Department of English Newsletter May 2015
Upcoming Department Events
Publications & Acceptances
Casey Pycior's short story, "Preservation," won the 2015 Charles Johnson Fiction Award and will be published in Crab Orchard Review.
During the summer break, Melissa Homestead's invited essay “American Novelist Catharine Sedgwick Negotiates British Copyright, 1822-1857” will be published in the Yearbook of English Studies, an annual British journal focusing on special topics (the 2015 topic being "Book History and Literature"), and her essay "Willa Cather, Sarah Orne Jewett, and the Historiography of Lesbian Sexuality” will appear in Willa Cather and the Nineteenth Century (Cather Studies 10).
Claire Harlan Orsi has a story in the upcoming issue of the Chicago Review and an essay in the "genrequeer" themed portfolio issue of the Cream City Review.
Steve Buhler will receive an "Artistic Achievement Award -- Literary Arts" at the Mayor's Arts Awards in Lincoln this coming June. The honor recognizes Steve's work with the Flatwater Shakespeare Company, along with his scholarship and teaching.
Wheeler Winston Dixon has recently published the following reviews:
- “Dreaming of Cinema: Spectatorship, Surrealism & The Age of Digital Media by Adam Lowenstein, “(Review), Choice, (May 2015): 1506.
- “Cinema of the Dark Side: Atrocity and the Ethics of Film Spectatorship by Shohini Chaudhuri,” (Review), Choice (May 2015): 1504-1505.
- “Maya Deren: Incomplete Control by Sarah Keller,” (Review), Choice (April 2015): 1321.
- “Imagic Moments: Indigenous North American Film by Lee Schweninger” (Review), Choice (March 2015): 1154.
- “Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship From VHS to File Sharing by Caetlin Benson-Allott,” (Review), Choice (March 2015): 1152.
- “The Cinema of Poetry by P. Adams Sitney,” (Review), Choice (March 2015): 1154.
- “Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store by Daniel Herbert,” (Review), Choice (February 2015): 980.
- “Rare Screening of the Films of Jim Krell, Anthology Film Archives, April 17, 2015,” Kulturtidskrifter.se February 17, 2015.
- “A Pocket Guide to Analyzing Films by Robert Spadoni,” (Review), Choice (January 2015): 810-811.
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster has recently published the following reviews:
- “Cinema, Slavery, and Brazilian Nationalism by Richard A. Gordon,” (Review) Choice (May 2015): 1506.
- “Shirley Temple and the Performance of Girlhood by Kristen Hatch,” (Review) Choice (May 2015): 1506.
- “Bad Seeds and Holy Terrors: The Child Villains of Horror Film by Dominic Lennard,” (Review) Choice (March 2015): 1153-1154.
- “Smart Chicks on Screen: Representing Women's Intellect in Film and Television, ed. by Laura Mattoon D'Amore,” (Review) Choice (January 2015): 810.
- “Beyond The Looking Glass by Ana Salzberg,” (Review) Choice (January 2015): 810.
Grace Bauer's poem "Modern Clothing" appears in the anthology Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace just out from Lost Horse Press. Grace also has poems in recent issues of Grist, Georgetown Review, and Yemassee and poems forthcoming in Paterson Poetry Review, Scapegoat, South Dakota Review, Storm Cellar and Xavier Review.
An interview with Joy Castro about editing essay collections is included in Considering Garlands: On Anthologies, curated by David Lazar. Interviewees include John D’Agata, Robert Atwan, Patricia Foster, Phillip Lopate, and Jill Talbot.
Jackie Harris recently accepted a Visiting Faculty position at Brigham Young University-Idaho beginning Fall Semester 2015 where she will teach courses within the English Department. She will move to Rexburg this summer after she graduates. Jackie would sincerely like to thank her committee members Stephen Behrendt, Peter Capuano, and Carole Levin, for their generous support. She would also like to extend particular thanks to her adviser, Laura White, for her support, encouragement, and guidance.
Steve Behrendt's essay, "Poetry," appears as the lead essay in The Cambridge Companion to Women's Writing in the Romantic Period, edited by Devoney Looser (Arizona State) and just published last month.
Ken Price has co-authored a book with Ronald Bosco and Sarah Wider, Encountering the Poems of Daisaku Ikeda.
Cameron Steele's poems "Artifacts of a Make-Believe Ghost" and "Anatomy of a Whisper" are forthcoming in the October issue of Red Paint Hill Poetry Journal.
