Faculty news

Paul Cantor is spending the fall semester at Harvard as a Visiting Professor of Government. He is teaching a lecture course on Shakespeare and Politics and a seminar on Shakespeare’s Roman Plays.

Rita Dove has been the recipient of several honors in recent months, including twice in one week. She was honored as a past recipient of the Library Lions award on November 5, 2007 during a celebration for the 10th anniversary of the Library Lions at the New York Public Library. And then on November 7 she was awarded the Chubb Fellowship at Yale University. She was also appointed as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2006.

Johanna Drucker wrote catalog essays for Cecily Brown’s exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in London, and for a show of contemporary art, Mad Love, at the Arken Museum of Contemporary Art in Copenhagen. The Gagosian Gallery was celebrating 25 years of Book Art at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, in DC. 

Her article publications had an international scope: “Performative Metatexts in Metadata and Mark-Up” appeared in European Journal of English Studies, Vol. 11, No. 2, August 2007, a British publication edited in Portugal; “Making Space: Image-Events in An Extreme State,” appeared in the London-based Cultural Politics, and pieces on digital aesthetics appeared in Litteraria Pragensia, Prague and the Journal of Philosophy in Nepal.

She was a keynote speaker for the Narrative Studies Association annual meeting in Washington D.C., for the Southern Graphics Association in Kansas City, and a conference on urban signage in Montréal where her talk, “Species of Éspaces,” drew on work by Georges Perec and Armando Petrucci. She was one of the workshop session leaders in the MLA Presidential Forum on “The Sound of Poetry,” organized by Marjorie Perloff, in which other sessions included Susan Howe, Susan Stewart, Christian Bok, Charles Bernstein, Kenny Goldsmith, Steve McCaffery, Caroline Bergvall, and Craig Dworkin. Her piece from that session, “Not Sound,” will be included in the publication of the Forum events. Her book Graphic! Design History from prehistory to the present, co-authored with Emily McVarish, will be published by Prentice Hall/Pearson in February. She will be a visiting artist in the University of Pennsylvania Speigel series, and in addition to talks at Brown University, Yale University, and the George College of Art, she has been invited to speak at the first international Korean Book Arts Fair in April.

This fall, Mark Edmundson published a new book, The Death of Sigmund Freud. The book is a biographical and analytic study of the last two years of Freud's life, during which he was forced to flee Vienna to escape the Nazis. It was supported by a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and has received wide attention in America and in England. It was a BBC Book of the Week in England and was reviewed on the front page of the Times of London Sunday Book Section. One selection from the book was published in The New York Times Magazine this September and another in The Chronicle of Higher Education. In October, the University of Chicago Press re-issued Professor Edmundson's first book, Towards Reading Freud. This year, Edmundson finished his term as NEH / Daniels Family Distinguished Teaching Professor and began an appointment as University Professor.

Clare Kinney notes: “I have recorded in CD and DVD format a 24 lecture course “Shakespeare’s Tragedies” for The Teaching Company (released last April). I was beguiled by the prospect of having a permanent record of something that's usually a very ephemeral experience — and also by the possibility of reaching an audience far larger than that of ENRN 322 (I’ve had audience feedback from as far away as Singapore!). The project did have its challenges: speaking to an audience of production staff and technicians doesn't exactly reproduce the buzz of the lecture room and one has to turn everything into 30 minute units for an audience that may not actually have read the plays in advance. One of the pleasures of the experience was working with the wonderful “Content Manager” for my course, Marcy McDonald, who received an M.A. in American Studies from our program some years ago. PS: If you visit the Teaching Company’s website, please be aware that I didn’t write most of the copy advertising my lectures!”

Christopher Krentz’s new book, Writing Deafness: The Hearing Line in Nineteenth-Century American Literature has been published by the University of North Carolina Press. 

Victor Luftig writes “Department faculty continue to work with Virginia’s K-12 teachers on ensuring that the Commonwealth’s children receive excellent literary instruction. Paul Cantor (Epic), John O’Brien (Satire), Lisa Woolfork (Adolescent Literature), and Victoria Olwell (American Women Regionalists) all journeyed to Virginia Beach this summer to offer courses to teachers in one of the largest school systems in Virginia. Gordon Braden (Tragedy), Cantor, and Woolfork did similar work for teachers closer to home in Albemarle County. Writers Sydney Blair and Lisa Spaar, and doctoral student Jennifer Chang, offered teachers a Saturday workshop at the Art Museum on writing about art objects. These programs are all under the auspices of the Center for the Liberal Arts (www.virginia.edu/cla), co-founded in the 1980s and directed for many years by Hal Kolb. Braden and Alison Booth now serve as CLA’s Project Directors for programs in English; Victor Luftig is CLA’s director. Luftig spoke about CLA’s activities in September at a conference of the Associated Colleges of Illinois, and in October at the Miller Center for Public Affairs at UVA. Teachers always respond enthusiastically to CLA programs: one of Cantor’s Virginia Beach students wrote of being “glad to get lots of background information to share with students,” and one of Woolfork’s called her “dynamic and though-provoking.” Center programs are sponsored by grants, gifts, and schools’ professional development budgets.

