Going Places

The University of Virginia’s Department of English boasts what I consider to be the very best graduate placement record in the country, head and shoulders above our peer institutions (including Yale and Harvard, where I worked before signing onto the faculty here). We can say that we contribute as much as any of our rivals to building the next generation of scholars. We have steady international clout, superb results nationally in all kinds of institutions, and a solid regional network that continues to draw on our students. Our students choose careers that unfold in a wide range of venues — from small teaching colleges to small and large research institutions, with the occasional preference for digital humanities, secondary school, or administrative careers thrown in. We do very well in securing post-doctoral appointments and visiting positions, positions that can be holding tanks until something suitable and long-term comes along or spaces in which to develop scholarship before the tenure clock begins to tick. Our candidates moving to assistant professorships often move within a few years to positions that suit them better geographically or in other ways.

As faculty, our goal as supervisors and launchers of careers is to get our doctoral students tenure, not just to get them working. U.Va. dissertation topics range much more broadly than most institutions, and we continue bravely to graduate a significant number of students writing in fields that are not usually seen in the Modern Language Association’s job list; we are famously strong in textual editing and humanities computing. But we have considerable success in placing these students as well. Of course the entire faculty works together on placement, giving many voices of advice and encouragement. But the placement officer makes a concerted effort to prepare all interested students for their encounter with the wide, wide world, helping them whip materials into shape at the same time that she urges them to maintain progress on the dissertation. In past years we have worked with many mid-career alumni as well, helping assistant professors move between institutions. Our placement record is a source of enormous pride and prestige for us, and we hope to continue to find ways of helping Virginia scholars shape their careers in ways that make us feel what we do as faculty is worth doing. Having inherited my role from a wonderful succession of Placement Officers — in recent memory, Alison Booth, Paul Cantor, Katharine Maus, and Jennifer Wicke —  I’m delighted that Professor Clare Kinney will, after my three years of coaching, now succeed me. Her perspicacity, commitment, and sheer style will be an enormous resource for our candidates, and we can expect and celebrate many triumphs to come.

PLACEMENT OF DOCTORAL STUDENTS, 2006-07

Assistant Professorships Accepted:

• Paul Gaffney, Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Hiram College, Hiram, OH
• Tiffany Gilbert, American Literature and Film, Gender and Cultural Studies, University of North Carolina, Wilmington, NC
• Brian Glavey, Twentieth-Century American Literature, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC
• Sarah Hagelin, American Cultural Studies, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM
• Neil Hultgren, Victorian Literature, California State University, Long Beach, CA
• Zackariah Long, Renaissance Literature, Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, OH
• Ellen Malenas, Late Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Literature, Rutgers University, Camden, NJ
• Brendan Mathews, Fiction Writing, Bard College at Simon’s Rock, Great Barrington, MA
• Katharine Nash, History of the Novel, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond VA
• Paul Outka, American Literature, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL
• Eric Song, Renaissance Literature, Queens College, City University of New York, NY
• Andrea Stevens, Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama, Literature and Culture, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL; Postdoctoral Fellowship, McGill University, Montreal, QC
• Maura Tarnoff, Shakespeare and Early Modern Studies, Saint Louis University and Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
• Nick Taylor, Fiction Writing, San Jose State University, San Jose, CA
• Joanne van der Woude, American Literature and Culture to 1800, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Postdoctoral Fellowship, Columbia Society of Fellows, NY, NY

Visiting and Postdoctoral Positions Accepted:

• Wilson Brissett, Colonial American Literature, Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA
• Michael Lundblad, American Literature, Syracuse University
• Lee Manion, Medieval Literature, University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI
• Kevin Seidel, Eighteenth-Century Literature, Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA
• Chloe Wigston Smith, Eighteenth-Century Literature, University of Georgia, Athens, GA
• Brad Tuggle, Renaissance Literature, The University of the South, Sewanee, TN

