GW English News

Q&A with English Work-Study Student Tori Kerr

2012-01-27T11:21:00.000-05:00

Earlier this week, I received the following email:

"Dear Employers," it reads. "As we plan for National Student Employment Week (April 9 - 13, 2012) we'd like to hear what your office has done in the past to recognize your student employees. We'll organize and publish what we learn."

Who knew there was such a thing as National Student Employment Week? Turns out it's sponsored by the National Student Employment Association, "a non-profit association of professionals involved with programs for students who work while attending college."

What would be more fitting, we thought, than to feature our two wonderful work-study students in English this year? Every semester, the English department employs a couple of students, ideally majors, to work with office secretary Linda Terry and manager Constance Kibler. So, in looking forward to the week of April 9, we offer this profile.

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English work-study student Tori Kerr

Meet Tori Kerr, a sophomore English major and creative writing minor from Virginia Beach, Virginia, who is one of this year's two work-study students. "I may be from Virginia, which is geographically close to DC, but my beach town is vastly different than the urban environment here," Tori writes.

Did you know about National Student Employment Week? How do you feel about being recognized?

I actually did not know about National Student Employment Week! I think it’s wonderful to be recognized. I think people sometimes forget that the life of a college student is not all parties and all-nighters.

What's the best thing about working in the English department?
The best part of working in the English Department is the wonderful conversations I get to have with witty and intelligent people. There’s definitely a sense of community among the English-loving folk.

What's the oddest thing you've been asked to do or the oddest phone call you've answered?

The oddest phone call I’ve received was from Pakistan. A man called inquiring about paperwork for international students so his son could apply. It was clear that he really cared about sending his son to an American school to study English.

On a more serious note: How does work-study fit into your experience at GW? What are your thoughts about affording college--not necessarily GW specifically, but private colleges and universities generally? Students elsewhere (in California, for example) have been protesting student debt. Are you and your friends also concerned about student debt?
Student debt is definitely a looming shadow on my college career, as it is for most students. GW, though often called “America’s most expensive college”, has been extremely helpful financially. Work-study is great, not only because of the obvious monetary compensation, but because it allows me a few hours every week to separate myself from the stressful, competitive side of scholarship. While I may be working on a paper, I’m not surrounded by other students (as I might be in Gelman), which creates a clearer intellectual atmosphere—at least, for me.

Are there particular courses/professors/areas of literary or cultural study that you've particularly enjoyed at GW?
It’s quite difficult to discern specific aspects of GW academia that have impacted me—I’m a product of all my Creative Writing and English Literature professors. What I can specify is the impact of a Women’s Studies course I took last year, with Bonnie Morris. I was, admittedly, one who scoffed at the idea of “women’s studies”, but that was only because I was so ignorant of the subject. It was an eye-opening experience not just as a woman but as a scholar and writer. The feminist lens is hardly a narrow, radical, bra-burning perspective of the world, but one that is crucial to understanding society then and now. I recommend women’s studies to everyone and anyone—especially boys.

Aryeh Lev Stollman Kicks Off Jewish Literature Live 2012

2012-01-25T12:26:00.000-05:00

Dr. Aryeh Lev Stollman, who kicks off this year's Jewish Literature Live readings, is one of those remarkable polymaths: an award-winning fiction writer whose "day job" is as a neuroradiologist at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City.

His first novel, From the Far Euphrates, was an LA Times Book Review Recommended Book of the Year, winner of a Wilbur Award, a Lambda Award, and other recognitions. It has been translated into German, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, and Hebrew. He is also author of the award-winning novel The Illuminated Soul and the short-story collection The Dialogues of Time and Entropy. Stollman's story "Love Returns!" (listen to it here) was commissioned by NPR and broadcast in 2008.

The Jewish Literature Live readings series is supported by a generous gift by GW alumnus and trustee David Bruce Smith and curated by Prof. Faye Moskowitz, who teaches the course Jewish Literature Live, a unique GW offering in which students meet in an intimate seminar setting with notable Jewish authors of the day.

Aryeh Lev Stollman's reading is Thursday, January 26 in Marvin Center 310 at 7 pm. The event is free and open to everyone.

Meet the New Student Bloggers

2012-01-24T10:20:00.000-05:00

Kevin Callahan

It's a pleasure to welcome two new student bloggers for English for spring 2012.

Junior Kevin Callahan, an English major and journalism minor, is editor of the G.W. Review, one of GW's two literary magazines. Since last fall, he has also been features editor of the GW Cherry Tree yearbook. In his free time, Kevin reports, he plays tennis and "is an avid collector of nutcrackers." He is very excited to be writing for the English Department blog. Welcome, Kevin!

Andrew Mendelson

Sophomore Andrew Mendelson, who hails "from the mystical land of Connecticut" [Ed's note: his words] is an English major with minors in psychology and creative writing. He enjoys reading Kurt Vonnegut, J.D. Salinger, and "the backs of cereal boxes." He also loves music and "all things sports," especially baseball.

Aside from taking lots of English classes and contributing to this blog, he also periodically updates his own blog, Ironwaffles.

Andrew and Kevin will write about department events, news, and people, including professors, students, and alumni. Please let them know if you have story ideas, or if you have news you'd like to share with the wider GW English community.

You can find Andrew at amen127@gwmail.gwu.edu. Kevin's email is kevincal@gwmail.gwu.edu.

"Newsweek" Dubs Mallon's Novel "Watergate" One of 12 for 2012

2012-01-12T11:45:00.001-05:00

In February, GW English Professor Thomas Mallon's new novel Watergate will be published by Pantheon. (Go here to pre-order your copy.) A historical novel that "conveys the drama and high comedy of the Nixon presidency through the urgent perspectives of seven characters we only thought we knew before now," Watergate is a highly anticipated work--and the first of Prof. Mallon's works to be released simultaneously as an audiobook. It recently made Newsweek magazine's list of 12 books "not to miss" in 2012, a list reprinted by The Daily Beast.

Currently director of the English department's program in creative writing, Prof. Mallon will spend the spring 2012 semester at Davidson College, where he will be the visiting McGee Professor of Creative Writing.

New Lounge Near Completion

2012-01-09T21:11:00.001-05:00


Jenny Moore Writer-in-Residence Tim Johnson relaxes in the new lounge.

The renovations of the English Department lounge are almost complete. You've got to love a makeover--care of the wonderful Laura Van Biber and Elise Katzif Walker, MA students in Interior Design and members of Project George--that includes mod touches such as knitted "poofs" and Lucite chairs. There's also the amazing wall--not shown in this photo--covered in HudsonPaint chalkboard paint and colorful chalk for messages, doodles, and inspiration.

Next up: a few minor repairs, installation of a couple of wall magazine racks, and the hanging of several pictures, including a print of a circa-1940 Works Progress Administration (WPA) poster by the artist Arlington Gregg. Are you a member?

Look for an announcement soon of our lounge dedication party.

Renee Calarco's Kicks Off Theater J's "Locally Grown" Initiative

2012-01-03T16:04:00.000-05:00

The Religion Thing, a world premiere comedy by GW playwriting professor Renee Calarco, kicks off Theater J's "Locally Grown: Community Supported Art/From Our Own Garden" Initiative. In it, according to Theater J,

Mo and Brian are a picture-perfect DC couple: they’re smart, they’re witty, and they have a beautifully remodeled kitchen. But when Mo’s best friend Patti announces she’s found Jesus and is putting her own career on hold, Mo must take a closer look at the harder truths surrounding her own marriage. A brand new comedy about relationships, faith and the fine line between compromise and regret.

The Religion Thing runs through January 29 at the Theater, which is in the Jewish Community Center at 16th and Q Streets, NW. Theater J has special pay-what-you-can performances, and offers weeknight tickets at a discount to theatergoers 35 and younger. While you're there, check out the Locally Grown festival, which runs through February.

Students reading this might be interested in Prof. Calarco's "Dramatic Writing" course, ENGL 2250.80, which meets this semester (spring 2012) on Mondays from 3:30-6 p.m. (ENGL 1210, Introduction to Creative Writing, is a prerequisite.) There are still spaces available!

Prof. McRuer Makes a "Top-10 Most Provocative" List--of Books, That Is

2011-12-19T11:23:00.000-05:00

Just in time for Christmas or Hanukkah: Sex and Disability, a collection of essays co-edited by Prof. Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow, a PhD student at UC Berkeley, will be published by Duke University Press on December 22. And it's already making Top 10 lists!

Here, DailyLoafing's Shawn Alff calls it one of the "10 most provocative books out this December."

According to the publisher,

The title of this collection of essays, Sex and Disability, unites two terms that the popular imagination often regards as incongruous. The major texts in sexuality studies, including queer theory, rarely mention disability, and foundational texts in disability studies do not discuss sex in much detail. What if "sex" and "disability" were understood as intimately related concepts? And what if disabled people were seen as both subjects and objects of a range of erotic desires and practices? These are among the questions that this collection's contributors engage. From multiple perspectives—including literary analysis, ethnography, and autobiography—they consider how sex and disability come together and how disabled people negotiate sex and sexual identities in ableist and heteronormative culture. Queering disability studies, while also expanding the purview of queer and sexuality studies, these essays shake up notions about who and what is sexy and sexualizable, what counts as sex, and what desire is. At the same time, they challenge conceptions of disability in the dominant culture, queer studies, and disability studies.

Contributors include Prof. McRuer and GW University Writing Professor Abby L. Wilkerson.

Tom Mallon on Christopher Hitchens

2011-12-18T06:29:00.000-05:00

A portrait by Jeff Singer. (Click through for more about the photographer's memory of the shoot.)

A year ago this week—at which point he’d been thinned by chemotherapy but not yet harrowed with radiation—a few of us sat with Christopher Hitchens around his dining-room table, trying to come up with a title for the essay collection he had scheduled for publication. The question hovering over us, of course, was whether or not Hitch would still be here to see the book appear, but we set that aside and went merrily to work. The evening proved inconclusive, and I can see from a search of my e-mail files that we were still at it the next day. I wrote to him:

How about Persuasion? It's what you've engaged in all your life.

It's got its Jane Austen echo--a certain ironic delicacy--and seems somehow to combine the political and literary sides of you. It also seems to suggest the art involved in what you do (the gentle art of making enemies, etc.). And it makes the book into a single entity, rather than a collection of items.

He wrote back, with one of our usual joke-salutations:

angelface and dream-rabbit,

this is thought, despite its near-uncanny percipience, to be just a shade genteel. can you continue to cudgel?

love,

The collection appeared—and he was here to see it—as Arguably. As titles go, it’s not bad, but when I consider it now, it seems faintly misleading. It suggests arguments undertaken just because they can be made. Hitch did love the pleasures of argument—why shouldn’t he? he was argument’s Michael Jordan—but for all that, I never, not once, saw him argue a point merely to display his wit (incomparable) or to hear his own voice (soft and seductive). His beliefs were always authentic, passionate, and wholly sincere; he regarded cynicism as the most boring form of naivete.

Our country and city have suffered a terrible loss. Christopher Hitchens was a wonderful friend, a brave man, and (I can now hear him saying “if you insist”) a great soul.

New Course on Asian American Cultural Studies for Spring 2012

2011-12-16T16:23:00.001-05:00

Spring 2012 is the first semester in which English will be offering ENGL 3965, a new topics course in Asian American Cultural Studies. Next semester, Prof. Patty Chu--known to many majors as our Director of Undergraduate Advising (she probably signed you up for the major!)--will be teaching the inaugural course under this new rubric.

As you'll see below, "Globalization and Its Discontents" has students reading works by a wide range of Asian American authors, from Korean American novelist Chang-Rae Lee to Iranian-French graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi, whose award-winning book Persepolis, adopted as a 2007 Academy Award-winning animated film of the same name. Here's a fuller description:

English 3926.10 Globalization and Its Discontents: Asian American Cultural Studies

Tu-Th 2:20-3:30 (67249)

This course examines the cultural legacies of Asian North Americans from China, Japan, Korea, Sri Lanka, India, Iran, and the Philippines. We’ll discuss race and identity, orientalism and neocolonialism in the U.S.; adopted, queer, and colonial subjects; trauma, memory, and racial melancholy; real and imaginary homelands; and the ongoing project of inventing Asian American literature. Representative texts: The Inheritance of Loss, M. Butterfly, The Namesake, Native Speaker, Persepolis. Fulfills the theory/culture studies or the minority/postcolonial requirement for the English major.

"Jewish Literature Live" Authors Announced for 2012

2011-12-12T10:46:00.000-05:00

Spring 2012 will mark the fourth iteration of Jewish Literature Live, the unique course in which students read the works by writers who then visit their classroom for an intimate discussion. As before, each author visiting campus will give a free public reading.

This year, the inimitable Prof. Faye Moskowitz has assembled a line-up of writers that includes the author a 1965 bestseller (Bel Kaufman's Up the Down Staircase) as well as younger writers of a 2010 novel about Russian-Jewish immigrants in Connecticut (Nadia Kalman's funny The Cosmopolitans).

Mark your calendars now for these public readings, and check in to our department calendar for updates about the times and locations of talks. One again, Jewish Literature Live at GW is generously supported by English department alumnus David Bruce Smith.

Thursday, Jan 26, Aryeh Lev Stollman, author of The Far Euphrates

Thursday, Feb 9, Nadia Kalman, author of The Cosmopolitans

Thursday, March 1, Nicole Krauss, author of The History of Love

Thursday, March 22, Pearl Abraham, author of The Romance Reader

Tuesday, April 10 Erica Jong, author of Fear of Flying

Tuesday, April 24, Bel Kaufman, author of Up the Down Staircase

"What does it do?": A Student's Tribute to His Professor

2011-12-06T16:28:00.000-05:00

Recently we blogged about the news that RateMyProfessors.com may be a relatively reliable indication of students' assessments of their professors, contrary to what some of us thought.

Here is a teaching"assessment" of the old-fashioned sort. The subject is Assistant Prof. H.G. Carrillo. The author is senior Joe Mancinik, who officially closes out this semester as student blogger.

On any given afternoon turn a corner on the seventh floor of Rome Hall and you'll probably hear the question, at once so terrifying to creative writing majors everywhere, pronounced with a heavy emphasis on the last syllable, "What does it do?" Now, granted, you may not know what "it" is, or what it might be doing (it is probably not doing much), but you will have the feeling that it needs to do much more; and you would be right.

If you happen to turn that corner and peak into the office from which this terrifying verb is emanating you'll likely see a shivering form seated in a chair in the center of the room. Fingernails digging into the chair's arms, the figure dodges books flung from shelves upon which they were formerly clinging. A man is seated at a computer shoved against the wall. His desk is overflowing with books steepled in the center, making librarians everywhere cringe. Wearing blue jeans, a long-sleeve white shirt, and impeccably-shined black boots, the man is thumbing through a sheaf of papers. Like cigarette ash the leftover pages drift to the floor. Pay attention; blink a few times. Be a good observer, as Ernest Hemingway once admonished. For amidst this swirling elixir of agony, books, and manuscripts magic is occurring. To have sat in this chair, as the author has on many occasions, leaves one panting both in exasperation and anticipation, as the man digresses from comments on the style of Swann's Way, a viral video on YouTube, the role of the paragraph break in narrative, the brilliance of John Updike, the charm of Flannery O'Connor's racist characters, and the latest episode of Glee. Topics to be avoided are the works of Jane Austen, paragraph breaks in the narrative, and the latest episode of Glee.

The man, of course, is Professor Hache (pronounced as "H" in Spanish) Carrillo. What he asks of young writers that is at first so dreaded to the novice is the most important question for all of us: What is your story doing? How is your story working within the framework you have created? Creation, that is what he is asking of his tutelage. Wilted roses mean something much more to him if that is the image the writer decides upon. Books are not flung from his shelves in anger. They are maps. Find your way. Have a voice! As with all the most magical teachers he gives very few few guided suggestions. And he is a magician. And a teacher. And a writer, escritor. (To see how these multiple forms can exist--teacher, writer, language--in one form, within, read Hache's beautiful debut novel Loosing My Espanish)

Laughing with fellow author Terry McMillan

So come prepared to defend your work. He asks nothing less. I could dwell on the number of times he has said that one word, that one phrase (The work is bigger than us, he says softly, as I hold the phone between my legs watching the little red slivers break out on my knuckles), which turned me back from whatever abyss I was staring into. It is not exaggeration to say that he has taught me everything I know about writing, by first teaching me everything that I didn't know. Did I do all of this for nothing? he recalls of his own formative experiences as a writer, but the message is unmistakable.

So how can I ever describe my teacher, my friend, my inspiration? What does it do?

I just did.

- By Joe Mancink

Dec. 8 Reading by Randall Kenan to Conclude Fall Jenny McKean Moore Series

2011-12-05T14:54:00.000-05:00

Writer Randall Kenan

Join the English Department in welcoming Randall Kenan, the last speaker in this fall's Jenny McKean Moore readings series. Kenan will read from his work on Thursday, Dec. 8 at 7:30 p.m. in the Marvin Center, Room 310.

