Graduate student news

Will Boast won the Balch Prize for the best short story written by a graduate student in English for his story “Weather Enough.” 

Joe Chapman won the Academy of American Poets Prize for the best poem or group of poems by a graduate student in English.

Timothy Duffy won the annual Thomas J. Griffis Prize for the best essay by a first-year graduate student. His essay “I hope to find pity, not pardon: Petrarchism, Submission, and the Early Modern English Lyric” tries to read the sixteenth century English lyric as a series of changing interactions between the poet and the literary and political system. The paper defines the submissive stance as an acknowledgment by a poet in his work of his socio-economic position and political limitations. Beginning with Wyatt, a poet who, in his most celebrated works, signals his political position (in exile at Kent, in jail, rebuffed by Caesar's 'hart') and ending with a signal towards Donne, a poet who is able to confound the submissive stance, the paper tries to read the sixteenth century as a more unified lyric experiment, not simply the “drab, golden, and metaphysical" ages of C.S. Lewis's contention.”

Paul Fyfe was the winner of the annual Thomas J. Griffis Prize for the best essay by an advanced graduate student for his essay “Accidents of a Novel Trade: Mary Barton, Industrial Catastrophe, and Insurance.” Paul notes that “this paper considers industrial accidents in early-Victorian cities to examine the overlooked but provocative intersections of the insurance industry and novelistic writing. I use Elizabeth Gaskell's 1848 novel Mary Barton to illustrate novelists' contest with actuaries and insurance agents to shape concepts of property, compensation, and probability.”

Brian Glavey was recognized as an honoree in the Seven Society Graduate Fellowship for Superb Teaching for 2007.

Neil Hultgren’s article, “Imperial Melodrama in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone,” was accepted for publication in the 2007 issue of the Victorian’s Institute Journal.

Jason Labbe has published poems in the Indiana Review and in Absent and Barrow Street.

Michael Lewis was a winner of the annual awards for outstanding teaching in the Department, an award conferred by the University’s Teaching Resource Center.

Justin Neuman was awarded a Dissertation Year Fellowship from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for the 2007-2008 academic year.

Ileana Popa presented a paper entitled “Rewriting the Body: Canonical Revisions in Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller” at the University of California Riverside’s 14th Annual Humanities Conference: (dis)junctions 2007: Malappropriation Nation.

Jon Perez presented a paper, “The Anxiety of Whiteness: Intersections of Critical Race Theory,” at the American Culture Association/Popular Culture Association conference in Boston in March 2007. He presented a paper entitled “Changes of Consciousness, from DuBois to Anzudula” at the American Comparative Literature Association conference in Puebla, Mexico in March 2007. He also presented his paper entitled “Critical Race Theory and Whiteness” at the Critical Race Analysis Colloquium at NYU in February 2007.

Jonathan Ready won an award for outstanding teaching given by the University’s Teaching Resource Center.

Brian Roberts was awarded a Dissertation Year Fellowship from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for the 2007-2008 Academic Year.

Amanda Sigler was awarded a fellowship from the Zurich James Joyce Foundation to research their archives during the summer of 2007; a portion of her research on Joyce, entitled “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Periodical Writer,” will be presented at the MLA convention in December 2007. In June she will be presenting her paper, “Crossing Folkloric Bridges: The Cat, the Devil, and Joyce,” at the 2007 North American James Joyce Conference in Austin, TX. Her article “Movement and Identity in ‘Cyclops’: Reevaluating Ulysses’s Correspondence to Its Homeric Urtext” is forthcoming in the Spanish Journal Papers on Joyce. 

Rivka Swenson presented a paper on Susanna Centlivre's dramatic prologues for the Early Eighteenth-Century Division panel at the MLA convention in December 2006, and one on Tobias Smollett's revision of “the Scottish Plot” at the ASECS conference in March 2006. She was the JD Fleeman Fellow at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, for the spring semester, where she gave a talk in their Guest Seminar Programme on Smollett, Jacobitism, and Scottish Nationalism. An essay, “'A Soldier is her Darling Character': Susanna Centlivre, Desire, Difference, and Disguise,” is forthcoming in Journal of Narrative Theory. A Festschrift collection, co-edited with fellow U.Va. PhD candidate Elise Lauterbach (nee Pugh), Imagining Selves: Essays in Honor of Patricia Meyer Spacks, is forthcoming in 2008 from University of Delaware Press/Associated University Presses. She was also the recipient of an award for outstanding teaching given by the University’s Teaching Resource Center.

Christin Taylor presented a paper entitled “Libido, Lactation and Les Femmes Fatales: Female Performance in Jessie and Jesus and Cousin Claire” at the Southern Writer’s Symposium at Methodist University in Fayetteville, NC.

J. Wood published a book, Living Lost: Why We’re All Stuck on the Island, with Powell Books (see the feature story in this issue). His book is work of cultural criticism based on the TV show Lost, and he contributes a regular blog column on Powell.com which discusses and analyzes each episode of Lost’s third season. He presented a paper, “Wednesday Night at the Improv: the Flexible Narrative of Lost,” at the University of Virginia English Department Graduate Conference. His paper, “Seamus Heaney’s Ulster-Saxon Beowulf,” was published in Mississippi Valley State’s journal Valley Voices. He developed a wiki for U.Va.’s Writing Center to be used as resource for students and teachers.