Wilson Brissett has accepted a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. His dissertation was directed by Marion Rust and advised by Eleanor Kaufman and Eric Lott. This is how Wilson describes his dissertation, “Beauty among the Puritans: Aesthetics and Subjectivity in Early New England”:

The puritans are infamous as extreme iconoclasts who sought to eliminate all external formal beauty in Christian worship in the interest of presenting their theological message in as simple a manner as possible. But they also speak of beauty frequently in their writings. This dissertation argues for the centrality of aesthetic sensibility within the religious culture of early Massachusetts. An aesthetic notion of conversion — seen as the turning of the self away from the ugliness of sin and toward the beauty of Christ — dominates puritan spirituality. Human desire, for the puritans, was rooted in aesthetic response, and they held out the complex, tragic beauty of Christ as the power of attraction driving both personal transformation and social cohesion. This submitting of the self to divine beauty is the central dynamic of Edward Taylor's devotional poetry (chapter one); it is at the heart of many public relations of true conversion (chapter two); it is the foundation of Jonathan Edwards' philosophy of beauty (chapter three); and we see its projection onto the field of puritan historical consciousness in John Milton's Paradise Lost and Jonathan Edwards' History of the Work of Redemption (chapter four). What emerges from these studies is a picture of aesthetic commitment among New England puritans that significantly shaped their theological view of God, their anthropological view of what it means to be human, and their social view of the coherence of the holy commonwealth.

Paul Gaffney has accepted a position as Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Hiram College, Hiram, Ohio. Here, he describes his dissertation, “Taking Stock of Middle English Popular Romance,” supervised by Dan Kinney, Hoyt Duggan, and A. C. Spearing: In Reading for the Plot, Peter Brooks says that story-telling is an organizing principle, but the episodic nature of much Middle English romance and its many moments of irrationality seem to break down organization, not further it. This body of popular narrative lives in a landscape of episodes and motifs. My investigation into such romances as Sir Degare, Richard Couer de Lyon, and even Sir Gawain and the Green Knight explores how the corpus of Middle-English romance functions as an intricate network of referentiality, a web of signification that can attract classical, historical, and religious narratives and recast them in romance mode. Samuel Johnson was half right about romances: they do depend upon a hermit and a wood, a battle and a shipwreck, yet that is not grounds on which to despise them; it is their vernacular.

Tiffany Gilbert has accepted an assistant professorship in the Department of English at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, NC, where she will teach courses in American literature and film, gender, and cultural studies. A description of her dissertation “Nuclear Diva: Constructing Cinematic Divadom in American Film, 1950-1959,” supervised by Jennifer Wicke, Eric Lott, and Alison Booth, follows:

“Nuclear Diva” measures the fallout created by the collisions between an actress’s star persona and her performance within the dramatic space of a particular film. Examining major works by directors Joseph Mankiewicz, Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, and Douglas Sirk, this dissertation identifies a kind of cinematic divadom yielded from the explosive encounters between star and character. Investigating the interpolation of a star’s image into the so-called diva politics of a particular film, I explore the ways in which cinematic divadom traverses and transgresses supposedly stable categories like age, class, and race. This project pays close attention to the dazzling and sometimes disturbing on-screen pas de deux between performer and performance. However, to assume that the characters these women portray in film exist only under the thumb or gaze of male authority — or ostensibly that of the director — ignores the manifestly different ways that these movies negotiate or recontextualize the divadom of these actresses.

Brian Glavey has accepted an assistant professorship in the English department at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, where he will be teaching in the field of twentieth-century American literature. Brian describes his dissertation, advised by Jahan Ramazani, Rita Felski, and Victor Luftig, as follows:

“'Queer Ekphrasis, Modernism, and the Avant-Garde’” brings together the insights of queer theory, aesthetics, and visual studies to argue for the importance of queer ekphrasis, a tradition that turns to the literary representation of the visual arts as a means of thinking about gender and sexuality. For a series of American poets and novelists including Djuna Barnes, Richard Bruce Nugent, Gertrude Stein, Frank O’Hara, and John Ashbery, the relation between word and image has provided an aesthetic staging ground for investigating the possibilities and limitations of what has come to be known as the politics of visibility. Queer ekphrastic texts identify with works of art in order to transfigure stigma and reification into new forms of aesthetic value, privileging form not because it offers transcendence or wholeness but because it allows for the revaluation of the experience of being treated as an image. Attending to such works provides an opportunity to rethink many assumptions about the relationship between sexuality and aesthetics that have structured discussions of modernism, the avant-garde, and visual culture.”