A version of Tom Lynch's presentation during the "passing show" at last June's Willa Cather Conference in Red Cloud has been published in the Winter-Spring 2015 edition of the Willa Cather Newsletter and Review. It's titled "The Virtues of Native Flora" and touts the virtues of the Cather Memorial Prairie and similar prairie restoration efforts.
Megan Peabody has accepted a position as an Assistant Professor of English at Lindenwood University-Belleville. She wishes to thank Stacey Waite and Pete Capuano for their help with job market preparation, and Ken Price, Maureen Honey, Greg Rutledge, Ken Winkle, June Griffin, and many, many others for their support, guidance, and kindness. A special shout out to the inhabitants of 222 Andrews (former, current, future), and a toast to the memory of Nick Spencer whose encouragement early on made all the difference.
Erin M. Bertram's hybrid text "The Urge to Believe Is Stronger than Belief Itself," which explores her mother's previous breast cancer diagnosis, is forthcoming in Uprooted: An Anthology on Gender and Illness, due out in Summer 2015.
Maria Nazos' poem "Before a Man in the Midwest Loses a Lover" has been accepted for publication in the online issue of The Fourth River themed issue that is dedicated to Queering Nature, due out in Fall 2015. Her translations of Dimitra Kotoula's
Greek poems "Escape or the Words" and "Landscapes I" have appeared in the Volume 9 Spring 2015 issue of Mead: The Magazine of Literature & Libations.
Raul Palma's short story "The Phone Thieves" is forthcoming in Temenos' Special Issue on paradigm shifts. His review of Cristina Rodríguez's "Law and Borders" was recently published on the Watershed blog.
Alicia Meyer has received the Benjamin Franklin Fellowship from the University of Pennsylvania, where she will be pursuing her Ph.D. in English.
Conferences, Readings, Workshops & Presentations
Melissa Homestead has been accepted as a participant in an NEH Summer Institute "City of Print: New York Periodical Culture," which will take place in New York City for two weeks in June. She will begin her usual frantic summer travels in May, presenting at the American Literature Association in Boston on “What Willa Cather's Letters Can't Tell Us about The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett," followed by presenting at the James Fenimore Cooper Seminar in Oneonta, New York, on "British Copyright and Cheap British Editions of James Fenimore Cooper in the 1830s and 40s." She will return to Nebraska to present at the International Cather Seminar on “‘Live Property’: Cather’s 1926 Revisions to the to the Introduction of My Ántonia and the Specter of Nineteenth-Century Women's Regionalism.”
Steve Buhler presented a paper, "Falstaff and the Constructions of Musical Nostalgia," at the annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America in Vancouver, BC, this April. Presenters at the conference with past Department of English affiliations included David Moberly (UNL M.A. 2011) and Matthew Hansen (UNL Ph.D. 2005).
Grace Bauer recently chaired the panel, B Words: Bold, Bossy. Bitchy, Ballsy Women Poets and the Body Politic at the National AWP Conference in Minneapolis, where she also read with UNL Creative Writing faculty at the Prairie Schooner/ African Book Prize reception.
Wheeler Winston Dixon delivered a keynote lecture, “The Current Fate of Experimental Works on 16mm from the 1960s and 1970s in a Digital Age,” at the Columbia University Seminar on Cinema and Interdisciplinary Interpretation, on April 16, 2015, with David Sterritt, Chair of The National Society of Film Critics as the Respondent. On April 17th, he interviewed Joshua Siegel, Curator of Film at The Museum of Modern Art, for a forthcoming feature in Quarterly Review of Film and Video on current challenges in archiving film and video; and on the evening of the 17th, Dixon presented a screening of the works of 1970s experimental filmmaker Jim Krell, along with a lecture and Q&A on Krell's work, at Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan, which was attended by a large audience. Finally, Dixon signed a contract with Palgrave / Macmillan for his new book, Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s, for publication late summer / early fall 2015; the manuscript has been completed and accepted, and is now at the copy editing stage. He also got a chance to have lunch with his old friend, Robert Downey Sr., director of the film Putney Swope - a great two days!
Rachel Azima presented "'Can I Use That In My Class?': The Ethics of Sharing Texts within Writing Center Tutor Training and Workshops" via Skype at the East Central Writing Centers Association conference in South Bend, IN. She will also attend the annual CIC Writing Center meeting in Chicago, IL.
At the 2015 AWP conference, April 8-11, Joy Castro read from her work at the A Room of Her Own reading and delivered two papers: "The Beauty and Beastliness of Plot" and "Crimes We Can Write About." She attended a CIC Academic Leadership Symposium at Ohio State April 16-18.