Kenan’s fiction includes the novel A VISITATION OF SPIRITS and the short-story collection LET THE DEAD BURY THEIR DEAD. He is also the author of several works of nonfiction. A highly decorate writer, Kenan is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, the Sherwood Anderson Award, the John Dos Passos Award, and was the 1997 Rome Prize winner from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was awarded the North Carolina Award for Literature in 2005.

Kenan is Associate Professor of English at UNC, Chapel Hill. His reading is free and open to the public.

Jane Shore Has a Perfect RMP Score!

2011-12-01T13:08:00.000-05:00

RateMyProfessors can be a delicate subject for faculty members, who often mistrust and fear it the way business owners mistrust and fear Yelp! ("The food was awesome!" "The food was inedible!" "Awesome!" "Inedible!").

But according to an interesting piece in The Hatchet, the site ranking system seems to produce results that roughly mesh with evaluations conducted the old-fashioned way. Except, of course, for the chili peppers, which are a RateMyProfessors hallmark.

We know that RateMyProfessors has is getting something right, though, because as the Hatchet piece reveals, Jane Shore has perfect scores on the site! By my wholly non-scientific reckoning, this either means that:

1. Jane Shore's students love her.
2. Jane Shore's students feel passionately enough about her teaching to go to RateMyProfessor.
3. All of the above.

If you're an English major, do you use RMP to record your thoughts about English courses? To award chili peppers? Do you trust RMP as a guide to choosing courses from semester to semester?

Creative Writing Presents Its Annual Fall Student Reading

2011-11-21T13:09:00.001-05:00

T. S. Eliot grabs the open mic to read

the swingin’est “Waste Land” ever

Lenthall House (606 21st Street, b/t F&G)

Thursday, Dec. 1 at 7:30 p.m.

Refreshments will be served.

Sign up for a slot (5 mins.) on the sheet in the English department office (Rome 760). Poets, prose writers, dramatists, screenwriters all welcome!

"Tempest" Debate: A Guest Post by English Major Tori Kerr

2011-11-17T14:00:00.000-05:00

Students from Prof. Huang's and Prof. Dugan's Shakespeare classes debated The Tempest last week.

With the Republican debates taking up most of media’s attention in the month of November, it seems fitting that GW should have its own debate—only, this one wasn’t political. Students from both Prof. Holly Dugan’s and Prof. Alexander Huang’s Shakespeare classes took to the stage in a debate concerning the protagonist of The Tempest—the topic was: “Resolved that Prospero genuinely pardons his foes and is a model of true forgiveness and reconciliation.” Does he truly forgive his enemies or is it all an act? Four students from each class formed arguments complete with opening statements, rebuttals, and closing remarks.

I entered the event with my own opinion, which was that Prospero was certainly no model for forgiveness. I must admit, however, that the negative team had an advantage in the wording of the prompt: can a debator argue that any person, not only Prospero, is a model of “true” forgiveness? As the negative team pointed out, that would be like arguing that Prospero is Christlike; even on the cross, Jesus pardoned his enemies. It was this tricky word “true” that the negative team utilized in order to formulate their arugment.

I knew the debate would get heated among the participants, but I didn’t expect to feel so excited just as an audience member. The argument quickly transformed from animated to passionate and then to fiery. Members of the opposing teams talked over each other, threw out sassy rebuttals and even waved fingers in the air to punctuate their speeches. While this sort of frenzy might not be acceptable for the GW Mock Trial team, state courtrooms, or the Republican presidential candidates, it made for a surprisingly exciting debate on The Tempest. I didn’t expect to enjoy the debate as much as I did. The debators’ energy clearly showed that Shakespeare’s plays were not written for only 16th century audiences—his themes are timeless. Revenge and forgiveness are topics for debate that will endure as long as humans (and politcal campaigns) do.

Graduate Teaching Assistant Molly Lewis for Prof. Huang's class was also impressed by both teams' performance. She wrote:

"The impassioned debaters were allowed an opening and an additional statement (both followed by cross examinations by the opposing team), as well as a rebuttal at the end of the debate. These vibrant “back and forth”s elicited strong reactions from their audience members, who eventually had to vote for which debate team they agreed with. In the end, though, many actually abstained from voting, a true testament to how well both debate teams performed."

- Tori Kerr

Click HERE for video highlights of the debate.

Books by GW PhDs

2011-11-17T13:54:00.001-05:00

Congratulations to Joseph Fisher and Brian Flota on the publication of their co-edited volume The Politics of Post-9/11 Music, which will be available next month from Ashgate.

Seeking to extend discussions of 9/11 music beyond the acts typically associated with the September 11th attacks - U2, Toby Keith, The Dixie Chicks, Bruce Springsteen - this collection interrogates the politics of a variety of post-9/11 music scenes. Contributors add an aural dimension to what has been a visual conceptualization of this important moment in US history by articulating the role that lesser-known contemporary musicians have played - or have refused to play - in constructing a politics of protest in direct response to the trauma inflicted that day. Encouraging new conceptualizations of what constitutes "political music", "The Politics of 9/11 Music" covers topics as diverse as the rise of Internet music distribution, Christian punk rock, rap music in the Obama era, and nostalgia for 1960s political activism.

Joe is currently a Learning Specialist with Disability Support Services at GW; Brian is Assistant Professor at Oklahoma State University.

Also recently out from Ashgate: Law, Literature, and the Transmission of Culture in English 1837-1925 by Cathrine O. Frank, which originated as a PhD thesis under the direction of Prof. Jennifer Green-Lewis. Cathrine is Associate Professor, Department of English and Language Studies, at the University of New England.

Focusing on the last will and testament as a legal, literary, and cultural document, Cathrine O. Frank examines fiction of the Victorian and Edwardian eras alongside actual wills, legal manuals relating to their creation, case law regarding their administration, and contemporary accounts of 'curious wills' in periodicals. Her study begins with the Wills Act of 1837 and poses two basic questions: What picture of Victorian culture and personal subjectivity emerges from competing legal and literary narratives about the will, and how does the shift from realist to modernist representations of the will accentuate a growing divergence between law and literature? Frank's examination of works by Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, Samuel Butler, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, and E.M. Forster reveals the shared rhetorical and cultural significance of the will in law and literature while also highlighting the competition between these discourses to structure a social order that emphasized self-determinism yet viewed individuals in relationship to the broader community. Her study contributes to our knowledge of the cultural significance of Victorian wills and creates intellectual bridges between the Victorian and Edwardian periods that will interest scholars from a variety of disciplines who are concerned with the laws, literature, and history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

"And the Bridge Is Love" and More Books

2011-11-13T20:48:00.001-05:00

Faye Moskowitz at Politics and Prose on Nov. 13.

Prof. Faye Moskowitz's reading tonight from the recent re-issue of her collection And the Bridge Is Love (Feminist Press) was a huge success. Not only did Faye get a standing-room-only crowd at Politics and Prose, but the store sold every copy of Bridge in stock. Faye read her wonderful piece about a Michigan family seder disrupted by the smell of something burning. GW English was well represented, with faculty as well as current and former students in attendance.

Recent books by English faculty on display at the Celebration of Scholarship Nov. 11

The photo above is of the display at last Friday's CCAS Celebration of Scholarship. Pictured here are recent works by Patrick Cook, GW President Steven Knapp (The Predicament of Belief), Tara Wallace, Chris Sten, Alex Huang, Evelyn Schreiber, Thomas Mallon, Jonathan Gil Harris, and Holly Dugan.

Shakespeare @GW English

2011-11-11T06:28:00.001-05:00

Friends of GW English know that our community is collegial; what you might not have known is that we also have lots of drama in Rome Hall.

ACT I. Collaboration is a wonderful thing

The Shakespearean International Yearbook Volume 11: Special issue: Placing Michael Neill. Issues of Place in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture is now out. The special issue is edited by GW English professors Jonathan Gil Harris and Alex Huang, and Tom Bishop (University of Auckland, New Zealand), and Graham Bradshaw (who has retired).

ACT II. Students Debate The Tempest

Last night (Thursday, Nov. 11) Shakespeare students from two teams culled from Prof. Huang's and Prof. Dugan's classes came to rhetorical blows over the following:

Resolved that Prospero genuinely pardons his foes and is a model of true forgiveness and reconciliation.

We eagerly await news of the outcome.

ACT III. We set Anonymous straight

Graduate students in English and students in Prof. Huang's and Prof. Dugan's Shakespeare classes were treated to a pre-release screening of Roland Emmerich's controversial new film Anonymous on Oct. 25 at the Regal Theatre Gallery Place in downtown DC. "Set in the political snake-pit of Elizabethan England," the film--with Shakespearean actor Derek Jacobi in the prologue--proposes that the Earl of Oxford Edward de Vere was the author of Shakespeare's plays. Along the way, the film dramatizes "cloak-and-dagger political intrigue, illicit romances in the Royal Court, and the schemes of greedy nobles hungry for the power of the throne were exposed in the most unlikely of places: the London stage."

As a follow-up, on Nov. 3, students enjoyed a roundtable to discuss the propaganda machine set in action by the film. In attendance were graduate and undergraduate students in English, and Profs. Hsy, Huang, and Dugan. Among the topics discussed were the social expectations and resistance of "geniuses," Hollywood's penchant for "conspiracy" and scandals, and--most importantly--how to set historical facts straight.

Anonymous calls to mind such films as Miloš Forman and Peter Shaffer's Amadeus. But there is one thing even undergraduates and non-specialist audiences do not buy. The film presented a very unconvincing picture of literary production. In the whole of early modern England, no one other than the Earl could write good poetry, and "Shakespeare," Jonson, and Marlowe stumbled over one another to beg (or threaten as the case may be) de Vere for an uninterrupted supply of manuscripts (which acts peculiarly as drugs). The film also misled the audience to assume that no other companies or performance venues mattered in Shakespeare's time.

The good thing that can come from "Anonymous" is that it can lead people to the real tour-de-force that is James Shapiro's fine book Contested Will, Records of Early English Drama, Early Modern London Theatres online, and other vetted sources for further study.

ACT IV: The Korean Tempest

Renowned Korean director and playwright OH Tae-suk visited GW on Nov. 4 to talk about his film version of The Tempest. Oh's Tempest won the prestigious Herald Angel Award at the Edinburgh International Festival this year (August 2011).

Rachel Hadas Reading Tonight @ 7:30, Marvin Center Amphitheater

2011-11-10T16:08:00.000-05:00

"Gay Bombay" Talk Today

2011-11-08T10:51:00.001-05:00

Flying High Like a Disco Jalebi: Gay Bombay and Beyond, a talk and reading

Parmesh Shahani, TED and MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow, and author of "Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)Longing in Contemporary India" (2008)

Tuesday, November 8, 2-3.30 pm Rome Hall 771 (801 22nd St. NW)

Parmesh Shahani is not your usual academic. He runs a newly formed corporate funded ideas lab that examines the nature of modernity in contemporary India. He also has a parallel life in which he travels all over India as Editor at Large for Verve, India’s leading fashion and lifestyle magazine, and tops lists like 2010 CNN list of “Mumbai’s coolest queers”. In his talk (accompanied by feature and documentary film clips), Parmesh will reflect on the changes taking place on the ground for LBGT people in India, set against the context of the larger national changes that the country is going through. Drawing on his ethnographic research within an online-offline gay community in the city of Bombay, Parmesh will mull over questions of identity, community and the national imagination. He will also read excerpts from his book.

Co-sponsored by GW's English Department and Women's Studies Program.

Lounge news (what else?)

2011-11-03T16:14:00.001-04:00

To decorate our new lounge space, English has partnered with Project George's Laura Van Biber and Elise Walker (both MFA candidates in Interior Design at GW). Here's the plan they proposed. It includes seating for 7 people. Laura and Elise also helped us pick out durable, attractive, and inexpensive furniture that will add a bit of color and make the room a bit less institutional. Highlights: wall lighting, a floor lamp, and colorful accent chairs that double as table space.

Furniture, including a new refrigerator for storing lunches, should be arriving next week.

"Evil" Inspires (When Taught by Prof. Carrillo)

2011-11-02T16:18:00.001-04:00

Had you taken Prof. Carrillo's class on "Evil," you, too, could have written about Marilyn Manson.

For this post, I'll just quote at length from GW student Ali Peters, writing in Monday's Hatchet:

It began with Marilyn Manson. One of my first college assignments was to dissect the lyrics to “The Beautiful People.”
For a kid coming from a suburban high school where slapstick poet Billy Collins and artist Salvador Dalí were considered controversial, Manson’s “The Beautiful People” brought education to a whole new level. I was completely out of my league.
Filing through YouTube videos of zombies, women in lacy straight jackets and dental torture devices, I began to wonder: Was this professor serious? It was the first time I had ever heard of shock rock, and as it was chock-full of cryptic one-liners like, “Hate every motherfucker that’s in your way.” I was definitely shocked.
The class was called “Evil.” Looking back, it’s not surprising that the simple, one-word nomenclature in itself prompted so many eager students to register for the course. The professor asked us to call him by his first name, so Hache quickly became the subject of my weekly phone calls home. Evil is where I was introduced to what would be a never-ending slew of ‘ism’s, like Panopticism and other concepts I had never encountered before. Every class was an adventure, whether we were picking apart Manson or debating post-Columbine massacre literature. I was excited and challenged. I finally felt like I had arrived. I was in college.

High praise indeed for Prof. H.G. Carrillo, affectionately known to students by his first initial. Students considering their spring schedules should consider Prof. Carrillo's ENGL 1310, "Critical Readings in English," a course that will focus on the short story and on techniques of literary analysis. The course will be held Mondays and Wednesday at 3:45 p.m.

Prof. Faye Moskowitz Reads Nov. 2 (Wednesday)

2011-10-27T15:58:00.000-04:00

Beacon Press, 1993

The Feminist Press, 2011

The English Department cordially invites you to join us for a celebration of Prof. Faye Moskowtiz's literary gem And the Bridge Is Love, a book of essays originally published in 1993 by Beacon Press and recently reissued by The Feminist Press. Prof. Moskowitz will be reading from her book of essays--at turns funny and tragic--in the Marvin Center 402 on Wednesday, November 2, at 5 p.m.

Hearing Faye read her own prose--always so felt, and yet always so beautifully shaped and controlled--will be a real treat for all of us. The reading is part of the "Jenny 2" series underwritten by the Jenny Moore Fund.

If you have to miss Wednesday's reading, you can catch Faye on Sunday, November 13 at 1 p.m. at Politics and Prose bookstore in Northwest DC.

All are welcome, and this event is free.

Recent Faculty Media Mentions & Other News

2011-10-26T11:54:00.001-04:00

Although you wouldn't know it from the mild manner of those of us who inhabit Rome 760, the English Department has been quite busy lately.

This is not Prof. Tongson at GW last week, although the set up was remarkably similar and the photo is in the commons!

Last week, in addition to seeing the completion of the construction work on our new department lounge, we hosted Prof. Karen Tongson of USC, who gave a well received presentation about her new book, Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries. In various case histories centering on the part of Southern California sometimes dubbed "Lesser Los Angeles," Tongson explores the ways in which queer lives and queer sensibilities flourish in suburban spaces. Part of Tongson's project is to pose a challenge to queer cultural theory, in its privileging of urban spaces as the spaces of queer identities, as in its perpetuation of the all-too-familiar story of queer migration out of "provincial" spaces and into urban spaces. The suburbs, as Tongson reminds us, are also inhabited by migrants of color who have "relocated" to the United States. As we know from the suburban strip malls of northern Virginia and Montgomery County, Maryland, the suburbs are crucial spaces for thinking about diaspora, including queer diaspora.

Two members of the GW English community (full disclosure: I'm one of them) were also in the news this week.

On Tuesday, October 24, Gayle Wald attended a ceremony in North Philadelphia to unveil a historical marker at 1102 Master Street, the last home of the gospel crossover superstar Sister Rosetta Tharpe. The marker was the idea of local entrepreneur Bob Merz, who worked with Girls Rock Philly to raise money. The small but joyful event was the culmination of various efforts to bring to public attention the career and legacy of Rosetta Tharpe, an American musical treasure.

Today, English PhD student Tariq Al Haydar published a blog post in The Atlantic on women in Saudi Arabia. Tariq, a novelist, is also an English lecturer at King Saud University, one of leading higher research institutions in the Middle East. You can follow him on Twitter at @TariqAlhaydar

Congratulation to Tariq for this notable publication!

Freshman English Major Pens Op-Ed for The Hatchet

2011-10-17T10:08:00.000-04:00

Congratulations to Marissa Fretes, a freshman English major, for her op-ed piece in today's Hatchet. In her editorial, Fretes argues that the University should not subordinate socioeconomic diversity to other diversity goals.