Sarah Hagelin has accepted an assistant professorship in the English Department at New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico, where she will be teaching American cultural studies, including film, television, and literature. Her dissertation, directed by Susan Fraiman and advised by Eric Lott and Sylvia Chong, is described below:

“Vulnerable Genders: Pain and Power in Post-Cold War America” builds upon recent work on gender and violence in film theory and feminist cultural studies to identify a new model of vulnerability in popular culture that challenges the ways culture and criticism continue to equate vulnerability with femaleness. The project examines war films, television police dramas, and science fiction narratives from 1990 to the present, arguing that this body of texts uncouples the sight of female pain from audience pity, divorcing vulnerability from gender and ultimately even from suffering. “Vulnerable Genders” reimagines the suffering body, the bruised body, and the broken body as spectacles that deserve investigation instead of pity.

Neil Hultgren has accepted an assistant professorship in the English department at California State University, Long Beach, California, where he will teach British Victorian literature, 1832-1914. Mr. Hultgren’s dissertation was directed by Stephen Arata and advised by Jessica Feldman and Rita Felski. Neil describes it as follows:

“Distance Overcome: Melodrama and British Imperial Fiction, 1857-1902” argues that melodrama was a crucial mode for the representation of British imperialism within generically hybrid works of late Victorian fiction. Contending that Victorianists have overemphasized the importance of the imperial Gothic and imperial romance, I focus on the productive overlap and tension between melodrama and the providential plots of Christian and national redemption that were used to justify British imperialism. Chapters focus on works by Wilkie Collins, Olive Schreiner, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Drawing on current critical debates in Victorian studies about critical distance and affect, I argue that melodrama’s activation of pathos and outrage within the public sphere not only enabled racist and jingoist imperial discourse, but also turned late Victorian fiction into a zone of contestation that could question such discourses.

Zachariah Long has accepted a position as Assistant Professor in the English department at Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, OH, where he will teach renaissance literature and culture. He moves from an assistant professorship at Sweet Briar College, Sweet Briar, VA. His description of his dissertation, now become a series of articles and a longer manuscript, follows:

“The Uncollected Self: Memory, Subjectivity, and Cultural Crisis in English Renaissance Drama” (Katharine Maus, director, with Clare Kinney and Elizabeth Fowler). This project takes as its starting point Hamlet's anguished question, “Must I remember?” Hamlet's lament of the insufferable burden of memory has often been invoked as a site of emergent modern subjectivity, particularly in psychoanalytic interpretations of the play. Yet Hamlet is just one of many Renaissance plays that evinces an obsession with the perturbations of memory. “The Uncollected Self” is a study of memory disorders on the early modern stage that resituates Hamlet's question in the cultural history of the period. Drawing on recent contributions to the history of subjectivity and embodiment, the project adopts an interdisciplinary approach that touches on aspects of cognitive theory, historical phenomenology, and the history of science to provide new understandings of the ways that cultural trauma was conceptualized and represented onstage. Each chapter brings together a different theoretical lens, cultural context, and aspect of early modern psychology to analyze varieties of what I call the “uncollected” self. My examples range from the comic amnesiacs of Middleton's city comedies, whose self-forgetfulness I examine alongside contemporary debates about the dangers of social and economic mobility, to the mnemonically fractured male protagonists of the Beaumont and Fletcher plays, whose particular blend of distraction and nostalgia I trace to contemporary arguments over the nature of aristocratic identity.