Jackie Harris recently presented at the 2015 Biennial Women and Gender Research Conference hosted by the University of South Dakota. Her paper, "The Intersection of L. T. Meade's Professional and Domestic Victorian Celebrity," examines depictions of the prolific female author within Victorian periodical interviews. At the conclusion of the conference, she received a student paper award for the presentation. In April, Jackie also attended UNL's Digital Humanities Bootcamp.
On March 30, Tom Lynch presented an invited lecture at the University of Minnesota-Duluth on "Ecocriticism, Settler-Colonialism, and 'Strange' Landscapes of the US West and Australian Outback. This was part of UMD's "Writing Nature" series.
Ken Price gave a talk at Rutgers University-Camden on "Oxford University Press, Edith Wharton, and the Prospects for a Print and Digital Edition of her Complete Works." He spent the rest of the day consulting about this project and was appointed to the advisory board.
Erin M. Bertram will be a co-presenter on the panel "Engaging the Present: How Mindfulness and Feminism Can Transform Educational Spaces" at the 2015 Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference at Arizona State University this October; she will discuss how her personal Zen practice informs the mindfulness activities she uses in her first-year composition courses.
Activities, Accolades, & Grants
Steve Buhler's audio essay, "Waking Bliss," aired on NET Nebraska Radio's All About Books program.
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster and Wheeler Winston Dixon are pleased to announce the inauguration of their new series of books from Rutgers University Press, "Quick Takes: Movies and Popular Culture," focusing on cutting edge theoretical and historical work in cinema and related fields.
Grace Bauer was awarded The Society of Midland Authors Award in Poetry for her book, Nowhere All At Once.
Maria Nazos' manuscript of poems entitled "Still Life" was a recipient of a Karen Dunning Creative Activity Award from The University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Women's and Gender Studies Department.
Jessica Amalia Vazquez (English & Film Studies major) has been granted a 2nd year of UCARE support to work with Marco Abel on her research project, "The Revolutionary Moment of 1968 and its Aftermath." Jessica's project focuses specifically on Mexico's "1968" moment.
EGSA is proud to recognize the first recipient of our Star Professor Award, Dr. Stacey Waite. One of the students who nominated Stacey wrote, "Stacey Waite is the most invested professor I've ever had. She's invested in her pedagogy, in her students, and in the act of writing. In her belief in her students, she inspires them to do more than they thought they could. In her belief in writing across disciplines and genres within English, she creates innovative scholarship and inspires her students to innovative scholarship. She's brilliant without being intimidating, inspiring her students to be better teachers, engaged in the subjects they're passionate about and creating pedagogy that engages with the world. She's rad." Congratulations from EGSA!
Kirsten Clawson and Daley ElDorado would like to extend their appreciation and gratitude to the English Department and the Helen Tabor Fund for graciously supporting them as they interned with the Curtis Brown, Ltd. literary agency in New York City this semester. They traveled to New York twice over the last few months to work in person with several agents from Curtis Brown as well as to network within the publishing industry; they met with people from HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, Simon and Schuster, and more! They received invaluable advice from every person they met, from how to market oneself when applying for jobs to how to survive in the publishing industry. Interning for an agency in New York has been an amazing experience, and they have learned so much about the industry and about themselves. Thank you again to all who helped make this possible!
Elliot Wilke, a junior English major at UNL, has been awarded a summer UCARE grant of $2,400 to participate in research regarding the life and writings of Virginia Woolf. Her project will offer a psycho-biographical study of Woolf’s mental deterioration from early stages of life, beginning with a covered up sexual abuse scandal within the family in adolescence, to her struggles with mental illness in her adulthood. Wilke will then research how Woolf’s inability to attain psychological stabilization resulted in semi-autobiographical works of fiction. Woolf’s novels, in combination with journal entries, essays, and letters are all in different ways personal documents that allow special insight into this writer’s psychology. Significant biographical data about Woolf has been revealed in recent years, opening the way for a more in-depth study of the author. Wilke hopes to shed light on how multiple ailments during Woolf’s life served as inspiration for her literary works. In addition to her intensive research, she hopes to present her findings at the annual European Studies Conference in Omaha, Nebraska in October and will co-write a twenty-five-page article with her faculty mentor, Dr. Beverley Rilett, for potential publication. Wilke notes that it will be an honor working with such an enthusiastic scholar of British literature. She is looking forward to a challenging yet rewarding summer and can’t wait to get started.
Robert Lipscomb is a 2015 student recipient of the Chancellor's Award for Outstanding Contributions to the GLBT Community at UNL.
Have news or noteworthy happenings to share?
The Department of English encourages our faculty and current students to submit stories about their activities and publications of note by filling out the Department Newsletter Submission Form.