And our lounge today!

2011-10-14T15:32:00.002-04:00

Our lounge space was painted yesterday, and today the new carpeting was put down. (This photo doesn't do the carpet justice.) Now we just need some furniture and a smart design.

And our lounge today

2011-10-13T14:07:00.000-04:00

We're getting there. Paining is being done today, and new carpets are being installed tomorrow. By next week we will have a new--if empty--lounge! Look for a new refrigerator and new seating soon!

Lounge Renovation!

2011-10-10T17:08:00.000-04:00

The drywall came tumbling down today! Here is a photo of our lounge-in-process. Right now, the main office is a bit of a mess, and the hallway is currently serving as the location for faculty mailboxes, but we're hopeful that the renovation will create a better community space by combining two smaller spaces.

Now we have to figure out decor. Small table? No table? Where to put the refrigerator? What a pleasure to have such questions to ponder!

Save the Dates

2011-09-28T06:36:00.000-04:00

October and early November are chock-a-block with English department or English-affiliated programming. Mark your calendars now for these upcoming events.

October 4: E. Patrick Johnson

The Northwestern University Professor and performer E. Patrick Johnson visits GW during the run of his critically acclaimed one-man show "Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South" at Arlington's Signature Theater. He will discuss the questions raised by his show in a presentation on October 4 at 2 pm at the Multicultural Student Services Center, 2127 G Street. Look forward to a conversation that draws a diverse crowd. Co-sponsored by Africana Studies, the MSSC, and other GW units.

Johnson's books include the award-winning Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Duke UP). You can see him discuss "Sweet Tea" here.

Johnson last visited GWU as a guest of Prof. Wald's "Post-Soul Black Literature and Culture" course in 2007, when he was workshopping an early version of "Sweat Tea." He also consulted with faculty participants in CCAS's Performance Studies Seminar.

October 10: Jewish Women Who Rock

Did you know that The New Yorker's first pop music critic was Ellen Willis, a Jewish feminist? That Genya Raven, aka Goldie Zekovitz, was the lead singer of an all-female band that toured with the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, and the Kinks? That some of the original Riot Grrrls were Jewish?

On October 10 at 7 p.m. in Phillips 411, join a lively exchange about gender, Jewish identity, and rock & pop music featuring Sara Marcus, author of Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution (2010), and Nona Willis Aronowitz, editor of Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music (2011). We'll discuss the roles Jewish girls and women have played in pop music history and how Jewish identities are enacted (or not?) by women today. Heard of the Shondes, the Brooklyn-based indie-punk band with Jewish influences and radical politics? You will after this event.

This is not your mother's "Hava Nagila." Co-sponsored by English, Judaic Studies, GW Hillel, Jewish Literature Live, the Women's Leadership Program, Music, and Women's Studies.

October 20: USC Prof. Karen Tongson

Just announced. Karen Tongson, Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California, will be presenting a talk on Thursday, October 20 at 2 p.m. in Rome 771 titled "Finding the Cloverleaf in Queer Cultural Studies." Tongson's hotly anticipated book, Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries, just came out from New York University Press. Here's what the press has to say about the book:

What queer lives, loves and possibilities teem within suburbia’s little boxes? Moving beyond the imbedded urban/rural binary, Relocations offers the first major queer cultural study of sexuality, race and representation in the suburbs. Focusing on the region humorists have referred to as “Lesser Los Angeles”—a global prototype for sprawl—Karen Tongson weaves through suburbia’s “nowhere”spaces to survey our spatial imaginaries: the aesthetic, creative and popular materials of the new suburbia.

November 3-4: Composing Disability: Writing, Communication, Culture

GW English Prof. Robert McRuer, a leader in the field of disability studies, is one of the organizers of a two-day symposium that considers some of the ways that disability studies and disability culture are transforming higher education and assesses how academic spaces and programs might be generated to respond to that transformation. The exciting keynote speakers for this groundbreaking GW event include Michael Davidson (Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body), Terry Galloway, performer and author of Mean Little Deaf Queer, and Merri Lisa Johnson (Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality).

“Composing Disability” brings together Disability and Deaf Studies, Writing Studies, Education, and Global Cultural Studies for spirited, collegial dialogue, about the production of disability culture, disability writing, and disability representation in and beyond academia today. The program is scheduled to begin on Thursday, November 3 at 1 pm and will run through Friday, November 4 at 3:30 pm. Look here for the full program.

November 4-5: Korean Shakespeare Coming to GWU

As part of Staging Korea: Korean Theatre in Search of New Aesthetics, a day-long event celebrating the beauty of Korean performance traditions, scholars and directors will discuss the internationalization of Korean theatre.

This year's highlight is the visit of Master Oh Tae Suk from Seoul and the screening of the film of his production, The Tempest, which won the Herald Angel’s Award at the 2011 Edinburgh International Arts Festival. The screening is on November 4 at 4 p.m.; the audience will have an opportunity to interact with the director at a presentation on November 5. Both events at the Harry Harding Auditorium, 1957 E Street. The events are part of this year's Hahn Moo-Sook Colloquium in the Korean Humanities.

New GW English Prof. Alex Huang recently discussed the show in the context of global Shakespeare in guest appearances on the BBC and at a lecture in Edinburgh.

English major Patrick Rochelle in the Hatchet

2011-09-26T10:49:00.001-04:00

English major Patrick Rochelle has a nice opinion piece in the most recent GW Hatchet. Rochelle urges the University not to shortchange the humanities, and cites last week's Toni Morrison events as a notable celebration of the humanities in general and literature in particular.

As Rochelle notes, Morrison referred to reading a mode of discovery--not just of the self but the world outside the self. She recalled reading an adult novel lying around her Lorain, Ohio home and enjoying it while not really understanding a word. (Her mother belonged to a book club, and the book delved into psycho-sexual themes.) Morrison implied that this early appetite for reading and curiosity about language were key to her development as a writer. Her advice to kids? "Read anything and everything."

I wonder if readers of this blog can remember "forbidden" books they read in childhood? I gobbled up novels by Pearl Buck and Leon Uris, and read Erica Jong's Fear of Flying before I had any idea what it was about. (The cover offered a hint, but beyond that I was clueless.)

Dinner with Toni

2011-09-23T20:10:00.001-04:00

English major Joe Mancinik with Prof. Toni Morrison

Prior to her appearance at Lisner Auditorium Wednesday night, our English Department blogger Joe Mancinik, along with a few other lucky English majors, sat down for a dinner and conversation with legendary writer, teacher, and intellectual Toni Morrison. This piece is about the experience.

She speaks softly, lyrically, pleasant tongue-clicks. Grace embodied, Have you ever been in the presence of grace? That most rare category of grace that stems from intelligence. The food, the action of chewing, the aroma of spiced shrimp, her metrical intonation, hypnotic and gentle, lulling her dinner audience into a pleasant catalepsy. Something about her voice has a delectable quality that the tongue-clicks and light, mellifluous way she enunciates makes the catered food that much better.

Inspiration, she is asked, where does it come from? "Questions," she says softly, "I have questions about a subject or a feeling that leads me to write." Like love, and its manifestations, which led her to write many of her novels, she says. A mother's love, as in Beloved, or love of God, as in Paradise. When discussing her process as a writer she whispers, as we all lean in (no one is eating though our plates are still full): "Write through the bad stuff." And then she chuckles.

Of course, the opportunity to really speak to Toni Morrison, to know her, is too brief in such an occasion. The supernumeraries surround her as the dinner is held behind the stage in Lisner Auditorium. She has to prepare for the event that has brought her here in the first place: a reading and remarks she will deliver to a large appreciative audience of GW students, faculty, and members of the community. Professor Morrison has had a full day--just prior to our dinner she had visited the White House--and her son lingers nearby, a solicitous and worried expression on his face. There is love right there, always near her.

Prof. Morrison's career represents, to a certain extent, triumph and vindication over oppressive forces. I cannot help but contrast that with the historical memory of my own Southern ancestors, to some of whom such a career connotes humiliation, the unraveling of not only a hierarchy but of an image, a way of seeing oneself, which Prof. Morrison points towards in her critical essay Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination.

Prof. Morrison warns against nostalgia, and it is true that it does distract. Anything further risks solipsism. I remain grateful for such opportunities as dinner with Toni Morrison, as staged as such things necessarily are, given to me by this university, to open my eyes and my heart to others, to look past all of the ugliness, to grasp a new beauty that lies within each of us and within myself, a new knowledge, a new hope and perhaps, finally, some reckoning.

Toni Morrison Packs Lisner Hall

2011-09-22T10:01:00.002-04:00


PhD student Elizabeth Pittman greets Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison at the F Street House

Yesterday's Toni Morrison events--the "Bench by the Road" dedication ceremony; the reception at Pres. Knapp's F Street Residence; the dinner for 20 GW undergraduates (including more than a dozen English majors); the wonderful presentation Morrison gave to a packed house at Lisner Auditorium--were a wonderful tribute to one of our greatest living writers.

We'll have more here soon from senior Joe Mancinik about the dinner with Morrison (he was among the lucky group to dine with her before her 8 p.m. presentation). For now, check out The Hatchet's nice video report here.

For now, thanks to everyone who made this event possible, especially English Prof. Evelyn Schreiber and her husband Scott Schreiber, who generously donated the memorial bench in front of Lisner.

Several events inspired by Morrison's visit are ongoing or forthcoming. They include an exhibit of Morrison's works and a separate exhibit of the black history of Foggy Bottom (both at Gelman Library), a public screening of the film version of her novel Beloved, and walking tours of the Black Heritage trail of Foggy Bottom.

Giving a 9/11 Speech

2011-09-20T17:18:00.003-04:00

On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the attacks on 9/11, GW English student blogger and military veteran Joe Mancinik delivered some remarks for a ceremony on the Foggy Bottom campus of the George Washington University. This piece is about his experience.

Before I knew it I had volunteered. Again. The first time I had volunteered for something I was working on a roof in the Florida Panhandle. The combination of humidity, hot tar, and noxious fumes--and the prospect of enduring conditions like that for the rest of my life-- drove me into that recruiters' office faster than my sense of patriotic duty ever would. And, I reflected, after sealing my fate (the second time), it was this choice, made in the godawful Southern heat--the kind of heat that makes your clothes stick to your body so that you itch all over when you dry off-- that had given me this opportunity, and this made me feel guilt--raw, introspective stuff--because I knew that I did not deserve it.

I had spent my military service on a ship, I reflected; or in the States. Any time the hint of an "opportunity" to go to Iraq or Afghanistan presented itself I ran the other direction. The truth is, I was terrified. Maybe I wouldn't be killed, but I might lose a leg or an arm, or part of an arm, I reasoned. And I also felt a deep sense that, in this case, the authorities were deeply mistaken. And, after all, if you can't trust your command apparatus, what good is an oath to it? That's how I justified it. And that kind of rational thinking is, if not discouraged, in the military, at least it carries with it a corresponding measure of guilt--just for thinking about it.

Ironically it was in the military that I first lost all faith in the concept of authority. One of my favorite sources of wisdom, H.L. Mencken, once said of my dilemma: "The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom."

This was the first break I had with many of my younger college peers, who may still have some hope that their parents and role models have some better notion for the trajectory of their lives. My father wanted me to sell insurance, like he had, and later, to remain in the Navy, where I could look forward to working long hours for supercilious superiors with the distinction of rank to justify their arrogance--forever remaining a nomad while moving from place to place.

My colleagues in the military looked askance at me (the ones who cared) when I announced my decision to separate and go to college. Perhaps some of them may have been envious, feeling trapped themselves. I was taking a big risk. In the military I was assured a regular paycheck and health benefits. I would be taking a massive pay cut (not so massive really) to do something as abstract as learn and gain knowledge. I didn't hold out much hope for a better job because I was too inured to disappointment by then.

So, here I am, agreeing to speak about my military service, which I regretted to a certain extent, and on a day like September 11, with the knowledge that so many poor kids from small towns, like myself, had gone to Iraq and Afghanistan in defense of ideals too abstract to stand the test of experience, to be maimed or killed, or to maim or kill, in defense of these abstractions; and here I was going to give a speech, in which I would have to speak glowingly of these abstractions.

Well I would have to back out, I now saw. Someone else, someone with combat experience, would have to speak--to lie about why they joined the military, that it was because of the attacks on 9/11, and not because of their zeal for their father's or uncle's or brother's approval, that it was due to their love of their government and a flag, striped by abstractions.

This made me realize that if I didn't give the speech, honestly, no one else would be capable of giving it as honestly as I. Now I knew my purpose: to give an honest speech, to expose the lie of patriotism and honor, and to educate these students still suffering from the delusion of compunction and rightness in authority. So I went to work, furiously pounding the keys, whipsawing the pen over the notepad. Exposed would be the fallacies of 9/11: the surveillance, the bag searches, shoe removal, foreign military expeditions; all of it would be brought into the light by my speech. Gritting my teeth I channeled all of my frustration at having to throw out expensive lighters, shaving cream, and hair gel. Rolling up my sleeves I exacted retribution on all of the arrogant officers telling me to shave or come to work on time. The more truth I produced the less guilty I felt about being a coward and avoiding the combat zone. My zeal rode the crest of a divine mandate to expose all of the heresies and madness resulting from 9/11.

Something told me that I should show a draft of my speech to a friend, with the noble intention of sharing these insights and illuminating them. My friend complimented me on my passion, but, well, did I need to dwell so much on the terrorism-security complex or the evil defense contractors in this passage here? This was not exactly the response I was expecting; after all, what the hell did he know? He wasn't in the military, like me. I did admit that, maybe I didn't, no. So I went off to show it to another friend and he said nearly the same thing. But what did both of them know? They weren't writers, like me. Quite deflated, however, I began to doubt my resolve to be a crusader for truth.

Soon after I was sitting somewhere and I wrote something about my guilt at never really sacrificing anything in the military (at least nothing besides a few girlfriends and a lot of sleep). The words started flowing. It was then that I realized that the only way to tell some measure of truth was by talking about my own experience. On a day when so many speeches would be dealing with the same conceits, this was my experience, solely mine. I was the one with the regrets and memories of funny jokes the other guys used to tell during long nights on watch, that the faces in my mind were their faces. The faces of people (we were just kids) who had lived with me through a formative time in their lives with the same regrets, who made the same mistakes, and had spent months and years away from their girlfriends, wives, husbands, children, and families, like me. My purpose now, I finally understood, was to write a speech for them.

As the day of the speech bore down on me (it's not hard to anticipate the date 9/11 approaching on the calendar), I began feeling that gnawing sense of guilt in my gut again. I was unworthy! This was the tenth anniversary of September 11. Jesus, what if someone in the audience had a friend, or, god forbid, a parent or sibling killed in the attacks? Would they slap me in the face afterwards and call me a hypocrite? Would someone who served in Iraq spit in my face?

The day finally arrived, which was also the "Freshman Day of Service" for the university. I boarded a bus filled with freshmen headed to the Armed Forces Retirement Home in Silver Spring. Someone called me "sir." I realized that these kids were eight-year-olds in 2001. They sang songs and laughed and flirted with each other. Their simple love of life and levity on such a somber occasion was one of those ironies that still make life beautiful and worth living to me. Those misguided young men who had crashed airliners into buildings could never take away such beauty.

The evening was warm and pleasant as I surveyed the throng of people gathered on the University Yard for the vigil. Suddenly the sight of the freshman processing down 21st street holding lighted candles caught the crowd's attention--a reminder of the solemnity of the occasion. The president of the university, Steven Knapp, introduced me and called me to the podium. The speech seemed to take forever but came off pretty well. The other speakers complimented me when we had all come down from the rostrum. What moved me most, however, was the unforeseen occurrence of many in the crowd coming up to shake my hand afterwards. One of them told me he also had come to college later than usual (I am thirty-one). The experience was surreal, one of those moments that give color to a memory.

The next morning I opened the student newspaper expecting to find a full transcript of the speech, my picture on the front page, and two editorials: one of which praising my words, and the other vilifying them. Of course, no such thing occurred. There was, however, an elegant one-line summation of the speech (naturally misquoted). My girlfriend reminded me that the speech wasn't about me, but about the event. Wisdom that I grudgingly had to accept. (She is very much wiser than myself). There were no ovations when I walked into my classes on Monday, either.

So I'm forced to make sense of the experience on my own (which is almost always the case in life, of course). I was honored to be given the opportunity to speak but still wonder whether I'll ever forgive myself. Maybe I'll just be one of those old men that wears a Navy hat around the neighborhood, too busy taking care of grandchildren to give it much thought.

Yossarian, the protagonist in "Catch-22," ascribes his prowess as a bombardier to his inordinate cowardice. Tim O'Brien writes in "The Things They Carried" that his unwillingness to go to Canada to avoid deployment to Vietnam was an act of cowardice. He was too afraid in the end, he wrote, to risk the opprobrium of his community.

