Faculty news

Stephen Arata has received the Richard A. and Sara Page Mayo National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Teaching Professorship. Arata plans to use the three-year term of his endowed chair to increase communication among Virginia college humanities teachers, including developing Web forums for teachers and students to exchange ideas about similar material and helping lecturers visit colleagues' classes.

Sylvia Chong (English and American Studies) is the recipient of a 2007-2008 Career Enhancement Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, where she will be mentored by Professor Robert G. Lee from Brown University as she completes her book, The Oriental Obscene: American Film Violence and Racial Imaginaries in the Vietnam Era (forthcoming from Duke University Press). The following year, 2008-2009, she will be a research fellow at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University, where she will begin research on her second project, a study of film and anthropology in the construction of race during World War II and the U.S. Occupation of Japan.

David Golumbia won a National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship for 2007-08, during which he will complete his book project, The Cultural Logic of Computation: The Authority of the Digital.

C. Brian Kelly's book Best Little Stories from World War II, originally published in 1989, has now been translated into Polish, and published by the Dom Wydawniczy Bellona publishing house in Warsaw. He will be taking part this summer in a week-long U. Va-Oxford seminar program on Winston Churchill. 

Clare Kinney received an All-University Teaching Award for 2006-07, the highest teaching award given at U.Va. She and other recipients from across the University were honored at a banquet held at the Rotunda on April 26. 

J. C.  Levenson (Edgar Allan Poe Professor Emeritus) reports: “At the meeting of the American Literature Association in May, I'll be respondent to a panel celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of my MIND AND ART OF HENRY ADAMS. Revisiting the book and the me of fifty years ago, I find some surprises and some pleasing recognitions of continuity over the span of years.”                                                                                     

Since 2002 Victor Luftig has been serving as director of programs funded by UVA's $5.5 million "Teachers for a New Era" grant (www.virginia.edu/provost/tne), designed to improve the university's preparation of future K-12 teachers.  Professors Mark Edmundson and Dan Kinney have joined Luftig as designated advisors for English majors who are enrolled in UVA's celebrated 5-year BA/MT dual degree program, in which future teachers receive a graduate degree from the Curry School of Education. Luftig was invited to speak of these activities at a major forum of the annual meeting of the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education in New York in February, and to prepare notes for a “Teachers for a New Era” delegation that in April met with Congressman George Miller of California, head of the House Education Committee, about reauthorization of No Child Left Behind. Luftig serves as Director of the Center for the Liberal Arts (www.virginia.edu/cla), through which UVA faculty provide programs for K-12 teachers from throughout Virginia and the United States. Founded and for many years directed by English Department Professor Harold Kolb Jr., CLA has long benefited from the participation of many members of the department's faculty; in recent years dozens have traveled east to offer courses for teachers in the Virginia Beach City Schools system or, closer to home, taught teachers from the Albemarle County Public Schools. The department remains one of the most active in the country in offering high quality programs for K-12 teachers.

Jerome McGann published two books this past year, and notes that “they are closely related, one being about criticism, the other about scholarship, and both being about the relation between the two.” The books are: The Scholar's Art. Literary Studies in a Managed World (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Point is to Change It. Poetry and Criticism in the Continuing Present (Tuscaloosa: U. of Alabama Press, 2007).

Victoria Olwell was named an all-University Teaching Fellow for 2007-08. She will use her fellowship year to reconsider her course, “U.S. Literature and Citizenship,” a course that examines how “literary writing has been a central location of discourse on citizenship in the U.S.” 

Stephen Railton, working in partnership with the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, has organized a 2-day conference called “Uncle Tom's Cabin in the Web of Culture,” which will be held in Hartford, CT, June 1 - 2, 2007. Drawing on the materials in the online electronic archive Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture, twelve scholars from eight different disciplines — including African American studies, art, children's literature, drama, history, literature, music and women's studies — will explore the story of Stowe's story as a cultural phenonemon, as it evolved through various media and over time. Complete information, and a registration form, are available at (http://www.harrietbeecherstowecenter.org/utc.shtml)

Tony Spearing writes: “My article 'Marguerite Porete: courtliness and transcendence in The Mirror of Simple Souls', originally given as a public lecture in the University of Bristol research program Envisaging Heaven in the Middle Ages, was published in a volume with that title, ed. Carolyn Muessig and Ad Putter (Routledge, 2007). 

Elizabeth Spearing's Penguin Classics translation of Julian of Norwich: Revelations of Divine Love, with my introduction and notes, has appeared in a Polish version, as Juliana z Norwich: Objawienia Bozej Milosáci, and will doubtless be seen on airport bookstalls throughout Poland, if not the world. In August I'm going to give a plenary lecture on Julian of Norwich (in English) at the University of Cambridge International Summer School.

I've spent a term of leave preparing the Conway Lectures, to be given at Notre Dame in October.

In the coming summer I am to read papers at the IAUPE (International Association of University Professors of English) Conference in Lund, Sweden, and at the preceding Medieval Symposium in Ystad, where I hope to trace the footsteps of Inspector Wallender, hero of Henning Mankell's detective novels.”