Jerome McGann’s NINES project — the “Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship,” located on the Web at www.nines.org — has now aggregated nearly 200,000 objects and is integrating the special collections of 4 major research libraries (in addition to U.Va.’s): the Bancroft at Berkeley, the Lilly Library at Indiana, the Houghton Library at Harvard, and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. NINES is also aggregating the relevant journals published through JSTOR and Project Muse. Jerry has also recently published three essays: “Interpretation,” in Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literature, third edition, ed. David Nicholl (Modern Language Assoc. of America: New York, 2007, “Death's Jest Book on Stage in 2003”, in The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Lovell Beddoes, ed. Ute Berns and Michael Bradshaw (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2007), and “Database, Interface, and Archival Fever,” PMLA 122.5 (October 2007).

James C. Nohrnberg was a first prize winner in the second annual Thomas Jefferson Center poetry and songwriting competition, “First Amendment Writes,” for his poem called “Three Entries for a Family Bible.” The competition was staged locally on November 5, 2007, at the Charlottesville Satellite Ballroom on the Corner. The contest was judged by Professor Lisa Russ Sparr, recording industry executive Bruce Flohr, and Dave Matthews Band musician Boyd Tinsely. Nohrnberg was one of last year’s ten poetry finalists as well, and also a first prize poetry winner of The Writer’s Eye annual competition held by the Art Museum of the University of Virginia, in 2005/6, for a poem called “The Summons to Transformation: Strophe, Antistrophe, Turn.”
 
A review of James Nohrnberg’s essay on the Iliad, “Homer to Brecht” on Amazon.com claims that his piece “is an eye-opening analysis of the epic and the epic hero. It is a clearly written and insightful look into the motivations and pressures Achilles faces as the greatest of the Achaean warriors. The essay provides a solid foundation for understanding the epic as a genre and the epic's place in literary history. A Must Read!”

His essay, “Britomart’s Gone Abroad to Bruteland, Colin Clout’s Come Courting from the Savage Ire-land: Exile and the Kingdom in Some of Spenser’s Fictions for ‘Crossing Over’,” in Edmund Spenser: New and Renewed Directions, edited by J.B. Lethbridge came out in 2006. Professor Richard F. Hardin’s notice in Renaissance Quarterly avers that “Nohrnberg’s monographlet is alone worth the price of the book.” Editor Lethbridge’s Introduction says: “Nohrnberg's paper, difficult to classify for descriptive purposes, might perhaps best be cited as an example of historical suspicious reading.  And extraordinary erudition is brought to bear on themes of virginity and marriage in The Faerie Queene, which, by means of analogy, source studies, and critical insight (and some humor) uncovers layer after layer of potential or suggested meaning and significance, tactfully laid out or indicated, sometimes in a mere phrase, passed from without undue urging to some further insight or historical material, eventually gathering themselves together as the paper proceeds to its conclusion. No one writes so spenseresquely about Spenser. Such reading, historically and anthropologically disciplined as it is, has, surely, much in common, despite the all-important fundamental difference, with the unraveling aims of theoretical criticism, and illustrates again that an historical approach is not a prerequisite for playful subtlety, for the revelation of theme upon theme, and the discovery of troubled but purposeful crosscurents in the ‘whole work.’”

Tony Spearing gave the 2007 Conway Lectures at the Medieval Institute, University of Notre Dame, under the title “Medieval Autographies: The ‘I’ of the Text” on October 11, 16, and 18.

Chip Tucker has given three plenary addresses in the last year, in various far-flung venues. He lectured on the topic of “Victorian Paranoia and the Stroke of the Contemporary” at the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English conference at the University of Saskatchewan in May, on “Hardy’s Epic Spectacle of Feeling in The Dynasts,” for the Thomas Hardy Association’s meeting at Yale University in June, and gave a lecture entitled “Victorian Genre Generalized” at the Dickens Universe meeting held at the University of California at Santa Cruz in August. His new book, Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790-1910 will be published by Oxford University Press in spring 2008; a short précis of the book will appear as the chapter on epic in the New Cambridge History of English Literature. Finally, he published an essay on Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Victorian Poetry last year, and has an essay forthcoming on C. M. Doughty’s Edwardian epic in the e-journal Romanticism and Victorianism on the ‘Net.

Cynthia Wall's book The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago 2006) has received an Honorable Mention for the Modern Language Association's prestigious James Russell Lowell Prize for 2007.