I suppose I can take some small measure of comfort from these two great authors' words, but I don't really. I just hope that if the time comes when I have sons that I guard against speaking too glowingly or nostalgically about my military career. Of course I am assaulted constantly by such nostalgia, which whispers to me that somewhere there is a ship waiting for me, riding high in its moorings, banners waving in the salt air, to whisk me away, to another time, to other sentiments, back to my youth and innocence.

Announcing the EGSA Blog

2011-09-19T21:20:00.000-04:00

The 2011-2012 English Graduate Student Association announces the arrival of the GW EGSA Blog!

Here is a report by graduate student Tawnya Ravy:

In an effort to stay in touch with English graduate students and to offer regular updates on events, we decided to create this blog. We see it as an exciting opportunity to encourage English graduate students to take an active role in the academic, professional, and social events offered by the department, the individual programs, and by EGSA. We also envision it as a place where current graduate students can exchange ideas, seek advice, or offer suggestions for the Association via the Forum function.

With teaching, studying, writing, and TA duties, we realize how difficult it is to foster a sense of community in a graduate program. We would like to change this by using the blog to encourage study breaks, form study groups, organize happy hours, access the unique opportunities for fun and development in D.C., support department events, and offer inspiration, news, and comedy to help students through the challenging years of graduate school.
Already you can find information on the upcoming National Book Festival this weekend in DC as well as the upcoming Plan Your M.A. Workshop. In addition, we are looking to organize reading groups to support some of the upcoming academic events including the two-day MEMSI event on Monster Theory and the upcoming Composing Disability event. Please visit the GW EGSA Blog to indicate your interest in participating in these events/groups or email gwegsa@gmail.com. You are also encouraged to “Like” us at the GW EGSA Facebook page where you will receive event invitations and updates.

Tim Johnston, Master Craftsman

2011-09-16T12:37:00.002-04:00

Looking into Tim Johnston's smoky gray eyes, one finds no presumption lurking there. His answers are direct, and he pauses for new questions; his voice is clear and his manner is pleasant. Johnston is the new Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Residence Fellow.

Profiling a writer is unlike straight biography for, say, a firefighter. There's the added wrinkle of a body of writing to think about. There are many approaches to take in profiling a writer. One approach, the one most writers are critical of, is the biographical approach: understanding the figure behind the page through the subject's experiences--without the page. Another approach is to open up the writer's life through the work he or she produces. The writer would probably prefer he or she was never opened up in the first place, but that is the tension inherent in a biography--between the biographer trying to reveal, and the subject trying to abstract. The latter approach is the most arduous.

A writer once said that all writing is about a lack. Ernest Hemingway put this into practice the best, using his "iceberg" approach to writing, by revealing only what was starkly visible in the narrative and hinting at the larger, turbulent forces roiling the surface of the water; the effects of which we can all see but are unable to discern. Hemingway kept his prose tight and free from ornament. A seemingly innocuous passage from Tim Johnston's short story "Two Years", an exchange between the protagonist Grant and the waitress Maria, demonstrates his dexterity with this technique:

She said, 'I'm sorry, I'm overstepping.'
'No, you're not.'
'I'm taking advantage of the circumstances.'
'Which circumstances?'
'She glanced at him, and looked back to the road.'

And a few paragraphs further, in response to Maria's question about his amputated fingers:

[Grant] said, 'No. Well there was a saw, but it wasn't a work accident. It was a drinking accident.'
'Oh.'
'I used to be a drinker.'
'Oh.'
'The turnoff's coming up.'
'I know. But thanks.'

These are some of the most tense moments in the narrative but Johnston deftly withholds as much as possible, dangling the characters' histories over the readers' heads like a sprig of mistletoe held by someone you are burning to kiss, who is also being a little too glib about it. That's the substrate of narrative, the sleight of hand, the thing that divides the journeyman writer from the apprentice, which Johnston has found.

"As I've gotten older and more confident," he says of his technique, "and just plain better as a writer of fiction, my fiction has become less and less autobiographical on the surface." Johnston admits to having a visceral reaction to seeing himself lurking at the edge of his writing. "I get kind of nauseated whenever I feel myself writing about a character who resembles myself too closely," he says, "and the moment that happens I will jettison the voice, or the character, or else change him or his story so dramatically as to make him alien and interesting to me."

Johnston spent many years as a carpenter, so his craftsmanship with words should come as no surprise to the reader. "Like writing, carpentry is about building," he says. "About taking care, about taking raw materials and making things at once beautiful and solid. You learn an appreciation for grain, for the sharpness of tools and for the keenness of your eye and your fingertips."

His interest is in teaching fiction and fiction writing. Part of his responsibilities as the Jenny McKean Moore fellow is teaching a workshop for students and for local residents. The syllabus for his workshop reads like a recipe for a good peach pie, as precise as a work manual: "We begin with the agreement that reading--and understanding--great fiction is an educational bedrock for anyone who wishes to create it...We will be frankly but humanely honest, impassioned with compassion, aware that the time and care we put into the stories of our peers is not only the lifeblood of the workshop, but will also be generously repaid in kind."

Johnston's collection of short stories, Irish Girl, won the 2009 Katherine Ann Porter Prize in Short Fiction. The eponymous story in the collection garnered him the O. Henry Prize in 2002. Author David Sedaris listed the collection as one of his favorite reads that year and promoted the book on his U.S. tour, including Irish Girl in his anthology of favorite stories Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules. Johnston wrote a humorous article about the experience for Salon.com last May entitled "When You Are Engulfed by David Sedaris." (It's worth a read)

Last night (September 14), Johnston read a portion of his upcoming novel The Next Hour as part of the Jenny McKean Moore series to a small crowd of bibliophiles and creative writing geeks in the School of Media and Public Affairs. The title of the novel, Johnston said, comes from an Arthur Schopenhauer quote: "Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and may therefore be demanded back the next hour." I suspect that he feels the same about his own fame--a trait that is essential to modesty.

The inevitable question about motivation Johnston answers with verve and humility, right down to the last rivet, the last substance. "Great writing drives me," says Johnston. "Great stories and novels. Sentences I never want to forget. I'm driven by the deep and incomparable sense of well-being and rightness that fills me when I am working intensely on some story, or novel, or sentence."

It's Official: The Ephemeral History of Perfume is Out!

2011-09-15T14:22:00.000-04:00


English Dept. Secretary Linda Terry, Assistant Prof. Holly Dugan, and Office Manager Constance Kibler.

It's official! Prof. Holly Dugan's The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England is out from The Johns Hopkins University Press! University of Michigan Prof. Michael Schoenfeldt calls it "[a] wonderful piece of work that will engage a wide readership. The subject of scent is central to so many attitudes and opinions in early modern culture, and Dugan does a splendid job of reminding us of its importance to canonical and noncanonical works. I know of nothing quite like this book."

Congratulations to Holly!

Tickets to an Intimate Dinner with Toni Morrison on Sept. 21

2011-09-12T09:04:00.001-04:00

By special arrangement with the folks organizing Toni Morrison's upcoming campus visit (thank you, Prof. Evelyn Schreiber!), the English department has obtained several seats for undergraduates to attend a dinner with Prof. Morrison before her talk at Lisner Auditorium on Monday 9/21 at 8 p.m. This dinner is by invitation only and is for fewer than 20 students, so it's a once-in-a-lifetime chance to spend time with one of our greatest living writers.

Undergraduate English majors who would like to have dinner with Prof. Morrison should email, by tonight (Monday 9/12) at midnight, a "tweet" to Prof. Wald. That is to say, email Prof. Wald an explanation in 140 characters or fewer of why you want to have dinner with Toni Morrison.

Profs. Schreiber and Wald will judge the entries and announce the winners of our Dinner with Toni Morrison contest on Tuesday.

Please note that this special invitation is for undergraduate English or English and Creative Writing majors ONLY. Tweets must be received by midnight to be eligibile.

All the World's a Stage: Alex Huang at GW

2011-09-09T15:33:00.007-04:00

Dr. Huang being filmed by BBC crew at the 2011 Edinburgh International Festival

There was a tempest of sorts happening outside as I rushed over puddles and clumps of wet leaves to catch one of newly-arrived Professor Alex Huang's courses entitled "Global Shakespeare." The course title could easily be describing Dr. Huang himself, a native of Taiwan, who first encountered a performance of the Bard's work in Germany--coincidentally, it was a performance of The Tempest--while an exchange student. Even his name is cross-cultural (much of his scholarship focuses on this subject) as his father, a historian, named him for the legendary Greek general.

Dr. Huang brings to GW years of experience as a Shakespeare scholar, and numerous accolades, including the prestigious MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for his book Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange. With his bona fides and experience—he holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and a Joint Ph.D. in interdisciplinary studies in humanities from Stanford University—why choose Washington, D.C. over, say, London or New York?

“Because the English Department is a smart and collegial community and GW is at a very exciting moment of development under the leadership of the president and provost," says Dr. Huang. "And there is so much going on in Washington, D.C., around Shakespeare." He offers the presence of the Folger Shakespeare Library (with which he has closely collaborated in the past) and three Shakespeare companies as examples. Dr. Huang was also very excited to work with colleagues in the GW Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute.

Along with the Ford Foundation Professor of Humanities Peter Donaldson at MIT, Dr. Huang was the driving force behind Global Shakespeares, a video archive--it is more accurate to call it the video archive--of worldwide Shakespeare performances that scholars, students, and anyone else can use to access Shakespeare around the globe.

“I think of (Global Shakespeare) as a YouTube for Shakespeare lovers,” says Dr. Huang.

I arrive at his class a little late, spilling coffee in the process, but he is too engrossed in a lecture on Julius Caesar to take much notice. The professor is very tech-saavy, as evidenced by his usage of multimedia in the classroom.

"(Multimedia) is the only way to get the job done when the goal is to teach performance and film analysis and critical thinking," says Dr. Huang. "The paradox of the age of YouTube is that despite the level of creativity and range of possibilities for teaching and learning, when videos and films are used in class, students slip back into the passive mode of viewing. I use multimedia in ways that compel students to engage with the materials in-depth and foster students' writing skills."

One of the ways he accomplishes this is by using VITAL (Video Interaction for Teaching and Learning), a program developed at Columbia and modified at MIT, that allows students to make their own multimedia content by splicing together clips from Global Shakespeare with their own writing about the work. The finished product can then be shown to the class to create a learning community.

A screenshot of VITAL

"On the surface, (VITAL) may look like a variation of such course management websites as Blackboard, or YouTube on steroids, but it is neither," says Dr. Huang. "VITAL offers a video-centric learning experience that fosters excellence in writing. Students get hooked after making their very first clip."

Gabriela Cruz, one of his students, agrees. "(Dr. Huang) has made Shakespeare a little more interesting than usual," she says. "He has made Shakespeare not only clearer but has expanded Shakespeare globally."

Professor Huang is offering two courses this semester: one is the aforementioned "Global Shakespeare: Shakespeare in Transnational Contexts" and "Shakespeare Today: Shakespeare alive on 21st century stage and screen." If you are interested, click on his name to find out more about Dr. Huang and his curriculum and scholarship.

Welcoming Joe Mancinik, the Newest GW English Blogger

2011-09-08T14:16:00.004-04:00

Joe when he is not in Foggy Bottom.

Joe Mancinik, the new English Department communications intern, has a philosophy on life, which is as follows: everything that is usual is boring, or eventually becomes boring.

So everything that is unusual is outside of himself, since every morning he wakes up to himself, or at least very near himself. Therefore he is very interested in unusual things, like crime, deviance, taboo, and other people. This philosophy explains much of his life and peregrinations, including joining the Navy and coming to college a little later than most.

“I wasn’t ready for college when I was eighteen,” he says, chewing on an apple core. “Immaturity is one explanation, mostly my parents’, but the other is that I had this theory that experience was something more intangible and less occupying and labor-intensive.” He chews a little more on his apple and grants that this theory was somewhat flawed. “But flawed reasoning is the path to wisdom, I think. I mean, it took an apple like this one falling on Newton’s head for him to acquire wisdom, and it took two or three marriages for my parents.”

Also, the senior English and Creative Writing major’s philosophy led him to become the new blogger for the English Department. He sees it as an opportunity to meet unusual people and professors, the latter category of which he views as “definitely satisfying that criteria.” Mancinik has a taste for mordant wit, obviously, and sees humor and irony as the ultimate proof of God’s existence (along with the works of John Cheever and Saul Bellow). “How else could you explain the appeal of Lady Gaga and the Republican Party?” he jokes. (Joe prefers jazz, especially Dexter Gordon and Bill Evans, and Coltrane when he’s feeling more “cerebral.”)

His ambition is to become an educator, writer, thinker, gardener, and humanist. "Anything but business," he says with disgust. "There's nothing more ridiculous to me than paying someone to do something that you're perfectly capable of doing yourself." A quick glance at all of the canning materials, gardening tools, livestock, and analog calculators strewn around his cramped Foggy Bottom apartment will attest to that. It was difficult, in fact, to nail down exactly what was fantasy or dissimulation to him and what was reality. "All artists lie," says Mancinik. "Just look at Hitchcock (the iconic film director) and his pranks. To them it's more fun. To their spouses it's another matter altogether."

When asked about his military experience Joe quotes Fred Durst, of Limp Bizkit fame: “Being in the Navy was like being in prison.” Though Mancinik is quick to add that his military service gives him access to the GI Bill, which enables him to go to an outstanding private university like GW, relatively free of expense.

Joe is currently researching, in his off-time, the poetic link between William Shakespeare and Tupac Shakur. “Heaven is my judge/ Not I for love and duty/ But only seeming so/ For my peculiar ends// Only God can judge me…nobody else/ All you (expletive deleted) get out my business.” Of this research Mancinik says, “It’s been tedious. It really has. About the only thing that I can really argue convincingly to my professors is that (Shakespeare and Shakur) are dead.” He also likes college football.

Getting deeper, to what drives him, takes a little further investigation. He cites the murders in 2005 of two close friends as a life-changing experience. “That put things into perspective for me,” he says, indicating by his body language that he is being sincere now.

“Before (the murders) I was pretty content with reading for my own knowledge and avoiding anything too complicated. But when my friend and his wife were killed, I began reevaluating that approach. They were my friends, you know, even when I was an idiot, and I often was. And friendship is real, and intangible, and in a way sort of like the humanities.” Julie, his friend’s wife, was working on a B.A. at the time of her death and Mancinik sees her goal as part of his own. “I think sometimes,” he says, pausing for a moment. “I hope that my own pursuit of a degree can in some measure fulfill her hopes too.”

Mancinik’s love of language stems from its mystical ability to cause tears to fall, rearrange perspectives, eliminate prejudices, and conquer ignorance. So it is decidedly not something trivial to him. “Language, literature, are about life,” says Mancinik. “About its pettiness and absurdity and joy and wisdom.” He links this belief to his own choice of a major. “What could be more valuable than a course of studies in that?”

- By Joe Mancinik

Celebrate Washington Writers with Profs. Sten, Mallon - Sept. 13, 4 p.m.

2011-09-06T09:56:00.000-04:00


English will celebrate Chris Sten's recent collection on September 13

A lot is going on in the English Department this month. In addition to the just-announced Evening with Toni Morrison, we are thrilled to be celebrating the publication of Prof. Chris Sten's book Literary Capital: A Washington Reader on Tuesday, September 13 from 4-5:30 p.m. in Phillips Hall 411.

Prof. Tom Mallon will read from his acclaimed 2001 historical novel

Prof. Sten will discuss the history of writers on and of Washington, DC and share with us the process of compiling this anthology, the first of its kind. Prof. Tom Mallon, a prizewinning writer whose 2001 novel Two Moons is excerpted in the collection, will also be reading at the event.

Light refreshments will be served. Please come out to support GW English!

An Evening With Toni Morrison: Please RSVP

2011-09-01T15:52:00.000-04:00

President Steven Knapp

invites

students, staff, faculty, alumni and friends

AN EVENING WITH

TONI MORRISON

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

8-9 p.m.

Lisner Auditorium

730 H Street, NW

Washington, D.C.

Nobel laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Toni Morrison will speak about her life and her work.

The evening will include readings

from Ms. Morrison’s most recent novel, A Mercy and her forthcoming novel.

http://morrison-at-gw.eventbrite.com

For more information contact 202-994-7129 or uevents@gwu.edu.

4 Days and Counting ... English Is Hiring

2011-08-26T06:44:00.000-04:00

The English Department is pleased to announce two job searches for this year. One is for the 2012-13 Jenny McKean Moore Visiting Writer-in-Washington, a creative writing position supported for more than 30 years by the Jenny Moore Fund. The genre of this hire changes from year to year. This year's JMM Visiting Writer is Tim Johnston, an extraordinary prose fiction writer (check out his award-winning collection Irish Girl). For next year, we're seeking a poet.