Michael Lundblad has accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, where he will be a Faculty Fellow in the Humanities, affiliated with the Department of English and the Program in American Studies. His dissertation, advised by Eric Lott, Jennifer Wicke, and Stephen Cushman, is titled “The Progressive Animal: Sex, Violence, and the Discourse of the American Jungle.” Building upon interdisciplinary work in American literary studies, ecocriticism, and the history of sexuality, Lundblad explores shifting representations of animals and human animality in American literature and culture from the 1880s to the 1920s. At the beginning of the twentieth century the metaphor of the jungle provided a new framework for associating animality not only with instinctual violence but also with “natural” heterosexuality. The discourse of the jungle transformed American representations of both oppression and reform in a wide range of cultural and literary texts, including Burroughs's Tarzan, Sinclair's The Jungle, and James's “The Beast in the Jungle.” Natural behavior from this moment on could be defined according to animal instincts that were observable, supposedly, in the wild, in the market, in the bedroom, or in the colonies, providing a new way of justifying a wide variety of oppression and exploitation.

Ellen Malenas has accepted an assistant professorship in the English department at Rutgers University, Camden, NJ, where she will be teaching late eighteenth-century, Romantic, and gothic literature. Her dissertation was directed by Cynthia Wall and advised by J. Paul Hunter and Patricia Spacks. Her description of it follows:

“Popular Reforms: Progressive Ideology and Gothic Writing 1760-1820” argues that gothic texts work to shape their contemporary political world by offering viable alternative solutions for vexed problems such as slavery, economic disparity, gender inequality, and institutional corruption. I trace the gothic’s evolving social consciousness — using drama, poetry, and chapbooks in addition to prose fiction — to reveal the gothic’s reform message reaching segments of the British public at every class level. During its zenith, the gothic mode dominated almost every type of artistic expression. By exposing the ways that gothic texts not only criticize society, but also demand that it improve, “Popular Reforms” recasts the gothic as a deeply idealistic, and even optimistic, mode that influences political thinking in the street, in the theater, and within the walls of Parliament.

Brendan Mathews has accepted a position as assistant professor of creative writing in the Division of Languages and Literature at Simon's Rock College in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where he will teach creative writing workshops and literature courses. He received our MFA in 2005. His thesis adviser was Ann Beattie; Chris Tilghman served on his committee.

Brendan's short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in the Southern Review, TriQuarterly, Epoch, Southwest Review, Glimmer Train and the Virginia Quarterly Review. In stories about accidental arsonists, Babylonian gods, cardboard boyfriends, Lithuanian journalists, and husbands, wives, parents and children, his work explores the intersection of personal and political history, the way we use stories to bridge divides and enforce boundaries, the legacies of failed relationships, and the emotional gravity that pulls us together and drives us apart. Since completing his degree, he has worked for the University as the Assistant Director of Media Relations.

Kate Nash has accepted an assistant professorship in the English department at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, where she will profess the history of the novel. Her dissertation, “Reading Like a Girl: The Rhetoric and Narrative Discourse of John Cowper Powys,” was advised by Stephen D. Arata, Patricia Meyer Spacks, and Jerome McGann. After earning the doctorate in May 2006, Ms. Nash was appointed as our own Edgar F. Shannon Fellow for 2006-07. She reports below on her current book project, which adapts the methodology of her single-author dissertation in examining the novels of several modernists.

