Marco Abel published, as co-editor with Christina Gerhardt (Associate Professor of German and Film Studies at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa), Celluloid Revolt: German Screen Cultures and the Long 1968 in Camden House’s Screen Cultures series. In addition to co-authoring the volume’s “Introduction: German Screen Cultures and the Long 1968” (1-23), Marco also contributed to the book with “An Interview with Klaus Lemke: ‘Being Smart Does Not Make Good Films’” (292-312), which is the first comprehensive interview in English with this key figure of German film history, a member of the so-called New Munich Group of the mid- to late-1960s. Moreover, Marco also translated from the original German Tilman Baumgärtel’s contribution, an interview with the late great German filmmaker, Harun Farocki: “An Interview with Harun Farocki: ‘Holger Thought about Aesthetics and Politics Together’” (271-280).

Grace Bauer’s poems “Fado” and Highway 2 Mirage” appear in the latest issue of Lake Effect. She has poems forthcoming in Oakwood, Rattle, and the anthology Maple Leaf Rag VII.

Joy Castro’s short story “Fox Hollow” appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of Ploughshares. Her essay “Genre as a Vessel for Presence” appeared in Issue 61 of Brevity.

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster finds a disturbing feminist streak in the work of Claude Chabrol in “Women as Prey: Les bonnes femmes (Claude Chabrol, 1960),” published in Senses of Cinema in March. Foster was highly honored to have her short film, The Leisure Class presented in the Another eXperiment by Women Festival, for the group show, “Entitled,” held at Anthology Film Archives in New York on April 17th. The Leisure Class is is a punk queer feminist critique of cis privilege, class privilege, white privilege, bridal fantasies, enforced hetero-normativity, the wedding industry, excess consumption, and coerced gender norms. Due to popularity, Foster’s video installation In Art We Trust, a four channel study in post-structuralist glitch abstractions, which ran in February and March at LACDA (Los Angeles Center of Digital Art), was extended to run through April. Gwendolyn was delighted to present her homage to Surrealist artist and Muse, Kiki de Montparnasse, Kiki’s Film, alongside the esteemed work of filmmakers such as Barbara Hammer and Bruce Conner at the “Experiments in Cinema Festival”, held in Albuquerque in April. Kiki’s Film was also presented by KinoBerlino at Kino Moviemento in Berlin on April 25th.

That Which is Hidden, Foster’s film homage for the Surrealist artist and poet René Magritte, was invited to be screened at The Wordfest Film Festival, a 24 hour Celebration of Spoken Word, Live Music and Cinema Projection, at Forum Factory on May 4th, also in Berlin. Foster recently published a number of book reviews in Choice, including Working in Hollywood: How the Studio System Turned Creativity into Labor, by Ronny Regev, Postfeminist Whiteness: Problematizing Melancholic Burden in Contemporary Hollywood by Kendra Marston, Classic French Noir: Gender and the Cinema of Fatal Desire, by Deborah Walker-Morrison, Producing Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Literature, Film, and Transnational Politics by Yuko Shibata, Enduring Images: A Future History of New Left Cinema by Morgan Adamson, Critical Mass: Social Documentary in France from the Silent Era to the New Wave by Steven Ungar, and Lessons in Perception: The Avant-Garde Filmmaker as Practical Psychologist by Paul Taberham. Finally, Gwendolyn is delighted that her Self Portrait [Détournement] in which a ‘found image as self’ morphs into multiple selves, had it’s Cuban premiere at the Festival Internacional de Videoarte de Camagüey (FIVEC) in Camagüey; Cuba from April 22 - 29, 2019.

Wheeler Winston Dixon was interviewed on April 25, 2019 for NPR’s Marketplace for a segment entitled “What Would Hollywood Be Without Superhero Movies?”. Dixon has published a review of “History and Film: A Tale of Two Disciplines by Eleftheria Thanouli,” in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television on April 29, 2019. Dixon also published two new reviews in Choice: “Some Kind of Mirror: Creating Marilyn Monroe by Amanda Konkle” and “Fellini’s Eternal Rome: Paganism and Christianity in the Films of Federico Fellini”, both in the June 2019 issue.

One More Voice, a new digital initiative led by Adrian S. Wisnicki and affiliated with his digital humanities project Livingstone Online, published a rare nineteenth-century African travel narrative in late April. That publication then became the subject of a very positive article in the Guardian.

Paul Olson published D. W. Robertson, Jr. and Paul A. Olson, Uncollected Essays of D. W. Robertson (Zea: Lincoln, 2017), introduction, pp. vii-xix; he also is publishing “Shakespeare’s Henriadic Monarchy and Chaucerian/Elizabethan Religion” in Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 33 (2020), an essay of about 12,000 words.