We're also conducting a search for a British Romanticist to contribute to the department's concentration in British 19th-century literary and cultural studies. This position is at the rank of assistant professor.

Both job positions have been posted in the Chronicle of Higher Education and the MLA Job List, but full descriptions and information about how to apply are on our website.

We look forward to the opportunity to recruit new faculty to join us in Rome Hall.

5 Days and Counting ... Faculty Kudos

2011-08-24T21:38:00.000-04:00

After a long post-earthquake '11 day today, I was tempted to give the Blog-a-Day idea a rest, but a backlog of faculty achievements makes this post easy to assemble. Some highlights of August faculty news:

Prof. Jane Shore, whose "New and Selected Poems" comes out next year, is featured in the current issue of Ploughshares magazine. Read her lovely poem "Fortune Cookie" here.
In a recent review, Prof. Andrew Hook of the University of Glasgow calls Prof. Tara Wallace's recently published book Imperial Characters an "elegantly written and exciting addition to the growing bibliography of work on the theme of empire in eighteenth-century Scottish and English literature."
Prof. Gil Harris, currently on sabbatical in India where he is researching a book on India in the English Renaissance imagination, published an essay in the Hindustan Times. "Whose India is it anyway?" examines two Aamir Khan film productions, Lagaan (2001) and Delhi Belly (2011), arguing that their takes on class and caste are emblematic of larger changes.

Congrats, all.

6 Days and Counting ... Grad Student Erin Sheley

2011-08-23T21:39:00.001-04:00

Six days until the start of the fall semester... and six more entries in the English Blog-a-Day countdown!

Yesterday I focused on the achievements of an undergraduate alumnus. Today I'm featuring English PhD student Erin Sheley, a 2006 graduate of Harvard Law School and a Law Fellow at Georgetown University. Recently featured on this blog for having had an article accepted in the prestigious Indiana Law Review, Erin was referenced in an August 7 Washington Post article about how young attorneys are positioning themselves to succeed in a shrinking law market.

English PhD student Erin Sheley

It turns out that one key to young attorneys' success is ... hard work. While she was an associate at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher practicing securities litigation, Erin completed a literary urban fantasy novel, Fear of Ice, which she describes as "Margaret Atwood Meets Neil Gaiman." The novel is now being shopped around by an agent.

Oh, and while combining her Georgetown law gig with an English PhD program, Erin also contributes regularly to The Weekly Standard. (In 2001, when she was a college senior, she contributed a lively piece about being a "conservative coed" at Harvard.)

Erin's advice to aspiring academics (according to the Post article): “Find time to write and produce scholarship. That’s the number one. You should have an article or two published. That’s the most important thing.”

7 Days and Counting ... Alum Thad Ziolkowski

2011-08-22T21:49:00.000-04:00

The summer has flown by, like it always does. As I arrived at the office this morning, I saw students wearing bright yellow "Volunteer Movers" t-shirts, and I noticed a bit more traffic in the Academic Center elevators. (One benefit of summer: press "7" and you get an uninterrupted ride to the English Department.) Personally, the big news in my life is the gradual disappearance of the old 22nd Street parking garage and the long-awaited opening of the Whole Foods on the former Square 54 site. Can you say salad bar? And did I mention it is approximately 37,000 square feet?

Although blog activity has been quiet in August, there's lots of news to report. I'll be counting down the days until the first day of the fall semester with tidbits that have been accumulating on my desk since July.

GW alum Thad Ziolkowski's notable 2002 memoir

First up: News about Thad Ziolkowski, one of our English major alums. A faculty brat--his father, John Ziokowski, used to teach Classics at GW--Thad wrote and published poems, got a PhD in English at Yale, and now runs the creative writing program at Pratt Institute, where he is Professor of Humanities and Media Studies. Thad's excellent memoir, On a Wave, about his childhood (which included learning to surf in Florida and going to high school in Wichita) was noted in The New Yorker and was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award in 2003.

A 2008-09 Guggenheim Fellow, Thad has a new novel, Witchita, forthcoming in 2012 from Tonga Books, a new imprint of Europa Editions. The book will be published in Italian, UK, and US editions.

Nobel Prize Laureate Toni Morrison to visit GW September 21

2011-07-15T14:09:00.001-04:00


Toni Morrison in a 2008 photograph.

Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison will be visiting GW on Wednesday, September 21, where she will be honored by the University and the Toni Morrison Society with the dedication of a memorial bench in front of Lisner Auditorium. The event will be part of the society's Bench by the Road Project, which takes its name from Morrison's own observation that in 1989, when she was writing her masterwork Beloved, there was no place to "summon the presences of, or recollect the absences of slaves ... There is no suitable memorial, or plaque, or wreath, or wall, or park, or skyscraper lobby ... no small bench by the road." The bench on GW's campus will recognize the fact that Lisner Auditorium was the first integrated venue of its kind in the District of Columbia.

As part of her visit, Morrison will address students, faculty, staff, neighbors, and guests in an evening talk at Lisner.

Toni Morrison is widely recognized as one of the nation's most important living writers. In 2006, a distinguished group of writers, critics, and editors deemed Beloved the best American novel of the last quarter-century.

Dog Days Reading

2011-07-06T15:16:00.000-04:00

English major Jessica Chace recently wrote to ask what folks in the English department were reading this summer, so we did a quick poll. Here are reports from far-flung students and faculty:

Jessica Chace is finishing up The Memory of Running by Ron McLarty. "The title is a bit of misnomer," she writes, "--it's actually about an overweight Vietnam vet who bikes across the country after his parents are killed in a car accident."

Prof. Jim Miller recently read Karen Tei Yamashita's 2010 novel I Hotel, a finalist for the National Book Award. Jim describes the book as a "pastiche" about 1960s radicalism. It's also on my to-read list. But before that, I have to finish Teju Cole's critically lauded Open City. And before that I had the pleasure of re-reading David Ritz's biography of Marvin Gaye, Divided Soul.

Office Manager Constance Kibler is about to dig into Silver Sparrow by former Jenny McKean Moore Washington Writer-in-Residence Tayari Jones. Her ongoing summer reading project is to read Les Miserables in French. "I always get to the same spot--page 17--and then I stop," she says. "Last summer is the last time I picked it up. I have it by my bed."

Speaking of European blockbusters, English major Megan Moore is reading Anna Karenina. And Kelsey O'Brien (GW '11) "highly recommends" Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. "I am currently almost finished with the book; it is easily my favorite already," she writes

Creative Writing Prof. Tom Mallon is re-reading Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs, in preparation for writing an introduction to a 100th anniversary edition of the book.

English major (and former blogger) Paula Mejia has this to write from Texas: "Two notable books I've read this summer are Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, which recently won the Pulitzer Prize, as well as Jon Ronsen's The Psychopath Test. After hearing him speak and read an excerpt from his new book at this year's AWP Conference, I'm current reading Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story, which is odd but enjoyable so far."

What are you reading, dear reader, when you're not reading this blog?

Visiting Student from Egypt Receives Fellowship for Graduate Studies

2011-07-01T12:52:00.001-04:00


Naglaa Mahmoud in a very DC shot. Can you spy the cherry blossoms in the distance?

Occasionally the English department has the opportunity to host visiting students or scholars who come to DC to take advantage of the resources at GW and in the city at large. Naglaa Mahmoud, a visiting student from Al Minya University in Egypt, was our most recent guest. Funded by the Egyptian government, Naglaa came to GW in 2009 to pursue work on a doctoral dissertation on Nubian Egyptians and Nubian literature in Arabic. She also has a strong interest in African American literature, and wanted to investigate the connections and disconnections between contemporary Nubian struggles for social and cultural recognition within the Eyptian polity and 20th-century African American struggles for citizenship and justice in the United States.

Naglaa's GW studies have recently paid off in the form of a Frederick Douglass Doctoral Fellowship to pursue her graduate studies at Howard University. Beginning this fall, Naglaa will be a PhD student in African Studies at Howard, continuing the research she began in Egypt and developed at GW.

Several members of the English department--Jennifer James, Jim Miller, and I--first met Naglaa when we joined colleagues in American Studies in a Fulbright Foundation-funded visit to Egypt to help train Egyptian scholars of American studies and U.S. literature. Although we were technically in Egypt as teachers, the visit was formative for teaching us a great deal about Middle Eastern approaches to teaching U.S. culture and literature at the time. The visit resulted in ongoing collaborations: While Naglaa has been affiliated with English for the past few years, her colleague from that course, Eid Muhammad, is about to complete his PhD in American Studies at GW.

As a visiting student, Naglaa became a visible and involved member of the graduate community in English. We all wish her hearty congratulations for this wonderful achievement!

Prof. Chris Sten to Debut New Book at Politics and Prose

2011-06-27T14:12:00.000-04:00

Literary Capital, Prof. Chris Sten's collection of "Washington writing" appears from University of Georgia Press later this week. Currently, the book is featured in a two-page spread in the press's spring/summer 2011 catalog!

Hailed as "an indispensable guide to the literature, culture, and history of Washington, DC," Literary Capital gathers historical writing focused on politics and writing about the lives and times of the people of DC with official Washington as the setting. The book also defines a core group of “Washington writers,” native and naturalized authors who focus much of their work on the city: Frederick Douglass, Henry Adams, Jean Toomer, John Dos Passos, Gore Vidal, Ward Just, and Susan Richards Shreve, among others.

Prof. John Stuaffer, Chair of the History of American Civilization and Chair of English at Harvard University, writes:

Here, finally, is a book that captures the nation’s capital in all its glory and tawdriness, revealing why it has long been a ‘magnet for writers,’ as Christopher Sten writes in his superb introduction. With its brilliant selection of writings, it is one of the very best books on the literature of a city.

Readers of this blog are cordially invited to toast Chris and hear him read from and talk about the book at Politics and Prose Bookstore at 6 p.m. on July 16. Autographed copies of the book will be for sale at the event.

Two English Faculty Win Teaching Awards

2011-06-09T12:34:00.000-04:00

In May we honored our graduating seniors and MA and PhD students. But we're also please to have two of our faculty member honored for their teaching.

Holly Dugan, assistant professor of English, is the recipient of a Bender Teaching Award for outstanding teaching for the year 2011, in the general recognition category. Endowed by Morton A. Bender, the Bender Awards are presented annually to faculty selected by a committee of their peers in recognition of their efforts as teachers.

Gayle Wald, professor and Chair of English, was chosen as this year's Robert W. Kenny Prize recipient. The prize is offered to a faculty member in the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences who is considered to be an outstanding teacher and has inspired students by teaching in creative, innovative ways.

This is nice recognition for Holly and me, but really--virtually all English faculty are wonderful teachers! I'm reminded of that fact as I read through student evaluations of teaching for this year. Truly, it is wonderful to be reminded again and again of how our faculty encourage and push our students, and how our students learn and grow through their coursework. In every stack of evaluations I read, at least one (and usually several) student wrote, "Great course!" "Best I have had at GW!"

Alexander C.Y. Huang Joins English Department

2011-05-25T11:21:00.001-04:00

Prof. Alexander Huang, an expert on Shakespeare in Asia, voguing Hamlet-style.

The English Department is thrilled to announce that Prof. Alexander C.Y. Huang, previously of Penn State University, will be joining the English department this fall as Associate Professor.

Prof. Huang, who was educated in Taiwan and received his PhD from Stanford, is an internationally recognized expert on Shakespeare in Asia, Shakespeare and performance, and digital humanities. His monograph, Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange (Columbia University Press, 2009) won the 2010 MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literature. He is also editor, with Charles Ross, of Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia, and Cyberspace (Purdue University Press, 2009) and co-founder of Global Shakespeares, an open-access digital video archive of Shakespeare performances. He was recently appointed General Editor of Shakespearean International Yearbook, the international journal of record on Shakespeare.

The recipient of two Penn State teaching awards, Prof. Huang will teach and advise undergraduates and graduate students at GW. His recent areas of teaching interests include early modern English drama, Shakespeare, intercultural performance, film studies, race and gender identities, Orientalism, modern Asian and Asian American drama, and global literary theory. In fall 2011, he will be teaching two undergraduate courses on Shakespeare.

Prof. Huang's appointment strengthens an already extraordinarily strong cohort of medieval and early modern studies scholars in the English department, including Profs. Jeffrey Cohen, Patrick Cook (who recently published Cinematic Hamlet with the Ohio State University Press), Holly Dugan (whose book The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press), Jonathan Gil Harris, and Jonathan Hsy.

Tom Mallon Receives Vursell Prize

2011-05-24T11:06:00.000-04:00

Tom Mallon's books on display at the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Last week Prof. Thomas Mallon was honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters with its Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award, a $10,000 prize "given annually to single out recent prose that merits recognition for the quality of its style." Prof. Mallon joins a distinguished list of previous prizewinners, including Amy Hempl, Ann Patchett, and Tom Wolfe.

The award ceremony is a large affair held at the Academy's auditorium on West 156th Street in New York. Each year, winners gather on stage for a group photo. The photo below shows Tom accepting the award from writer Lorrie Moore. If you squint, you can see Edward Albee, to Tom's left, applauding.

Jeffrey Cohen Featured in Hatchet for Guggenheim

2011-05-17T13:06:00.001-04:00

Read coverage from The Hatchet about Prof. Jeffrey Cohen, winner of a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship for 2011-12

Graduation 2011

2011-05-17T11:19:00.001-04:00


Our class of M.A. students. As good-looking as they are brainy.

Last week, the English department celebrated the achievements of our graduates with a Ph.D. hooding ceremony, a reception for MA and PhD students, a party for graduating seniors, and, of course, the Columbian College Celebration and Commencement.

This year, 12 students earned Departmental Honors in English: Chelsea Adler, Lauren Black, Joseph Hydoski, Karissa Lake, Zainob Lawal, Deborah Matteliano, Rebecca Mitchell, Amanda Panitch, Zachary Robbins, Andrew Roth, Troy Shamos, and Calder Stembel.

Congratulations, too, to our 2011 departmental prize winners:

The Astere E. Claeyssens Prize for the best original work in playwriting:
Samuel H. Fox Hartin

The DeWitt Clinton Croissant Prize for the best essay on drama or the theatre:
Rebekkah Meyer

The E. K. Cutter Prize for excellence in the study of English:
Tay Tufenkjian

The Alice Douglas Goddard Prize for the student earning the highest cumulative average in American literature courses:
Abigail Dimen-Taylor

‏ The Hassan Hussein Prize for the best theses in the English and Creative Writing Major:
Matthew Nelson-Teutsch (Fiction)
Matthew Mersky (Poetry)

The Student Poetry Contest for best poem:
Daria-Ann Martineau

The Vivian Nellis Memorial Prize for special promise in Creative Writing:
Zach Borenstein

The Sylvia S. Speck Prize in English Literature for exemplary academic achievement in English literature:
Taylor Tibbetts

The Academy of American Poets Prize:
Christina Beasley

Annie-Rose Strasser
(Honorarble Mention)

And here are more photos of the happy celebrants of this year's graduating class:

Prof. Faye Moskowitz (left) read a poem at our celebration for graduating majors.


Prof. Robert Ganz (right) retired this year after more than 45 years at GW.

Prof. Robert McRuer (right), Deputy Chair, presided over the Departmental celebration.

End-of-Term News Roundup

2011-05-04T14:27:00.001-04:00

Our Spring 2011 Newsletter: Clearly something to applaud!

As I write, the English office is quieter than usual, but not because no one getting work done. Rather, everyone is hunkered down: faculty are busy reading and grading; students are even busier writing papers and studying for final exams, which end this Monday, May 9. For graduating students, a round of celebrations culminating in Commencement begins shortly thereafter.

Here is a list of recent highlights concerning English department students and faculty. I'll report in later this spring with news and statistics from our annual department report.

GW Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute - Director Jeffrey Cohen reports that GW MEMSI has received two years of additional funding from the office of VP for Research Leo Chalupa, allowing the Institute to continue to offer a robust series of talks, seminars, and other events during 2011-13.

So popular was her call for papers on Asian American literature and cinema that Associate Professor Kavita Daiya organized two panels--one on "Gender, Sexuality, and New Perspectives in Asian American Literature and Cinema" and another on "Space, Sexuality, and New Perspectives on Asian American Cinema" for the recent Northeast Modern Language Association annual conference. "What was interesting about both panels was an attention to the transnational connections between Asia and the US/North America, political and cultural, that allowed for a new analytic focus beyond labor migrations," she writes. Among the panelists were former English undergrad Rajiv Menon ("Romancing the Desi Girl: Masculinity and Performance in South Asian Diasporic Film and Culture") and current English PhD student Marilena Zackheos (“Queer Subjectivity, Ex-isle and Belonging in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy”).

Professor and Deputy Chair Robert McRuer put together an excellent spring newsletter for English department alumni. Check it out on the department website. Thanks to the excellent CCAS staff--including Ryan Dellolio, Anita Ponchione, and Denise St. Ours--for their help.