“My book project, which grows out of my dissertation, examines ways in which Anglo-American modernist novels construct their audiences. I am interested in the ways authorial strategies, narrative progression, and implied reading responses work together to form rhetorical and ethical contracts between writers and readers. I am particularly interested in the ways modernist novels responded to Victorian and eighteenth-century discourses about women's reading practices. The late nineteenth century witnessed a revolution in prevalent perceptions of women's modes of attention (how they read) and women's relationships to novels (what they read). Although moralistic concerns about women's supposed vulnerability to corruption through reading fiction had lost cultural currency by the early twentieth century, they had not disappeared. Novelists such as Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Sayers, Gertrude Stein, and John Cowper Powys alluded and responded to that long history of gendered reading practices in their fiction, not just thematically, but in the very structure of their novels. They all wrote novels whose modes of progression do not fit comfortably into any of our current theoretical models. Narrative progression in these texts, I argue, operates according to historically contingent assumptions about what and how women were expected to read. As I examine the authorial strategies, modes of narrative progression, and implied reading responses in works by each of these novelists, I will explore the rhetorical and ethical dimensions of modernist experimentation with narrative form.”

Paul Outka has been appointed as an advanced Assistant Professor in the English department at Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida. After completing his doctoral work at U.Va. in 2000, he held a visiting assistant professorship at New College of Florida, Sarasota, FL and an assistant professorship at the University of Maine, Farmington, ME, where he was awarded an ACLS/Mellon Junior Faculty Fellowship.

Paul Outka’s dissertation, written under Mark Edmundson and Richard Rorty, initiated a dialogue between the theoretical tradition of the sublime and Whitman’s pervasive unsettling of erotic, political, and social distinctions between embodied subjects. He subsequently published three articles from the dissertation, in The Journal of American Studies, The Mickle Street Review, and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment. Professor Outka’s description of his current book project follows:

“Race and Natural Experience from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance lays the groundwork for what should be an important discussion in critical race studies and ecocriticism: how natural experience became racialized in postbellum and modernist America. Drawing on theories of sublimity, trauma, and ecocriticism, the book offers a critical and cultural history of the racial fault line in American environmentalism that divides largely white wilderness preservation groups and the largely minority environmental justice movement to this day. Understanding sublimity and trauma as two racially marked outcomes of the same fundamental experience — a potent moment in which the human and natural merge — the analysis both denaturalizes race and racializes nature, insisting on their definitional entanglement in American environmental and social history. The manuscript is contracted with Palgrave Macmillan for their “Signs of Race” series.

Kevin Seidel has accepted a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. His dissertation was directed by Ralph Cohen and Paul Hunter and advised by David Vander Meulen. In the following paragraph Kevin Seidel describes his dissertation, “Leisure to Repent: The Bible at the Origins of the English Novel.”

“Using original research on the English Bible in the eighteenth century to push forward debate about the history of the English novel, “Leisure to Repent: The Bible at the Origins of the English Novel” contains three pairs of essays. The first pair combines an essay on biblical criticism at the turn of the eighteenth century with an essay on John Bunyan’s fiction in order to show how Pilgrim’s Progress offers rest from the obligation to interpret the Bible as the great law of morality. The second pair combines an essay on the printing and distribution of the English Bible around the Atlantic with an essay on Daniel Defoe’s three-book novel Robinson Crusoe to better understand the religious irony that Defoe uses to raises the status of his fictional narrator. The third pair combines an essay on Bible reading and devotional practices with an essay on Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa to show how Richardson uses the psychological authority of scripture to hallow his descent into the characters in his novel. Unsettling assumptions about the relationship between the religious and the secular that underlie most histories of the novel, these essays show the different ways that these works of fiction appropriate the complex authority of the English Bible, raise their literary status in the process, and thereby gain the attention of later novelists, critics, and readers who canonize the English novel.”

Eric Song has accepted an assistant professorship in the Department of English, Queens College, the City University of New York, in New York, NY, where he will teach Renaissance literature. His dissertation, described below, was co-directed by Gordon Braden and James Nohrnberg and advised by Katharine Maus.

“'Dominion Undeserved: The Critique of Nation and Empire in Milton’s Later Work’ identifies a powerful tension between English nativism and expansionism inspiring the post-Restoration writings of John Milton. By tracing the links that these texts establish with epic and lyric poetry, travel narratives, histories, and colonialist discourses, this project argues that Milton’s major works imagine power as both central and inimical to nationhood. Conquest and exclusion build a fractured nation; expansionism replicates internal crises. This project opens new lines of inquiry into Milton’s political and literary engagements with the discourses of nation and nascent.”

