and is a Trustee of the International James Joyce Foundation.  He is also a member of the Modern Language Association's Task Force on Evaluation of Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion which has just released its final report.  Recently, he has delivered lectures at Harvard University, University of Delaware, the University of California, Santa Barbara, the Dublin James Joyce Summer School, and DeMontfort University (Leicester, U.K.).  In March, the Modernist Journals Project (co-directed by Latham and Robert Scholes) received a two-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create critical digital editions of Poetry Magazine, Scribner's Magazine, and the English Review. 

Laura Stevens is at work on the Silver Jubilee issue of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, to be published in spring 2007. As President of the South-Central Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies for 1006-2007, she chaired the Society’s annual conference in Tulsa this past February.  In January she presented a paper, “’A Lasting Honour to her Sex’: Reading Deborah in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic,” at an Advanced Seminar of the School for Advanced Research Santa Fe, and in March she participated in the New Mission History Symposium at Creighton University. She recently published reviews in History: Reviews of New Books and in The Journal of British Studies. She has been awarded a Women’s Studies Course Development Grant for the summer of 2007, to design a seminar on women and writing in the British Atlantic world before 1800. On sabbatical this fall, she is writing a book on eighteenth-century interpretations of women in the Bible.  A paperback edition of her book The Poor Indians: British Missionaries, Native Americans, and Colonial Sensibility was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in fall 2006.

Gordon Taylor addressed the McFarlin Fellows in January 2006 with a talk titled "'The Real War Will Never Get in the Books': Reflections on American Writers and the War in Vietnam."  He published a biographical/critical essay on the Japanese American poet and memoirist, David Mura, in a new volume of the Dictionary of Literary Biography devoted to Asian American authors.  He also contributed a section on the novelist Ralph Ellison in the Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, forthcoming in connection with the centennial celebration of Oklahoma statehood. 

Sandra Vice, Department Assistant II, was honored with the coveted STAR award (Service That Achieves Results) by President Lawless at the employee appreciation lunch in May 2004.  This is the university's highest award for staff service.  Sandy has been a STAR award nominee various times; most recently in 2006, and a tremendous asset and resource for the Department of English for over twenty years.  

James Watson published "Peter Matthiessen's Sal Si Puedes: In America with Cesar Chavez," in Genre; is engaged on a book-length study of the work of Peter Matthiessen; and will guest-edit the Summer 2007 Special Faulkner Issue of The Mississippi Quarterly.    

Yevgeny Yevtushenko received the Peter the Great Medal of the Russian Association of Managers; was named a Living Legend by the Ukrainian Cultural Association; received the highest decoration of The Republic of Georgia, the Order of Honor, and in March 2004 he received from President Vladimir Putin one of the highest decorations in Russia, "Great Achievements for the Motherland".  He received Chile's highest honor from Michelle Bachelet, Chile's new President, remembering his connection as poet with democracy in that country and with the government of Salvador Allende; he recently published the 7th volume of his Collected Works in Russian.  In October 2006, he read poems and participated in a concert of Shostakovich's "Babi Yar" Symphony at the PAC. He continues to work on an anthology of the last 1000 years of Russian poetry. 

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