Professor Gayle Wald (that would be me!) won this year's Robert Kenny Prize for Excellence in Teaching. Sadly, I'll be out of town during CCAS Celebration, when the award is usually announced.

Christina Beasley BA '12 Wins Poetry Award

2011-04-23T13:42:00.000-04:00


Christina Beasley. Photo by Thomas Sayers Ellis.

The first-place winner of this year's Academy of American Poets' University and College Poetry Prize is Christina Beasley '12, an International Affairs major and Creative Writing minor. Christina will receive a $100 prize and a one-year membership to the Academy.

Honorable mention goes to senior Annie-Rose Strasser, an English and Creative Writing major.

Thanks to grants from the Jenny McKean Moore Fund for Writers and Columbian College in 1990, GW was able to join the influential Academy, founded in 1934 to support American poets and their work. In doing so, we became eligible to award an annual $100 prize--named in memory of English Prof. A.E. Claeyssens--for the best original poem or group of poems by a GW student.

When the college prizes were first offered in 1955, ten schools gave them out. Today some 180 colleges and universities participate. Many American poets won their first recognition with an Academy College Poetry Prize (Sylvia Plath, Louise Gluck, James Merrill, among them) ... along with some of our own creative writing teachers. Every five years the Academy publishes and distributes an anthology of selected prize-winning poems.

Visit the Academy's website to find out more about its fun e-newsletter and iPhone app (a poem a day!). And here, courtesy of Christina Beasley, is one of her prize-winning poems:

Cruciform: Unbeginning

A god flower has naked space between
her petals. A sharp scaffolding like
the ribs of a hot window pane, and then,
welled eyes of a bromeliad.

Leaves grasp the ground with vein-pronged
tongues, lunge toward making, she is doused
with human bees who try to make her live forever.

No, she will not always be in season,
this elegy-stem, this prettiest nape of the bud.
The corolla. Her thorns twist, pulse, they hold
her anyway, there are holes in their palms for it.

Her hymn-hum a whorl of swears that only
flora would use. The fragile pain. Her broken
stem sweated with wick.

Poet Denise Duhamel to Read Monday, April 25 at 7:30 p.m.

2011-04-21T22:12:00.001-04:00

Denise Duhamel, a terrific and prolific poet, will be reading at GW on Monday evening at 7:30 p.m. in 1957 E Street, Room 213. The reading is the final event of the Jenny McKean Moore series this year.

Duhamel is the author of numerous books and chapbooks of poetry, including Ka-Ching!, Two and Two, Mille et un sentiments, and Kinky. Duhamel is the author of numerous books and chapbooks of poetry, including: Ka-Ching!, Two and Two, Mille et un sentiments, and Kinky, which includes poems about Barbie dolls. A winner of the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, she has been anthologized widely. Her work has appeared in four volumes of The Best American Poetry. Duhamel teaches creative writing and literature at Florida International University.

Sana Krasikov Reading Thursday is Last JLL Event of 2011

2011-04-19T09:20:00.000-04:00

Prose writer Sana Krasikov. Photo by Staci Schwartz.

Prizewinning prose writer SanaKrasikov will read on Thursday night at 7 in the Marvin Center Amphitheater (3rd floor), concluding this year's amazing Jewish Literature Live series curated by Prof. Faye Moskowtiz.

Krasikov, a Russian emigre, is author of the collection of short stories, One More Year. Her stories have appeared in New Yorker the The Atlantic Monthly. A profile of Krasikov from The Village Voice (from whence the beautiful and sad photograph above is taken) appears here.

English Department in the News/Kudos

2011-04-13T10:51:00.000-04:00

Thomas Mallon and his CW colleagues offer one-on-one instruction to to aspiring writers.

This month's E-magazine from Columbian College leads with two items about English:

a piece about our Creative Writing program, which gives students one-on-one access to accomplished writers, including award winners Edward P. Jones, Thomas Mallon, and Jane Shore;
and a piece about Prof. Jeffrey Cohen, winner of a prestigious Guggenheim Foundatioan Fellowship for his outstanding contributions to the field of medieval literary and cultural studies. This award comes on the heels of Jeffrey's receipt of an ACLS [American Council of Learned Societies] fellowship, and puts him in a very elite group of scholars, indeed!

Here are some additional kudos:

CW faculty member Lisa Page, President of the Pen/Faulkner Board of Directors, will be moderating an event May 2 at the Writer's Center in Bethesda, part of the PEN World Voices Festival. The reading will feature writers from Sudan, the United States, and Sweden.
Prof. Patty Chu spoke at a March 22 event hosted by the Asia Society Washington, on a panel titled "Homeward Bound: Chinese Reverse Migration and Identity." Prof. Chu shared her research--some of it based on personal experience--about the Chinese-American diaspora and narratives of return to China.
Samuel Fitzpatrick, an English major who graduated in January 2008, has received a fellowship to pursue at Ph.D. in English at the University of Iowa. At GW, Fitzpatrick was inspired by courses in African American literature, by Prof. Jennifer James's "Ethnicity and Place" course, and by Prof. Tony Lopez's "Caribbean Cultural Studies" course. At Iowa he will focus on Postcolonial Studies. "The idea of empire and its impact on the world's people has always been swirling around in my mind as a subject of interest," he writes. Now it's full steam ahead!

Daria-Ann Martineau Wins 2011 Student Poetry Contest

2011-04-12T10:02:00.001-04:00


Daria-Ann Martineau is the winner of a $500 prize for her poem "Orchids."

The English Department congratulates senior Daria-Ann Martineau, a speech and hearing major and creative writing minor, for her poem "Orchids," which won this year's Student Poetry Prize, awarded to the best poem submitted by a student at George Washington University. Martineau's poem, originally written for Prof. Gregory Pardlo's ENGL 107 class last fall, was the unanimous choice of the three faculty judges, who called it "exceptionally well crafted as well as bold and substantive."

In addition to being an accomplished poet, Daria-Ann is secretary of GW's chapter of the National Student Speech Language and Hearing Association and corresponding secretary of GW's Caribbean Students Organization. Thanks to Daria-Ann for her kind permission to publish her poem below.

Orchids

Needle to my ribcage,
the tattooist imprints the flowers.
My pores break open at the seal
where he places the tip,
unleashing pearls of blood
that blend into purple.

I have chosen this emblem
after seeing orchids in a wedding.
I fell in love:
with corollas meshed into the bride's veil
and centred in her bouquet.
The petals--
jewel hues against white dress--
protruding as defiant tongues,

The convolutions of their shape,
shades,
wine-coloured communion
spilling into concavity.
Undeniable as pure sin.

At home I disrobe,
view my beautifully crafted scar,
remember how orchids first pierced me,
a breathy Oh buds at my mouth.

English Department Welcomes E.L. Doctorow

2011-04-11T13:29:00.000-04:00

E.L. Doctorow reading at Funger Hall last week.

E.L. Doctorow's campus visit and reading last week were a high point of the spring semester for the English Department. Doctorow visited Prof. Faye Moskowitz's Jewish Literature Live class in the morning, talking to students about his novel The Book of Daniel, and then gave a public reading to more than 200 people gathered in Funger 108 in the evening. In between, he attended a dinner thrown in his honor at the F Street House, where members of the department were joined by President and Mrs. Knapp, Provost Lerman, Dean Barratt, and various Trustees of the University, including JLL supporter David Bruce Smith, in celebrating Doctorow's many achievements.

GW Today has a piece about Doctorow's visit (we are shamelessly sampling their photo above); here is an account by Paula Mejia, the English department student blogger:

Last Thursday, I had the unbelievable opportunity to attend a reading and a conversation with distinguished Jewish American author E.L. Doctorow. I'm going to go ahead and admit that I didn't take great notes- I found myself too enthralled by Doctorow's story and words- but I'll try to describe it as best as I can!

After a brief introduction by Prof. Faye Moskowitz, who had set up the event as a part of her Jewish Literature Live course, a humble Doctorow approached the stand amid a lecture hall of thunderous applause. "I've never been compared to Sinatra before," he said sheepishly, referring to Prof. Moskowitz's equation of her "giddiness" at introducing Doctorow to her giddiness, as a young woman, at Frank Sinatra. He then briefly introduced "Writer in the Family," the story from his new collection All the Time in the World. Doctorow connected with the audience by speaking about how "Everyone always talks about the writer in the family, which can be embarrassing."

After the reading, Doctorow answered questions from the audience. He spoke about evolving as a writer--where images, phrases, and pieces of music were the "evocative feelings that incited the private excitement in the mind." He offered advice to young writers, saying that he had no aesthetic manifesto. "Give yourself to the writing and trust it. Ideas are always there--we carry them around."

But perhaps the most compelling of questions, at least for me, was the first one.

"How much of what you write is true?" called a voice from the crowd.
"Does it sound true?" replied Doctorow.
"Well, yes."
"Then it is true."

-Paula

E.L. Doctorow to Read Thursday in Funger 108

2011-04-04T17:00:00.000-04:00

E.L. Doctorow will visit with students and then give a public reading Thursday.

On April 7, the English Department will be hosting a reading by acclaimed writer E.L. Doctorow.

The author of eleven novels, Doctorow has received numerous awards for his work, including the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Doctorow has also "pioneered the technique of presenting an era as a quilt showing multiple points of view, all in an effort to make sense of a particular time and place," says Prof. Faye Moskowitz. This is especially emphasized in his work The Book of Daniel, a fictionalized account of what happens to the children of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg after their parents were found guilty of espionage and executed in 1953. Doctorow's reading is a part of Prof. Moskowitz's Jewish Literature Live course, which works to bring Jewish American authors to the class and to readings.

The reading will follow Doctorow's visit to the class, during which Doctorow will speak about his latest book, a short story collection titled All the Time in the World.

Don't miss out! The event is open to the public and will be held in Funger 108 at 7:30 pm.

~ Paula

Recent Graduate Student Accomplishments

2011-04-01T10:39:00.004-04:00

Mark DeCicco won the award for best graduate paper at the recent meeting of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (check out the guest speaker). His prize: publication in the Journal for the Fantastic in the Arts, a scholarly journal with a substantial readership.

Lowell Duckert was selected for Honorable Mention in the 2011 competition for the Philip Amsterdam Graduate Teaching Award at GWU. This University-wide competition recognizes the contributions of graduate teaching assistants to the quality of education at GW. The award is named for a former GW Trustee.

Erin Sheley's essay on victim impact statements as expressions of criminal harm just been accepted by the Indiana Law Journal, a top-25 law review associated with Indiana University Bloomington. This is a special honor because Erin's work was in competition with that of law school professors.

Jessica Frazier, who is writing her dissertation on "Fashion's Travel Narratives: English Novelties, Global Trade Networks, and the Early Modern Theatre" (under the direction of Prof. Gil Harris) won admission a highly competitive NEH summer seminar on "Shakespeare: From the Globe to the Global." Jessica will receive a stipend of $3900, and will join some of the world's top scholars of Shakespeare and early modern drama. Only two spots in the NEH seminar were reserved for graduate students.

Congratulations, all!

GW Student Marissa Ciampi's Poem Selected for Website

2011-03-31T10:21:00.001-04:00

Poet Claudia Rankine included a poem by GW student Marissa Ciampi on her website.

Recently Prof. Gregory Pardlo posted a piece here about the Theft of Flat Langston at the DC restaurant/literary spot Busboys and Poets.

Now he reports in about a GWU student's contribution to a major discussion in the poetry world. The discussion was sparked by a panel at the February 2011 AWP Conference, at which poet Claudia Rankine discussed the implications of a Tony Hoagland poem that frankly articulates (for the sake of critiquing) racist views. In the original poem, Hoagland uses some provocative language to achieve the poem's ends.

As Prof. Pardlo writes:

Hoagland's strategy was attacked by Rankine, who felt he was reifying dead metaphors. Anyway, the controversy raged on well after the conference. Rankine later issued a call for contributions to her "Open Letter" on racism. I encouraged my students to think about the issues at stake and we had a discussion about it in workshop which resulted in one student, Marissa Ciampi, contributing to the open letter website! Here she is, between Marjorie Perloff and Martha Collins, and alongside many other established names in American poetry (click her name to read her submission).

We're all proud of Marissa's now published contribution to this debate. And kudos to Prof. Pardlo for teaching his students about how poetry and poets are involved in such important contemporary dialogues.

Kudos for 2 Faculty Award Winners

2011-03-25T11:30:00.000-04:00

to Prof. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, recipient of a highly competitive American Council of Learned Societies Grant for 2011-12.
to Prof. Thomas Mallon, winner of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The $10,000 award is for a writer "whose work merits recognition for the quality of its prose style."

MEMSI Conference Afterthoughts: "Animal, Vegetable, Mineral"

2011-03-23T11:39:00.000-04:00

A packed crowd listens to Jane Bennett's keynote address at the recent GW MEMSI conference.

GW MEMSI hosted an extraordinary conference March 11-12. "Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects in Early Modern and Medieval Periods" drew an amazing array of speakers to campus for lively discussion. Here is a wrap-up of the event by English Ph.D. student Nedda Mehdizadeh (cross-posted from the GW MEMSI website):

One large black work glove, one unblemished dead rat, and one smooth stick of wood. In this motley assortment of nonhuman “things” gathered near a storm drain in Baltimore, Jane Bennett found the inspiration for her provocative book Vibrant Matter: a political ecology of things – a response to different theorizations of matter (Kant, Spinoza, etc) as well as a “reply to a call from things.” For GWMEMSI, it was the springboard for a series of conversations that culminated in the spring conference, “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects in Early Modern and Medieval Periods.” The exchange Bennett experienced with these nonhuman objects left her with an enticing question: “What if the items really did – in some underdetermined sense – hail me?” As a result, her book attempts to contend with thing-power, with the agency of the object, the thing, the nonhuman entity, and its desires, its stories. The conference, likewise, attempted to contend with the same ideas, calling on a variety of scholars, including Valerie Allen, Eileen Joy, Sharon Kinoshita, Julia Reinhard Lupton, Peggy McCracken, Carla Nappi, Kellie Robertson, Karl Steel, and Julian Yates, not to mention many other scholars from across the continent sharing works-in-progress (or even thoughts-in-progress), to make sense of human and nonhuman interactions. What we came up with were .... well ... more questions à la Jonathan Gil Harris’s concluding remarks, but also perhaps a better idea of which questions to ask and a closer understanding of how we might share the world with our nonhuman cohabitants. What are these nonhuman “things” telling us? What are the ethics behind ventriloquizing their stories? In what ways do these interactions shape our approach to cultural studies?

For me, the nonhuman “things” that began our story, as well as other nonhuman “things” discussed during our two days of conferencing, were guides to unexpected places. As a graduate student working on Anglo-Persian encounter in the early modern period, objects have played but a bit part in my work, getting eclipsed by human interactions between Persian kings and English travelers. The truth is that I began thinking about my dissertation topic through objects. During the spring semester of 2007, my dissertation director, Gil Harris, introduced me to seventeenth-century travel writer Sir Thomas Herbert, and I was taken with his obsession with the ruins of Persepolis. Over the years, I have visited and revisited this moment in his narrative without ever reaching a satisfying conclusion about what to make of the fragments that captivate Herbert – and, me. Or to use Bennett’s words, the objects of Persia’s ancient, fallen past have been calling to me. But their call has been largely ignored, or met with exasperation, like an exhausted mother without an idea of how to pacify her child who incessantly repeats “Mom. Mommy. Mama.:

Recently, however, I started thinking more critically about the structure of Persepolis, and what its fragments are doing. For Herbert, it is a portal to ancient Persia where the palace still stands in all its splendor and is still very much alive. For me, they are a bridge to many temporalities – ancient Persia, early modern Persia, modern day Iran. And I didn’t have to stray too far from home to begin making sense of this moment and its objects, turning, as I often do, to my professors and mentors: Jeffrey Cohen, in his article, “Stories of Stone,” from the inaugural edition of Postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies and Gil Harris’s chapter on Othello/Desdemona’s handkerchief in his Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare. During the AVMEO conference, I found myself transported to Herbert’s encounter over and over again, often by a nonhuman agent introduced by one of our fascinating speakers.

The animals of Sharon Kinoshita’s talk, “Animals and the Medieval Culture of Empire,” were facilitators of exchange between the Christian and Islamic worlds, often associated with a variety of movements brought upon by gifting or bartering. But as the question/answer period following her talk indicated, these same movements occur with stone; as Kinoshita reminds us, the materials that make up the palace of Persepolis come from different locals, producing one structure made up of fragments from different places. Or the “Flower Girls” of Peggy McCracken’s paper which focuses on “a garden of plentitude” encountered by Alexander in Roman d’Alexandre whose forest can restore virginity. The filles de fleur are in many ways one with the forest and its virgin-(re)making properties after encounters with visitors – such as Alexander and his men – in what is perhaps a metaphor for the plentitude of virgin land that will offer itself to Alexander’s desire for empire-building. Or Valerie Allen’s “handout” – mine, a periwinkle gemstone with clouds of white – that fascinated me with its curves, dent, and coloring, giving me a tangible way to wonder at the “virtue” of an object. Or Carla Nappi’s Chinese words that translated and transliterated Persian script, underscoring the practices of “making sameness” and the importance of considering systems of identification in order to understand the early modern object that is, in many ways, foreign to us now. Each of these moments, brought about because of a nonhuman “thing,” made me think more about what is at stake in thinking about objects, particularly those from the many Persias I encounter in my work.