Andrea Stevens has accepted a position as Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL, where she will teach Shakespeare and early modern drama, literature, and culture. She has also been awarded the Tomlinson Postdoctoral Fellowship at McGill University, Montreal, Quebec. She describes her dissertation “Skin Theaters: The Epistemology of Paint in Early Modern Drama,” co-directed by Bruce Holsinger and Katharine Maus and advised by Elizabeth Fowler, as follows: “Bloodied soldiers, blackfaced virgins, and gilded Christs: to sustain these important images the early modern theater turned to theatrical paint, or the cosmetics applied to the skin of dramatic actors. The vehicle for stage displays of violence, blackness, death, and divinity, paint is so entrenched a part of theatrical illusion that early modern writers suggested it embodied the very essence of playing. Recent critical re-evaluations of the significance of stage properties, however, have largely ignored theatrical paint, perhaps because its inherent ephemerality makes it difficult to recover from a historical distance. “Skin Theaters: The Epistemology of Paint in Early Modern Drama” embraces theater history, early modern discourses of embodiment, and performance theory to interrogate this crucial (and crucially elusive) aspect of early modern spectacle. Drawing on archival research into paint’s composition and its role within early modern trade, I consider paint special effects in performances ranging from the Chester cycle to Jonsonian masques to Shakespearean tragedies. These performances all engage self-consciously with this dimension of their own materiality; recognizing this engagement provides a clarifying perspective on the early modern theater’s representations of interiority, psychological plenitude, and cultural difference.”

Maura Tarnoff has accepted an appointment as Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Communication at Saint Louis University’s campus in Madrid, Spain. There she will teach Shakespeare and early modern studies in the B.A. and M.A. programs, the latter in connection with the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. For the last two years, while working on the dissertation, she has been Visiting Assistant Professor at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN, teaching courses in Chaucer, Renaissance poetry, Shakespeare, and travel writing. This is how Maura describes her dissertation, advised by A.C. Spearing, Elizabeth Fowler, and Gordon Braden: “Curious Inventions: Women’s Needlework and the Making of English Humanist Authorship” asserts the centrality of women’s domestic embroidery to the story of humanist authorship and its “invention” of literary history, both by introducing a set of interrelated texts and textiles and by showing how persistently late fifteenth- to early seventeenth-century British male writers claim literary authority by deferring to the aesthetic conventions of the “feminine arts.” By examining texts by John Skelton, Thomas Wyatt, Edmund Spenser, George Puttenham, and William Shakespeare in relation to embroidery by, among others, Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth I, and Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury, my project seeks to recover the aesthetic importance of poems and of embroidered artifacts, as well as the powerful role women played as visual artists within the development of English humanist poetics.

Joanne van der Woude has accepted a position as Assistant Professor in the Department of English and the Program in History and Literature at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA, beginning in the fall of 2008. Her area will be American literature and culture to 1800.  For the interim, she has accepted a postdoctoral year at the Columbia Society of Fellows in the Humanities in NY, NY. Here is Joanne’s description of her dissertation, which was directed by Marion Rust and cheered on by committee members Elizabeth Fowler and Anna Brickhouse:

“'Towards a Transatlantic Aesthetic’ examines the processes of cultural contact and adaptation in colonial America. Focusing on three kinds of structured, ritualized behaviors: telling, singing, and mourning, which loosely correspond to the generic conventions of autobiography, psalmody, and elegy, I study the symbolic productions of English, German, Dutch, and French immigrant groups in the New World. Looking at scenes of interaction with Native American communities, I note the gradual transformation of colonial utterance in comparison to contemporary European expressions. The simultaneous consideration of the strategies of self-representation in colonists’ and Indian performances reveals a convergence of discourses and depictions that creates a changed way of seeing and interpreting: an epistemology of contact or transatlantic aesthetic.”