Patrick T. Randolph (PIESL) published “Three Unorthodox Prewriting Activities for Writing Classes” in the TESOL Second Language Writing Interest Sections News. This piece offers three highly unorthodox prewriting practices that draw from research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. The activities include physical exercise, mindfulness, and personifying the craft of writing. Randolph also published “Examining the Personal-Association-Based Components of the Head-to-Toe Method of Associations for Vocabulary Acquisition.” This is PART 2 of the Personal-Association-Based Components that focuses on Mind-Body Based Associations. In particular, it looks at “Personal Memory Associations.” These associations are used to connect vocabulary with episodic or semantic memories. His students, Ishraq Al-Abri from Oman, Olivier Niyonshuti Mizero from Rwanda, and Nikoleta Dubjelová from Slovakia also contributed to the article with student samples and analyses of the benefits from student perspectives.

Katie Schmid Henson’s poem “My Death” appeared online at The Atticus Review. Her poem “The Boatman,” has been nominated for Best New Poets 2019 by 32 Poems, the journal in which it first appeared. Her poem “Apple Glory,” has been nominated for Best New Poets 2019 by American Literary Review, where it was a finalist for their annual contest.

Jessica Poli’s poem, “Prothalamion,” was a runner-up for the Meridian Editor’s Prize and will be published in their next issue.

Cameron Steele’s essay “White Carpet on the Back Stairs: Blackface, Whiteness, and My Virginia Childhood” was published in Entropy Magazine on April 5. Her flash nonfiction essay “So Far” will be published in the May issue of GRAVEL. Her poem “Bubos” will appear in the summer print edition of American Poets.

Grace Bauer participated in a Nasty Women Poets offsite event reading during the annual AWP Conference in Portland, OR in March.

Steve Buhler shared a paper, “Listening Again to Soviet Shakespeares: Sound, Song, and Sensibility in Yan Fried’s Twelfth Night,” with the Shakespeare in Film History seminar at the Shakespeare Association of America meeting in Washington DC, April 17-20, 2019. The paper relies extensively on the transcription and translation abilities of Zamira Atlukhanova. Former UNL English students in attendance at the conference included Timothy Lundy (B. A., 2013), currently a doctoral candidate at Columbia University, and Alicia Meyer (B. A., 2013 and M. A., 2015), currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania.

Joy Castro served as the Visiting Hurst Professor in Nonfiction for one week at Washington University in St. Louis. She was accepted to the NEH Summer Institute “José Martí and the Immigrant Communities of Florida in Cuban Independence and the Dawn of the American Century” at the University of Tampa.

Patrick T. Randolph (PIESL) gave five presentations at the 2019 TESOL International Convention & English Language Expo in Atlanta, Georgia. His talks and travel were funded by Colorado TESOL (CoTESOL) through the award his received in 2018—The Best of CoTESOL. Of the 1,000 sessions and presenters at the convention, Randolph was one of the select few to give five talks. His first presentation, “Helping Students Embrace the Emotion of Vocabulary Through Verbpathy,” focused on using verbpathy and emotion-associations to learn vocabulary. His second talk, “Nurturing Critical Minds: Introducing the One-Point Multiskills Analysis,” looked at his own unique one-point analysis, which functions as a concise alternative to the standard research paper. His third talk, “Using Embodied Semantics to Cheerfully Help ELLs Acquire Vocabulary,” is a method that is a part of his Head-to-Toe Method of Associations for Vocabulary Acquisition. The embodied semantics portion, is a six-step approach that incorporates using both the body and mind to acquire lexical items. Randolph’s fourth talk, with Michael Berman of Montgomery College in Maryland, “The Magic of Exercise: Energizing ELLs’ Brains, Enlivening Language Classes,” was a workshop that focused on various case studies showing the importance of using physical exercise in the classroom to help the learning process. They also offered 6 different activities that their participants could use. His fifth talk, “A Practical Guide to Creating Collaborative Mini-PD Conferences,” discussed various methods on how to set up low-cost mini-conferences.

Randolph was also invited to speak at CoTESOL’s spring conference in Greeley, Colorado. He gave two talks. His first talk was “Creating a Blissful Balance: Mindfulness Ideas and Activities for Teachers,” and his second talk, with Dieter Bruhn, was “Creative Writing as a Springboard to Academic Writing.”

Grace Bauer has been named an Aaron Douglas Professor of English. She thanks the department, especially Marco Abel, Kwame Dawes, and Steve Behrendt for supporting her nomination for this award.

In April, Adrian Wisnicki learned that his multispectral critical edition of explorer David Livingstone’s 1870 Field Diary received the prestigious seal for editions approved by the MLA Committee on Scholarly Editions.

The UNL Slam Poetry Team returned from the national tournament at the University of Houston on April 14. The team (comprised of UNL students: Bianca Swift, Celie Knudsen, Celine Haynes, Jax Lindstrom, and Jack Buchanan) qualified for semi-finals for the first time and ranked 17th in the nation. On their road to semi-finals, the UNL Slam Poetry team took victories over some talented teams—University of Georgia, Tufts, and UC-Berkeley among them! Stacey Waite and the UNL Slam Poetry Team are so grateful to everyone in the English Department for their support.