Something that I am realizing is that I might have been asking the wrong question about Herbert’s Persepolis all along. Maybe there is no stable, singular answer that will ever satisfy me because maybe that is not the point. Herbert, in each edition of his narrative (1634, 1638, 1664, 1677), goes back to Persepolis, reimagines the space, and rewrites it. It is his way of going back to that moment of history. To the moment of Persia’s splendor. To the moment that fascinates him most: Alexander’s destruction of the palace. Maybe it is the “going back” that matters here. Or at least, maybe it is the “going back” that matters to me. Persepolis takes me back. To my roots. To memories of stories told by my family about our past. To my first visit to Iran when I was a nine-year-old walking through the ruins, not fully understanding its importance or the stories the stones were telling, but knowing the profundity of the experience. To the stories it anticipates about Iran today. To the possibilities of what Iran might look like in the future. Eileen Joy, in her inspiring plenary entitled “You Are Here: A Manifesto,” discusses in part three “A Text Is A Sentient Being...” the ways in which texts are themselves vibrant matter. She says, “we might say that literary narratives, although they are, in one sense, completely unreal, or sur-real, and inhuman, pitch themselves at the real world and also create space (underground passageways, shelters, hiding places, root cellars), for that which cannot be brought into being, or cared for, anywhere else.” Returning to Persepolis – to a place that allows me to visit all of the versions of Persia/Iran – brings what is gone, what is left, what is meant to be into that space Joy talks about. Sifting through the ruins of Persepolis is, perhaps, my “reply to a call from things.”

"Modern-day Jane Austen" to read Thursday at 7 p.m.

2011-03-22T09:45:00.000-04:00

Allegra Goodman

Novelist Allegra Goodman will be reading at the Marvin Center Amptitheater at 7 p.m. on Thursday as a part of Prof. Faye Moskowitz's Jewish Literature Live course. The class explores the works of a variety of contemporary Jewish-American authors and features them in class visits and public readings.

Heralded as a "modern-day Jane Austen" by USA Today, Goodman is a National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author. She'll be reading from and speaking about her latest novel, The Cookbook Collector, considered to be a modern take on Sense and Sensibility. You don't want to miss this!

- Paula

Spring Break has Sprung

2011-03-12T06:08:00.000-05:00

We're not quite there yet. But it is Spring Break.

Here's what students and professors are doing over the break:

Prof. Tara Wallace will be flying to Vancouver to present a paper at the annual conference of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
Prof. Christopher Sten will be traveling to Minnesota to see family, and hopefully the last of winter!
Prof. Jeffrey Cohen will be "recovering" from the "Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods" conference, as a part of the GW Medieval and Early Modern Studies program. He'll then be writing and delivering three lectures as the Ida Beam Visiting Distinguished Professor at the University of Iowa.
Prof. Margaret Soltan will be journeying to Ireland after years to visit her daughter, Ania, who is a GW junior studying abroad.
Prof. Combs will be enjoying tax season...
Prof. Evelyn Schreiber will be venturing to the Woolly Mammoth Theater to participate in a trip to London to see new plays, as a part of her Fall 2011 Dean's Seminar, "What's New About New Plays." Then, she will grade first drafts of papers for her students, as well as try to finish a draft of a chapter on family structures in Toni Morrison's Love for a collection on Morrison's latest fiction.
Prof. Gregory Pardlo will be making headway on a couple of essays, one about Langston Hughes, and another about the persona poem and dramatic monologue.
Prof. Gayle Wald will be catching up on work, but also traveling to New York City just to be a tourist.
Sophomore and musician Drew Bandos, recently signed to Mush Records for his "solo-ish" ambient/shoegaze project Is and Of The, will be utilizing the break to write live versions of the songs on his album, Heads Phased for Dreamless Sleep, as well as new material back home in Philadelphia. He'll also be doing a live in-studio session at Drexel University's radio station, WKDU, at 12:30 pm EST on Wednesday, March 16th- listen if you can!
Student Abby Dimen-Taylor will be basking in the Miami sun!
Junior Eliana Reyes will be relaxing at home in Virginia, then venturing to Toronto for St. Patrick's Day.

As for me, I'll be heading back home to Texas for some much-needed rest, relaxation, and authentic Tex-Mex- (burritos in DC just don't cut it!). I'll be seeing friends at home in Houston, and will also be traveling to Austin for a day or two to catch the tail end of the 2011 South by Southwest Music and Film Conference. With the abundance of free concerts, how could I not?

Hope everyone has a wonderful spring break!

- Paula

Alumna Lilly Rivlin Screens Film about Writer Grace Paley

2011-03-06T15:35:00.001-05:00

Writer and Activist Grace Paley

Last Thursday, I had the opportunity to attend the screening of Lilly Rivlin’s documentary Grace Paley: Collected Shorts, as a part of Prof. Faye Moskowitz’s Jewish Literature Live course, which works to bring in Jewish authors to speak. The film tells the story of the life and work of Grace Paley, a Jewish American activist and short story writer.

Preceding the film, Rivlin, a GW alumna and director, said a few words. She explained that her motivation for making this film came from a “love of activism regarding social justice,” something that she shared with Paley. She then asked the audience to keep the question “What will the Jewish American writer look like in the future?” in mind while viewing the film.

With Rivlin’s intriguing question in the back of my mind, I was able to see the inspiration behind Paley’s works, as well about learn about her life. She was a writer, mother, and friend, but also a dedicated activist. She went to Vietnam in 1969 to protest the war, sat in during protests, and was arrested multiple times for her dedication to social activism. The film was a meld of perspectives, including personal interviews with Paley herself, photographs, interviews with friends, family members, and colleagues and quotes.

Although I’ve never read any of Paley's works, through the film I was able to see that Paley’s writing was inspired by her experiences. Her characters were the people she saw on the streets of New York. Paley's stories have been described as “urban and unusual," as well as telling and true. Her inspiration for her writing proved to be very compelling for me, as I enjoy writing through experience as well.

Long after the compelling documentary, one phrase resonated with me at the end of the film. While interviewed during her last days, Paley states “Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.”

- Paula

Jenny 2 Readings by Three Talented CW Faculty

2011-02-28T14:47:00.000-05:00

Last Wednesday, I had the fortune of seeing GW English professors Michelle Brafman, Mary Tabor and Lisa Page, in a reading that displayed an amazing array of talent. The three writers, also fiction and creative writing professors in the GW Creative Writing department, were part of a series of readings entitled "Jenny 2," in conjunction with the Jenny McKean Moore Fellowship Foundation.

Prof. Michelle Brafman

Prof. Brafman, who gave the first reading of the series, was actually my creative writing professor last semester, and is currently my fiction writing professor this semester. Although I had never read any of her works, I was astounded with the reading she gave of her incredible short story, "Washing the Dead," an excerpt of the novel she is currently working on of the same name. Inspired by both her previous work as a filmmaker and a visit to a waterpark with her family, the story explores a mother's struggle right before she is about to have an exceedingly difficult conversation with her daughter. Exploring the different outcomes of the conversation through the lens of an independent film the woman formulates in her mind, the story utilizes attentive details in regard to lighting, specific actors and soundtrack, making it incredibly rich and intriguing.

Prof. Mary Tabor

Instead of jumping into the reading, Prof. Mary Tabor spoke first about her journey in finding herself as a writer, and everything that happened in between that inspired her to write her book (Re)making Love: A Sex After Sixty Story. "The writer must crush him or herself, and say the unsayable," she advised the audience, while exploring where her writing came from. She read an excerpt from her memoir, a beautiful, intricately written piece about her relationship with her ex-husband. This story particularly struck me, as music played a heavy influence in the riveting story, especially with her personification of the piano. I was also found myself admiring Tabor's optimistic outlook, and being able to openly speak about difficult life experiences. I found her parting words to be particularly inspiring: "If my husband hadn't left me, I would have never embarked on this journey."

Prof. Lisa Page

The third and final reader, Prof. Lisa Page, read a compelling piece about childhood. A recent nominee for GW's Professor of the Year, awarded annually by GW student-athletes, she was asked to write a piece for the Children's Defense Fund. Utilizing her creative abilities, she was able to implement attributes from her childhood, as well as cultural and societally significant topics. Her piece "Psychedelic Shack," named after a song by The Temptations, brought back a whirlwind of nostalgia. "Childhood is like a myth--we idealize it and believe in its magic," she began, going into her experience growing up in the south side of Chicago in the late 1960s. With mentions of Martin Luther King, 45s and penny loafers, Page's story was a wonderful piece combining the cultural and the individual and personal, with the thread of childhood experience underlying the story.

This trio of talented writers were all part of a phenomenal reading- stay tuned for more readings soon!

- Paula

Toni Morrison's 80th Birthday Celebration at the LOC

2011-02-25T14:28:00.000-05:00

Prof. Schreiber toasts Toni Morrison (seated, at left) at her birthday celebration at the Library of Congress last week.

This guest post is from Prof. Evelyn Schreiber.

On Feb. 18, Profs. Evelyn Schreiber, Jennifer James, and H.C. Carrillo attended the 80th Birthday Reception for Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison at the Madison Hall of the Library of Congress. Prof. Schreiber was co-chair of the event with Dana Williams, chair of the English Department at Howard University.

In addition to chairing the event, Prof. Schreiber contributed a chapter entitled "Personal and Cultural Memory in A Mercy" to the Festschrift which was presented to Ms. Morrison at the Reception. This book, entitled Memory and Meaning: Essays in Honour of Toni Morrison, contains tributes by scholars and artists, including Princeton Professor Cornel West, and poets Rita Dove and Sonia Sanchez.

Leftovers of Morrison's amazing cake were consumed in the English Department lounge!

The reception included a performance of Songs of Edward "Duke" Ellington by the opera singer, Jessye Norman; Greetings from the President of Howard University, Sidney A. Ribeau; tributes from classmate (Howard '51) Mary Wilburn and Professor of Religion David Carrasco, Harvard University; music by the Howard Jazz Trio; remarks by Dr Carolyn Denard, the founder of the Toni Morrison Society; and a proclamation by DC Mayor Vincent Gray that Feb. 18th, 2011 was Toni Morrison Day in the city of Washington. Michel Martin of NPR, who hosted the evening, read out a birthday tribute from Barack and Michelle Obama.

The co-chairs gave the closing Birthday Toasts as the cake was presented and champagne was served. Here is Prof. Schreiber's toast, which contains words from all nine of Morrison's novels and riffs on various Morrison "keywords."

Professor Morrison, tonight we have come from all over the world to celebrate your birthday and the community that you have created through your works. Thank you for enabling us “to pass on” to our students compelling histories and complex emotions, providing each generation with a vision of their past, insight into the present, and a guide to the future.

Your work teaches us what it means to be human, to recognize our limitations, and to carry on despite them. To believe in the power of love, family, and community and to verbalize our personal and communal pain as well as our triumphs. We thank you for your generosity: you share, you nurture, you listen. Your works profoundly affect the lives of your readers. To read Toni Morrison is to be altered forever: you “remake” us as readers and as human beings. You teach us how to “nourish the soil so that seeds can grow,” to not settle for a “secondhand” self, to “name and claim” ourselves, to recognize our “templates” and to rejoice in them, to “feel our way” and see what “certain kind” of people we can be, to allow us to “hum,” to “fly,” to be “Complete,” and to be our “own best thing.” We eagerly await your work to come.

I asked my students what I should say to you in this toast and they wanted you to know that you have given them something that no amount of therapy ever could—the ability to embrace personal history as something to celebrate and to appreciate what makes them unique. Thank you for helping us sift through the voices of our culture to find our own healing voices. Thank you for the academic, personal, and psychic home that you provide.

On your birthday and always, know that you are loved as you “have loved us all.”

"This Conversation Is Not Over": The Theft of Flat Langston

2011-02-23T19:10:00.001-05:00

This post is guest blogged by Prof. Gregory Pardlo.

It seems we have not quite put AWP behind us. One of the controversies enlivening the recent writer’s conference has now managed to capture the imagination of people outside the literary community. Picked up by the Associated Press, the debacle over what is now known as “Flat Langston” has gained more widespread attention in two weeks than most books of poetry do during their entire shelf life.

Flat Langston is a life-sized cardboard cutout photograph of Langston Hughes dressed in his busboy uniform from the time when Hughes worked in the Wardman Hotel [now the Marriott Wardman Park, where AWP was headquartered]. He is holding a tray of dirty dishes. This cardboard cutout image was “liberated” from the 14th Street Busboys and Poets by the poet Thomas Sayers Ellis, a DC native who currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. The GW community will remember Ellis from his appearance here in the Fall 2010 semester when he gave a reading sponsored by our Creative Writing Program. Ellis also visited my Intermediate Poetry Workshop for an in-depth discussion of the craft of poetry. Not only is Ellis a Harvard and Brown-educated and award-winning poet; not only is he co-founder of the Dark Room Collective, a poetry collective based in Cambridge in the early 1990’s, out of which grew poets such as Pulitzer Prize-winner Natasha Trethewey, Major Jackson, Tracy K. Smith and Kevin Young; not only is he a respected literary activist and an accomplished photographer; but it gives me a perverse thrill to know that we can now add petty larceny to the long list of Ellis’s accomplishments.

As to why TSE stole Flat Langston, here’s the nutshell: There is a faction of the DC literary community that has a longstanding beef with Andy Shallal, owner of BB&P, for what they see as his exploitation of poets and the literary heritage of DC. Indeed, it is more than just a beef over money. The argument, most frankly articulated by poet and Assistant Professor at American University, Kyle Dargan, is that while Shallal is profiting not simply through shrewd marketing and business practices (Shallal is unarguably a shrewd businessperson), the good will he enjoys with his customers is born out of the associations the restaurant has with DC poets and poetry. Further, there is a pretense that BB&P is contributing materially to the development of DC literary talent. However, the $50 weekly stipend BB&P offers their resident poet, Dargan argues, doesn’t cut it.

Into this fray waltzes Flat Langston. Or rather, into DC waltzes the largest annual gathering of American poets and writers, and the spillover delivers TSE to his fateful faceoff with Flat Langston in the dining room of BB&P.

A dramatization:

TSE:     Mr. Hughes, what are you doing here? And dressed like that? You only had that job for a little while. If you must be here, you should be honored as a poet, not a busboy.

FL:     Poets have to pay their dues, Thomas. Don’t be so proud. If I weren’t bussing tables, I would be adjunct teaching somewhere for the same amount of money.

TSE:     All due respect, Sir, it’s not a matter of pride. It’s a matter of literary history. Your legacy is not defined by one of your many temporary jobs. Yet this restaurant has turned you into a mascot.

FL:    You think?

TSE:    Sir, by rights, if you were respected here, you would be a marble bust. Or a portrait with a little brass lamp over you bathing you in eternal glow. Have you seen yourself lately? Not only are you depicted as a busboy, but you’re a cardboard cutout.

FL:     Is it a racial thing? It’s a racial thing isn’t it. It’s always a racial thing.

TSE:    Sir, sir, we really don’t want to be distracted. Let’s just say it’s complicated. In many ways more complicated now than in your day. But we do have to get you out of here, Sir. C’mon. You comfortable in there? muffled response from FL under TSE’s coat OK, let’s go.

The AP article points out that the bookstore Politics and Prose does not pay its featured readers either. The article does not point out however, that Politics and Prose does not have the benefit of plying its customers with food and drink once the literary environment, if not the readers themselves, draws the customers to the store. This is not to say Shallal has no defense. Shallal’s position is clear in one of his recent statements on matter: “We want to be better stewards. We are the big boy on the block.”

Along with an open letter making patent the intricate motivations for liberating Flat Langston, Dargan delivered a check for the cost of the cutout to Shallal, $150. The open letter was signed by a host of DC poets, myself included. Shallal returned the check and promised not to replace Flat Langston. He also replied to the letter with a conciliatory letter of his own. The subject is still a sensitive one, but the grievances have been aired. And it is clear the two sides of the issue have the best intentions for the DC literary scene. In the words of Ezra Pound, “let there be commerce between us.”

Bob Ganz's "Last Lecture"

2011-02-21T09:38:00.000-05:00

Prof. Robert N. Ganz delivered a "Last Lecture" to more than 100 friends and colleagues.

Prof. Robert Ganz's unique legacy of teaching that began in 1964 culminated Friday February 18 with an honorary "last lecture" that drew friends, alumni, former students and colleagues. Although I never personally had a class with Prof. Ganz, I was able to see the remnants of his "eccentric, wonderfully abrasive" teaching, as described by former students, an engaging style that has made him a notable and integral part of the GW English Department over the years.

During the lecture, Prof. Ganz utilized dramatic emphasis, proclaiming phrases and quotes emphatically, serving to both engage and educate the audience. Interwoven with mentions of Frost and Nietszche, Ganz's lecture focused on the premise of the lived experience in modernism. Ganz concluded his lecture by quoting Frost, stating, "my time has reached its last." A standing ovation, as well as a reception, marked the end of a rich career for an English department veteran.

- Paula

[Note from the Chair: For those who were unable to make last Fridays' event, or for those who simply want to think about his remarks more fully, we will try to have a copy of Prof. Ganz's last lecture available soon. Look to this page for more information.]

An Interview with Prof. Robert Ganz, who delivers an honorary 'Last Lecture' Friday

2011-02-15T09:50:00.001-05:00

Prof. Ganz enjoying time outside of the English Department

Prof. Robert Ganz, an integral component of the GW English Department since 1964, will retire this spring. As a valued professor and scholar of Robert Frost and modernism, Prof. Ganz has seen the growth of the GW English department, as well as the different eras filled with talented students.

I was fortunate enough to have a few words with Prof. Ganz on retiring, the GW English Department and how student life has changed over the years.

What will you miss about teaching?

I'm retiring, as it happens, at a stage in my life when I’ve been particularly enjoying teaching and preparing for my classes. Thanks to humanities department, I’ve been able, during the past twenty or so years, to teach a lot of new-to-me works spread out over the whole gamut of the Western canon. I’ve not been confined to works by English speakers nor, for that matter, just to literary works. I will also miss the opportunity to consult with my colleagues on matters of mutual interest. I hope that the humanities program will be revived. It’s been the case for some time now that these courses have only been taught when I or someone else has persuaded a dean to let us do so. These humanities courses have always been over-subscribed and I have found the students to be for the most part very enthusiastic.

How have the students changed over the years?

Students now are different from the ones I started with in the early sixties. In those days they were better prepared. I could count on them to have read certain things in advance of coming into my course. But today’s students are still card-carrying members of homo sapiens; hence have the same intellectual curiosity that I have and the same sense of likeness and of how to use it.

Any memorable students?

I’ve had wonderful students including Ann Romines, Patti Griffith and Faye Moskowitz, who are now members of our department. Others who have gone into the profession include Al Nielsen and Richard Flynn. Patrick Prentice, who was in my first class at GW, has gone on to success as a film-maker with more than three hundred works to his credit. Another early student, the late Sarah Jewler, ran New York Magazine. Still another, early student was Judith Hermanson Ogilvie, who has had a career in foreign affairs and has just been appointed by Northern Illinois University as the founding director of a center for non-profits which draws on "real world " experience and offers an interdisciplinary degree. My apologies to those other equally worthy former students whom I have failed to mention during this off-the-top-of-my-head improvisation.

What will you do during your retirement?

I'm only retiring because, at going-on 86, I think I should be setting my own lands in order outside of academia before I lose the capacity to do that. Recently, I’ve been concentrating my focus on the last slightly more than two centuries and taken that to be one period. Perhaps my favorite of all periods is the Baroque, though I have no special expertise in it. But it’s certainly been a wonderful couple of decades of self-education, aided and abetted by the opportunity to pursue this activity in close collaboration with others: my students.

Prof. Ganz will deliver an honorary “Last Lecture” for students, faculty, alumni and friends on Friday, February 18 in Funger 103. Following the lecture, there will be a celebration of Prof. Ganz’s life and work in Phillips 411, with hors d'oeuvres and cocktails. For more information, call 202-994-6180. This event is open to all friends of Prof. Ganz.

- Paula

Prof. Wald at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

2011-02-14T15:15:00.000-05:00

That's me at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in conversation with Lauren Onkey last week.

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at a screening of the new documentary Godmother of Rock: The Rosetta Tharpe Story at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland. The event kicked off the Rock Hall's Black History Month celebration, which this year focuses on black musicians on film.

The screening paired the Tharpe documentary with the 1929 film St. Louis Blues, which contains the only extant footage of blues singer Bessie Smith (who does a nice turn as the Wronged Woman). It was followed after by a lively Q&A session moderated by Dr. Lauren Onkey (an English Ph.D. and former professor!). Click here for footage of the Q&A.

Next month the Rock Hall opens a "Women in Rock" exhibit, which will continue through next year. And book your tickets now for Cleveland in January 2012, when the Rock Hall will open its Library and Archives, a fabulous public facility which will instantly become an important resource for anyone interested in American music.

David McAleavey in "Poetry Northwest"

2011-02-11T13:19:00.001-05:00

You can read a new prose poem by Prof. David McAleavey on the website of the journal Poetry Northwest. David's poem, "Daylily Season," appears as a Web-exclusive feature. Find out how King Lear, the lingering scent of cigarette smoke, an umbrella, high heels, and Lady Bird Johnson enter the poet's imagination. You can even leave your own response to the poem!

AWP Conference Highlights

2011-02-09T09:49:00.001-05:00

Last weekend I was thrilled to have an all-access pass to the 2011 AWP Conference (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) here in DC. With a badge and notebook in hand for coverage, I trekked over to the Wardman Park Hotel on a beautiful afternoon with no idea what to expect. Little did I know that I would find an unbelievable wealth of resources, information, unique experiences about writing, and extraordinary talent, all in one amazing display of writers over an incredible weekend of events.

One major highlight of the conference was the panel celebrating 35 years of the Jenny McKean Moore Fellowship at GWU. Poet and professor Greg Pardlo introduced the panel, which also included Prof. Faye Moskowitz, president of the fellowship and founder of the Jewish Literature Live author series; Prof. Jane Shore, poet and recipient of the Jenny McKean Moore scholarship in 1989-1990; Honor Moore, poet and daughter of the late Jenny McKean Moore; and Prof. Thomas Mallon, director of the Creative Writing Program at GW.

Prof. Pardlo introducing a panel celebrating the Jenny McKean Moore Fellowship at GWU.

The panelists engaged in an open discussion about the life and legacy of Moore, a writer, activist and "vibrant woman, who found a place in your consciousness and settles in," according to Prof. Moskowitz. Also on the panel were former JMM fellows Ed Skoog, a poet, and novelist Tayari Jones. Following the event, there was a great reception at the hotel's Stone's Throw restaurant.

Dept. Office Manager Constance Kibler, JMM Fellow Tilar Mazzeo, and Prof. David McAleavey.

With forums, readings, a book fair, and exclusive author events, it was almost overwhelming how much there was to do. GW had a great booth in the book fair, with new brochures and information about the Creative Writing program!

We distributed these beautiful new brochures at the conference.

I was so impressed with the events on Friday, I brought two friends with me from GW on Saturday for an amazing reading and conversation with Amy Hempel and Gary Shteyngart. Hempel, a professor at Harvard University and Bennington College and recipient of awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the United States Artists Foundation, and the Academy of Arts and Letters, read from three of her short stories, beautiful accounts of the interaction between humans and animals. An animated Shteyngart, author of The Russian Debutante's Handbook and Absurdistan, both national bestsellers, read from his newest book. The lively discussion and readings were followed by a talk by our very own Tom Mallon.

I could go on and on about the conference- it truly was a phenomenal experience. I'll definitely be making plans to attend next year!

- Paula

Prof. Priyamvada Gopal to Address Department this Thursday

2011-02-07T17:00:00.001-05:00

Prof. Priyamvada Gopal

Please join the English Department as we welcome Prof. Priyamvada Gopal, of the University of Cambridge, on Thursday, Feb. 10 from 4-6 pm in Rome 771. The title of Prof. Gopal's talk is "Is Feminism Bad for Multiculturalism? Gender, Cultural Identity and Literary Controversy"

Prof. Gopal is the author of two books, Literary Radicalism in India (Routledge, 2005) and The Indian English Novel: Nation, History and Narration (Oxford University Press, 2009). She also reviews books and writes for newspapers like The Guardian, The Hindu, and Outlook (the weekly Indian newsmagazine) on politics and culture. She has also co-edited, with Neil Lazarus, After Iraq: Reframing Postcolonial Studies, a special issue of the journal New Formations.

Prof. Gopal's talk is co-sponsored by English and Women's Studies, and organized by English Prof. Kavita Daiya.

Creative Writers' Conference in DC

2011-02-02T11:59:00.001-05:00

Starting this afternoon, thousands of writers will be gathering in DC for the annual conference of the Associated Writers & Writing Programs, headquartered this year at the Marriott Wardman Park in Woodley Park. The conference features readings from scores of writers, as well as opportunities for writers to network with editors, publishers, and each other. Panels cover topics from contemporary poetry in Toyko to DC's literary lineage to writing and publishing in an increasingly paperless world. Thanks to the generosity of Columbian College and the Offices of the VP for Research and Provost, GW is an institutional sponsor of the conference, and was able to offer free all-conference passes (a $45 value!) to our English-Creative Writing majors. GW English will also have a presence at the Conference Bookfair, where we will be giving out beautiful brand new brochures about GW's Creative Writing program.

A couple of events--one that requires conference registration, one open to the public--are of particular interest. On Friday at 4:30, a panel organized by GW Prof. Gregory Pardlo will celebrate the 35th Anniversary of the Jenny McKean Moore Fellowship, which funds poets and writers for a year in residence at GW, typically during crucial early stages in their creative development. Recent and former fellows will share reflections on their fellowship year, discuss the impact of the fellowship on their work and the literary community beyond GWU, and celebrate the legacy and generosity of the fellowship’s benefactor. Panelists include: Profs. Faye Moskowitz and Jane Shore, Prof. Emerita Maxine Clair, former JMM Fellows Tayari Jones and Ed Skoog, and Honor Moore, daughter of the late Jenny Moore, for which the fellowship is named.

On Saturday night at 8:30, GW English will host a reading and conversation with Amy Hempel and Gary Shteyngart, moderated by Prof. Thomas Mallon. A recipient of awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the United States Artists Foundation, and the Academy of Arts and Letters, Hempel is author of the highly acclaimed Collected Stories. She teaches at Harvard University and Bennington College.

Shteyngart’s first novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. His second novel, Absurdistan, was a national bestseller. He was named to both Granta’s Best Young American Novelists and the New Yorker’s Top 20 Writers Under 40 in 2010.

The Hempel-Shteyngart event will be in the Marriott Ballroom on the lower level of the hotel. It is free and open to the public.

On the Road: Prof. Robert McRuer in Vienna

2011-01-31T14:02:00.000-05:00

This just in from Prof. Robert McRuer, who just returned from the University of Vienna, where he presented his lecture “Defections: Globalizing Queerness and Disability” as part of a daylong event titled “Barriere-frei?! Perspektiven der Disability und Gender/Queer Studies auf die Hochschullandschaft” [Barrier-free?! Perspectives on Disability and Gender/Queer Studies in Higher Education].

Prof. Robert McRuer being interviewed on Freak Radio in Vienna

"Two other lecturers were featured at this event: Anne Waldschmidt, of the University of Cologne, who is the first (and still the only) professor appointed to teach disability studies in Germany; and Heike Raab, of the University of Innsbruck, one of the only professors of disability studies in Austria. The event was sponsored by the Gender Studies Program and the Center for Teaching and Learning, and was attended by faculty and students in those programs, as well as by a wide range of community members and disability activists from Vienna.

The conversation over the course of the day touched upon representations of sexuality and disability in contemporary film, neoliberal containments and redeployments of contemporary movements for disability and queer liberation, the crises facing higher education in Europe and globally and its impact both on the development of disability studies transnationally and on the material conditions of disabled students and faculty, and visions for the future of this interdisciplinary field.

The possibilities and dangers of translation were also very much under discussion, as “disability studies” itself tends to travel as an English phrase through the German-speaking world, marking the transnational import of this emergent field but also reproducing the dominance of English-language work in it (although this event was largely in German, with real-time translation whispered into my ear!).

The next day, I was interviewed by Freak Radio, a collaborative mixed-ability radio collective that has been operating in Vienna for more than a decade. Freak Radio asked me to introduce disability studies and crip theory for listeners, and to expand on some of the themes that had been discussed the previous day."

You can follow Freak Radio on Twitter. Look for Prof. McRuer's interview to be posted soon!

Adam Kirsch Talk Cancelled for Thursday Night

2011-01-27T08:24:00.000-05:00

CANCELLATION

The talk by poet and critic Adam Kirsch has been cancelled for this evening because of the weather. The talk was to have been in the Marvin Center Auditorium at 7 pm. We hope to reschedule him later in the semester; look to this blog for more information.

Meet Paula Mejia, Class of 2013, our New Student Blogger

2011-01-26T14:29:00.001-05:00

I'm happy to introduce our new Student Blogger, Paula Mejia, Class of 2013. A prospective double English/CW major, Paula will soon be blogging regularly. Here's what she writes about herself:

I hail from Houston, Texas. Since childhood, I’ve had the opportunity to spend many lazy summer afternoons reading, writing, and breathing in my surroundings. My adolescence was shaped by Jeffrey Eugenides, Chuck Palahniuk, Jonathan Safran Foer and David Sedaris, some of whom are still among my favorite authors. Currently, I’ve been delving more into Thomas Pynchon and Beat generation literature, reading works by Jack Kerouac, Allan Ginsberg, Ken Kesey and William S. Burroughs.

Not surprisingly, here I am a college sophomore, with an intended double major in English and Creative Writing, with a minor in Journalism and Mass Communication (I know--I either love writing or I’m a little masochistic!). In my free time, I enjoy camping with friends, going to concerts, and venturing around DC.I'm increasingly interested in the music business, music journalism, and/or music industry studies further down the line, once I’m out of college. I’ve been pretty involved in the Texas music scene, particularly in Houston and Austin, since high school, following local musicians, critically acclaimed bands, and establishing connections--and now I’m doing the same here in DC. I’ve been heavily involved in WRGW, GW’s on-campus radio station, since the defining first day of the first semester of freshman year. As a clueless intern, I was alarmed to discover that the DJ I was interning for wouldn’t be able to do the first show of the semester, and it was all on me to put on an articulate, well-thought out, musically competent show. I was sure that everyone listening could hear how loudly my heart pounded in my ears. But something clicked that day--the DJing, the commentary, the broadcast--it just came naturally to me, and I realized that this is something I want to at least explore doing.

You can catch my radio show, Sit Back and Dream, every Friday from 2 to 4, where I’ll be talking about cultural and local shows, have commentary with my co-host, Drew Bandos (also an English major) and playing a wide variety of genres, including shoegaze, lofi, trip-hop, indie rock, and more. That’s it for now- stay tuned for more updates!

Two English Professors nominated for Professor of the Year

2011-01-25T11:50:00.000-05:00

Prof. Lisa Page

GW English creative writing faculty members Lisa Page and Faye Moskowitz were both nominated for the 2010 Professor of the Year, a distinction awarded by the University's 450 student athletes.

Prof. Moskowitz and Prof. Page are among the 25 nominees, while Prof. Page is one of 6 finalists! (Does this sound like March Madness?)

According to Karen Ercole, executive director of academic assistance for GW Athletics, eligible student athletes vote on professors who have demonstrated a commitment to their success in the classroom. Profs. Page and Moskowitz will be honored at a special halftime program during the GW men's basketball game against the University of Richmond on Wednesday, Feb. 9 at 7. During the program, the winner of the 2010 Professor of the Year award will be announced.

We hope to see Prof. Page at mid-court at the Smith Center on the 9th!

On the Road: Prof. Kavita Daiya in Mumbai

2011-01-24T10:39:00.000-05:00

This is the inaugural post of On the Road, an occasional blog series about GW English Professors and their scholarly travel. In an age of Skype and video conferencing, travel to conferences or to other institutions remains an important way for scholars to share their work and learn about what their colleagues elsewhere are doing and thinking.

This academic year alone, GW faculty have traveled to England, Portugal, Canada, Czechoslovakia, and Spain to share their research. And also to less exotic but equally wonderful places like Los Angeles, New York, and Ann Arbor.

Here's Prof. Kavita Daiy's account of presenting her research in India recently:

I gave an invited lecture at the University of Mumbai on Dec 20, 2010 titled "The 1947 Partition, Gender and the Postcolonial Public Sphere in South Asian Literature." I was invited by the interdisciplinary Group for Research on the Indian Diaspora (GRID) and the English department of the University of Mumbai.
It was quite an honor: I was welcomed with flowers, and there were more than fifty attendees (including faculty from English, Philosophy, French, Sociology). A great Q&A as well as a lavish reception followed!

Would that those attending the annual MLA Conference got flowers!